Not Tonight's Blue Moon

Photo date: August 30, 2023. Photographer: Mark Mahin. 

I was disappointed tonight when photographing what was supposed to be a blue moon. The moon did not look blue to me. But I did get the photo below, showing a mysterious orb outdoors.  

There was no fog, mist, rain or precipitation on this night. 

Spooky Synchronicity

 Today I was on a walk, when I saw landing on the sidewalk just exactly in front of my path the feather shown below. It landed an arm's length in front of me, not a bit to the left or the right. There was a tree above me, but I could see no birds in it. Thinking this a rare event, I walked on about 10 meters. But then I thought that I should pick up the feather, perhaps for the sake of identifying it. I returned to the spot the feather was. At the exact instant I reached down to pick up the feather, another falling object landed at the same spot, only about a thumb's length away from the feather: a green leaf.  Both are shown below.

Today is August 28th, and it is more than a more than a month before lots of leaves start falling here in New York City. There were almost no leaves on any of the streets. What are the odds against two different things landing at exactly the same tiny spot, in different minutes, during the only ten seconds I passed the spot?

I first brought the feather back to my home, but then thought I should go get the leaf also, to show how healthy it looked. Returning to the spot where the leaf was, I saw nothing else fall. But at the moment I picked up the leaf, there was a squirrel an arm's length away, on the same sidewalk where the feather and the leaf appeared. Oddly, the squirrel seemed to pause and look back at me as I picked up the leaf. 

Were I to try to speculate on a symbolic meaning of the synchronicity in the first photo, I might imaginatively speculate that the feather symbolizes some flight of the soul in my future, and that the green leaf symbolizes being "green-lighted" for such a flight. But that's just a wild guess. 

Pilots Seeing Sky Orbs Almost Daily?

 An article in the British paper The Sun has quotations by former US Navy pilot Ryan Graves. Some of the quotes are startling. Referring to "Mach 2" (twice the speed of sound), he says this:

"What we were seeing were objects, primarily spheres, that were traveling anywhere from completely stationary and very high winds, to an order of Mach 2...We are seeing these objects on a near daily basis. It would be out there all day. We don't know their origin, [or] what their intent was. We eventually had to start modifying our training so that we wouldn't hit one of these objects and they were getting pretty close."

A Yellow Orb

 Photo date: August 23, 2023. Photographer: Mark Mahin. 

We see below a mysterious yellow orb I photographed indoors.

These 10 Spooky Things May Be Signs Before Death

In 1825 Horace Welby wrote a book entitled "Signs before death, and authenticated apparitions: in one hundred narratives." You can read it for free at www.archive.org using the link here. Welby noted  that "there has been, notwithstanding this scepticism, in all ages and countries, a partial credence given to presentiments of death."  On another page he noted, "It is the common opinion of the Turks and Persians, that near the close of life, every person has some sort of extraordinary revelation of that event." Welby's book is full of tales of people who had forewarnings of death or people who saw apparitions. We can count him as one of the first parapsychologists. 

The claim is often made that serious research into psychical phenomena began in 1882 with the founding of the Society for Psychical Research. This often-repeated claim is untrue. Serious research into psychical phenomena dates back much earlier. Serious research into psychical phenomena was being conducted by the early Mesmerists such as Amand-Marie-Jacques de Chastenet, the Marquis of Puységur. In 1784 he discovered through experimentation what he called "artificial somnambulism," something that is  now called hypnotism.  It is clear that parapsychology was a serious study by 1825. That year saw not only the publication of Welby's book, but also the beginning of the second committee on Mesmerism which carried on operations between 1825 and 1831. The committee consisted of doctors of the Royal Academy of Medicine in France. That commission found resoundingly in favor of clairvoyance, as reported here. Some other examples of parapsychology in the early nineteenth century are discussed here. 

Welby's claims about "signs before death" have been corroborated by modern evidence for deathbed visions, which often include apparitions of the dead.  Some posts on the topic can be read here, here and here.  An interesting possibility is that there may occur many different types of signs alerting someone that his time on Earth is short. Speculating freely about a large range of possibilities, I could say that signs before death might possibly include (1) strangely repetitive bird sightings, (2) hard-to-explain weather events, (3) improbable symbolic flower appearances, (4)  machines mysteriously turning off or digital clock numbers fading in and out, (5)  lights switching off or smoke detectors inexplicably activating, (6) untouched lights turning off and then back on, (7) dreams suggesting life after death, (8) apparition sightings, (9) tablet or smartphones devices mysteriously lighting up and then going dark in a long-lasting loop, when recharging;  (10) maybe even strange appearances of tangible objects with a symbolic interpretation.

