The Doctor Saw Orbs and a "Shadow Body"

On page 11 of the May 1929 edition of The Occult Digest, which you can read here, we have an account by Julia Seton M. D. She states this about an experience of applying anesthesia to a patient:

"Dr. Hunt bent his eyes upon me. I was almost spellbound with the intensity of his voice as he gave me a second command. I obeyed. Slowly but deftly I began steeping the patient’s senses. His pulse became almost imperceptible. I had reached a critical point—I looked at Dr. Hunt again, waiting for a signal to stop. He moved a little closer to the patient. Then suddenly something happened. To this day I cannot tell whether it was really the heat of the room, with the fumes of the ether acting upon my overwrought imagination, or if something actually took place. It might have been a complex-confusion in my own mind, but anyway, as I bent over the unconscious patient I saw a ball of soft hazy light gather around his head and face and from this a slender thread of light moved down and gathered into another flimsy ball of light just in the center of his body.

These two spots of misty light gleamed and seemed to act as the positive and negative ends of some occult electric battery. Then very abruptly from the center of this connecting thread another ray of light stretched out like a cord and lay over the sheet across the patient on the operating table. I followed it closely with my eyes and suddenly saw that it appeared to end in another body, standing very near the table. 

I looked up and caught the fixed gaze of Dr. Hunt as he leaned forward breathlessly. I followed his gaze and we both saw distinctly the shadow body of the patient standing beside the operating table looking at his own body; then, lifting his eyes, he looked at the surgeons, next at Dr. Hunt and at last slowly looked directly into my own staring eyes, and at that moment there passed through me such a dizzy shock of electricity that I struggled frantically to keep my senses."

You might be inclined to dismiss the whole account as nonsense until you consider that during out-of-body experiences people often report seeing their body from a meter or two away from it, or seeing their body from a viewing perspective at the top of the ceiling.  So it is far from unthinkable that an external observer might see something corresponding to such a person's out-of-body experience. 

Strange Edges

 Photo date January 29, 2025. Photographer: Mark Mahin. 

We see below an odd orb or half-orb I photographed indoors. 

As I Expected, There Was a Spooky Disturbance on My Late Father's Birthday

 Having witnessed a very spooky disturbance on my late father's birthday in 2024, I expected that there would be a similar spooky event on his birthday, today. It did not take long for my expectation to be fulfilled, with the event occurring in the first hour of my father's birthday. 

At about 12:50 AM I lay awake in bed, and heard a loud noise. I went into the living room to investigate. I found the front panel of my kitchen lying on the floor.  The photo below shows exactly what I saw, before I had touched the panel.

The kitchen and the room were remodeled a few years ago, and the panel had been firmly glued into place for about three years.  If the panel had just fallen naturally from its normal position (shown at the top of the photo), it should have landed on the opposite side of the side shown above, a side that had lots of glue on it. 

There is an interesting partial match between the name of the fallen unit and a word meaning "father." The English word for the fallen unit is "panel," a word that begins with the syllable of "pa," which in English is a causal word meaning "father."

I had expected an event like this to occur because on my father's birthday last year something similar had happened, as described here. On that day last year I had a dream about a papaya. While lying in bed wondering whether that dream had symbolized my father (because "papaya" starts with the word "papa"), a circuit breaker in the bathroom mysteriously went on, without any imaginable natural cause. 

The spooky observation reported in this post may be causally related to the spooky observation reported in my post here. 

I predict that next year on my father's birthday (if I am still alive then), there will occur some other spooky disturbance. 

Pairs and Trios of Sky Orbs: A Retrospective (Part 1)

Below are some photos I previously took of pairs and trios of mysterious orbs in the sky. All of the photos were taken in clean, dry air when there was no fog, mist, rain or precipitation. 

My 2018 photo below shows a pair of sky orbs of different colors, with the two seeming like close companions:

My photo below from 2018 shows one large orb near a small orb.

My 2017 photo below shows two purple night orbs:

My 2018 photo below shows a trio of orbs near a building:

My photo below from 2018 shows two orbs of different colors and sizes:

My photo below from 2018 shows two orbs of different colors near a building:

My photo from 2019 shows two orbs in the sky.

Was the Visible Orb a Death Omen?

