How things started with me

[scots_nomad]

I mentioned in one of the above posts that as well as being mind-blowing, enlightening and all that stuff there was also a great deal of hilarity in our chats, so just to give me somewhere to start with 'specifics' I've decided to explain that bit. I'm going back to about halfway through our very first day chatting when they (I never know whether to call them he/she/it/or they so generally I will refer to them just as 'my friends) took me by surprise by asking:

"What language is that you are speaking John?"

"What?"

"What language is that you are speaking John?"

(They had a really annoying habit of repeating exactly what they had just said - but nothing more - whenever I replied to one of their questions by saying "What?". And when I say exactly, I mean with every tone exactly the same as before, just like they were rerunning a tape of themselves.)

"No! I mean, how can you ask that when I have been speaking it and you have been answering it for ages?"

"What language is that you are speaking John?"

(The annoying habit also applied when my response didn't actually answer the question they had asked! That was really annoying!)

"It's English! What language are you answering in?"

They completely ignored my counter-question and just continued with their line of enquiry,

"It's like English, but we know English and this is not it."

"Aww, I see what you mean! It is English, but I am speaking with a Scottish accent so it will sound different."

"No, it’s not that either. We know Scottish accents, but that is not it."

"It is! I have been living away from Scotland for a while, so my accent may have changed a bit but this is still a Scottish accent."

"Yes, we can hear the accent, but that is not it. Even when we take the accent out, it is still not English. What other language might it be? What language do you think in?"

"English! I think in English! Maybe I think in English with a Scottish accent, I don't know, but I know that it is English ‘cause that is the only language I speak."

"No, it’s not English."

"It ****ing is!"

(We had previously agreed that I should not bother filtering my language to remove swear words.)

"What language did you think in as a child?"

"English!"

"Ok, let's try another way. We have read all of the books in there in your living room. Which of them is written in the language closest to the language you used as a child?"

"Ahhhh! I think I see where you’re going. Let me look ‘cause I can't remember what books are there."

I started to walk toward the window into my living room and at the same time I tried to visualise the pile of books I had by my TV. There were about maybe a dozen or so, but I didn't have to think beyond the one that was on top of the pile. I stopped walking toward the window...

"The Big Yin's book! I mean..."

I was going to clarify that ‘The Big Yin’ was Billy Connolly but I didn't get a chance to utter another sound because a voice I recognised immediately replaced the previous monotone that I had been hearing for ten minutes or so...

"Awwwwwwww Rrrrrrrrrrrri-ite Wee Man! Now wur talkin’!"

"****ing hell!"

From then on they spoke to me with Billy Connolly's voice! And I don’t just mean they spoke like him or they spoke with his accent, for the rest of that day (and indeed for the rest of our conversations) it was just like I was talking and having a laugh with Billy Connolly himself. I guess most of you won’t know who Billy Connolly is but he's a comedian from Glasgow who is now based in Hollywood and does a bit of straight acting too but he happens to be my favourite comedian and also the funniest person I've ever seen - at times I laughed so much that I really did nearly wet myself! From that point onwards I have referred to it/them as either Big Yin or Big Man and they generally call me Wee Man, and even though I’m 6 feet tall it feels appropriate…

It’s hard to recreate the humour in all of it now because so much of it depended on their tone and their amazing comic timing but there was one bit of our first day’s chat that comes to mind which really had me in stitches. I can’t remember off-hand what brought us to this point in the chat but this bit started when they said:

“…Anybody can see that you are 'no David' now, but maybe you'd be surprised at how well you could clean up with our help if you try!"

"Ya cheeky ba****ds! Or is that another one of them 'sort-of-compliment' thingies?"

"Do you understand what we meant exactly?"

"Well these days people would probably say 'Well, I know I am no Brad Pitt', but I know who David is."

"We'll get to that, but first of all tell us who would say 'I know I'm no Brad Pitt' like that?"

"I suppose lots of people say it."

"But who specifically has said it to you?"

"Ahhhh! You mean my mate Andy? He said that very thing to me in a bar in Abu Dhabi after he told me a really funny true story about a couple of ugly, fat, dyed-blonde British women that we knew who began to think they were gorgeous because of all the attention they got in Abu Dhabi! ****ing hell! You people really have been following me around for a while!"

“Longer than you can possibly imagine, but just to refresh everyone’s memories could you tell us what Andy said?”

“Well another one of our mates was flying back to the Manchester for business and when he boarded the plane he saw a couple of those girls already on board. He didn’t really know them but he had seen them around in a few of the bars and clubs we go to so he said ‘Hi’ but they just completely ignored him. He just left it at that and sat down but when they arrived back in Manchester they were right behind him as they got off the plane so he waited until they set foot on the tarmac then turned around and said ‘Welcome back to Britain ladies….What does it feel like to be ugly again?’!”

"And do you remember exactly what you said when Andy said that?"

I burst out laughing - I was doing a lot of that 'that' day...some of the time!

"Yeah I remember, and I suppose that would have to go down as one of my top five 'Funniest Lines Ever'…How many's that now? About twenty?"

"Aye it’s about twenty. Twenty-three to be exact, but who’s counting!"

"Well you obviously are!"

"That's what we do, but never mind that for now, tell us what your line was."

"Well he had ended his story by saying something like ‘Don’t get me wrong, I know I’m no Brad Pitt myself, but…’ and I said something like "No, you’re certainly no Brad Pitt...well not unless you’re talking in Cockney rhyming slang!"

(They laughed, but they had obviously heard it before!)

"So do you know your 'no Brad Pitt'?"

"Yeah, I am definitely no Brad Pitt."

"What about David?"

"What about David?"

"What David do you think we mean?"

"I assume you mean Michelangelo’s 'David', the so-called perfect example of the male of the species."

(Applause)

"Why do you say 'so-called'?"

"Well, how can I put it?....Let's just say that if you're gonna make a statue of me then you are gonna need a bigger bit of marble! Boom-boom!"

"OK. Can you tell us exactly how much bigger?"

"p*** off! Just make sure it's bigger! I don't want you lot spoiling my reputation just to save yourselves a few bob on the cost of the marble."

"OK. If you won't give us an exact size, can you at least give us a clue? For example, would you say it had to be 'bigger by a long chalk', maybe?"

I was p***in' ma'self again by this point!

"**** off you lot! In fact I've just have a better idea! I want a ****ing fig leaf! Boom-boom"

"Did you say a 'fig leaf' or a 'big leaf'?"

"**** off, you’re at it! Just make sure I get a fig leaf!"

"So,...you don't want a big leaf then?"

"**** you! Aye, I want a big fig leaf, and before you ask what size 'exactly', the size is 'big enough!'. And if you don’t know what size that is up there then I feel sorry for you…Or actually I feel sorry for your women! You’re the smart ones so just make sure you find out what ‘big enough’ means before you start my statue!"

"No problem Wee Man."

Maybe I was just imagining it, but there seemed to be an emphasis on the ‘Wee’ bit when they said ‘Wee Man’!

"Hey! You cheeky ba****ds! I'll get my lawyers on you next!"

"OK, ok! 'Big enough' - No problem! We know what big enough means and we’ve got plenty that size up here, but we’ve still got a problem with you.”

“Why?? Big enough is big enough, so just make sure that it’s ****ing big enough! What’s the problem with that?”

”Well…If the fig leaf has just got to be ‘big enough’…Does that mean that you want an elastic one?."

I was totally gone by that point! I couldn't speak for laughing so I was desperately making the 'time-out' sign with my hands.

No matter how hard or how serious the conversation, having a laugh and a sense of humour can help get you through

[scots_nomad]

I just put the photo attached to this post up in the Gallery page of this site but decided to show it here together with an explanation:

Right back at the start of that period when my life to be becoming engulfed is a whole series of escalating bizarre events one of the first strange phenomena that I noticed was that at times certain shades of blue seemed to ‘look weird’ to me sometimes – sort of as if they were glowing by emitting their own light rather than merely reflecting it.

The weird thing I then noticed was that it wasn’t constant – some blue objects could look ordinary one minute then seem to glow and then later go back to looking ordinary. I had no idea why that was but after a while I noticed that that ‘phenomenon’ always seemed to precede something weird or bizarre happening. I never knew what to expect, but whenever I saw blue like that it seemed to be saying ‘Pay attention to everything because something weird is about to happen’

Anyway, one day I had MTV on in the background to get some music while I was messing around with something else. At one point my TV lost the incoming signal and the screen went blue but when I looked at it I noticed that it was the glowing shade of blue I just mentioned (obviously the TV screen would have been glowing anyway but this just had that ‘extra dimension’ to it). As an experiment I got my hand phone and took a photo of the TV screen because I wanted to see if that ‘extra blueness’ would show up in a photo, and if so whether the photo would remain the same even after whatever weird phenomena had passed.

Almost as soon as I took the photo the signal came back and MTV reappeared on screen but when I looked at the photo I had just taken, rather than being a plain blue screen (glowing blue or otherwise) the screen on the photo was covered with this really strange pattern of spirals (as I mentioned before, spirals seemed to come up very often both before and after the chats with my friends started).

I know that the lines of a TV screen can cause interference patterns which create strange effects on TV (such as when someone wears a jacket with a check pattern on it) so I don’t know whether that was what happened with that photo but since that time I have tried taking photos of similar blue screens many times from many angles but every other photo I ever took just came out normal.

Edited June 28, 2013 by scots_nomad

[scots_nomad]

I’m not sure whether anyone is still following this or whether I am just typing to myself here but I’ll explain a bit more about what happened during the very early stage of our chats. This bit of the conversation actually took place before the post I made yesterday while they were still using their monotonic, accentless, emotionless voice:-

“So have you any idea what you have done John?”

“What I’ve done? I’ve done nothing, I was just surviving.”

“Oh you have done something John!”

“What have I done?”

“You have just made a quantum leap.”

I raised my eyes brows and smiled when I heard that phrase,

“We see you smiling at that John, does that mean that you know what a quantum leap is?”

“Nooo, it wasn’t that! It was just the word ‘quantum’ that made me smile as I had been beginning to think I had been caught up in some weird quantum theory something.”

“So you understand quantum theory?”

“Oh no! I know a little bit about it but I certainly can’t say I understand it. I’m not sure any one down here really does really but they know it works even if they aren’t really sure why.”

“So how do you know about it?”

“Mmm, maybe from old science fiction books I’ve read…No actually they wouldn’t really go into any kind of detail on it so I guess I probably picked up bits of it from watching Open University programs on TV.”

“You did an Open University course?”

“Nooo! But when I was young I got into a habit of sleeping on the sofa in the living-room far more often than I slept in my bed and usually I would leave the television on. Back in those days most television channels stopped about midnight or one o’clock in the morning so the only thing to watch were the Open University programs that used to be shown on BBC2 during the night.”

“So what age were you back in those days?”

“I don’t know, twelve? Maybe thirteen? I’m not really sure.”

“And you could understand university level quantum theory?”

“Well I can’t say I could understand it – I would only catch the odd program now and again so I didn’t see the whole course but I could generally follow whatever bit they were discussing…well in layman’s terms anyway.”

“That’s very impressive.”

“Meh, I was really just passing the time…So what is a quantum leap then?”

“Well most civilisations will make a leap of logic every century or so - It varies but that tends to be about the average. That is what we mean by a quantum leap. The thing is that usually quantum leaps only come about when a few great minds all work together to achieve it but you have managed to do it all on your own which is quite amazing.”

“Mmm, well like I said, I don’t feel I’ve really done anything coz all I was trying to do was survive.”

“You have certainly done something John, something big! We are always watching out for quantum leaps and I can tell you that yours is the first one this year!”

“Oh.”

“You don’t seem very impressed by that.”

“Well, after the big build up you gave it I was expecting you to say something more than ‘this year’, I mean it’s only June so we are just talking about six months.”

“We are talking about at least six months John…In fact I have just had it confirmed to me that it is actually the first one this century!”

“Oh.”

“Oh? You still don’t seem impressed about that John.”

“Well it sounds good when you say ‘this century’ but that is only four years so far…Maybe three depending on when you start counting from.”

“But we are talking about the first one this century in the whole of the universe! Isn’t that impressive?”

“Mmm, well again it sounds good, but for all I know that is exactly the same thing as saying it’s the first one on Earth this century – Sure the universe is a big place but for all I know we are the only civilisation in it!”

“Ahh you are still thinking very logically John. That’s good! But take my word for it you have done something very impressive. So impressive that our experts up here are still trying to work out exactly what you have done. You see John, normally when a civilisation makes a quantum leap it moves up to the next layer of logic. Very occasionally a civilisation can jump two logic levels in one leap however we KNOW that you have jumped at least five levels and possibly even as many as twenty-seven!”

“Wow, that does sound a bit impressive but I assure you it was just sheer luck. I was just taking leaps in the dark most of the time just trying to find a way to survive.”

“No John, that’s not possible. Sure there may have been some luck involved, which is why we are not yet sure exactly how many levels you have jumped. We can tell you that you are on the twenty-seventh level just now but we know as a minimum you have leaped five levels based on pure logic and it is probably much more than that. That is one thing we want to find out from talking to you today.”

“Well OK, but I still think it was all pure luck.”

“We are never wrong John. Sure you could possibly find one stepping stone by pure luck but can you imagine what the odds would be of managing to cross twenty-seven stepping stones in a row with your eyes closed and with each stepping stone being in a different direction and with the distance between stepping stones increasing each time?”

“Well I don’t know what to tell you. There were certainly a few times when I felt like I was making a huge leap of faith but to be honest I was only hoping that I would land on something solid.”

“Were you only hoping or were you expecting?”

“Mmm, well I wasn’t really just jumping blindly into the abyss. I always had a reason for doing whatever I did, but at times it just seemed such a crazy reason that I really wasn’t sure where I would end up.”

“Thanks John, that is just the kind of information we wanted to know from you and I can tell you that you have definitely moved more than five levels on pure merit.”

“Hmm, OK.”