Today I found in my front yard the piece of paper below, which might be interpreted as some sign of a coming "admission" into some afterlife realm:

Part of the reason I wonder about such a thing is that I haven't seen an old style ticket like this in ages. 

Postscript: I can add one other possible sign before death: the sighting of a type of insect you've never seen before, particularly if the insect's name has a symbolic relevance. Today at eye level on my front door rim I saw the insect shown below, a type I've never seen before.

The insect is called a spotted latternfly. In near-death experiences people often report floating out of their bodies and flying up to some mysterious light, sometimes called a Being of light. The name "latternfly" brings to mind such a motif: a soul flying up to some mysterious light or Being of light would be like an insect flying up to some outdoor lantern. 

Spooky Systems

On the night of August 5, 2023 at around 9:10 PM a ceiling smoke detector went off in a room  with closed windows, a room I was in. The smoke detector was a state-of-the-art electrically powered ceiling smoke detector that had been installed about 18 months ago during remodeling. There was no smoke or vapor in the room, and no one had cooked in the house or showered nearby during the past hour; nor was there any smoke anywhere in the house, where no one smokes.  For hours no one had even made coffee or tea in the room where the alarm went off. The very modern smoke detector stated something like "Smoke has been detected on the first floor," even though there was no smoke. It was not any electrical problem, and the TV and lights in the room continued operating normally.  The cause of this spooky event is a baffling mystery. The detector (an expensive Nest Protect model) is shown below. No such anomaly had occurred in the 18 previous months, or in the ten days since August 5.  The next day a relative reported that the death of her husband had occurred on this very night of August 5, 2023.

Today at about 12:05 AM I saw the latest in many cases I have seen of the little green light in my  modern-type GFCI outlet in a bathroom going off for a second or two, and then turning back on. I have seen many cases of this happening, as recorded in my post here.  Later today there was a new twist I have never seen before. I used the bathroom about 8:00 AM, without noticing anything unusual. The green light on the outlet was still on. Having had difficulty getting back to sleep in the middle of the night, I slept until about 9:50 AM. When I entered the bathroom at 9:50 there was no power in the bathroom, although nearby electric clocks displayed the time normally. Trying to turn on the two different bathroom lights, I got no lights; and the green light on the GFCI was off. Apparently between 8:00 AM and 9:50 AM one of the white buttons had mysteriously been pressed, something that shuts off all power in the bathroom. I pressed one of the two buttons to restore the power in the bathroom. There was no one else but me on this floor after 8:00. The outlet is shown below. How the button got pressed is a spooky anomaly similar to the smoke detector anomaly. The GFCI outlet is shown below. 

To read about many other spooky events I saw (some far spookier than the ones above), see my "Spookiest Observations" post here (which includes some videos I took of devices acting in very spooky ways), and the post here.

Postscript: Another day, another spooky system. This time it's my Simplisafe home security system. It has a control system screen which normally looks black and blank whenever the alarm is off. Tonight (September 7) my wife pointed out that the screen was flashing on and off, even though the alarm is set to off. I witnessed the effect myself, which I have never seen before with this system.  

Post-postscript: The mysterious shutting off of the GFCI outlet occurred again on January 29, my late father's birthday, at the very instant I was thinking about my late father, as I describe here. There was also another spooky event with the smoke detector, which I describe in the March 1, 2024 postscript of the post here. 

Post-post postscript: I cannot recall any case of the smoke detector shown above going off mysteriously, with a vocal indication of smoke, during the time between August 5, 2023 and September  15, 2024.  Then on September 16, 2024, around 5:50 PM, the smoke detector went off, flashing red, with a voice from the alarm saying that there was smoke in the bedroom. But there was no smoke anywhere in the house, and no one was cooking. It was not any electrical problem, and the TV and lights in the room continued operating normally. 

Orbs Continue to Spook Pennsylvania

My previous posts here, here and here report sightings of mysterious orbs in Pennsylvania.  At the site Stan Gordon's UFO Anomalies Zone, we read more of these reports.

In the first report dated July 28 we read this:

"Researcher Kevin Paul received information that two people walking along a river trail in Greene county early that evening observed two beachball sized balls of light about twenty feet apart flying in a diagonal formation. The spheres blinked orange and white and were estimated as moving through the sky at less than two hundred feet altitude."

In another report dated July 28 we read this: "Mysterious sounds, small orbs of light low to the ground have come out of the woods and have approached within a few feet of witnesses, and other odd light phenomena are some of the anomalies reported." A report dated July 29 says, "The researchers heard what appeared to have been a tree pushed over, and a  bright red sphere of light was observed low to the ground." Another report from the same day but involving a different observer says, "He also noticed several smaller bright objects near the spherical object that seemed to be quickly moving around it."