 Below is an account found on page 159 of the October 1884 edition of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, which you can read here. 

"From the Rev. Stephen H. Saxby, Mount Elton, Clevedon. Mr. S. M. Saxby, the percipient, is now dead. 

About the year 1841 I was in a room with my father in our house in the Isle of Wight, when he exclaimed, 'Good God, what is that ?' starting up as he spoke, and apparently looking at something. He then turned to me and said that he had seen a ball of light pass through the room, and added, 'Depend upon it, Morse Simonds is dead.'  This was an old servant ill London, to whom he had been sending money, in illness. In course of post came information that she passed away at the very time in question. S,H.S." 

A Strange Orb

 Photo date: January 24, 2025. Photographer: Mark Mahin. 

Below we see a mysterious orb I photographed indoors. It has a strange mark on it, in additional to some unusual color features at the bottom. 

You Are a Reality Detective

One of the very important jobs that you have in life is to be a reality detective. That role involves trying to very slowly get a better and better idea about what type of being you are and what type of universe you live in.  

The number one rule of any good detective is: don't throw away clues. In your lifetime you will be given many clues that can help you get a better and better idea about what type of being you are and what type of universe you live in.  An extremely important rule is: don't throw away any observations you make or any fact you learn or any reliable testimony you hear about that could be a very important clue about such questions. 

Some of the very important clues you may get in life may be facts that you learn, such as the fact that every proton has precisely the same electrical charge as every electron, but with an opposite sign, or facts involving the short lifetimes of brain proteins, or facts involving the enormous hierarchical organization and component interdependence in the human body. Other very important clues you may get in life may come in the form of strange things you see, strange dreams you have, strange experiences you have, or strange things that show up in your photos. Other clues may come in the form of amazing accounts by reliable witnesses. An extremely important rule is: never throw away anything that might be a very important clue as to what type of being you are and what type of universe you live in.  You are a reality detective, and good detectives don't throw away clues. Whenever you observe or learn anything that might be an important clue about who you are and what type of universe you live in, write it down somewhere, save it, date it, and classify it. 

The universe may give you only so many clues about its nature and your nature, and every possibly important clue on these topics should be saved as surely as you would save a diamond dropping from the sky. Never say, "I'm not sure this is an important clue so I'll discard it." Save anything that might be an important clue, and you can ponder later whether it is important. If you doubt whether a clue is important, just save a private record of it. 

Slowly collect clues, and slowly, carefully ponder their implications. A crime detective needs to work fast, but a reality detective works over a time scale of decades. 

Orbs and a Ghost?

 Early in episode 1 of season 9 of the Expedition X series on HBO Max, we hear of a French chateau associated "with repeated accounts of orbs of light alongside bright yet transparent entities." We hear that in 1984 "six people witnessed a pulsating white apparition floating through a hallway for nearly a half hour." Later there is mention of mysterious shadowy figures seen in the chateau. Around the 8:02 mark a witness on camera says that "just last week" he saw shadowy forms stand next to him. 

A Double-Striped Orb

 Photo date: January 21, 2025. Photographer: Mark Mahin. 

We see below a mysterious orb I photographed indoors. 

Big Sky Orbs: A Retrospective (Part 8)

Below are some photos I previously took of large mysterious orbs in the sky. All of the photos were taken in clean, dry air when there was no fog, mist, rain or precipitation. 

My 2017 photo below shows a mysterious blue orb near a building

My 2017 photo below shows a big blue sky orb. 

My 2017 photos here include one photo of a large blue sky orb:

My 2015 photo here shows a sky orb with a lovely purple color:

My 2018 photo here shows another beautiful purple sky orb:

My 2018 photo here shows a big blue orb and a smaller green orb near the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York:

My 2018 photo here shows a mysterious orb that looks like it is peeking through a window:

Analyzing the Account of the Latest "UFO Whistleblower"

Recently a video on the www.newsnationnow.com site has gained considerable attention, and is being talked about quite a bit on the UFO subreddit here.  A helicopter pilot named Jacob Barber is interviewed, and he makes claims of having seen something of non-human origin. The video starts out by asserting that Barber had involvement in intelligence activities, and had a high security clearance. We hear testimony from a few people saying Barber is trustworthy.