There was a short pause and then they said,

“Would you like to see what twenty-seven layers of logic looks like?”

‘What the **** does that mean? Who knows, but it could be pretty crazy!’

“Yeah, why not? So what do I do?”

“Just stand there, close your eyes and tell us what you see.”

“Close my eyes and tell you what I see? I won’t see anything if I close my eyes!”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Well I suppose I’ll see the inside of my eye-lids…It you can actually see the inside of your eye-lids.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“I wonder how we could verify if that is right.”

I laughed. The voice may be completely emotionless but he was still a right sarcastic ba****d!

“I know! Why don’t I close my eyes and see what I see?”

“Yes, that could work.”

I closed my eyes for about two seconds and then opened them again,

“I was right! I saw nothing.”

“You saw absolutely nothing? That shouldn’t be!”

“Well I saw the kind of ‘echo’ of the sun if you know what I mean – Like if you have been looking at the sky and you turn away you can still see a small glow in the darkness…It works with light-bulbs too.”

“Ahh! That’s what you were supposed to see, but are you sure it was the echo of the sun?”

“Yeah, pretty sure.”

“I wonder how we could double check that?”

I thought to myself ‘Sarcastic ba****d!’

“OK I’ll shut my eyes and have another look shall I?”

“If you wouldn’t mind.”

I closed my eyes for another few seconds and had a better look at the glowing spot. I opened my eyes again and said,

“Ahh I see what you mean! It isn’t just the echo from the sun it is kind of like an orb.”

“What do you mean ‘It’s like an orb’?”

“Well, do you know the round golden globe thing in the British crown jewels? It was sort of like that.”

“Oh that’s not right. It shouldn’t look like an orb and it certainly shouldn’t be golden. Perhaps we have to adjust something here.”

“No, it wasn’t golden and it wasn’t exactly like an orb. There was no wee cross on the top of it for a start and it looked more like iron than gold…Kind of like an old cannon-ball, and the bands around it weren’t covered in jewels, it looked more like old fashioned rivets…And the band running from top to bottom went all the way around whereas I think the band on the crown jewels’ orb only goes down to halfway.”

“Ahh! Why didn’t you say that before? That is exactly what you were supposed to see. You know it really would help us if you would try to be a bit more accurate with your descriptions.”

I felt like a little boy being scolded by a matron,

“Sorry…but it is still kind of like an orb!”

I am pretty sure I heard a disdainful ‘tut!’ in the background but I couldn’t swear on it.

“OK, so close your eyes and look at the ‘orb thing’.”

I could tell by the way they said ‘orb thing’ that they were still not too impressed at my description.

“OK, I see it.”

“Can you see it clearly?”

“Yes.”

“Where is it?”

“It’s right in the centre of my view.”

“How big is it?”

“Huh? You want me to measure it?”

“No, just give us an idea of how it looks to you.”

“Mmm…Maybe like looking at the Sun from Earth…Except it’s not up in the air…Not like looking at the Earth from the moon because it would be much bigger…maybe like looking at the earth from Mars, although I have no idea what that would be like…No wait, that’s dumb, it would be much smaller if I was that far away…Can I say like a tennis ball floating at about arms-length in front of me?”

“OK, that’s good enough, but it is good that you thought of it as looking at the Earth because that’s what it is.”

“No it’s not, it’s nothing like the Earth!”

“We mean that is what it represents!”

Hey if they were gonna be pedantic then why couldn’t I?

“That is the Earth bound inside its current layer of logic and you are looking down on it from the next logic layer out, OK?”

“Yeah, OK.”

“So that is where you would have jumped to if you had only jumped one logic level. Are you ready to go to the next one?

“Yes.”

“OK, here goes.”

“Woahhh!”

This will be hard to describe but I will do my best: The small orb representing the Earth rotated to my left by about ninety degrees, but at the same time the point at which I seemed to be looking at it from slid outwards and upwards and to my right at an angle of forty five degrees, so rather than looking at it directly in front of me as I had been before I was now looking down on it, from about twice as far away as I had been before and there seemed to be a thin translucent shell around ‘The Earth’ at about the distance I had been watching from originally. The whole manoeuvre had been ‘accompanied’ by a dull metallic sound, kind of like very heavy steel doors sliding shut. The globe had swung left as I swung out and up and right and it all felt so real that I actually felt it in my stomach in a similar way to times when I have been watching film footage taken from a helicopter as it flies over the edge of a high cliff, except a little more ‘nauseating’ because of the simultaneous sideways movement.

“Are you OK?”

“Yes, but I wasn’t expecting that!”

“OK, we will move you out to logic level five now which was the minimum leap we knew you had made, OK?”

“OK”

I had expected the same kind of thing to happen but this time taking me much further ‘out’, however rather than completing the whole journey in one go they ‘slid’ me from one level to the next to the next. At each step the small globe in the centre had swivelled in a different direction – Sometimes downward, sometimes to the left, sometimes to the right and sometimes upward, but always by ninety degrees, and at each of those movements my point of view had also slid around in a different direction which was always more or less opposite and away from the direction that the small ‘orb’ had rotated, each time accompanied by the same sound of those heavy steel gates slamming closed…It was actually quite disorientating!

“Woahhh! Are you trying to make me sick?”

“Are you going to be sick? We can stop if you are?”

“No, I’m OK but maybe you could have warned me what to expect?”

“How?”

“Good point! OK, I think I’m OK with it now anyway.”

“Good! So that is you looking down from the fifth logic level. How does that look now?”

By that point I could see no definition in the central orb at all, it was just a small lump giving off a slightly bluish-white glow surrounded by four translucent shells which also seemed to emit a slightly less intense bluish-white glow.

“It looks pretty far!”

“Yes, it was a big leap. So Now we are going to take you out to the twenty-seventh logic level, are you ready for this?”

“As ready as I will ever be I guess.”

My whole world seemed to start twisting and turning and sliding and rotating time after time after time. Sometimes I would be looking directly down on the quickly disappearing orb, sometimes I would be side on, sometimes looking from a forty-five degree angle either upwards or downwards and at other times I was looking from directly underneath. It really felt as though my body was actually sliding between all those vantage points, upwards, downwards or laterally, but always outward at the same time.

I heard myself say,

“Stop! I really think I am going to be sick here!”

“It’s OK, you are at the twenty-seventh level already. So what do you think?”

From that final vantage point the small globe at the centre of it all had completely disappeared, or at least it had become so small that it was impossible to differentiate it from the numerous luminous spheres which surrounded it in ever more densely packed shells.

I took a while to respond to their question. In fact it wasn’t really a response at all, more of thought which was spoken aloud,

“I suddenly feel a long, long way from home!”

They didn’t reply.

“Can I open my eyes now?”

“Yes you can open them anytime you want to.”

I opened them right away.

“I think I need to sit down now, I think I almost just got sea-sick on dry land!”

I almost collapsed back down onto the sun-lounger and they left me in silence while I tried to re-coordinate myself with the world around me.

[VvROMULUSvV]

Okay scots_nomad, I've been reading your thread with interest from the beginning but as I digest each of your posts... something is becoming a little 'not quite right' about it all. You set your preamble early on that you were not concerned whether people took your accounts at face value (i.e. 'believe') but that's often nothing more than the old 'trust me' line.

You mentioned in your first or second post about your desire to write a book and I feel you've given away more than you think from this statement. Here are my observations that have become increasingly more obvious to me the more I read.

1. The amount of character dialogue you are presenting is increasing. No one could remember such detailed conversations at a near verbatim level years after they occur.

2. Your 'friends' as you call them have gained more and more of a personality the more you write. It's as if you are in character development here. Also, I love Billy Connolly too..but really? Remember when the Alien in the "Flight of the Navigator" scanned David's mind and suddenly had cool voice to make him less threatening? Yeah well...

3. I remember reading Anne Rice's novel 'Memnoch' in my final year of High School. Absolutely loved that book. 95% of it is just the Devil and Lestat having a continuous dialogue, where the Devil reveals all to Lestat, all the secrets of the Universe and God. Very much in a verbally volley like your characters. Antagonistic at times, forthcoming at other times.

4. I feel like you're using the UM site as a kind of lab rat, to see if you can actually come across believable and worthy to a demographic most likely to buy your future books.

I actually feel no animosity towards you, I think you'll make a great Fiction writer, but please be upfront with the members of this site. It does not feel at all like you're writing from experience but more so from an imagination. A lot of people here take these things very seriously ( I do too in general) and if you look at something like Whitely Strieber's "Communion", these kinds of occurrences (when real) are more likely to be filled with psychological anguish and suffering rather than a humorous and almost whimsical tale such as you have presented.

In essence - I call shenanigans big time on this one (and I'm not even a good sceptic!)

[+ouija ouija]

Okay scots_nomad, I've been reading your thread with interest from the beginning but as I digest each of your posts... something is becoming a little 'not quite right' about it all. You set your preamble early on that you were not concerned whether people took your accounts at face value (i.e. 'believe') but that's often nothing more than the old 'trust me' line.

You mentioned in your first or second post about your desire to write a book and I feel you've given away more than you think from this statement. Here are my observations that have become increasingly more obvious to me the more I read.

1. The amount of character dialogue you are presenting is increasing. No one could remember such detailed conversations at a near verbatim level years after they occur.

2. Your 'friends' as you call them have gained more and more of a personality the more you write. It's as if you are in character development here. Also, I love Billy Connolly too..but really? Remember when the Alien in the "Flight of the Navigator" scanned David's mind and suddenly had cool voice to make him less threatening? Yeah well...

3. I remember reading Anne Rice's novel 'Memnoch' in my final year of High School. Absolutely loved that book. 95% of it is just the Devil and Lestat having a continuous dialogue, where the Devil reveals all to Lestat, all the secrets of the Universe and God. Very much in a verbally volley like your characters. Antagonistic at times, forthcoming at other times.

4. I feel like you're using the UM site as a kind of lab rat, to see if you can actually come across believable and worthy to a demographic most likely to buy your future books.

I actually feel no animosity towards you, I think you'll make a great Fiction writer, but please be upfront with the members of this site. It does not feel at all like you're writing from experience but more so from an imagination. A lot of people here take these things very seriously ( I do too in general) and if you look at something like Whitely Strieber's "Communion", these kinds of occurrences (when real) are more likely to be filled with psychological anguish and suffering rather than a humorous and almost whimsical tale such as you have presented.

In essence - I call shenanigans big time on this one (and I'm not even a good sceptic!)

I agree with you, which is why I 'stepped out' of this thread a little while back.

[scots_nomad]

Hi Romulus,

As I have said from the start I have absolutely no problem with anyone who finds my story too unbelievable to possibly be true as I have no doubts whatsoever that that would be my reaction had I not lived it myself. I also said that I would take it as a compliment if people thought I was imaginative enough to have made this up because it really is a hell of a story and you still haven’t heard the tip of the iceberg (albeit that your compliment that you think I’ll make a great fiction writer one day is somewhat overshadowed in my mind by the suggestion that I am plagiarizing my story from the work of someone else ). To reiterate something else I said earlier in my posts my life would be a whole lot easier if this was a work of fiction, or even if I was willing to keep the truth to myself and claim that this was all a great work of fiction that I had made up - This wasn’t just ‘an experience that I went through’, I have lived this story for 8 years now and it has caused me more problems in my personal life than you can possibly imagine.

There is little point in me either giving you my word it is true or swearing an oath to that effect as you don’t know me from Adam so why should my word be worth anything to you, but I will repeat that every single word I have written (and will write) on this subject IS true, however should you chose to ignore any further posts or continue to consider them as being a work of fiction it really is no skin off my nose and I trust you will find some enjoyment or interest in them either way.

Having said that, I do welcome your post as no doubt some others may be thinking the same way you do so it gives me a chance to address the points you made (where I can).

Re: Point one; ‘…No one could remember such detailed conversations at a near verbatim level years after they occur’. All I can say in response to this is that you are wrong because that is exactly how my memory works and how it always has done. I have no idea how other people remember things – I have heard people being described as having a photographic memory, well my seems to work on sound rather than images (although I can also remember events in great detail like I am watching an old cine film of them). That is how I have always remembered things. I have never had to study or revise for exams because I just found it easy to remember the lessons and as long as I understood the subject being discussed at the time then recalling during exams was never a problem. It is now almost exactly 8 years since the events discussed in my posts happened and during that time we talked for many hours each day over a period of 3-4 weeks but even after this time I could probably still sit down and type out the vast majority of our chats in near verbatim fashion. In truth however much of what I have posted so far has been cut and pasted from stuff I had written out at various times during those 8 years.

For more than a year after the initial ‘introductory crash course’ I didn’t breathe a word of my story to ANYONE – primarily because I didn’t expect anyone to believe me – Well actually I didn’t think anyone would believe me without hearing the whole story (or most of the whole story at least) and the big problem was that the whole story was just too big and would take too long to explain for me to expect anyone to sit and listen all the way through it without jumping to an early assumption that I had gone nuts! I thought about writing the whole story down as a book but I had soooo much stuff in my head that I had no idea where to start, what to put in, what to leave out, and even knowing how my memory worked I doubted whether I would be able to recall ALL of it because we had chatted so damn much.

Every day of that first year memories of a whole range of things we had talked about went round and round in my head (and I would remember each of those parts of the conversations on a verbatim basis), however it tended to be the ‘big stuff’ that I would recall – I don’t just mean ‘mind blowing or potentially even world changing stuff’, I mean things that provoked strong emotions in me, so in my memory I would ‘replay’ the funny, the sad stuff, the bits that made me angry, the bits that made me scared (there were plenty of angry and scary stuff, but I’ll get to that when responding to one of your later points). I could remember all of those individual parts of the conversation in isolation as clear as day but trying to remember what order everything came in seemed almost impossible (The intensive chats went on for about 4 weeks however in Vietnam in June the weather is basically identical each day, and the vast majority of our conversations happened while I was either lying our side on the sun lounger in my garden or sitting on my sofa in the sitting room so there was very little variation in circumstances that would help me sort out the order that all the ‘big stuff’ happened). I also worried that ‘the big stuff’ had been so big and so numerous that maybe I wouldn’t have bothered saving memory space for all the ‘small stuff’ that linked it all together. I knew that I had a great memory for recalling conversations (NB during the period before ‘contact’ when I was messing around with trying to write a book to fill all the spare time I had on my hands during the period when my mate and I were trying to open a bar I had even amazed myself with my ability to remember conversations I had had with my father when I was a small kid or with my primary school teachers on a verbatim basis) but I still had doubts whether I could remember enough of all the chats with my friends to be able to make much sense to anyone else.