In a recent story in the UK Mirror, we read this: "Ever since that monumental year, countless residents and UFO enthusiasts have openly shared their peculiar experiences in the sleepy town, from hovering lights to oval-shaped flying objects and large 'glowing balls' - earning Bonnybridge the title of the 'Scottish Roswell'." 

Orb-Like UFOs Are Four Times More Common Than Disk-Like UFOs

 On the page here you can see the current totals (by shape) of UFOs reported by  the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC). 

Unspecified 6388

Changing 3872

Chevron 1713

Cigar 3688

Circle 14083

Cone 602

Cross 493

Cube 20

Cylinder 2431

Delta 1

Diamond 2087

Disk 8602

Egg 1260

Fireball 9826

Flash 2408

Formation 4784

Light 27207

Orb 5562

Other 9957

Oval 6281

Rectangle 2554

Sphere 7560

Star 146

Teardrop 1222

Triangle 12952

Unknown 9860

It seems reasonable to combine the categories of "Circle," "Fireball," "Sphere" and "Orb" into a single category we may call "orb-like."  Doing that we get a total of 37,031 for orb-like UFOs.  UFOs in this category are more than four times more common than disk-like UFOs (with 8602 occurrences). But for some reason when people think of UFOs they tend to imagine disk-like objects. Maybe it was all that talk of "flying saucers" around 1952 that created such a "stereotype." 

We read here of a sighting of many yellow orbs in India in 2012:

"Units of the Indian Army and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police Force (ITBP) reported over 100 sightings of UFOs in the Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir between August and October. Observers described the objects as yellowish spheres that rose from the Chinese side, traversed the sky for several hours, and then disappeared. Despite investigations involving ground-based radar, spectrum analysers, and a reconnaissance drone, the objects remained unidentified."

The Orbs Followed the Aircraft

 By downloading the pdf file version of the SCU Review 4.1 using this link, you can see (on page 10) the full January 2, 1945 New York Times cover page story reporting that US pilots had been reporting for more than a month "balls of fire" called "foo fighters" that flew along with the planes, appearing in colors of red, or in groups of three or fifteen.

The news story begins like this:

"The Germans have thrown something new into the night skies over Germany -- the weird, mysterious 'foo-fighter,' balls of fire that race alongside the wings of American Beaufighters flying intruder missions over the Reich. American pilots have been encountering the eerie 'foo-fighter' for more than a month in their night flights. No one apparently knows what this sky weapon is. The balls of fire appear suddenly and accompany the planes for miles."

We later hear a Lieutenant Donald Meirs of Chicago describe three types of these orbs: "One is red balls of fire which appear off our wing tips and fly along with us; the second is a vertical row of three balls of fire which fly in front of us, and the third is a group of about fifteen lights which appear off in the distance -- like a Christmas tree up in the air -- and flicker on and off." Meirs recalls being chased for twenty miles by one of these strange balls. A Lieutenant Gould said he had seen one of these objects follow his wing tips and says it then "in a few seconds, zoomed 20,000 feet into the air out of sight." Gould said, "We were very close to them, and none of us saw any structure on the fire balls." 

The news story speculates that the strange balls were some kind of German weapon, but they never caused any damage, and no one was ever able to explain them. The strange balls acted nothing like weapons. 

And speaking of major newspapers reporting aircraft followed by mysterious spherical objects, the Washington Post story here from 1987 is entitled "UFO SIGHTING CONFIRMED BY FAA, AIR FORCE RADAR." We read of the case of Japan Air Lines Cargo Flight 1628. We read this:

"The FAA confirmed on Tuesday that government radar picked up the object that Terauchi said followed his Boeing 747 cargo jet. Terauchi, a pilot for 29 years, said he briefly glimpsed the large unknown object in silhouette. 'It was a very big one -- two times bigger than an aircraft carrier,' he said. Terauchi made a drawing of how he thought the objects' looked. He drew a giant walnut-shaped object, with big bulges above and below a wide flattened brim. The captain, who is stationed in Anchorage with his family, was flying the jumbo jet from Iceland to Anchorage on a Europe-to-Japan flight when the crew encountered the object in clear weather over Alaska. Terauchi said the three unidentified objects followed his jet for 400 miles."