 Then Barber tells us of being involved in some attempt to retrieve by helicopter a weird egg-shaped object about 20 feet in size. At 9:36 Barber says he got within 150 feet of the object. At 10:48 Barber is very oddly asked a question about how he knew that the object was non-human in origin -- "alien tech."  That's a very odd question to be asking someone. At this point Barber fails to give a convincing answer. He says that looking at the object you could tell it was extraordinary and anomalous, and non-human. That is not a good answer. Seeing something strange looking does not entitle you to claim that is something artificial and of non-human origin. 

At 11:29 Barber says the object was a white egg-shaped object with no thermal signature and no sign of a propulsion system. He is asked again at the 12:13 mark how he knew that the object was of non-human origin. Again, he fails to give  a very convincing answer to that question. He describes the object as ridiculous-looking, but that does not justify a claim of non-human origin.  He says that later he heard from someone that what he recovered that night was "NHI," a term meaning nonhuman intelligence. Hearsay accounts like that are of much less value than first-hand testimony. 

Around the 13:25 mark the interviewer says that his organization has received footage of a helicopter retrieving an egg-shaped object in a sling. We see what looks an egg-shaped object being carried in a sling-like device. Around 15:13 Barber says there was another object involved, an acorn-shaped object. Around 15:54 Barber describes what he calls a profound-experience while retrieving one of the objects.  He refers at the 16:16 mark to feeling an "intense hybrid of sadness and happiness and beauty." The article gives us these quotes:

" 'I felt like something connected with me,' he said. 'I felt like something had tuned in to me and my soul and was providing me some sense of guidance on what to do and how profound what I was doing was. It was so overwhelming that I began to cry.'

Barber said he had never experienced a feeling like that before.

'It was a very feminine energy. I’ll tell you that it felt like the spirit of God, but not in any masculine sense. And it wasn’t like a soul; it was like a frequency that I was connected with. And whatever that force was since that night, it has stayed with me. And as crazy as this sounds, it’s what’s guiding me now, and it’s what’s providing protection for me.' "

At the 19:03 mark he says there is a psychic component to the UAP research. 

It is true that reports of UFO encounters and so-called "alien abduction" experiences often seem to have a strong psychic and spiritual component. I discuss that in my post below:

Quite a Few So-Called "Alien Abductions" May Be Spiritual Experiences

Around the 19:31 mark we hear that Barber says he was convinced that he had connected telepathically to a non-human intelligence. We then hear (around the 19:50 mark) Barber speculate that that the appearance of the egg-shaped object was not accidental, that the object was "summoned" by something called the Psyonix Team (or the Psionics Team). Around the 20:13 mark Barber is asked what is a psionic. He answers that a psionic is someone with "astral, temporal" abilities. In the next minute he claims that there was an attempt to use psychics to summon a UFO or UAP to land. At 21:39 someone else (Don Paul Bales) says something that sounds rather supportive of some of Barber's claims.

Around the 25:00 mark Barber says that he and his team got ill, possibly because of the retrieval mission. He describes symptoms such as hair loss that are similar to those of radiation poisoning. Later in the video we have a hard-to-follow account in which Barber describes some involvement in retrieving sensitive hard-drives pertaining to UFOs or UAPs. There is some kind of complicated story in which it is insinuated that someone's life may have been in danger. 

The physical part of the account is not all-that impressive, in the sense that a 20-foot white oval object is not very impressive evidence of some nonhuman power.  Any number of human powers might be able to manufacture such an object.  The most interesting parts of the account are the claim that some team is attempting to summon mysterious visitors using telepathy, and Barber's claim that he had some kind of mystical telepathic encounter while retrieving this object (or a related object) in a helicopter he piloted. 

The evidence for telepathy is very good, and the evidence for psi abilities such as ESP and clairvoyance goes back nearly 200 years, consisting of both an abundance of experience accounts and a great abundance of convincing experiments. You can read about some of this evidence in my long series of 68 posts you can read here, by continuing to press Older Posts at the bottom right. We should not throw away Barber's account just because of its telepathic element.  Despite some cases of drawing big conclusions about non-human origins based on insufficient evidence,  Barber mostly appears rather credible and persuasive as a witness, so his account cannot be summarily dismissed. Instead his account should be noted and preserved, and scholars of UFOs should look for further evidence that might support his claim of people trying to summon UFOs telepathically (particularly people funded by a government), or claims of people having telepathic experiences after encounters with UFOs. The general rule to follow about any report of the paranormal that is even halfway credible is: don't discard, but put it in your records, and keep an eye out for other accounts of the same type.  