Just over a year after those initial chats I received a two line email from one of my mates in Glasgow which basically said ‘Long time no hear. So what has been happening with you?’. He couldn’t in a million years have dreamed of the reply he would get, because that was when I decided I was ready to start sharing my story with someone else.

I figured that maybe putting parts of my story down in writing – even in an email – would maybe stop me replaying them over and over and over again in my head (which I guess was partly because I was scared of forgetting some of the big stuff and partly because every now and again while replaying one part of ‘the big stuff’ I found I could continue with that thread of memory until it joined up with the next bit of big stuff…It was kind of like doing a mental jigsaw with my memories – rather than trying to complete the whole picture all at once I was joing up the small memories to form larger ones, and occasionally finding I could join two or more of the larger ones together.

I also so another benefit in revealing my story to a close and trusted friend (who I knew to be almost as much as a sceptic as myself) – Rather than me deciding what bits of the story ‘other people would need to hear and in what order, I could give him a basic introduction to what happened and see what questions it raised in his mind…Then I would answer those questions and see what new questions, and so on and so on. I figured that once I had explained enough of ‘everything’ to him I could then go through all those emails I had written, cutting and pasting the ‘story’ bits from our general ‘mate talk’ bits and then use those extracts to form a basic skeleton for a comprehensive book about my experiences which I could then let other family and friends read (at that time I was more concerned with convincing friends and family that I hadn’t gone nuts or had a mental breakdown than with any desire to sell my story as a book.

My friend and I exchanged emails on an almost daily basis for around 3 months (by which time I felt I had enough of the basics of the story down in writing even though it would still amount to no more than 10% of the whole thing), but during that time a problem…or rather a complication…had cropped up.

One day I was replying to one of my mate’s emails and I had CNN news on in the background and I heard them mention that a category one storm called Katrina was approaching the coast of Florida. It was no big deal (in global news terms) at that time, but it immediately triggered a memory to me, so in the email I was writing I told my mate to keep an eye on Katrina because it was going to become huge ‘maybe even become the biggest named hurricane in US history’. I didn’t say any more about it in that mail nor did I explain how I knew it was going to because a huge because it was just too long and complicated a story however by the next mail I was writing Hurricane Katrina had crossed Florida and grown into a category 3 hurricane which was now being taken very seriously by CNN. At that time the US hurricane centre were predicting that Katrina would make landfall in Baton Rouge but I knew exactly where it was going. I told my mate that I believed Katrina would become a huge category five hurricane that was gonna be bad news for New Orleans ‘…but that I wouldn’t fancy being in a place called Biloxi (and if you don’t know where that is you don’t need to bother looking it up because you will be hearing a lot more about it in the next few days)’ (NB that’s pretty much an exact quote from my email). As the story of Katrina developed over the next couple of days I couldn’t take my eyes off CNN – partly because I felt I knew what was going to happen and partly to see if what I was pretty sure was going to happen would actually happen!

With around 12 hours to go before Katrina was due to make landfall the US hurricane centre were still predicting that she was heading for Baton Rouge, but when I was watching CNN I was almost horrified (OK that is too strong a word, but maybe panic-stricken might do) to see they had a couple of reporters based in a small, timber framed motel on the coast road in the otherwise evacuated town of Biloxi – apparently believing they were at a safe enough distance to stay in such a fragile building. I didn’t know what to do – I felt a bit like ‘Chicken Licken’ trying to people that the sky was falling, but I went onto the CNN news webpage hoping to find an email address for them so I could at least try to warn them. Instead of an email address I found a ‘contact us with a story’ section so I wrote to them saying something like ‘Look I know this sounds nuts, but as you can see from the attached emails I have written over the last few days, from the second I heard the name I knew Katrina was going to become a huge news story. I can’t really explain how I knew that but it’s really important that you get your two reporters out of that motel in Biloxi’. I didn’t receive any reply or acknowledgement from CNN, and I spent the rest of the night glued to my TV screen – I guess I would have been glued to the screen no matter what, but I was hoping to see those reporters again reporting from some other safer location…I didn’t see or hear from them again until many hours after landfall (where they were showing images of the totally destroyed motel where they had been reporting from the previous night – That whole stretch of the Biloxi coast road was just a row of concrete foundations and piles of broken timbers!).

When the eye of the hurricane had made landfall and moved on and become weaker I tore myself away from my TV screen to write another email to my mate. I headed the email ‘Hurricane Zena on the way?’ because I was pretty sure that for the first time in history they were going to run out of letters of the alphabet to name the hurricanes (I know they wouldn’t use a Z name, that was the point I was making) and I began the email something like ‘Well it may look like the Big Easy has escaped the worst of that one, but watch out for it flooding – not from the sea but from the land a la Lawrence of Arabia…). About an hour or two after I sent that email the first levee failed in New Orleans!

In that same email I also wrote ‘…I’ve also got the feeling that this hurricane isn’t the end of it for New Orleans but just part one of a double whammy. I’ve just checked through the list of Hurricane names for this year and I note that the next hurricane is due to be named Lee. I don’t think New Orleans has anything to worry about from that one but the name Rita may well be worth remembering for people in that area!’

At the time I wrote that last comment there was no guarantee that Hurricane Rita would ever exist, in fact the law of probabilities would tell you that it was extremely unlikely that it would exist because there are rarely enough tropical storms in one season to reach that far through the alphabet. If Rita ever did exist it was even more unlikely that it could become anything like as big as Katrina, as it was already late in the hurricane season and the strength of storms tends to tail off and water temperatures fall later in the year, but I was pretty sure Rita was coming, I knew she would be huge and I knew where she would be heading…Just over 5 weeks after I wrote that email Rita became the biggest named hurricane ever (bigger even than Katrina) and re-flooded New Orleans just after they had finished patching up the levees and pumping out the first lot of flood water!

The reason that I described those comments (and some other stuff along similar lines albeit not of such noteworthy subjects) above as ‘problems or complications’ was that my story just got even bigger than even I thought it was, and those emails that I had intended to merely cut and paste extracts from had now become a very significant part of ‘the story’, as each of the emails I had sent had been independently ‘time and date stamped’ not only by Yahoo and my ISP but also by each and every server they had passed through on my way to my mate’s inbox, which meant they could be used as irrefutable proof of what I said and when I said it. I mentioned in earlier posts that due to the problems I had had with losing data during the ‘pre-contact weirdness’ I was in the habit of typing my emails out on Word documents then copying and pasting them onto my Yahoo email site when I finished them. Normally I would delete the Word document as soon as the email was sent however as I had always intended to cherry-pick the relevant bits out of that email exchange with my mate at some later date I had saved our entire email exchange into one single word document (including the incoming mails from my mate, which I would copy and past to the document before writing my reply). The problem was that that Word document was now about 850 pages long! Before the stuff with Katrina and Rita I had planned to cut and paste maybe 200-300 pages worth of the stuff in that email exchange then edit it down and polish it up a bit before letting anyone else read it, but the problem now was that I had no way of knowing which bits were (or would be) relevant and which bits weren’t – What if I discarded some bits of the general ‘mate chat’ bits that seemed like idle gossip but would in due course become relevant at some future date when something else ‘Big’ happened?

Anyway, this post has gone on long enough (probably more than long enough) and I have really only addressed point one of your email. There isn’t really much I can say about your second and third points because I have never read or seen either of the works you refer to but I will address those comments in general terms in another post some other day, as well as addressing the other points you made in your post. There is actually a part of my conversations with ‘my friends’ where we specifically discussed my ability/trait or whatever you wanna call it to remember conversations in a near verbatim fashion years after the events which I will probably discuss in a future post to but I guess I will leave this post here for now.

[VvROMULUSvV]

Yes there are people with exceptional memories out there, no doubt. I would even say that I myself have a slightly better than average memory (at least compared to those around me) but I'm certainly not infallible. I also know that replaying a sequence in one's mind over and over can really cement that in permanently (I won't go into the mechanics of neuro-networking despite being a fascinating topic on its own).

So, whilst you may very well be able to spew forth such complex dialogue from your own memory, none of that can really be presented as any more than what it really is. Then again, you have no need for my acceptance, I can choose to take it or leave and only you will know for sure what you have experienced. Everyone here on the UM boards are entitled to view your posts and make up their own minds. One could even argue that even if you were 'trolling' so to speak, you certainly are one of the most articulate posters providing a good level of entertainment at least.

Also, please don't misunderstand one of my points. I am in no way accusing you of plagiarism. I was merely making a comparison that you were writing in the style of the above mentioned book. Similarities? Yes, but not close enough to claim plagiarism.

In any case feel free to keep writing. You certainly aren't offending anyone with it and if you maintain that all this is true then so be it. There's a large part of me that hopes it is but unfortunately at this stage I would have failed your 'friends' test because I still hold too much doubt. A word of caution though, my experience on this site has shown that fraudulent posters are dealt with a torrent of derision!

[scots_nomad]

Well VvROMULULUSvV, you certainly are not the first person to think I have made all this up and I am sure you won’t be the last – It brings to mind a line from an old Cat Stevens song which goes ‘If they were right I’d agree but it’s them they know not me’. I will address the other points you made in your first post, not in any attempt to convince you to change your mind but rather because they are valid points that deserve a reply. If you prefer to take this as merely an interesting work of fiction, that’s your choice and your prerogative (although I suppose it isn’t really a choice, if you can’t believe it you can’t believe it) but as far as I am concerned the loss is all yours.

As I said yesterday in my first reply I can’t comment on any similarities that you see between my story and the tow works you referred to as I have neither read the books nor seen the movies. I have never been much into movies, in fact the last film I saw in a movie theatre was the very first Shrek movie which must be more than 10 years ago now, and while I do occasionally watch a movie on TV and have seen trailers for The Flight Of The Navigator it didn’t appeal to me at all as it looked like a kids movie to me.

With regard to their use of Billy Connolly’s voice and indeed his entire persona that was entirely down to ‘my friends’ – I am just telling things as they happened - With hindsight though I can see that it was an inspired choice by them as it made the whole thing sooo much easier for me to handle. Right at the beginning of my chats (when they were still using their accentless, emotionless monotonic voice) it struck me as strange that while I expected to be discussion ‘big things’ they seemed more interested in discussing what seemed to be completely irrelevant and trivial details about me and my personal life (I have mentioned before that we had discussed many of my friends – in Glasgow, Vietnam and in Switzerland. When I raised this point with them they said basically ‘We intend to discuss Everything thing with you in due course but we have plenty of time to chat about the big stuff later. We will warn you now that at times things will feel really tough to you so we want to make sure that we do as much as possible to do this in the way that best suits you, but before we can decide what way that should be we really need to get to know each other and we need to be clear on what kind of things you like and what kind of things you don’t like’.

When they first started using Billy Connolly’s voice it was both funny and clever as far as I was concerned (because they really did have him down to a tee), but after maybe 10-15 minutes there were times when I felt like saying ‘OK that’s enough of the impressions, can you go back to using your own voice’ but actually not so long after that it just became ‘normal’ and I stopped thinking of it as talking to someone who was doing an impression of someone else and genuinely felt that I was chatting to someone as fun and as funny as Billy Connolly himself (I am not saying I thought I was chatting with the real Billy Connolly – I was always aware that I was chatting with ‘something else’, but I’m just saying it sounded and felt natural and genuine rather than put on).

Regarding your comment ‘these kinds of occurrences (when real) are more likely to be filled with psychological anguish and suffering rather than a humorous and almost whimsical tale such as you have presented’, I would start off by repeating something I have already said a few times before – You have only heard a tiny bit of the story so far! My friends weren’t kidding me when they said that there would be times when I would find things tough – in fact with hindsight I would say that was a MASSIVE understatement. Back during the exchange of emails with my mate in Glasgow yesterday there was one mail where my mate said something like ‘You must feel like a lucky b****rd’ or something like that. I haven’t bothered looking up his exact words but I replied by saying something (very) like:

Sure there have been some highs and a lot of fun times but I can assure you that I have felt cursed just as often as I I have felt blessed during the past eighteen months. I have seen what the abyss of insanity must look like. There have been times when I have felt so angry, so sad, so terrified, so lonely and soooo far out of my depth that you wouldn’t believe. My friends took me to the edge time after time to show me what they could do, to show what I could take, and to change my opinion of what is and what is not possible.

At times I was like a kid on his first day at nursery school, at times I felt like a kid in a candy shop, but most of the time I felt like a wee boy fae Glesga who was a long, long way from home, and I have not felt like that for a very, very long time. To be honest though, even if I was given the choice to turn the clock back now so none of that ever happened I wouldn’t turn back that clock but I still don’t think I would wish it on my worst enemy – No one should be jealous of what I have been through since this started!

[White Unicorn]

Truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction is just speculation running wild usually from a strange truth discovered by an author playing out his own fantasies to fill in his gaps of knowledge. Fiction, as in say Star Trek has led to much of the fiction becoming reality, such as comunicators etc. I think we can learn from others fiction, because their imaginition helps fill in gaps that science has yet to understand. The best researchers use their imaginations to come up with their next experiment to discover truth behind wierd effects discovered.

The point I am making is that not all fiction comes from a sick deluded mind, it's just adding imagination to find answers. It's a natural process of curiousity. The truth is only known after all the speculations are played out in imagination. So fiction can be a powerful tool to lead to more discoveries, if we comprehend it as speculation not a hard fact or sick delusion.

