THE UNEXPLAINED
When a Simple Business Trip Turns into a Paranormal Adventure • BY FRANK JOSEPH S
ome paranormal events are so ex- traordinary and inexplicable; that they form the outstanding experi- ences of a lifetime. My own en- counter began at daybreak last September 16, when publisher Wayne May and I drove from the offices of his magazine, Ancient American, in Colfax, Wisconsin, to an alter- native archaeology symposium some 200 miles away.
Before arriving at Marquette, Michigan, where attendees of the Ancient American Preservation Society were meeting the next day, we stopped overnight at a friend’s country home little more than an hour’s drive from the conference site. Alex, our gra- cious host, was a Vietnam War veteran, whose bizarre mix of macabre and hilarious recollections kept us up until almost mid- night. He also suffers from multiple scler- osis, a chronic, inflammatory disease that at- tacks various parts of the nervous system leading to muscular disability. Although con- fined to an automated wheelchair, Alex’s mind and spirit are bright and indomitable. Sometime after 11:00, Wayne and I were shown to our sleeping quarters in a large room on the second floor. A faint drizzle was falling outside, typical of the rainy conditions through which we had passed most of the day during our drive toward Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. We doused the lights; the room fell into perfect darkness and silence; and I was soon drifting off to sleep, when I heard a loud “snap!” or “click!” that re- minded me of a circuit breaker being thrown.
46 ATLANTIS RISING • Number 85
“What was that?” I asked Wayne, who was lying in his own bed on the far side of the room. He had not yet fallen asleep but hap- pened to be staring unseeing into the night toward the ceiling, thinking about the up- coming conference. The sudden sound brought my mind back to full consciousness, and I opened my eyes.
Responding to my question, Wayne could only offer, “I don’t know.”
Just
then, an intensely bright light exploded, without any additional noise, in our room. The white wall I faced in the darkness lit up in a sheet of intense violet brilliance. I thought at once that an electrical short had shot through the house. But the source of this abrupt incandescence winked on just where Wayne had been staring in the dark- ness. He was looking directly at a spherical white light the size and shape of a large soft- ball encircled from top to bottom by a broad band of purple neon hanging motionless and without a sound near the ceiling fan. A broad skirt of violet light streamed like an enor- mous lampshade descending from the orb to illuminate all four walls, leaving the floor and ceiling relatively unlit.
Although the object popped into exis- tence with the abruptness of an exceptionally potent flashbulb, it lingered longer, perhaps two seconds. It left Wayne blind for a few seconds more until he was able to make out the midnight horizon beyond our rain- streaked windows stabbed with about a dozen lightning strikes. These were followed shortly thereafter by a rolling series of thun- derclaps that shook the whole house. Given the surrounding storm, we as- sumed our brilliant visitor must have been a
meteorological phenomenon of some kind, most likely a form of ball lightning, an at- mospheric electrical discharge little under- stood by science. Most of what is known about ball lightning derives from eyewitness accounts that vary greatly in their descrip- tions. Reports of color, size, configuration, movement, behavior, or sound all differ in the extreme. The brilliant orbs range from more than 10 feet across down to the dimen- sions of a pea, with shades of red, green, white, or purple, mostly blue.
According to Brian Dunning, writing for Sceptoid, Critical Analysis of Pop Phe- nomena (
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4192, 2010), “Electromagnetic theory makes no prediction that anything like ball lightning need exist. It does predict all known forms of electrical discharge. Some have speculated that ball lightning is a plasma ball, but that theory has been dismissed, because a hot globe of plasma should rise like a hot-air bal- loon, and that is not what ball lightning does.”
Our September 16 encounter did not match this or any other description of ball lightning I was able to locate on the In- ternet. The orb Wayne saw did not move. Nor did its purple band and descending skirt of light resemble anything we could learn about ball lightning, which is invariably characterized as highly mobile, of a single color, and not accompanied by a lampshade- like formation.
Alex wondered if the powerfully charged sphere would have injured, or even killed him, had it appeared instead in his down- stairs bedroom, where his sleeping facilities comprise a kind of metal cage he uses to
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