Approximately 9/8/1990 The Professor, his then-girlfriend, and a few friends were spending a few days at Ocean City, Maryland. One afternoon, while hanging out on the beach, they all began making sand sculptures. The Professor sculpted an alien, with typical bulbous head and large, teardrop shaped eyes--in short, a typical "gray" head, with an arm extended as if waving hello. His friends thought it was cute. The others sculpted various things: a clown, an elephant, a dog. 9/22/1990 Again, the Professor took a vacation at Ocean City, this time with just his girlfriend, at a condo his mother owned. They spent most of the time eating pizza, drinking beer, and relaxing on the balcony. That evening, the Professor had a dream about a television show. Appearing on the dream show was a panel of UFO experts. One expert was a Phil Klass-type skeptic, another was a Bud Hopkins-esque abduction specialist, another was a Jacques Vallee sort, another was a Hynekian nuts-and-bolts ufologist, and another was a paranoid, "the lizards are going to eat us for lunch" conspiratorial ufologist. They bantered back and forth until the paranoid guy started ranting: "They're cooperating with the government! They're stealing our children and the government knows it! They're taking control! The men in black are demons!" etc... The other panelists on the show chuckled at his outbursts. Professor Pan then awoke from the dream, disturbed. He found he could not shake the dream. Throughout the day he recalled it, and talked about it with his girlfriend. 9/23/1990, approximately 7:30 pm. The Professor and his girlfriend, packed up and ready to leave for home, decided to take a quick stroll along the beach. The Professor's girlfriend strolled along the surf, while he remained about 200 feet back. He looked down at a mound of sand and noticed that it had been sculpted into a humanoid face, although part of it was obscured by footprints. This made the Professor flash back to the alien face he had sculpted in the sand weeks earlier, miles away from where he was now. He noted the synchronicity--just one of many that frequently broke up the normalcy of his life. The Professor, standing by himself, thinking about the alien face he had sculpted, looked up into the clear, starry sky and said, mentally, half-jokingly: If you're out there, now is the perfect time to show yourself. He did not in the slightest expect anything to actually manifest. He walked down to join his girlfriend. A few minutes later, she pointed up into the sky. "What's that?" she asked. The Professor followed her pointing finger. Two red "blobs" of light began streaking across the sky. They flew about erratically (far too erratically to be conventional aircraft), almost playfully. At one point, they actually merged, and flew, in the same jerky fashion, as one unit. Then they split up again, and vanished in the haze of light on the horizon caused by Ocean City's brightly-lit boardwalk. (An illustration of the incident (jpeg)) "Oh, my God!" the Professor said, over and over again. Having read a fair amount of scary books about UFO abductions, he and his girlfriend quickly left the beach and got in the car to drive home. Conclusions The sighting of the two anomalous objects, and the attendant "high strangeness" of the incidents that led up to it (face in sand synchronicity, the previous night's UFO-related dream) further reinforced the Professor's speculation that the UFO phenomenon was something deeper than just the simple aliens from outer space, nuts and bolts theories would suggest. Somehow, "they" were connected to dreams, to synchronicity (space/time), and could somehow manifest themselves upon request--unless it was all a huge coincidence, of course. Whatever the case, it was an immensely powerful, bizarre experience which convinced the Professor and his girlfriend that the UFO phenomenon was deeply tied to the imaginal realm of dreams and consciousness, and was not just about flying crafts from another world surveying the planet for scientific interest. The Professor has made his request to the night sky for a reappearance several times, with no success. He is happy, however, that his long-time interest in the phenomenon was rewarded with a sighting that included another witness for corroboration. |