[scots_nomad]

I was gonna post something else next but somehow this bit of the stpry seemed more appropriate

…At one point in the conversation my friends asked me how I came to realise they were there. I replied,

“How could I fail to notice that something was going on? For a while there it began to feel like I was caught up in some kind of cross between ‘Tron’ and ‘The Truman Show’.

My friends then asked me which film had come closest to 'hitting the nail on the head' and I said

“Neither of them were exactly like what I was going through, but they seemed like some kind of metaphor in a way. I only mentioned ‘The Truman Show’ because I have felt under some invisible spotlight nomatter where I went or what I did and in fact I have never seen ‘Tron’ so maybe it was nothing like it at all but there is one bit from ‘Tron’ that I have seen in trailers and that’s the only bit I am talking about”

“We know the bit you are talking about.”

“How can you if I haven’t even explained what I mean?”

“Well if anyone tells you that they only know one bit from ‘Tron’ then it’s pretty obvious which bit they are talking about, isn’t it? The bit with the motorbikes right?”

“Ha! Yeah and I suppose you’re right that it could only be that bit although with me it had nothing to do with motorbikes, it was just that for a while I was really trying to shake you off. You seemed to have worked out where I would be and where I would be going next all the time so I deliberately started heading in other directions or turning corners for no real reason but no matter how many times I changed direction the weirdness always seemed to there.”

"So which movie came closest to hitting the nail on the head?"

"Neither of those two actually came close to hitting the nail on the head but there was another movie that I saw a few years ago that could maybe fit. I don't know if you have seen it because it was quite a low budget, low profile movie that I just happen to catch one time on a plane when I was flying from Hong Kong to Auckland if I remember right..."

"We did see it!"

"How can you say that before I even say what it was?"

"Can't you work that out?"

"Oh, I forgot. You have seen 'Everything'!"

"Yeah, there is that, but how else could we know what you are going to say?"

"Well, I suppose that you could get your time machine out and 'jump forward a few seconds’ to see what I was about to say."

"Do you believe we can do that?"

"I know you can do that!!! I don’t know whether you actually need a machine to do it but I know you can do that sort of thing. You’ve made that kind of obvious already…I am just ****ed if I can work out how!"

"OK, so we don't have to prove that anymore...So how else could we know what you are going to say?"

“I suppose you could have been following me for years and so you can remember what film I watched on the flight from Hong Kong.”

“Yeah, we can remember you flying from Hong Kong, but how else could we know what film you were going to say if we hadn’t been on that flight with you?”

"You could read my mind maybe?"

"Do you believe we can do that?"

"Ohhhh....Let's just say that I don't really want to think about that too much just now, and leave it at that."

(I was beginning to believe that that was exactly what they were doing, and that is kind of an uncomfortable feeling when it only works one way!)

"OK, we will leave that for now,...So how else could we know that you are going to say 'The Thirteenth Floor'?"

"Holy ****! That is impressive!...A bit creepy, but impressive!"

"So you admit that we got you with that one?"

"**** yeah!”,

"So how else could we have known that if it wasn't through one of the ways you have mentioned?"

"I dunno....just logic I suppose"

"What do you mean by that?"

"Well, if there was a 'right answer' rather than just being a few 'good answers' to that question...I mean, if 'The Thirteenth Floor' was the one movie that hit the nail 'exactly' on the head then you may have had some way of knowing that I knew the ‘right answer’."

We spoke about ‘The Thirteenth Floor’ for a while.

(NB: For anyone who hasn’t seen the movie ‘The Thirteenth Floor’, it is about a group of computer game inventors who develop a fully immersive virtual reality game where the ‘player’ actually becomes a character in one of a number of digitally created environments – in one game it was a wild west situation and in another it was a 1920’s gangster world. In the movie one of the game developers who has played an experimental version of the game later finds himself being pursued in his real life by one of the baddies from the game. The movie reaches a climax when the game’s creators realise that the only way it would be possible for a digitally created character to exists and survive in the ‘real world’ would be if their ‘reality’ was actually just a part of someone else’s virtual reality creation.)

Then my friends asked me,

“If that is the truth, can you handle it?"

"**** knows!...It's an interesting logic, but what the **** are the implications of it? …Can I handle being that 'insignificant'? …If we are all part of someone else's virtual reality game, does it really matter whether you are a pawn or a King?...”

I sat in silent thought for a few seconds before continuing,

“I suppose if that's all it is then that is all it is...It's the same 'ALL' that it was yesterday I, so why shouldn’t I be able to handle it?...Does the fact that someone now knows what it is change it from what it was yesterday?"

"So do you think you could handle a truth like that?"

"I suppose I am gonna have to!...But who is gonna tell that lot?"

(I nodded in the general direction of ‘the rest of the world’)

"Do you think they could handle it?"

"I dunno about that...Maybe some of them...Maybe if it was explained right....Maybe not....People down here down seem to handle 'truth' too well…I guess they don’t get to see too much of it these days."…

[BarnabasCollins]

I have been reading your posts with some interest. I can't say whether the events you are describing actually happened, whether you think they happened but they happened in your mind so you believe them to be true, or whether you are writing a bit of fiction knowing full well none of it happened and you don't even think they happened, but from what you say, whether I or anyone else believes it all to be true is not that important to you. That's a good attitude, I think.

As for whether the events actually happened, it is obvious (and I think you'll agree with this) that some of the things you described are physically impossible. For example, throwing the things you were going to pack over your shoulder and landing all sorted out, could not happen physically (or, as you said, the odds of it happening are so astronomical as to be virtually impossible). As for the predictions about Hurricane Katrina, I have no way of knowing whether you actually predicted those events prior to them occurring since I do not have the verified e-mails with appropriate dates to prove the timeline you claim. I am not asking for verification, by the way because before they convinced me of anything, I would also have to independently verify some of the things you said like when the National Hurricane Center actually concluded that Katrina would hit New Orleans (you said twelve hours prior to coming ashore, the National Hurricane Center was still predicting it would hit Baton Rouge). I haven't researched that, and I don't plan, too. I'm just saying the kinds of things I would have to do, in addition to seeing verified time/dates on the e-mails, to believe that prediction was actually made.

As for whether you actually believe the events to have happened, bear something in mind as you ponder these events. If anyone tells you something about yourself, that proves nothing because you already were in possession of that information. What would be most convincing would be for someone to tell you something that you had absolutely no way of knowing but could be verified as being true. I suppose that was the point about Katrine, but as I have already said, I have no way of verifying the timeline of those e-mails.

In any event, I have been reading your posts as an unfolding story and I will say that I am enjoying the story. I will continue reading in that fashion and with that mindset.

[scots_nomad]

At the point in the conversation I discussed in my last post I didn’t know that they could read my thought but I I was beginning to suspect that they could because there had been quite a few times when they either changed the subject of the conversation to something that I had been thinking about at that time or where they had asked me a question which had left me wondering how I should answer because there wasn’t a simple way to answer without a lot of clarification or qualification but before I had decided how to answer they had then either clarified or modified the question which made it much easier to answer. When that had happened a few times I could dismiss it as just coincidence but as the chat went on it seemed to be happening way to often to be just coincidence.

On the second day of our chats I was in my sitting room and had MTV on my television as we chatted. They played the video for a Britney Spears song called ‘Every Time’ which showed her being chased around by paparazzi and fans and hangers on and I was thinking ‘Who in their right mind would want to live like that?’. The day before while my friends had been asking me about my ambitions and goals and stuff – at the time I had been planning to open a bar with my mates and was really looking forward to the change and the challenges that would bring. After I had talked about that my friends had said ‘Don’t you want to be rich and famous?’ and I had replied ‘I don’t mind being rich but I have got no wish to be famous’. During that first day my answer led us into discussing why I was writing a book if I really had no wish to be famous, which had then led into a whole variety of other stuff and the ‘rich and famous’ bit wasn’t mentioned again however as I was watching that Britney Spears video and thinking ‘Who in their right mind would want that?’ my friends asked ‘out of the blue’,

‘Are you sure you don’t want to be rich and famous?’

That really was one coincidence too far for me so I decided to confront them about it. I was going to come right out and ask if they were reading my mind but I decided to be a bit more subtle about it.

‘ You KNOW I am!’

I had expected them to ask how I could ‘KNOW’ as they were always very picky about stuff like that but they surprised me,

‘Yes we know, but are you really sure that you know you don’t’

‘Yeah I know…That would be a nightmare to me.’

They were silent for quite a few seconds before saying,

‘So you know we can read your thoughts then?’

‘Yeah I do now.’

‘And are you OK with thet?’

I shrugged my shoulders and said ‘I guess so’

‘That’s very brave of you.’

‘Brave? It’s got nothing to do with being brave. I don’t seem to have much choice in the matter but at least now I know you are doing it’

‘You do have a choice – We will stop it if you want.’

‘Nah it’s OK. It’s better the devil you know I guess coz even if I said I wanted you to stop how would I know that you are not still doing it.’

‘We promise we won’t if you ask us to stop’

‘Mmm…I still wouldn’t know for sure so let’s just leave things as they are for now and see how it goes.’

‘Like we said Wee Man…Brave!’

I said in one of my first posts here that they taught me how to communicate telepathically and that I would post the story of how they did that later but I thought it would be better to explain that last bit of my story first before going on to explain how they took that next step.

The telepathy lesson was sometime in the second week of my chats with them and it really took me by surprise at the time. For the first few days after our chats began my friends made sure that I stayed at home where it was just me and them and where we could chat openly to each other (the buggers actually ‘hid’ my house keys from me so I couldn’t leave the house even if I wanted to, but with hindsight that was probably a very good thing coz I don’t think I was in any state to be out in public in those first few days). I think it was actually the second time that I left the house – I didn’t really want to go out as I was really tired and there was nothing in particular that I wanted or needed from ‘in town’, but they said that they needed me to go out so that they could move a few things around in my house ‘for my next lesson’. I offered to just close my eyes or even go out into the garden for a while but they insisted that I go into town for a couple of hours. As I was getting ready to go out they told me that I should put on my baseball cap (which I usually only wore when playing golf in the hot sun out there). After the usual ‘Why?”/”You’ll understand later” discussion I picked up my baseball cap and realised that it felt much heavier than it usually did. On closer inspection it felt like something very flexible but very heavy (possibly as heavy a as lead) seemed to have been sewn into the headband of the cap I said ‘Hey! What the **** is that?”, and they said ‘Don’t worry, it’s just something that will allow us to communicate with you out there if we need to contact you urgently’. I shrugged my shoulders, put on the cap and then called a taxi to take me into town.

I got the cab to drop me in the centre of downtown Saigon and as I stepped out I said to myself “Right! What am I going to do for a couple of hours?”. I’m not sure whether I actually said it aloud or whether I just thought it to myself (I wasn’t even sure about that at the time), but there was an immediate ‘pulse’ in/around my head as if someone had suddenly tightened the hatband of my baseball cap momentarily and then a little voice in my head said “Why not go to The Underground?”, and then there was a second ‘pulse’ (The Underground was the name of my regular bar in Saigon). Now, when I said ‘there was a little voice in my head’, the fact is that it didn’t sound anything like Billy Connolly’s voice at all (as my friends’ voice had sounded for the past few days) but actually just sounded exactly the same as all of my own thoughts sound to me when I think them. I really wasn’t sure whether it was just one of my thoughts (although it seemed to have come completely out of the blue as far as I was concerned, as it was only around noon and I wouldn’t normally have even thought of popping in to the bar at that time) or whether it was a suggestion from my friends, but the fact that it had started and finished with a pulse from my hatband seemed to suggest the latter. I looked around to make sure there was no one close enough to overhear me and then I whispered

“Is that you?”.

There was another pulse in my hat and then the same ‘voice’ said

“Were you expecting a call from anyone else?”, followed by another pulse.

I stifled a laugh and then whispered

“Wow! This is amazing!”.

There was another pulse and then the same wee inner voice said

“You don’t need to whisper, all you have to do is think of what you want to say and we will hear it.” (followed by another pulse).

Despite what they just said I continued to whisper (after making sure that no one around was looking at me strangely)

“But how will you know if I am speaking to you or if I am just thinking?”,

There was a pulse and then they said

“Does it matter?” (pulse!).

I thought it might matter but I decided to give it a try anyway, so I thought to myself

“Can you hear this?”.

There was another pulse and then they said something like

“Are you going to waste both our time here like this or are we gonna go to that pub?” (pulse!).

I soon realised that they were using the pulses in my hat in the same way that NASA used the ‘Beeps’ during their conversations with the astronauts on the Apollo missions – it was a way of letting the other party know when they were starting or finishing a communication, which was necessary to avoid them both talking over each other because of the time delay caused by the distance that each message had to travel to reach the other.

I walked along the road towards the bar not really saying/thinking much except “Wow this is weird” or “Wow, this is amazing”, but the truth is that I spent most of my time trying to think of absolutely nothing at all coz I still wasn’t sure about how comfortable I was with them listening in to every thought that went through my mind – especially with the number of women walking around central Saigon who had lovely backsides! J

When I got to the bar there were a few other regulars in, as well as all the staff who I already knew well so it was quite easy for me to pass away a pleasant couple of hours in there. Well I say it was easy, but in fact there were times when I was finding it quite difficult, or more specifically there were times that I found it difficult to keep a straight face while I was having a conversation with some friends or staff from the bar only to have my own wee personal Billy Connolly whispering funny lines ‘in my ear’ at the same time. I tried to carry on double simultaneous conversations for a while – chatting to my friends while in between times trying to ‘think’ the answers to whatever ‘my friends’ were saying (which most of the times was something like ‘Will you shut up while I’m talking to other people coz this is difficult enough to get my head round as it is?’).

At one point I decided that it was getting too difficult to keep up, so I decided to take my baseball cap off for a while just to give myself a rest. As I whipped off my cap I thought to myself

“This will shut them up for a while!”.