UFO studies have been dominated by materialists advancing a "nuts and bolts" explanation that UFOs are spaceships from another planet. We can expect that the typical UFO buff may be hostile to Barber's claims. But the kneejerk hostility of materialists to telepathy claims (a topic materialists fail to decently study) means very little. 

Repeating Patterns in Mysterious Orbs

 The visual below sums up into a single image my post "Recurring Patterns in Mysterious Orbs" which you can read here. The numbers below each image tell how many photos I have taken with that type of pattern. By using the link here you can see each example of each pattern.  The pattern repetitions would almost all occur on different days, with the pattern not appearing in consecutive photos from the same camera. 

Freaky Friday

A few minutes ago I was alone on the first floor of the house where I live, when a hall ceiling light about six feet behind me turned off by itself. I instantly turned around and saw no one near the light's switch on the first floor. At first rather incredulous that this could have happened, I thought that maybe someone had turned off the light from the second floor. I tried all the light switches on the second floor, next to the stairway leading from the first floor to the second floor, and none of them were capable of turning off the light on the first floor. It could not have been a circuit breaker going off or a lightbulb wearing out, because the light on the first floor turned back on as soon as I tried it. 

Postscript: (January 19): A few minutes ago, I was about to go to bed, and I tried to turn on my sound machine which I run while sleeping, to make a waterfall sound. I accidentally pressed the wrong button on the machine, and turned on a light on the little round sound machine. I turned off that light (which I never use at night), and pressed the right button to turn on the waterfall sound. After going into an adjacent room for a few minutes. I came back to the area of the sound machine, and I was very surprised to find that the light I had turned off a few minutes ago was now back on again. There was no one else in either room.  Other cases of lights turning on or off mysteriously are reported in my "Spookiest Observations" post you can read here. 

The Mystery Orbs Were Super-Fast

 Below is a news account that appeared in the January 22, 1953 edition of the Madera Tribune, which you can read here. We read of weird sky orbs that changed color and moved at blazing speeds. 

For non-English readers, here is a quotation:

"Strange balls of colored light, sometimes moving slowly and sometimes streaking through the skies over northern Japan so swiftly that a 600-mile-per-hour U. S. jet couldn’t get near, were reported here today. The objects were seen both on Dec. 29 and Jan. 9. according to Col. Curtis Low of Needham, Mass., commander of the 39th Air Division, which is responsible for the defense of Northern Japan. He said the glowing balls, sighted only a few minutes flying time from a Russian Far East air base, change continuously from red to green to white. They have been spotted. Low said, by U. S. radar observers and American pilots. 'These were well corroborated sightings by trained men—not the reports of a few imaginative people.' he said."

UFO Guy Says People Are Seeing Orbs in Their Homes

 Below is a statement made on January 9 by Stan Gordon, who has the web site "Stan Gordon's UFO Anomalies Zone":

"More startling are the ongoing reports of mysterious incredibly low level and close range luminous orbs, or balls of light. I became aware of these reports in the 1960s. I have been calling them, 'mini-UFOs' for years. I often have reports of these spherical objects at various altitudes in the sky. The incidents that I am most intrigued with are when these objects are encountered remarkably close to witnesses, low to the ground, or even on the ground. These objects have reportedly paced and entered moving vehicles. People have told me that these mystery spheres have tapped on the windows of houses.

There have been cases reported where these luminous orbs have appeared inside of homes. In some  instances, witnesses I interviewed were only a few feet away from those objects. Some people reported physiological effects as well.

 Many of  these reports describe luminous spheres of assorted colors. Orange, blue, and white are commonly reported. These objects often range in size from that of a  golf ball to a foot or two in diameter. Some are smaller and others are larger. I have also talked with witnesses who have also encountered these mystery spheres at very close range and in some cases described the objects as appearing solid and metallic. These  mystery orbs  in many cases just suddenly vanish, move out of sight, or move through the walls of a structure.".

