Time portal found?

I know some of our regular readers have been following a certain thread on ATS discussing the mysteries and possible dimensional anomalies surrounding the area of a legendary mountain, the Untersberg, on the border between Austria and Germany.
(And this, unlike the thread mentioned in the previous post, most certainly does deserve a link.)

The thread is interesting mostly because it is probably the main and most reliable compendium of information and focus of discussion in English.

However, there are a few forums (or fora, whatever, no time for dead languages now) in other languages, notably in German. This one, hosted by a man - a shaman - who calls himself White Eagle, is probably the most relevant one.

And it was here that the announcement has been made two days ago that possibly (the font size is no glitch) a "time portal" has been found in the vicinity of Hallthurm.
("Stumbled upon" - by two people from Salzburg, on December 30th - would be perhaps a more fitting expression.)

Picture of the area where the "time portal" - or whatever it is - could be located (taken from here).

It is highly speculative, of course - how could it be anything else?
And nobody is saying it is anything else.

But in the opinion of White Eagle (the author of the original post on the forum) who, being a native, has been researching the area for decades now, that location could be the site of a "time portal".

Anyway, this thread, for a change, really might be worth following.
There have been all too many anomalies reported about the area through the ages to simply shrug and chalk them up to... what, exactly?

Unfortunately for all those who cannot read German, the thread on the German forum is, of course, in German. And we don't have the time to translate it right now.

But I am sure there will be English "summaries" coming up soon. *
Meanwhile, you can learn a lot about the road that led to this possible and highly speculative "discovery" by reading through the thread on ATS (beware, though: it's gigantic!), especially the original posts and, with particular attention, the recent (September-December 2009) posts by a member called BlueOrb (who among other things came up with highly interesting parallels between the nearby buildings constructed for Hitler and the buildings of the Cathars, and seems to be researching the topography of the churches around Untersberg).


Now, if you look at your watch... didn't the time you spent reading this pass unusually quickly? :-)


P.S. As you well know, we edit our posts again and again and again... That's how we are. So, be sure to come back sometime in the future, to check out our afterthoughts.


* Please, see the comment by BlueOrb below this post.


P.P.S. (added on 6. I. 10):

Just a quick note to all those of you who, in your eagerness to find out more - either to escape from the tax people or to "debunk" it - might be composing email upon email, to extort more information from us... Please, have another look at the post.

Did you see the word possibly?

Do you know why it is so big?

Because we couldn't find any BIGGER fonts.
OK? :-)

Hold on to your hats.
We're sure this decade is going to be a fast-speed chase along a very bumpy road in any case... :)

The dangers of conf(abu)lation

I am serving you yet another P.S.
But if you are interested in the "dead again - alive again" phenomenon (whatever it is), it may be worth the few seconds of your time that it's going to take.

There is another thread discussing "dead celebrities who are now alive" over on ATS. (See the link in the post above, in the section regarding Karen Carpenter. I am not giving it here simply because I think the entire thread, save for two or three messages, is - to be blunt - unworthy of your attention and mine. I mean, seriously: now there are people "explaining" this apparent anomaly as being the consequence of - take a deep breath now... ... - cloning.)

Amidst all the "chaff" there is a single interesting - albeit not the least surprising - indication of what is going on in many, perhaps most, cases:

A person thought s/he had heard that Joanne Woodward, a fantastic actress and wife of the late Paul Newman, had died many years ago - drowned, to be precise.

Another person pointed out that it was Natalie Wood - wife of Robert Wagner - who drowned, back in 1981, during a yachting trip that included Christopher Walken.

Have you noticed anything particular about the names of the people involved in these two accounts?

That's right: they all start with W, or include this visually very prominent letter.
So, what we have here is a classic case of conflation (which, of course, is NOT the same as confabulation, a far more annoying, and potentially dangerous, phenomenon that only harms the endeavours - and the reputation - of those who are striving to explore genuine mysteries).

Oh, BTW: you may be glad to read that - amazingly! - the person who thought it was Woodward who had drowned (only to be "alive again" in recent times) conceded that was what happened.
I know I am.

The truth of the world is mysterious enough as it is.
We don't need more "chaff" to confound it.
Intellectual honesty is the way to go... wherever it is that we are going.

Out of mind?

Oh, to be in England - the magic country of wandering houses and wayward hills and flights across time ...

Just as I thought I had read most of the most interesting "time slip" stories taking place in the United Kingdom, I was reminded of another one - of two, actually. (And yet a third one, for good measure.)

It's a story about a vision purportedly witnessed by Dr E. G. Moon, a supposedly "very down-to-earth" Scottish physician, on a certain day in 1935 when he visited one of his patients, the famous Lord Carson, at his home at Cleve Court (Isle of Thanet).