Although I had already taken my cap off there was an immediate and identical pulse around my head and then a little voice said

“Surprise! We don’t actually need you to wear the hat at all we just used the hat to make it easier for you to get your head around this to start with!” (pulse!).

I just put my head in my hands and thought to myself “How the **** am I gonna handle this???” – that wasn’t a message to them, that one really was just a thought to myself.

Not long after that I decided that I had been out of the house for long enough so I caught a cab and headed home to see what they had been up to in my absence. When I got home everything seemed exactly as I had left it so I said to them (out loud, in the way we had been talking for days),

“I thought you said you needed me to go out so that you could move things around, but nothing’s changed.”

They replied (telepathically, as they had been doing all afternoon),

“Maybe we’ve moved some things and maybe we haven’t, but things have definitely changed Wee Man. You don’t have to worry about today’s lesson, you’ve already passed it with flying colours so you can go get changed and just chill out for a while if you want.”

From that point on they used telepathy 99.9% of the time, even though I asked them to continue to use their ‘normal’ voice at least when we were alone at the house – They’re reply was something like “Why take a backward step now Wee Man? Get used to it, this is the communication method of the future.”

[scots_nomad]

BarnabasCollins wrote:

As for whether you actually believe the events to have happened, bear something in mind as you ponder these events. If anyone tells you something about yourself, that proves nothing because you already were in possession of that information. What would be most convincing would be for someone to tell you something that you had absolutely no way of knowing but could be verified as being true. I suppose that was the point about Katrine, but as I have already said, I have no way of verifying the timeline of those e-mails.

Hi Barnabaas, I wasn’t ignoring your post yesterday but I had actually prepared my post yesterday before I saw yours.

I totally agree that ‘my friends’ telling me anything about my past proves nothing (not even to me, because believe me there were many times that I asked myself ‘could I possibly be imagining all this?). The stuff I wrote about Katrina and Rita are true but there is no way I can prove that here as if I posted copies of the emails here or even forwarded the actual email to anyone they would have no way of being sure I hadn’t tampered with them after the events however I have no doubt that there are plenty of experts who could forensically verify that they have not been tampered with (and I have invited a number of reputable bodies to investigate my story over the past few years but have had no takers). There would be little point in me taking a lie detector test as it is already recognised that some people are able to fool lie detectors however I have heard that an MRI could be used as a fool proof lie detector as it is able to monitor whether it is the ‘creative areas’ or the ‘memory areas’ of the brain that are active while the subject is being tested. I would certainly be willing to take such a test but would there really be any point? If that test ‘proved’ that I was in fact telling the truth wouldn’t people find it easier to see it as proof that the MRI is not fool proof after all rather than taking it as proof that I am telling the truth?

I have long since accepted that most people are not going to believe me ‘no matter what’ so I am not on any kind of crusade to convince anyone, but as I said to Romulus before – The loss isn’t mine!

Maybe some people would be convinced if my emails about Katrina and Rita were independently verified. Maybe others would be convinced if Steven Hawking checked his email inbox and confirmed that I did write to him in 2005 to explain to him how information escapes from black holes three years before anyone in the scientific community, and there are plenty of other ‘inexplicable’ things I could present for investigation but the fact is that there will always be people who will prefer to believe I am lying no matter what. All I can do is tell my story and leave it up to people whether they believe it or not. I will do another post today about another part of my story which ‘I would have no way of knowing’ but it will take a bit of explaining so I will end this post here and make that a separate post on its own.

Edited July 2, 2013 by scots_nomad

[scots_nomad]

Right at the beginning of my chats (when I still thought I was talking to an ET) my friends told me that we could talk about anything because they had already seen all of our TV shows and movies. I said that they couldn’t have seen them ALL but they insisted that they had:

"Wait a minute, there are hundreds of countries here sending out thousands of TV signals in hundreds of languages every second of every day. How can you possibly see all of them?"

"We told you. There are lots of us!"

"OK, I guess if there are enough of you, you could watch everything, but that wouldn't really mean anything unless you had some way of indexing 'Everything'. So who remembers who remembers what, if you understand what I mean?"

"We understand what you mean"

"So who remembers?"

"We all do!"

"But doesn't that mean that you all remember everything?"

(Big round of applause!)

"That's what we have been trying to tell you!"

"****! I am back where I started again!"

"And anyway, even if we missed some programs - which we don't - we could always catch them later if we had to"

"Wow! Are you telling me that you can travel faster than the speed light?"

"No, no, no, no. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light"

"So how can you catch a TV signal if you 'miss' it first time?"

"How do you think we could do it?"

“I don't have a scoobie. What you say seems to be a contradiction according to what I understand"

"OK, we will give you a clue. You are not the only one who knows a short cut" (the short cut bit was a reference to an earlier bit of the conversation)

"You know a short cut? Is it something to do with bending light? I suppose if light bends around something and you can go in a straight line then that would be a short cut"

(Round of applause, but not too enthusiastic, it was more 'close but no banana' style)

"Do you know what the speed of light is?"

"Not exactly, but it is roughly 186,000 miles a second, or something like that"

"You think that that is the speed of light? Noooooooo. Light travels much faster than that?"

"Much faster, or do you mean my figure is not exact enough?"

"We mean 'Much faster'"

"How can that be?"

"Can't you work it out?"

"What me? Now? You are telling me that the best physicists in human history are all wrong about the speed of light, and you expect me to work out how right here and now, when you have already blown my mind so much that I don't know if my ass is screwed or bored?

"Can you?"

"Of course I can't!"

"We think you can!"

"Well I guess that proves you wrong about knowing everything then, coz I don't have a clue"

"Don't you?"

"No, I don't think so. I mean 'No!' I don't have a clue on even where to start thinking"

"Do you know how they measure the speed of light?"

"I assume they have some more scientific ways of doing it now, but I remember hearing or reading that the first time that it was actually measured it was done using some high intensity beam and a load of mirrors. Maybe it was even sunlight that they used, but I know they used a series of huge mirrors set miles apart and angled so that the light reflected between them so as to maximise the distance the light actually traveled before it ended up back where it started - that way the person who started the timing would know when to stop it."

"Where were the mirrors?"

"They would have to have a clear line of sight between them. Were they placed on certain mountain tops, where they had survey reference marks?"

"Where else could they have done it?"

"Out in the desert, on salt flats maybe"

"Do you think they would have gotten accurate results measuring that way?"

"Apparently they were surprisingly accurate. I know that the speed of light has been measured by more scientific means since then, but the results of the original measurement was roughly correct"

"What were they trying to measure?"

"Eh?"

"What were they measuring?"

"Duh! The speed of light!"

"Do you think that is what they were measuring?"

(Pause for thought)

"Wait a minute. Are you talking about the difference between velocity and speed?"

(Big round of applause – far more enthusiastic than before)

"Do you think that could explain it?"

I thought for a minute...

"No! That would work the other way. The velocity is the 'displacement' over time, and the speed is the 'distance' over time. If they used the mirrors to reflect the light back to where it started then it would have a velocity of zero, but the speed of light would still be the figure that they measured"

"Would it?"

"Ok, let me think about this...Maybe I do have a clue where you are going with this, cos I was thinking of something along the same lines yesterday when I was out here ****ing around at the swimming pool"

"****ing around? Is that what you call what you were doing here yesterday?"

"Aw crap! You weren't watching then too were you?"

"Yes!"

"Aw crap! That’s embarrassing! I was dancing around here like a ****ing idiot!"

"We thought you were quite good"

"**** you! You're taking the p*** now!"

"So what were you actually doing?"

"I was just feeling good, watering the garden and refilling the swimming pool"

"Did the swimming pool need refilled?"

"Not really, but the weather was lovely, I was in a good mood coz I knew I had written enough for now so I could go back to see my brother and my family in Glasgow, the music was good, and I got engrossed watching the patterns the light was making when it reflected off the spray from the hose"

"And what were you thinking about?"

"It's just when I was watching the ripples of the water on the surface of the pool I thought of another way of trying to explain to people how I seem to think differently from everyone else"

"And what were you thinking in particular?"

"I wasn't thinking of anything in particular - it was just one of a million thoughts that crossed my mind when I was ****ing around in the garden."

"What was?"

"I was getting to that, but I am still not sure whether it has anything to do with the speed of light - maybe I will make a complete ass of myself if I even say it, so before I do, can you tell me one thing?"

"What's that?"

"Is light three-dimensional?"

(Big, big round of applause)

"Why do you ask that?"

"Well, when I was watching the ripples on the surface of the pool I realised that most people would think that that is all there was - a few waves on the surface of the water, but I was picturing it as two hemispheres of ripples. One growing in the water and another one in the air"

"Which hemisphere is more important?"

"How can one be any more important than the other - neither can exist on its own"

"Which came first?"

"How can one come before the other if one cannot exist until the other exists. That is the sort of bull **** that was going through my head"

"Do you think it's bull ****?"

"At the time it was just something passing through my head, but if I extend that sort of thinking to what you say about the speed of light then I think I can maybe understand how you can know a short cut"

"And how would that be?"

"Well, most people would visualise a light bean as a two dimensional sine wave sort of thing"

"Why would they think that?"

"Because that is how we are taught to visualise waves at school, using oscilloscopes"

"So what do you think?"

"I can't imagine how anything could be two dimensional. Everything must have a depth of some kind, so maybe the image that we are seeing on the screen is really just a cross section through a three dimensional wave"

"So what would the wave look like?"

"It would look something like a slinky. Maybe it would be a slinky that gets wider at one end. Maybe a laser is like a slinky."

"And would that explain everything?"

"I don't know if it would explain anything, but it’s the best guess I got"

"So, if we told you that you were right, what would that change?"

"It would change the speed of light. Light could be going much faster than 186,000 miles a second along a spiral, but you could take a short cut by traveling at that speed along the centre!"

(Big round of applause)

"So how much faster would the speed of light actually be?"

"**** knows! You expect me to work that out now?"

"Can you work it out roughly?"

"How could I?"

"That is a good way to look at it. How could you?"

"Well. I suppose what people are actually measuring is the velocity of light in a straight line, but in reality the light is circling around a central axis. That means that people are only measuring the lateral movement of the light rather than the full 'circumference of the light-wave'"

"So how many times faster would the speed of light be compared to the velocity?"

"It would be roughly Pi times their measured results. They are measuring the diameter of the wave rather than its circumference which would be roughly pi times d"

"So what else would it change?"

"**** knows! Maybe it will change everything or maybe it is just theoretical stuff that won't really change much. I really don't know enough about the theory to guess what the implications could be"

"What do you know that would change?"

"Nothing! I can't think of anything real that relies on the speed of light?"

"Don't you?"

"Wait a minute. Let me think about this... if E=mc^2 and c is the constant which is the speed of light, then c^2 is going to increase by roughly pi squared"

"And what is pi squared?"

"Roughly ten, for easy counting"

"So what difference would that make?"

"Well, if E is right, and c squared is ten times more than everyone thinks, then the mass must only be about a tenth of the figures they are assuming!!!!!!"

"And what does that mean?"

"Well, that seems to mean that they are all wasting their time looking for the 90% 'dark matter' that they can't find! ****ing hell! They have spent all that time, effort and energy looking for something that isn't! Nae wonder they canny find it!"

"So what do you think about that then?"

"What do I think about that???? 'Where's my ****ing Nobel Prize'? That's what I think about that!"

That conversation took place in 2004 – I wrote it down about one year later and put it on the internet around the end of 2005. I was well aware that suggesting that anything could travel faster than 186,000 miles per second basically amounted to scientific heresy as at face value it seems to contradict Einstein’s special theory of relativity (In fact it doesn’t contradict it at all, as ‘they’ were not saying that it was possible to travel faster than the speed of light but rather that we have been using the wrong figure for the speed of light as we only ever measure the lateral movement of light and fail to take account of the rotational energy within it). Notwithstanding that fact, it still seemed impossible to imagine that all of our physicists have been so fundamentally wrong for all these years, however you may remember last years ‘big science story’ where scientists who were sending neutrinos from the CERN laboratory in Switzerland to another lab in Italy were baffled to note that in a number of instances where some of those neutrinos seemed to have arrived in Italy faster than the speed of light! And they were at a loss to explain how that could possibly have happened. Those observations sparked a major controversy within the scientific community and since then those original results have been scrutinised however as they have been unable to either replicate or explain the original findings it is now assumed and generally accepted that there must have been some unidentified error within the measuring equipment, however it does appear to me that my friends may have given me a perfectly logical explanation for those results IF it could be proven that light waves actually ‘corkscrew’ through the air (or through a vacuum) rather than simply travelling in a straight line from A to B (Or from Switzerland to Italy as the case may be.

I that regard I was very interested to read an article on the BBC World news website two days ago ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23096320) where they were discussion the latest development in superfast fibre option information transfer by using what they call ‘twisted light’ – If you care to read that article you will see that photons within light do actually spin actually in addition to their ‘speed of light’ lateral movement! (And even as a complete layman it seems to me that the energy of that spin has been totally ignored in Einstein’s E=mc^2 equation)

(And interestingly, the electron microscope photos of the ‘twisted light’ within that news article look incredibly similar to the six armed spiral pattern that my friends laid out on my floor the day before our chats started!)

….So do I get my Nobel Prize yet? :-p

[scots_nomad]

I put the following post up on the ‘Breathing Underwater’ yesterday but as I noted at the end of it there was more to this story in relation to my chats with my friends:

For many years in UK we had a program called ‘Tomorrow’s World’ where they highlighted the latest inventions and scientific advances. I remember one show about 30 years ago or more where they did one story about a newly inverted fluid (it may have been water, I’m not 100% sure but it was clear and looked like water) which was supersaturated with oxygen to the point where it could actually be breathed. On the show they did a demonstration where they dropped a mouse into large beaker of the fluid. The mouse assumed it was water and panicked desperately trying to swim and trying to get out but the sides of the beaker were high and vertical so it had no chance to escape. Eventually the mouse tired and gave up its struggle, apparently settled to the fate of drowning. It stopped struggling and sank to the bottom of the beaker perfectly still as if dying – I swear you could see the look of surprise on its face when it suddenly realised it could breathe under the ‘water’ and from then on it ran about in the fluid just as happily as it would have run around in a cage.