The home page of Stan's UFO/UAP site can be reached here.

Big Sky Orbs: A Retrospective (Part 7)

 Below are some photos I previously took of large mysterious orbs in the sky. All of the photos were taken in clean, dry air when there was no fog, mist, rain or precipitation. 

In my photo below from 2018 we see a large sky orb that rather seems to be lit from below. 

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My photo below from 2018 shows another large blue orb near a building:

My photo below from 2018 show one orb much larger than the other:

My 2018 photo here makes you ask: two orbs or one?

I gave this 2018 photo of mine a caption of "Harpooned?"

It's interesting how this 2018 photo of mine shows an orb that looks so much brighter than the building to its left:

My 2018 photo below shows a translucent sky orb:

A Smoke Alarm Triggered From the Great Beyond?

 Less than an hour ago a very strange thing happened in the house where I live. The house's state-of-the-art Google Nest smoke alarm system went off, causing smoke alarms to go off all over the house. I and another occupant of the house looked in every room, and found no trace of any smoke or mist. No one was cooking at the time. The last person to cook was myself. I had taken a few minutes to make an omelet about 25 minutes before the smoke alarm went off, but I had used the ventilator fan, and had turned off the gas. The electrically powered smoke alarms of the house are all on the ceiling, 9 feet or higher than the floor below them.  There was no electricity anomaly. 

We have the mystery of what caused the smoke alarm to go off. There was no sign of any smoke or mist in any room of the house when the alarm went off; there was no odd smell anywhere;  and all occupants are non-smokers.  The whole house was clean, and no one in the house or its yard had been doing anything this day to raise dust, or anything unusual  The Google Nest system (which gives audible messages) said the alarm came from "the den."  There is no room in the house we call a den. Conceivably someone setting up the system may have labeled one of the house's rooms as "the den." 

I have an interesting speculation that could conceivably explain the event. Maybe the event was caused by communication from the Great Beyond. My late father's name was Dean. Imagine that you are some invisible power that has the ability to make a fleeting manifestation in our world. You might choose some type of manifestation that has a  resemblance to your name. So if I died and my soul survived and I wanted to leave some manifestation indicating I had survived death, I might perhaps leave a mysterious mark on the wall.  That mark might be a sign that some manifestation had come from Mark. (The English word "mark" meaning a variety of things including "a small area having a different color from its surrounding" has the same spelling as my name Mark.)

In this case the word  "den" resembles my late father's name: Dean. How would a deceased Dean try to leave a sign? Maybe by triggering a smoke alarm in a way that would cause it  to speak a word ("den") close to the sound of his name, Dean. Of course, this hypothesis is highly speculative. 

I do know that the same smoke detector mysteriously went off (when there was no smoke or mist in the house)  on the night a relative of mine died far away, as I reported here.  See my post here for something very spooky that happened where I live on my late father's birthday.

I get many mysterious-seeming events like this where I live, such as my PlayStation machine mysteriously turning on by itself ten times on ten different days, and a green light in the bathroom mysteriously turning off and on dozens of times. 

In the nineteenth century a huge number of people reported seeing dramatic signs they interpreted as manifestations from the dead. To read about the reports, read my "Spookiest Years" series here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,  here, here and here.

 Postscript: A mind-boggling event occurred in the hour after I finished writing this post -- one of those things that makes you say, "If this was coincidence, the chance of it was 1 in a million." Because the event is closely related to the content of another post, it is described in a postscript to another post in my series of posts with a tag of "miscellaneous paranormal events" that you can read here and continue to read by pressing Older Posts at the bottom right.  

In the event described above, part of the oddness was that the smoke detector failed to turn off after a few presses of its button, which should have turned it off, even though there was no sign of smoke, mist, vapor  or dust anywhere. Only after several minutes would a button press turn off the alarm. Later in the same day (also with no smoke, mist, vapor or dust anywhere) the smoke detector again went off, but this time a single press of the button made it silent.  The alarm was silent throughout the next week. 

Post-postscript: On January 15 I got the orb below apparently next to the smoke alarm that was acting so strangely.

