Before I begin the blog post for this week, I wanted to mention that I am always happy to receive encounter reports from my readers. Most of what I do as an author is digging into varied sources and bringing my readers stories that I think they might be interested in. I think of myself as a sort of Fortean archivist but archives also include material that has come directly to the archivist, so, if you would like to share a paranormal story, then I would love to hear from you. Your anonymity is guaranteed unless you give me explicit permission to use your encounter statement in public (either on this blog or in a future book).
This weeks’s encounter comes from the writer who gave us the Oz Factor: Jenny Randles. In her absolutely amazing book Time Storms, Ms. Randles gives us the story of David, a young man who experienced a most unusual paranormal event while walking the streets of Kent, OK, back in 1966.
David was eighteen at the time of this occurrence and was walking his girlfriend back to her house at around midnight. The couple usually took a shortcut through a large, open space that ended in a grove of trees. The moon shone brightly that night and the air was warm, if a bit damp, so the two decided to sit for a while on a bridge. As they were enjoying their quiet time, the approach of some teens on motorcycles alarmed them. As the motorcycles approached, the couple realized they were fleeing from something unknown.
David goes on to say,
Suddenly there was an unusual silence … It felt like my ears were stuffed up. It happens when you plug them with your fingers. And then the whole body went numb. This was followed by a strange feeling of pressure, heaviness; slow motion. I turned and looked at my girlfriend. She seemed to feel it too … she was dizzy. The voices of escaping teenagers sounded like they were coming from some kind of crevice, echoing off the rocks.
At this point, another sign of the paranormal manifested: a white fog about 6 inches off the ground (see my book Mysteries in the Mist for tales of mist, fog and clouds in the paranormal). The fog seemed to circle the couple, and David noted that time had seemingly slowed down. Bodily movements seemed to last indefinitely, the smoke from cigarettes curled up so slowly that it almost seemed to not move at all and sounds slowed down and became “muffled”.
David testified that:
It was like playing a record in slow motion; we could not understand what each of us was trying to say to the other. I would have jumped up and run away, but the body was terribly heavy, and, in addition, my girlfriend hysterically grabbed me, not letting me move …
After some time had passed, the feeling subsided. The couple noted that their ears popped as though they had been on an airplane and descended suddenly as the world around them returned to normal. Interestingly, though several minutes had passed during the experience, David commented that his cigarette had not burned down at all – almost as though all physical processes had slowed down during his bizarre experience.
If you are interested in stories like this one, Time Storms is a must read. Jenny Randles is an experienced investigator and researcher, and it certainly shows in this book.
So, what are we to make of this incredible story? A so-called skeptic would instantly ask what sort of substances the couple had been imbibing before this event occurred. It was the 60s after all, and the use of hallucinogens was not unknown. I had a friend who had a very similar experience while under the influence of “magic mushrooms”.
I don’t buy the drugged out hippy hypothesis for a moment though unless the “skeptic” can explain why the couple experienced the same “trip” at the same time. Rather, I am certain that something quite unusual happened to these two young people, something that affected them strongly enough for them to report the incident to someone who might be sympathetic to the experience.
In this circumstance, we must consider Jenny Randles’ theory of time storms, a localized event that alters the normal flow of time and space. While Randles couches her theory in terms of quantum physics, citing the indeterminacy theory and the principles of chaos theory, I rather suspect that she and I might be talking about the same thing, only in different contexts.
Randles obviously approaches her subject from a more scientific worldview and tries to make the bizarre incidents in her book fit into the framework of known science. This is an admirable goal, but one that is going to have to wait for science to emerge from its materialist paradigm before it will be completely fruitful. While quantum physics has some interesting ideas and concepts, mainstream science is still stuck in the world of the five senses and cannot “grok” anything that can’t be perceived by those senses or, at least, detected by their instruments.
I think that Randles’ localized events that alter the flow of space/time are an excellent description of what happens when The Silence descends on a location. The phenomenon always heralds high strangeness; it is localized to a very specific area and whether it’s related to cryptids, UFOs, or faeries, or is related to time distortions. My feeling, as I have expressed throughout this blog, is that we humans are experiencing the incursion of the Other World into our reality when The Silence descends.
We never hear from David what happened with the gang of teens who were fleeing from something on their motorcycles that night. It could be that they had attracted the attention of local law enforcement, but it might also be that David’s experience was not the only evidence of an Otherworld incursion that night. The UK is a treasure trove of otherworldly stories, as I’ve discovered while researching everything from Phantom Black Dogs to faery lore.
In the next post, we will look at another instance of The Silence in relation to a high strangeness event.