The liquid hadn’t been invented merely as a way to mess with the heads of mice however but was actually intended for medical use. At the time they reckoned it could be used to save premature babies born without fully developed lungs which would otherwise be prone to collapse and they also believed it would be ideal to treat babies with fluid on their lungs as this new miracle liquid was more dense than the fluid in the lungs so if the lungs were filled completely with the liquid the unwanted fluids would basically float up and out of the mouth, and when the oxygen in the liquid had been exhausted the liquid was harmlessly absorbed into the body and the lungs went back to breathing normally.

Even as a young teenager there seemed to be so much more potential for that new invention as both my parents smoked at the time and I could imagine in years to come that it could be used to ‘flush out’ the lungs of all smokers however for some reason that invention seems to have just disappeared off the radar as I never heard of it again – I don’t know whether they discovered some unforeseen side effects, whether it was just too expensive to produce or whether people never really saw the wider possible uses for it, but it did seem like a bit of a game changer to me at the time.

(I know this is a bit off topic as it obviously wasn’t what you were swimming in as a kid but the thread just triggered that memory for me as well as triggering another memory linked to it which is just sooo far off this topic that I will pick it up in a separate post on my thread ‘how things started with me’)

That TV program (Tomorrow’s World) came up early in my chats with my friends when they had asked me what TV shows I liked as a kid. They then asked me which specific items from the show stood out in my memory and I was surprised to note that even though it was on for many years and I watched it every week there were only three items from the show which immediately stood out. One item was when they had said that on the following weeks program they would be demonstrating that it was possible to transmit coloured images to black and white TVs which seemed pretty exciting to me as a kid because it was back in the very early 70s and we still had a B&W TV set. There was a big build up to the following weeks show with many trailers promising that Tomorrow’s World would be broadcasting colour to every B&W TV set in the country and there was a huge TV audience for that show however it was a HUGE anti-climax – I expected to see full colour pictures but instead all they showed was an pattern made up of thin black and white lines which apparently produced an interference effect when shown on TV and created a slight tinge of blue, green and red at various points in the pattern (I say apparently coz I saw no colours at all and neither did loads of other viewers who wrote in to the show and to newspapers to voice their disappointment!). The second TW story from my childhood which stuck in my memory was when they demonstrated a new machine from America that was actually able to record TV programs and show them back later on your TV!!! VCRs may seem old fashioned now but to me at that time it was AMAZING! The third story that had stuck in my memory was the breathable water that I mentioned above.

My friends then asked me why I thought that out of all the things I had seen on the show only those three things stuck in my memory. I said ‘Well the first one stands out because it was such a huge disappointment, the second one because it seemed so exciting at the time but I am not really sure why the third one stands out so much – sure it was interesting but there were loads of interesting things on the show so I don’t know why that one particularly stood out. My friends then said ‘Don’t worry about why it stuck in your memory just now but we can tell you that you were right! There was far more potential for that invention and your people really should had done far more research and development on it because they could have found answers to a great many problems you have now and will have in future’

(Later in our chats they said the same sort of thing about ‘phages’ – if I have spelled that right - which as far as I remember from a documentary I saw on TV many years ago about them are strains of bacteria which the Soviet Union had spent a great deal of time and effort on researching them as an alternative to antibiotics only to dump the research completely when their economy started to fail, and they also told me that the drug Thalidomide which has become almost demonised these days due to the horrendous birth defects it caused back in the sixties is something that ‘my people’ should not forget about as it has a great deal of potential to solve our future problems!)

Anyway, getting back to the breathable water my friends asked me if I would be willing to volunteer as a human guinea pig if they ever did bring it back as a medical treatment. At the time I had been smoking for about 25 years and had a bit of a smokers cough and I never felt I had fully recovered 100% from a bout of pneumonia I had suffered a few years earlier so I said I would have a few questions to ask if I was going to be the first guinea pig but assuming I was satisfied with the answers I got then I would probably give it a go. We left the conversation there for the time being however like so many other parts of those early chats the subject would come up again a few days later. I will pick that story up in my next post because I guess this one is long enough for now.

[scots_nomad]

In my last post I said there was more to come about my discussions with my friends about ‘breathable water’ – I intended to carry on with that story today however I guess it will have to wait until tomorrow as I have just done a post on the thread called ‘Seeing the same numbers on the clock’ and the final point I wanted to make in that post would have taken that thread so far off topic that I decided it would be best to transfer the final part of my response to this thread:

The person who started that other thread had noticed that he/she seemed to be constantly noticing the same time whenever they look at a clock (i.e. always 11 minutes past the hour) and was wondering whether it could be a sign and if so what that sign could mean. On that thread I explained that I went through a similar ‘phenomenon’ at the start of ‘all this’ and I told how that eventually led me to the point where I did get an explanation for it (and everything else) but I reckon that this thread would be a better place to post what that explanation was:-

…At one point my friends explained that they watched ALL of ‘my people’ ALL of the time, and that they try (as far as they are able to without actually ‘blowing their cover’) to encourage good, social behavior where possible. To use their words, “Good deeds earn signs, and lies break chains. Wee good deeds earn wee signs and big good deeds earn big signs, wee lies break wee chains and big lies break big chains”. They then went on to explain that the ‘signs’ they were talking about were signs that ‘they’ actually existed and were really paying attention to what goes on down here, and the ‘chains’ that they were talking about were chains of memory.

With regard to the ‘signs’ bit of the chat, I jumped in with something like,

“So why didn’t I get many signs then?”

(Full of myself, or what?)

“You didn’t get many signs???? What do you think you’ve been bombarded with for the past few weeks then?”,

“Aye OK, I saw them THEN, but if that’s what you mean then I haven’t really been ‘that good’ recently…Or what I actually mean is that I haven’t been any better during the past few weeks than I have been during the rest of my life, so why did the signs start all of a sudden?”

“Firstly Wee Man, as far as we are concerned you have been amazing during those last few weeks – Sure, you haven’t gotten any better in general terms, but then again, you haven’t gotten any worse, so in our ‘relative terms’ you have just been amazing. We could see what you were going through – Obviously we could, coz it was us that was putting you through it! – and none of us could have blamed you if you had started taking some of that out on the people around you. We certainly couldn’t have blamed you if you had decided that other people were just gonna have to look after themselves for a while coz you needed to concentrate on yourself with all that s**t going on, but you didn’t do that. Like you just said Wee Man, despite everything that was going on around you, you didn’t treat other people any better – or any worse – than you did during the rest of your life, and in a way THAT was your downfall, coz every time you blew us away by doing that you just earned yourself more and more, bigger and bigger signs. Can you get that?”

”Aye….I suppose so…No wonder it felt like I was being hit by a ****ing avalanche out there!”

“Now, with regard to your earlier good deeds, you DID get signs for them. At first you got the same kind of wee signs that everyone else gets for their good deeds – nothing that was supposed to blow your mind or anything, just a kind of wee tickle here and there to let you know that we were happy with you. To some of your people a wee tickle every now and again is all they really need to keep them going through their whole life, but we noticed pretty early on that you weren’t really that interested in wee tickles, so we started saving them up for you – Like money in the bank kind of thing, coz we never forget when we owe someone a tickle! – Then every so often we would decide to give you a wee bit of the interest that you had accrued in one ‘lump sum’ – Maybe not something that was hugely valuable in financial terms, but something that was BIG in ‘sign value’. Something so weird that it just ‘had to be’ a sign…..Does that ring any bells with you?”

”Aye, I suppose so, coz some weird s**t has happened to me now and again, but how is something like that supposed to be ‘a reward’, coz all it did was confuse the s**t out of me for a while?”

”And why was that?”

”Coz I had no idea what was going on!....And then ‘nothing’ started going on again, and that just kinda made the strange stuff make even less sense than it ‘never’ did before, so to speak!”

“And why was that?”

”Coz that’s the way it was! It didn’t make sense to me! ****, it wouldn’t have made any sense to ANYBODY!”

”Do you believe that?”

”What part of it? Wait! You don’t need to answer that coz I meant it ALL!”

“But what if you already believed that we existed?”

”How could I already have believed you existed?”

”OK, maybe ‘believed’ is not the right word, but what if you had been told that we existed or that you ‘hoped’ that we existed, or something like that?”

”Awwwww! I get it now! Are you talking about the ‘God stuff’ again?”

”Not necessarily ‘God stuff’ – Try to imagine what some other people might have been hoping for proof of – People that were maybe not quite so sceptical about everything as you.”

”Oh aye…Like ghosts of people they’d lost, or life after death….Or even aliens I suppose.”

”Exactly Wee Man! Our signs were never supposed to tell people what we are, just to let them know that there really is more to this universe than they can see every day. Your people were always free to interpret our signs anyway they wanted to, after all, they had earned them so they became ‘their’ signs.”

“Yeah, OK. I can kind of see that. I can kind of see how stuff like that could be a comfort to some people. I can see how people like my dad could have taken that as some kind of ‘wee wink’ from God, but what about me and people like me? All you would do is confuse the s**t out of us!”

”Well firstly, your Dad was way beyond the ‘wee wink’ stage, but that’s your Dad’s business not yours, and as far as the ‘people like you’ bit is concerned, there really aren’t that many ‘people like you’ among your people – And before you accuse us of kissing your ass again maybe we should point out that we are talking about ‘real sceptical b*****ds that believe in absolutely nothing’ when we say ‘people like you’!”

“Ya cheeky b*****ds!...Or is that actually a compliment?....Mmmm…I’m not really sure either way!”

”Well you can decide on that later, but all we are saying here is that there aren’t that many ‘people like you’ down there, no matter what they may say in public most of your people already believe in something and the ones who are don’t usually earn enough good deed signs for that to ever create a big problem for us….I suppose that that is another thing we should thank you for Wee Man, coz it’s not too often that any of your people make us flex our imagination the way that you have at times.”

I thought about ‘all of that’ for a while and then sort of shrugged,

“OK. I suppose that that all kind of makes some kind of sense to me….Although the jury is still out with regard to how much of a ‘reward’ all this is! Don’t get me wrong – today has been ‘interesting’, and you really are a funny b*****d…But how screwed up is my life gonna be after all this?”…. “

Edited July 5, 2013 by scots_nomad

[scots_nomad]

OK I am back to finish off the bit of the story linked to ‘breathable water’. This part of the story happened a few days after we had first discussed the ‘breathable water’ during the first days chats, and but that time they had showed me how they could guide me to things or places if I was willing to hand over the ‘steering’ to them – I used to refer to is as ‘going onto autopilot’!

(basically I had to try and clear my mind and try not to ‘want’ to go in any particular direction or to any particular place – I would just stand in one spot and sway slightly until I felt ‘drawn’ in one direction of the other. In previous days they had used ‘autopilot’ to show me to things I had lost or things which I had forgotten where I had put them. They also used it to guide me to where the ‘fault’ was that had been making my doorbell work intermittently, and in days to come they would use it to guide me to shops in the town centre which had ‘just the thing I was looking for. Usually it was a VERY gentle force they used – so gentle it was almost imperceptible unless I was willing to try to feel it but on other occasions they should me that they could crank the force WAY up leaving me no choice about where I was going to go or when I was going to go there, but generally it was a very mild ‘attraction’ that needed me to be willing to participate, and that was the case on the night in question).

On that night I was in my sitting room when they said that they wanted to demonstrate something to me but I would need to ‘go to autopilot’ (they did say ‘demonstrate’ rather than ‘show’ which struck me as strange at the time, but since they had been demonstrating some amazing things to me during the previous days I was happy to go along for the ride). They guided me out of my sitting room and into my garden and then around towards my swimming pool. They led me directly to the top of the tiled steps that led down into the shallow end of the pool but as I was wearing shorts, tee-shirt and towelling slippers (a souvenir from my last stay at some 5* hotel) I stopped at the edge of the pool at which point they said,

‘Just keep going straight ahead.’

‘Aye right! Maybe you can walk on water but we can’t!’

‘Have you ever tried?’

‘Of course I haven’t tried!’

‘So how do you know you can’t if you never really tried?’

‘Because I am not stupid!’

‘OK but how do you know that you won’t be able to do it now?’

‘Are you saying you will make it so I can walk on that water?’

‘Would you just take our word for it is we told you we would?’

‘Mmm I guess not, well not until I tried it anyway.’

‘So what are you waiting for? Just keep walking straight ahead’

‘Can I take my slippers off?’

‘Oh ye of little faith!’

‘OK! **** it! This could be pretty crazy!’

And I guess it would have been pretty crazy if I had actually walked on the surface of the water, but what actually happened was that I stepped off the edge and onto the first underwater stair down into the pool, soaking my slipper and my right foot up to my ankle! I let loose a burst of swear words at my so-called friends!

‘Did you REALLY think you could walk on water?’

‘Of course I didn’t!’

‘So why are you so angry? What did you expect to happen when you did that?’

I let loose another bunch of expletives!

‘I thought you were going to demonstrate something to me!’

‘We are, but obviously you know now that it was not that you can walk on water, so just keep walking straight ahead.’

‘OK but let me take my tee-shirt off first.’

‘Why bother? You’re going to be washing it anyway aren’t you?’

‘Ok, I guess you’re right and I’m wet now so let’s go.’

I flicked off my one wet slipper and one dry slipper and walked down the steps and into my pool. I walked directly ahead (toward the deep end) until the water reached my bottom lip.

‘So now what?’

‘Just keep walking directly ahead’

‘You want me to swim?’

‘We said ‘walk’!’

‘Are you trying to drown me here?’

‘Why would we want to drown you after spending so much time and effort to get you this far?’