A 2009 Paper on "Spherical Anomalous Phenomena"

 A 2009 scientific paper by scientist Massimo Teodorani is entitled "Spherical Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Scientific Observations and Physical Hypotheses, Danger Evaluation For Aviation and Future Observational Plan." The author is an astrophysicist PhD who has authored or co-authored quite a few scientific papers you can read on Google Scholar using the link here, and the author is a co-author (with Harvard astronomy professor Avi Loeb) of a 2023 scientific paper laying out the framework of the widely discussed "Galileo Project" that will study unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs).  

The 2009 paper tells us this: "Spherical unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), of both plasma and solid-like kinds, have often been observed in the world." The author tells us that "most of them have been classified as earthlights," although I don't think that claim is correct. "Earthlights" is a term used only rarely for mysterious spheres or mysterious orbs. We read that "The majority are seen singularly, in other cases they fly in a sort of formation."  We read this:

"The Hessdalen valley in Norway is probably the prototype of these special locations, not just due to the many events that are reported, photographed, and videoed (and sometimes occasionally measured) but because of the existence of a permanent measuring station there and the occurrence of many international missions in the area. This location has become a sort of 'laboratory area'  that is very well suited for the investigations of physical scientists in general (Strand, website). It can now be confirmed that similar recurring phenomena also have been sighted in other areas of the world: for instance the Brown Mountain (Warren, 2004) and Marfa light phenomena (Bunnell, website; Stephan et al., 2009) in the U.S.A. and the Min-min phenomena in Australia (Strand, 1996; Pettigrew, 2003) are quite well known and have been scientifically monitored."

The paper makes these claims about spherical anomalous phenomena:

• "They are most often of spherical shape, of different colours (mostly white), often of long duration (up to 30-60 min, spaced out by periods of 'off' and 'on' phases), and relatively large dimensions (1-10 meters)."
• "They are often able to emit a high level of radiant energy. The most credible measurement attributed to them a power on the order of 20 KW in the optical spectrum (Teodorani, 2004a). They are most often unstable in luminosity and are subject to light variability at the rate of a few seconds or less, with no clear periodicity, i.e., irregular. They can remain on for some minutes (while pulsating) and then turn off during a similar duration."
• "Quite often the light phenomenon presents a radar track (Strand, 1984), and anomalous radar signatures also can be recorded when a luminous phenomenon is not in sight (Montebugnoli et al., 2002)."
• "Many witnesses report that such phenomena very often tend to approach people and/or animals in a way that goes beyond a simple mechanism of electrostatic attraction."
• "Some spherical light phenomena have been seen quite often flying close to airplanes (Haines, 2003; Haines, 2007; Haines, 2009). A similar phenomenon was reported during WW-II giving rise to the so called 'foo fighters' repeatedly seen by military pilots. Similar spheres have been seen (and filmed) going from up to down in the streets of some cities. Popular ufology used to call these phenomena 'probes', meaning that they are 'scout devices' sent from larger airships of alleged exogenous origin." 
• "It has already been said that more classic 'earthlight phenomena' tend to very often occur close to the ground (an example is shown in Fig. 4), but similar light balls also have been seen high in the sky, and we do not yet know if the two represent the same phenomenon or not."
• "Observations often (but not always) show sudden and sometimes zigzag movements: this is not at all an aerodynamic motion."
• "Unidentified anomalous phenomena of spherical shape are increasingly reported in many areas of the world. Most of them seem to be a plasma anomaly of some type, others appear to be something technological. The dilemma is to find out if they are two separate kinds of phenomena, two different manifestations of the same phenomenon or some third phenomenon we now know nothing about. In any case we have a precious opportunity to expand our scientific knowledge."

Correct, so why are scientists continuing to follow a "nothing spooky allowed" rule, and continuing to ignore this important phenomenon of mysterious orbs?

The high energies reported do not match anything in my experience, so probably we have a case of different things with different energies. I have never had the slightest worry about being electrically shocked when I photographed a mysterious orb. 

Are you surprised that an astrophysicist PhD has taken a serious interest in mysterious orbs, apparently  regarding them as some important reality? You should not be, given that physics PhD Klaus Heinemann previously wrote the book The Orb Project, and summarizes his views on the reality of mysterious orbs in the article here. 

Sky Orbs in Diamond Formation Disabling a Radar?

 At the link here you can read a transcript of last week's testimony to the US Congress regarding Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. At one point in the testimony we read this statement by US congressman Matt Gaetz:

"And they saw a sequence of four craft in a clear diamond formation for which there is a radar sequence that I and I alone have observed in the United States Congress. One of the pilots goes to check out that Diamond formation and sees a large floating I can only describe as an orb, again, like I said, not of any human capability that I’m that I’m aware of. And when he approached, he said that his radar went down. He said that his flir system malfunctioned and that he had to manually take this image from one of the lenses, and it was not automatic automated."