Now, this particular house is said to be haunted.
But what is said to have happened to Dr Moon doesn't appear to be a "haunting" proper. (And what is a "haunting" - or a "ghost", for that matter - anyway? For a few of my thoughts on the subject, see here.)

I found this story here, and since it is uncommonly well written, I think it would be best to let the author of the original text speak:

In 1935 Dr EG Moon, a very down-to-earth Scots Physician with a practice in Broadstairs, was at Minster in Thanet visiting his patient, Lord Carson, who lived at Cleve Court, a haunted house referred to elsewhere in the section. After talking to Carson, the doctor left his patient and made his way downstairs into the hallway. His mind was very clearly occupied at the time with the instructions he had given the nurse about the prescription he had left for Carson. At the front door Dr Moon hesitated, wondering whether to go back upstairs to have another word with the nurse.

It was at this point that the doctor noted that his car was no longer where he had left it in the driveway. In fact, it had been parked alongside a thick yew hedge and that, too, was missing. Even the drive down which he had driven from the main road was now nothing but a muddy track, and a man was coming towards him.

The newcomer on the scene, only thirty yards from Dr Moon, was rather oddly dressed wearing an old-fashioned coat with several capes around his shoulders. And he wore a top hat of the kind seen in the previous century. As he walked he smacked a switch against his riding boots. Over his shoulder he carried a long-barrelled gun. He stared hard at Moon. And the doctor registered the fact that the man coming towards him might have looked more at home in the 19th century.

Remarkably, Dr Moon seems not at the time to have been either alarmed or even mildly surprised by the changed scenery, by the quite oddly dressed man approaching his or the fact that his car was missing. What preoccupied him was the thought of Lord Carson's prescription. He simply turned away, without any concern, to go back into the house. But he did quite casually take one more look at the scene he was leaving. And now, as if by magic, the car was back where it had been and the yew hedge too. The drive was no longer a muddy track. And the man had also disappeared, back one assumes to the previous century. And it was only now that Dr Moon realised that something odd, something decidedly odd, had occurred.

All of this took seconds and so there is every reason to understand why Dr Moon did not immediately go out into the driveway to see where his missing car was. For the same reason it is understandable why he did not speak to the man dressed like a farm bailiff of the past. Dr Moon was drawn into some kind of accepting, hallucinatory state. When he came to - for that seems to be the best way of describing his return to his own time - he described to Lady Carson what he thought had occurred. He was anxious, however, that no word of if should come out in his lifetime for fear that his patients would begin to question his judgement. It was only after his death that the story was revealed.**

Now, this is a fascinating story as it is. But it's this little bit what makes it even more interesting, to my eyes:

"Dr Moon was drawn into some kind of accepting, hallucinatory state".

He seems to have been in some sort of trance, an almost hypnotic state, similar (at least I understand it that way) to the state of mind one often encounters in dreams: the weirdest things seem not only somehow "normal", but often we simply know (during the dream only), why they make sense, why they should be so. This, I believe, is the Theta "state of mind" (actually, a brain wave rhythm).

Salvador Dalí, The Apparition of the Face of Aphrodite of Cnide in a Landscape (1981)

And, luckily for us, we seem to have another story - from the very same region (and found on the same website) - pointing to the very same phenomenon, whatever it is that induces this strange state of receptiveness.

It is the account of a woman called Charlotte Warburton, who is said to have had a "time slip" on June 18, 1968, on Calverley Road, in the English town of Tunbridge Wells (Kent).

You can read the account here. I shall only point out the similarly unquestioning state of mind that she seems to have experienced - because I believe it is the key to such phenomena.

Was it an external factor, something from outside, what caused these experiences?

A third account - not strictly a "time slip" -, about a girl called Naomi Fuller (read it on the same page as the two accounts above) would seem to suggest that there is something about the area itself that, under certain (as yet undetermined) circumstances, switches a susceptible mind into a Theta-like state, which then makes it possible to perceive usually non-observable realities.

But if that were the case, wouldn't there be many more reports of such experiences? After all, timidity or fear of ridicule can only explain so much.

On the other hand, of course, there places, all over the world, where such experiences (be it "hauntings", "ghosts" or whatever one might call them) are reported quite often. Of couse, it is virtually impossible to establish how many reports are genuine, and from those that are, how many were "fed" by self-suggestion, by expectation.

Anyway, such places deserve - and often get - a thorough in situ individual investigation. (However, many seem to show unusually high electromagnetic activity. More on that some other time.)

For those who would fancy having a look at the planetary configuration of Mrs Warburton's purported "time slip", I even made an astrological chart. (Not knowing the exact time of the purported sighting, only that it was "morning", I entered 10 a.m.)

(If you find anything interesting in it, do let me know. ;))

Be it as it may, I think there is little doubt that it is the individual's susceptibility that makes such things happen.