‘Well if I walk any further that’s what will happen coz I can’t ***ing breathe underwater’

‘That’s not ordinary water John! We took all the water out of your pool and replaced it with our special water.’

‘Oh wow! Are you saying that this is the stuff we were talking about the other day? The stuff you can breathe?’

‘Would you just take our word for it if we said ‘yes’?’

‘Mmmm, I guess not…But I am goona kick your ass if I drown here!...Or at least I am gonna try!’

They totally ignored my ‘threat’,

‘Just walk directly ahead’

I held my breath and took another few steps forward until I was completely submerged (I wanted to be as close as possible to the edge of the pool just in case it was another one of their ‘well what did you think was going to happen if you tried berathing underwater?’ kind of demonstrations!). I braced myself and then took a deep ‘breath’ of water….

It hurt like HELL!!!! (and was most definitely NOT breathable!!!!)

Coughing and spluttering I grabbed the edge of the pool and pulled myself over to the metal stairs that led out of the pool. I got out, knelt by the side of the pool and threw up!!

After a lot more coughing and spluttering I got back to my feet and stormed into my kitchen,

"**** YOU! That's it! I've had enough of this ****! I am going to get dried and changed and then me and my bumbag are going straight to the airport and I am getting the next flight back to the UK to see my brother.! Maybe we can pick this conversation up again in a week or a month IF you are still here and IF I come back. That's up to you, but I am out of here!"

I said 'me and my bumbag' because ever since I had heard that my brother had had some big problem with his heart a week or so before ‘contact’ I never left home without my bumbag, which contained my passport, my credit cards, some cash and a few other essentials. I carried the bumbag at all times so that, if necessary, if I received a call from home with some serious news I could head directly to the airport without even going back to my house if I had to. At home I also had a hold-all packed with some clothes sitting by my front door so that I could grab it quickly if I had time, but even though I was at home when I decided I had had enough, I was so p***ed that I was not going to bother pausing to pick the hold-all up.

I was out of there! I meant it when I said it , and they KNEW that I meant it! Nothing was going to stop me. I didn't even bother drying myself properly, I just pulled off my wet clothes and pulled on a dry tee-shirt and a pair of shorts without even breaking stride in my march toward the front door. Nothing was going to stop me! Nothing could have stopped me! Nothing, that is, except the voice that I heard and the words that that voice said.

It was my dad! My dad had been dead for four years, but it was definitely my dad. I could tell by the voice, but I could tell more by the words that stopped me dead in my tracks:

"Don't worry son, it's me that has got Gerry's back...and I am going nowhere!"

My friends had told me the day before that I would be able to speak to my dad when 'the time was right', but I had taken that with a large pinch of salt, but now I couldn't argue. It was my dad! I could feel him there!

"Dad?....Aww Dad!..." was all I could get out of my mouth as a rush of emotion knocked the breath right out of my body. I could breath, but I could only breathe in, but even when I breathed in as much as I could for as long as I could, there still did not seem to be any oxygen in my body.

I don't know how to describe what I felt in words - picture the movie 'Highlander' when all of the captured 'lifes' rush out of the body of one of 'the immortals' when their head is cut off (have I got the right movie?). Now run that scene backwards, so that all of the lives are rushing in. That is what it felt like. I couldn't get any oxygen in my body because I felt like I was breathing pure love. And it almost suffocated me!

After what felt like far too long not to be breathing, I managed to squeeze out the words:

"Ohh dad! I miss you a lot!"

"I've missed you too son"

At that point the 'other voice' interrupted,

"Maybe the two of you should go out into the garden"

That was the perfect suggestion to me at the time. I felt 'rapturous', or enraptured, or whatever the word should be, although I am not sure that any word can really give any understanding of what that feeling felt like unless you had felt it yourself. I know that I have never felt anything close to that feeling, and I am not talking 'ball-parks' here, I had never before felt anything which was even in the same universe!

I needed air, and I wanted to be alone with my dad, so I stumbled through the kitchen to the back door, and stepped out into the garden. THAT was another experience which I will find hard to describe in words - maybe THE most amazing experience I experienced throughout the whole experience, but maybe I will save that for another time. Maybe I’ll also do a post with the final bit of the story linked to the ‘breathable’ water subject or maybe that’s enough for now…I guess I’ll see how I feel tomorrow.

[MySummerJob]

This is a very interesting read. I don't know if this is all real, or not, but I will give you benefit of doubt, and believe in your story.

Funny about the breathable water. I remember I watched a Sci-fi movie or show featuring that stuff. I think it would be beneficial for deep sea diving because of pressure under the ocean.

It would be cool to try that stuff, but I would probably freak out if I tried to use it.

[Dodir_Svile]

I couldn't read every post in this topic, mainly because the posts go into so much details and are very long, but I've read as far as the beginning of this page. I have to say, although it seems really interesting, and I thank you scots_nomad for writing it, I have to see it as only a good science fiction story.

That being said, I'll play along as if it weren't and since it's still interesting piece, I'd like to ask a few questions (pardon me if they've been answered already on this page):

1. Would you be willing to try to test the thuthfulness of your story and the existance of your friends? I could tell you to ask them a question about me (for example), that only I know the answer to. If they know so much about universe, have been following us for many years, PLUS can communicate with us telepathicaly, I'm sure answering such question wouldn't be a problem for them. If you decide to ask them and if they reply, I'll post the correct answer here to see whether they got it right.

2. You've mostly written about the way it all started, about them sorting out your luggage and cleaning the place (I have to say I'm a bit jelaous of that ), about how they changed their voice and kind of mundane stuff. Although that stuff was also interesting, why don't you tell us about some more important, metaphysical stuff? For example, have you asked them who they were, whether they've influenced our evolution, whether there's god, what's the purpose of life, will we be able to time-travel...? Stuff like that. Maybe you were planning on talking about that stuff later on, but your posts are really detailed and I'm not sure I'll read all of them, so I'll appreciate it if you could just answer couple of these questions in short. You don't have to put the dialogs like before, you can just retell what they've told you.

If this is really you just testing for the reception of your book (as I think it is), I see no real harm in that. Good luck with it.

(Also, I'm reading your part of the dialog in a scottish accent which is so cool )

Edited July 8, 2013 by Dodir_Svile

[scots_nomad]

Hi Dodir,

Re: Your first point about asking them to tell me something about you; unfortunately that is how they play the game. They told me/tell me specific things that they want me to know for specific reasons – If they would give me specific answers to any question I asked them then I would long since have proved the truthfulness of my story by winning the national lottery every week for the last eight years! (Not for the money though, one lottery win would be enough for me but I am sure it would put them out of business if the same person won every week and I really think national lotteries are a bad thing – a tax on optimism as I have heard others describe them, and also about the most unfair odds you will get in any form of legal gambling). At one point way back in the early days I was watching a prog on TV where people who claimed to be able to water divine were tested scientifically by placing a glass of water under one of 20 or so upturned plastic buckets (NB none of them were able to demonstrate any such skill) but as I was watching I said,

‘If I was on there you could either tell me which one it was under or use ‘autopilot’ to guide me to it’

‘Of course we could’

‘But would you?’

‘If that seemed like the best way to do it at the time we would but let’s just keep it as a ‘maybe’ for now.

You can ask me your question if you want to try it but to be honest I wouldn’t hold out much hope for an answer because that really isn’t how they work. If they wanted to prove their existence beyond all possible doubt they could do it in a second without any help from me in any one of a billion was, but that really isn’t the point of the game at all (see later in this post for clarification). With one exception (which I am keeping to myself for now) they have never came right out and told me that something specific was going to happen but rather they give me hints or clues of an occasional nudge to make sure I pay attention to something and it is up to me to try and put those clues or hints together. For example, at no time did they tell me that a hurricane called Katrina was going to flood New Orleans and that one called Rita would do the same thing a few weeks later – I actually had to put a few different ‘hints’ together to work that out for myself. The first clue came early in our chats when they had apologised for something they had done to me and I said ‘No big deal, worse things happen’ – they then pounced on my comment to start up a (very) long conversation about what were the worst things that could happen. My first response was to say dying would be the worst thing that could happen (which I realised immediately was a dumb answer coz there are loads of situations I could think of where I would rather be dead…and in fact I had been through a couple of them in the day before we started chatting…but that’s another long story). Even before I realised how dumb my first answer was they said (and I know you said you don’t need dialogue but it is the best and easiest way to explain many of the bits in my story)

‘Are you sure that’s the worst thing that could happen?’

‘Well actually maybe it could be the best thing that could happen, I suppose it all depends what’s going to happen tomorrow.’

‘What if we tell you that tomorrow is going to be pretty much like today?’

‘Well in that case it would depend on what happens the day after tomorrow…and if you are going to say that will be like today as well then I mean the day after ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ if you know what I mean’

(NB Shakespeare quotes came up quite often in out chats)

‘Yeah we know what you mean, so tell us what’s the worst thing that could happen ‘the day after tomorrow’?’

That started us off on a conversation that lasted hours and hours where I had to imagine all of the worst things that could happen. We actually sped through the man-made disasters I could think of very quickly (nuclear holocaust, chemical or biological warfare, toxic leaks etc etc etc) and probably spend 99% of the conversation talking about natural disasters – and this was three or four months before the natural disaster movie called ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ came out!

(NB: The conversation took place in June 2004. In July 2004 I went back to UK for a holiday and to see my sick brother then in September I flew back to Vietnam, going the long way around via NYC, LA, Hawaii and Tokyo. The first time I heard the name of that movie was on the flight from NYC to LA where that was one of the inflight movies – I actually spent most of the time laughing at the ‘wee private jokes’ my friends seemed to have hidden in it – e.g. the bit where the people in the lighthouse were watching my favourite football team (Glasgow Celtic) being beaten 4-0 by Manchester United – but it did make me kind of uncomfy when I got to the bit where LAX was being wrecked by a few cat 5 tornadoes seeing as that was the airport I was about to land at and I couldn’t help wondering whether I might have missed an important hint somewhere!)

Anyway, while we talked about the worst kinds of various natural disasters we seemed to skip through earthquakes and volcanoes fairly quickly but my friends seemed keen to talk about hurricanes quite a lot (out of the time we spent on natural disasters we seemed to spend 40% of it on hurricanes, 40% on tsunamis - or giant tidal waves as I called them at the time - and only 20% on the rest!).

They asked me what the worst kind of hurricane was and I immediately answered ‘a category 5 hurricane’. After me confirming I was sure that was the worst hurricane you could get they said ‘so a category five hurricane is worse than say a category three?’. It seemed so obvious to me that it was that I began to suspect they were digging and something so after a bit more thought I said ‘Well actually a cat 3 that makes landfall would be worse than a cat five that always stayed over the sea so they went back to asking me what the worst possible hurricane would be. I said it would be one that hit the most vulnerable place with the biggest population, which I reckoned would probably be somewhere in the Caribbean islands or the coast of Mexico but didn’t have a clue where specifically as my knowledge of that area was limited so they narrowed it down to the States and asked what the worst hurricane would be in the States. I knew that NYC had the biggest population within all the potential hurricane zones but also knew that because of the cool waters off NYC it would really only be liable to be hit with a max cat 3 so I had to decide whether a cat five hitting a big city in the south would be worse than a cat three hitting NYC…I figured the cat 5 would be worse. They then asked me which big city? At first I said there were a few relatively big cities on the southern coast but I didn’t know much detail about them so I couldn’t be sure but they pressed me to think of what I DID know about any of those cities, and the first fact that sprung to mind was that most of New Orleans was below sea level and therefore a flood caused by a hurricane there would be a far bigger problem than any of the other cities I could think of – I got a big round of applause for that and assumed we must have finished dealing with hurricanes but they then asked ‘So how could a hurricane in the States be even worse than that?’…After all the effort I had just been through to get to a cat five hitting and flooding New Orleans it seemed like a dumb question to me so I said,

‘IF there is a way for a hurricane to be worse than that then you will need to give me a clue because I have no idea where to even start thinking’

‘It’s funny you should say ‘If’, because ‘If’ would be a good place to start thinking!’

That may not sound like much of a clue to most people but I got it right away – mainly because the poem ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling had been on my mind a lot during the weirdness avalanche that led up to ‘contact’ (in fact it was one of the few things that helped me get through the tougher times and if anyone doesn’t know it I would highly recommend googling it coz it is an amazing piece of writing!). As soon as they gave me that clue I realised they were talking about the line from the poem:

‘’…Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools..”

‘OK! I’ve got it now! The worst hurricane you could get in the States would be the second one!’

There was a big round of applause but then the voice asked ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well Kipling was right up to a point, because if you have gone to a lot of time and effort to build something only for someone or something to come along and destroy it then it is really hard to start all over again to build it back up, but what Kipling didn’t say is that it is ten times harder still to do it for a second time!’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well imagine a hurricane did do that to New Orleans – sure it would be tough to come back into town and pump it out and then clear all the debris away so you can start building it back up again, but you would also have the ‘let’s get at it!’ attitude…The ‘I am not gonna let a dumb hurricane beat me’ attitude and that rush of enthusiasm will help you get through it, but just imagine you did all that and then another hurricane came along just as you finished clearing up and sent you back to square one! Most people would just think ‘Meh! What’s the point?’! THAT is why the second time would be 10 times worse than the first!’

I got a HUGE round of applause for that and we finally did reach the end of the bit of the chat about hurricanes!