The Ghost Expert Suggested : Don't Ignore Orbs

On page 314 of the January 31, 1890 edition of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, which you can read here, we have a long article by the extremely accomplished psychology and parapsychology scholar Frederic W. H. Myers.  On page 332 Myers stated this while discussing apparition sightings, using the term "phantasmal figure" to refer to an apparition:

"Sometimes we have the phantasmal figure seen as though illuminated on a dark background. Sometimes it appears as in a disc or oval of light. Sometimes its contour is indistinct, and it resembles a luminous cloud, either for the first moments of its appearance or throughout all its stay. Sometimes there is no figure at all, but a phantasmal 'ball of light,' or a brilliant diffused glow, which seems a sufficiently unique experience, and coincides sufficiently closely with a death, to have some claim to rank as a veridical phantasm. Now from all this I argue that the phantasmogenetic agency at work-whatever that may be-may be able to produce effects of light more easily than definite figures."

We have here a fascinating speculation by one of history's greatest scholars of anomalous phenomena: the speculation that maybe visible orbs appear when mysterious psychic powers are producing their less dramatic efforts, with full human forms appearing when more vigorous or successful efforts occur.  Similarly, it takes much less effort for you to quickly bang on your neighbor's door to alert him than for you to write a note and slip it under the door. 

Perhaps for some mysterious unseen agency there is an "easiest, harder, hardest" situation in which orbs visible only in photographs are the easiest effects, orbs visible to the naked eye are the harder effects, and full apparitions in human form (such as translucent apparitions) are the hardest effects to produce. 

Frederic Myers was the author of the monumental two-volume work Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, which you can read online here and here. 

Big Sky Orbs: A Retrospective (Part 6)

 Below are some photos I previously took of large mysterious orbs in the sky. All of the photos were taken in clean, dry air when there was no fog, mist, rain or precipitation. 

My 2018 photo below shows a large mysterious orb near a tower. 

My photo below from 2018 shows a large mysterious orb near a building in New York City. 

Another 2018 photo of mine  shows one orb much larger than another:

 Another 2018 photo I took shows a large orb near a building:

This 2018 photo I took shows a brighter and smaller orb apparently in front of a larger orb with a different color:

This 2018 photo I took shows a large mysterious orb:

This 2018 photo I took makes me wonder whether a sky orb found a nice place to rest. 

My photo below from 2017 shows what looks like a big large speeding orb near the Met Life building in Manhattan:

Humans May Show Sheldrake's Pet ESP Effect Regarding Returning House Occupants

The biologist Rupert Sheldrake carefully documented an effect involving dogs who seemed to know or sense when their owners had almost returned from trips outside the house. Sheldrake documented that certain pets tend to wait near the door a few minutes before their owners return, even though their senses provide no basis for any suspicion that their owners are about to return. You can see some of Sheldrake's research on this topic at the link below:

https://www.sheldrake.org/research/animal-powers

Claims sometimes made by skeptics that such research was not replicated in a test by Wiseman are refuted by Sheldrake here, where he states that the data gathered by Wiseman actually supports Sheldrake's claim about this topic. 

I myself notice an effect similar to the pet ESP effect documented by Sheldrake, but involving myself and family members leaving the house. I typically only look out the front window rarely. But again and again I seem to look out the front window just at the moment that some family member silently approaches the front gate after having been away for quite some time. This happened again today. Two family members left for a shopping trip of more than an hour. It seemed that I did not look out the window during their whole trip, except for the very moment they were approaching the front gate. I have had remarkable successes in informal ESP tests with some of the same family members, as discussed here. About 1975 I had an amazingly successful ESP test with a sister, described at the beginning of my long interesting post here. 

The reality of telepathy or ESP in humans is well-proven by hundreds of years of observations and rigorous experiments, some of which you can read about here, here, and in the 67 series of posts here (you can read the whole series by continuing to press Older Posts at the bottom right after using that link). In 1941 the editors of Scientific American confessed that telepathy was proven, as I document in my post here. 

A Striped Orb

 Photo date: January 1, 2025. Photographer: Mark Mahin 

We see below a mysterious orb I photographed indoors. 

Ghosts in the News, Part 7

 Here is the latest in a series of videos I am making. 

If you have trouble viewing the embedded video above, try the Youtube link here.