But if you think I am politely alluding to so-called "hallucinations", you couldn't be more wrong. Apparently, there can be shared visions of things normally unseen (this blog is full of such accounts; I would especially recommend reading the entries about Jung, the Andersons and, of course, about the legendary Misses Moberly and Jourdain) - and not all of them can be satisfactorily explained away as either lies or "folie a deux".

So, judging by such accounts, it would be relatively safe to assume that, at certain locations and under certain (undetermined) influences, an external local force (or interplay of forces) is capable of inducing or triggering perception of otherwise unobservable realities external to the observer - and judging by the accounts of odd or uncharacteristic receptivity accompanying these visions, it would be safe to surmise that the mind is perhaps on a Theta-like "wavelength" at the time of the experience.

More on that on a future occasion.



* Unfortunately, it is not entirely clear who the author of the text(s) is. According to the Credits, it could be either W. H. Johnson or John Haverson (or both).

** I have yet to unearth the original source of this account.

Lost (in) time

I have always, even as a child, suspected that there may be something quirky about "time": that it may not be all that it seems to be - or not to be.

But before I discovered the internet, I had no idea that so many other people had occasional... »issues« with time/space. And it took me a relatively long time to google for »lost time« - just to see what would come up (apart from Proust, of course.)

Nor did I have any idea that so many people seem to associate this phenomenon (be it subjective perception or something else) with UFOs and/or with "spirit activity" (scroll down to "lost time").

But the odd occurrence I am about to describe has nothing to do with either "spirits" or UFOs, even if they do come and visit us and/or influence our perception of timespace. That much I (seem to) know.

What exactly it was, I don't know.
You decide.

Salvador Dalí, Soft watch at moment of first explosion, ink on paper, 1954.

It happened one mid-afternoon in the summer of 1999 or 2000.
I was waiting, somewhat impatiently, for a re-run of a TV documentary which was scheduled to start about 25 minutes later.

I checked the hour, turned on the TV to see whether there was any change in programming - no, there wasn't (checked it against the printed programming in the TV guides, too) - and turned it off again to do some work at the PC.

As I sat down to work, I glanced at my PC clock and then at another clock in the living room. (Both were always on time.) I opened a document file... and closed it again, almost immediately (certainly before writing a single word) - I decided I was in no mood for work, after all.

So I got up, sat on the sofa and turned on the TV again - just in case... But of course the documentary I was waiting for was still some 20 minutes away, according to both the schedules and my clocks. And obviously there had been no sudden change in the programming; the channel where the documentary was coming up was still showing a different programme, exactly according to the schedule. I turned the TV off. (Yes, I have this mania of never leaving the TV on if I am not watching - sue me.)

So I got up again and went to the kitchen, to have a drink - but not before checking the hour on my monitor screen and on the other clock. (Needlessly - about a minute, at most, had passed - but automatically.)

I crossed the two or three metres that separate my sofa from the kitchen. I opened the fridge, took out a drink, closed the fridge door and went back to the sofa. Still bored, I switched the TV on again... and there was my documentary, WELL under way!
(How do I know that? Because I had seen the programme before, but had missed the first part of it - that's why I wanted to watch the re-run. What I saw when I turned on the TV was the part I was already familiar with.)

At first, I was incensed (at the TV station, for its highly irregular programming - or so I thought). I took the TV guide again, checked the schedule, checked the clocks... and discovered that, somehow - I have no idea how or when - 20 minutes had passed since I last checked the hour.





What happened there?
Or rather... HOW did it happen?

I have no idea.

I do know that it was NOT a »seizure«, as some people are quick to suggest.
I mean, who on Earth has seizures standing in their kitchen and not even notice it?
Besides, what kind of "seizure" exactly - and I emphasise: exactly, i.e. am asking for a scientifically rigorous definition - would that be, especially considering I had never experienced any before?
(But then, the most »scientific«-sounding explanations are usually the most ridiculous and in-credible ones. The often flippant tone that comes with them doesn't help either.)

I was under no influence of drugs (don't use them), alcohol (I rarely keep even a drop of booze in my home, and that wasn't one of those rare occasions), or any type of medications. As far as I can remember, I had slept normally the night before.

The weather, by the way, wasn't unusual in any way - not that I can remember. (I mention this because an electrically charged atmosphere seems to be much more conducive to time/space anomalies.)

Whatever it was that happened, I do know I am by no means the first, the last or the only person to have experienced this.
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of accounts of this kind.
To read more about such experiences, go here and here.
(And if you had one yourself, be sure to drop us a line.)

But if you'd rather forgo timespace speculation and invest your time in Marcel Proust's quest (always a wise investment, if you ask me), go here.
It is a totally delightful website; I could not recommend it warmly enough. The time you spend there, or indeed with Proust himself, may be lost - but never wasted.

It looks like a human, but it shouldn't be there...

... and the answer that immediately seems to spring to mind is: what is a GHOST!*

I am somewhat reluctant to include these musings here, since this blog is not supposed to be about »ghosts« - and there are many, many genuine time/space displacement stories waiting for their turn to be told here.
And since "ghost" stories transcend the usual perceived boundaries of every single time/space continuum – AKA the present – it is somewhat tricky to discuss them here, in this space dedicated to perceived time/space anomalies. Because once the floodgates are open, this space could soon outgrow its carefully trimmed hedges and burst into the anarchy of (yet another!) generically »paranormal« blog. (The fact that the blog mistress is para-normal should be more than enough, for the time being...)

But it occurs to me that we don't really know what so-called »ghosts« really are. And I don't think they can even be lumped together into a single category, however broad.

I love a good – let me emphasise that: GOOD – ghost story. Who doesn't?

But there really aren't all that many around – good ones, I mean.
(On the other hand, there are quite a few very good ones that aren't »around«, because the world has simply not heard of them yet.)

I don't know about you, but I've always found it somewhat irritating that so many people – even documentary film-makers and such – jump to conclusions regarding the nature and origins of apparitions and other para-physical phenomena indicating a sort of human presence.
Whenever the presence of such a phenomenon is established, it is followed – and, usually, preceded – by stories of somebody living and/or dying in the place that is »haunted«, often without any evidence that the apparition is in fact linked with the specific person(s) who supposedly lived and/or died in the house.

In short, among those who give any credence to the phenomenon at all, ghosts seem to be widely identified with »wandering souls«; they are thought to be ex-people, if you'll excuse the pythonesque allusion, who for some reason couldn't »rest in peace«.

And what irritates me the most is precisely the absence of questions – of questioning - regarding the actual origins of such apparitions.

And yet, some apparitions are clearly not the result of »tormented« spirits. Such is the famous case of the Roman regiment – complete with a mule or horse – that is said to have been seen (in 1953, by one Harry Martindale) marching through a cellar of the Treasurer's House in York (England).

The soldiers were said to have a haggard, disheveled – tired? – appearance, which would be in no way unusual, considering their occupation. (The appearance of the mule is not described in detail.)

More unusually, however, the lowest part of their bodies, from the knees down, seemed to have vanished.

Were they victims of a shin-worshiping tribe or something? Maybe the local women craved their footwear and the soldiers wouldn't part with it?

Hardly: as I said, they appeared to be marching – in perfect silence - through the cellar, only the lower part of their legs was unseen. And we do know there was a Roman road leading through that future cellar – and that the street level was a feet or two lower than the level of the ground today.

Here is a good (if short) account of the story (from The Independent):

(And here is an entry about Roman structures in non-haunted cellars from a wonderful history blog, with some humourous comments, one of which includes an allusion to this story: WHAT YOU CAN FIND IN CELLARS.)

But even the most pedestrian programmes about "haunted" places can yield surprisingly productive thoughts.

I was (semi)watching a programme about »ghosts« on the TV the other day.

Semi-watching TV is they key word here; with the »corner« of your eye you can sometimes catch more than you would normally. And with the »corner« of your mind, you can sometimes catch thoughts that might not occur to you normally. (Of course, being sleep-deprived helps, too...)

There was talk of a certain room in a certain hotel that is supposedly »haunted« (and there are many such hotel rooms across the world). Purportedly, people often see "shadows" or "grey" apparitions of people wandering through the room before disappearing as suddenly as they appeared.

So far, so good... but wouldn't you know: immediately the team proceeded to investigate whether somebody died in that room.

Why?

What IF some of the localised, i.e. space-specific, »apparitions« and other, non-visual manifestations of a human »presence« are really the effect of that person's (the ghost-to-be) mental revisiting (remembering, if you will, only with more intensity than usually) the spaces that were important to them – from within their own timeline? Or, perhaps more accurately, across time.

(Or maybe the place wasn't even all that important to them; maybe their thought - or their "astral body", as many like to call it - simply wandered into their room because of some random mental association?)

Could this explain appearances such as the one Ingmar Bergman reportedly witnessed in a theatre?

I for one have the distinct impression that all times really DO exist all at once.
(But more on that some other time. Besides, there is a wonderful collection of books listed at the bottom of this page that discuss just that. You don't have to buy them - borrow them, and I am sure at least one or two of them will be worth your while.)

I hear you: it is rather thankless to offer a theory that cannot be supported by evidence and is, furthermore, based on another unsupported theory...

But thinking is fun. ;)

So... what do you think?

* For those who are not familiar with American pop culture, this unusual form of expressing an answer refers to a very popular quiz show called "Jeopardy".