You will note however that there was nothing in that chat to suggest that Katrina would be the hurricane to do it – That clue came in a different bit of the chat entirely! During that bit of the conversation we had been talking about the day before ‘contact’ when I had been trying to do something but it seemed that everything that could possibly go wrong to stop me doing it did go wrong. I had spent hours walking around under the burning heat of the Saigon sun, I was completely exhausted, my feet were killing me, the wind was blowing dust and dirt into my eyes and every step I took was agony but I was no nearer achieving what I set out to do. Eventually I just said ‘**** it! I give up! I am going to the pub for a beer!’ I turned 180 degrees and almost instantly the whole world changed…The sun which had been beating down on my back now felt pleasant on my face and seemed to be evaporating the rivers of sweat, the breeze that had been blowing dust in my eyes was now cooling my sun scorched back and blowing me along towards the pub – me feet stopped aching instantly and it felt like I was almost floating along effortlessly in comparison to before. When I said that my friends said ‘Would you say it was like walking on sunshine?’. It was actually a great way to describe how I felt, but I was also aware that we were playing a game where we had to try and slip the titles of songs into the chat to see if the other one noticed so I said,

‘Walking on Sunshine’ was by Katrina and the Waves by the way!’

‘So you remembered that?’

‘Yeah! They were one hit wonders from back in the 80s!’

(NB Actually they had had a second hit in the UK in the 90s while I was in Asia but I didn’t know that at the time)

‘So were Katrina And The Waves special to you?’

‘To me? No – It was a decent song and I was a part-time DJ when it was out and lots of people liked dancing to it but they weren’t particularly special to me.’

‘So why would we have brought them up then?’

‘Phhhw, who knows? Maybe you are a big fan of Katrina And The Waves for all I know!’

There was a sudden and completely unexpected burst of applause at that that took me completely by surprise!’

‘We are THE big fan of Katrina And The Waves! Will you remember that we said that?’

‘Mmm…Well to be honest you have told me so much about so many things that I am not actually sure what I will remember but I am sure that if I hear that song again or if I hear the name Katrina And The Waves I will remember it.’

‘What if you only hear the name Katrina?’

‘Mmm…I’m not sure to be honest…Maybe, but it depends on the context…I guess there are a lot of people around called Katrina so I can’t promise it will spring to my mind if I get introduced to some girl called Katrina but if the context makes it stand out then I’m sure I’ll remember you said it’

So if you are half expecting a hurricane to flood New Orleans sometime soon and ‘out of the blue’ you hear of a hurricane called Katrina how much more appropriate a context could ‘Katrina AND THE WAVES’ be?

(NB, there was no advanced hints about the name of Hurricane Rita but once Katrina hit I knew it was only the first of two so I looked up the list of that years planned hurricane names and just worked my way through them asking ‘Is it gonna be that one?’ until I got a big nudge at Rita!)

As I hinted above when I said we spent 40% talking about hurricanes and 40% talking about tsunamis I also ‘knew’ there was a big tsunami on the way (the SE Asia one of Boxing day 2004, not the later one in Japan). The first clue to that came up during the very same ‘What’s the worst thing that could happen the day after tomorrow’ conversation. Not gonna go into it in as much detail as above (which was still only 1% of the full story), but when we got to talking about giant tsunamis they asked me what the worst giant tsunami would be would, to which I replied ‘What’s the best giant tsunami you could get, coz that are all bad news wherever they happen!’. They said ‘OK, we can start there if you want so what’s the best, or least worst giant tsunami you could get?’ I decided it would be easier to start with the worst after all, and after a bit of thought and a lot of chatting I got to deciding that a tsunami starting from Hawaii (where there just happens to be an old extinct volcano balanced on the edge of a still active volcano on top of the biggest mountain in the world - Hawaii is actually the peaks of underwater mountains that are far taller than Everest if measured from the ocean floor – just waiting to topple in and trigger a MASSIVE tsunami some day!) would be worst because it is almost exactly at the centre of the biggest ocean with some huge cities on the coasts to the west, east and south of Hawaii all facing in the direction of Hawaii and therefore right in line for a direct hit.

They then pressed me to come up with the ‘least bad’ giant tsunami, so I just reversed all of the conditions from the situation in Hawaii – Moved it to the smallest ocean (I wasn’t sure what damage gould happen to if the tsunami were to damage the ice sheets at the poles so I couldn’t consider the Arctic or Antarctic Oceans). Instead of being triggered at the centre I figured it would be best stuck right over to one side or the other and moved it to the far north where the coast of India would be at 45 degrees to the course of the tsunami rather than facing a direct hit as would be the case with the cities around the Pacific coasts. Then I only had to decide whether it should be west of India or to the east of India – I had worked in the Middle east so could imagine the problems that could be caused if it was to the west of India as sooo many of the population there depend on coastal desalination plants for their water supplies so my final answer for the least worst place to have a giant tsunami was: ‘In the north of the Indian ocean right up against one of those big, sparcely populated Indonesian islands which would shelter most of Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore from the wave’

…In other words EXACTLY where the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami was triggered from!

OK, I KNOW you didn’t want a long post or so much detail (Dodir) and I really intended to give as brief as possible a response as I could but with most things it is the DETAILS of my stories with my friends that matter and I really think that stuff was important to understand – having said that tomorrow I will try to answer all the questions in point 2 of your post as briefly as I can (but no promises! )

Cheers for now

[Dodir_Svile]

Thanks for your reply. The Katrina part is interesting.

[scots_nomad]

Hi Again Dodir, I’m back to try and tackle all the questions in part two of your post a couple of days ago, so without further ado:

Re: ‘Have you asked them who they were?’; Very early in the chat I asked what their name was and they said ‘We have talked to many of your people and we have been called lots of different names’. I asked them which they preferred and they said they had no preference and that I should just call them whatever felt right to me…That was before they started using Billy Connolly’s voice – In Scotland Billy Connolly is almost universally known as ‘Big Yin’ so that was the name that fitted best for me. As far as what they are, the whole point of the conversations and the demonstrations was for me to work that out or decide for myself. I have my opinion/decision now but it’s best that everyone decides for themselves once the hear enough of the full story.

Re: ‘Have they influenced our evolution?’: ABSOLUTELY! I said before that they had talked to ‘many of my people’ before…later on in the chat they said that throughout our history they have given us the best explanation of ‘Life, the Universe and Everything’ that we were capable of understanding at that stage of our development. They have actually had a far greater influence on our evolution than that but you will understand what I mean after the rest of this post.

Re: ‘Is there a God?’: If you ask 100 people what God is you will get almost as many different answers so I guess that really depends on what ‘God’ means to you however what I can say is that there isn’t some old guy with a white beard taking notes about who attends church/mosque/synagogue/temple/pagoda or whatever each week. I was a devout agnostic before all this started and whilst I am no more religious than I was (i.e. WASN’T) then, I do actually believe that there is a point and a reason for all this.

Re: What’s the purpose of life?: Were you REALLY expecting a short answer to that one??? The purpose of this part of our life is to learn, make progress, develop and become a more advanced species and learn how to exist, work and develop TOGETHER! (Life is a team game!). In an earlier post when my friends asked me what movie seemed to have ‘hit the nail on the head’ as far as I was concerned and I went for a movie called ‘The 13^th Floor’ which was about a bunch of people who had developed a total submersion virtual reality game eventually came to realise that they themselves were only characters in someone else’s VR game – basically what I am saying is that this world and this universe and these lives are all part of a virtual reality game and ‘my friends’ are the game developers AND on-line moderators! I know some people will struggle to accept that all the solid objects around them (including the Earth itself) isn’t really there, but it basically all comes down to Descartes famaous ‘I think therefore I am’, because THAT is the ONLY thing that any of us can really know for sure! We may BELIEVE that we are humans living on a planet called Earth but all we can ever know for sure is that we individually exist in some form or another, and we KNOW that because we think! I am not saying that this life is just a trivial computer game – Far from it in fact – but what I am actually saying is that this world, this universe and these lives are actually a hugely complex logic puzzle and it is here to be unravelled and solved by us…IF we can stick around for long enough.

You may ask how you are supposed to do any of that during one short 70-80 year long life but there is far more to ‘a life’ than that. Maybe that sounds like I am saying that the Buddhists and Hindus were right and we are actually reincarnated at the end of each period on Earth but actually the twist is that every religion is ‘a bit right’ (maybe even mostly right if you prefer). Western religions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam believe that we live one life and then we are judges and either go to a good place or a bad place depending on how we lived that life whereas eastern religions like Buddhists and Hindus believe in reincarnation but the way it was explained to me was a bit of both!

I am not going to go through the conversations I had with my friends about all this chapter and verse because it wasn’t something we chatted through from beginning to end in one go but rather something that came up a few times spread all through our chats (and the whole conversations would be far to long for one post anyway) so instead I will just copy and paste something I wrote a while ago when I was trying to summarise it for someone else:

Just to avoid confusion about reincarnation here I would add that although I have said that each existence builds upon the achievements of the previous ones, that is NOT to say that we will all get continuously more rich and more successful in each existence as long as we have lived a good life in the last (as some faiths believe) - The whole point of the exercise is to make humans 'more complete' with each return visit. To that end we are all given the same amount of raw talent/potential at the very start of the game (i.e. each of us is a metaphoric test tube which is half full of potential at the beginning of the game), and the object of the game is to build upon that potential by learning lessons and overcoming challenges that we all will face at some time along the way.

In order to make it fair for all, we are all given the chance to look at life from all sides - as male and as female, as a white and as a black, brown, yellow, etc, from privileged background and from poor background, healthy or infirm, tall or short, blue eyes or brown eyes, western or eastern, etc, etc etc. There is no prescribed route through these existences, there is no right way or wrong way, no 'up' or 'down' (and we are NEVER reincarnated as animals! 'The animals are our gift to you, they are us and ours, but they are never you', as my friends put it!).

Each time that we return to this planet we are placed in a situation where we will have the best opportunity to learn the lessons that we have not learned from past experiences – selecting which situation is best suited to teach us what we have yet to learn is one of my friends’ roles in the game. There is not a prescribed number of 'visits' - each person is given as many opportunities as they require (time permitting!). Slower learners get more opportunities to learn whereas faster learners have longer, more selective 'gaps' between visits - The chains are not continuous, i.e. you are not instantly reborn as soon as you die, and there can indeed be centuries between one existence and the next.

Some people may ask how we are supposed to learn from one life to the next when we are not allowed to retain memories from one to the next (That was certainly one of my 'Ah, but...?' questions!), but the key to that is instinct, intuition and morality - people may not distinctly remember the details of when they have been faced with a similar situation in a previous existence, but, if they HAVE learned their lessons from past lives then something inside them will guide them toward the right thing to do, for although memory does not continue of accumulate, 'talent' does, as 'talent' is the most precious of all human qualities as far as my friends are concerned! That is not to say that if you take the time to learn how to be a great pianist in one life you will automatically be a great pianist, or even a great musician in another - the overall amount of 'talent' is maintained but it can be (and is) traded/exchanged/transformed from one existence to the next. The simile that my friends used to help me understand this was to compare life to a game of 'Trivial Pursuit' - the object of the game is to fill up ALL of the segments of your playing piece, NOT to see how many orange cheeses you can accumulate!

I mentioned above that slow learners are given most opportunities 'time permitting', so maybe I must explain that this life/death/life/death level of the game was never intended to go on forever as there is an obvious limit to how much any one human can learn or achieve during 'three score years and ten' (or whatever!) – in the next level of the game there will be no need for people to ‘die’ at regular intervals.

The period for this current level of 'the game' is finite in a way, however that does not mean it was pre-limited to a specified number of years. This phase of our existence was/is limited to the earliest occurrence of either (a) Any one human managing to completely fill his playing piece/test-tube, or ( Humanity completely using up, destroying or exterminating one of the key resources which will be required at some point in the future to allow the game to continue (i.e. To quote my friends, “The answer to every problem your people will ever face is already on your planet”, however should we completely exhaust or destroy something which is key to our future survival, thereby making it impossible for the puzzle to ever be solved, there would be no point in continue with this level of the game), or © Humanity reaching the stage where less than twenty percent of the players in the game were 'worth bothering about', and by 'worth bothering about', what I/they mean is 'taking all things into account, someone who does more good than harm by their existence' – in other words, if it reaches the point where only 20% of people have at least 50% ‘talent’ left in their test-tube it will be time to wind up this level of the game and take those 20% on to the next level of the game without further ado.

(Note: Although talent is meticulously maintained between one existence and the next, it can be, and often is, squandered during our periods on Earth - it therefore is quite possible for someone to 'return to base' with less talent that they started with!).

The 'logic' behind that latter cut off point is that this 'life' is supposed to be a team game - we are supposed to learn from each other, build upon past achievements of humanity, and proceed on to the next stage as a species, not as 'lucky individuals', however if ever things got so bad down here that only one in five individuals were capable of setting good examples for others to follow, anyone sent back here after that would find the odds so stacked against their being able to 'improve themselves' that it would be both unfair and illogical to continue!

Metaphysical enough for you Dodir? I know many of you believe that I am making all this up and that really is up to you – No one will be judged on what they believe, but merely on how they live your life so if you are confident that you are within the 20% that are going through to the next stage of the game it really doesn’t matter whether you think this is a load of BS or not (and I don’t mean you personally Dodir, I mean ‘you’ in general) and I am certainly not on any kind of campaign or crusade to ‘save people’ – I just pass on the message and the rest is up to you! - but if you are not so confident of that maybe you should have a look around and try to asses how far away we as a species are from that 20% ‘doing more good than harm’ cut off point…because according to my friends we are not very far away from it at all!

Re: Is time travel possible?: very definitely – I have seen my friends do stuff with time and to time that you would not believe (not that you will believe me anyway :-p) but I will discuss that more in future posts. You may actually mean ‘Is time travel possible for us?’, which is a different question and I guess my answer to that would be to ask – Do you think we are ready for time travel??? You want to go back or go forward? Can you imagine the trouble we could cause by going back? What if you could go back in time but all of the memories you had gathered and all the things you had learned from that point in time (i.e. where you ended up) were erased as you did it so all you would really do is make the same mistakes all over again? How do you know that that isn’t happening all the time? Maybe it is – maybe déjà vu is just the point where you are reconnecting with your previous memories? So maybe backward time travel is either pointless or dangerous even if it is possible – would forward time travel be any safer? Would it be any more beneficial? Wouldn’t we just be missing out on our learning opportunities? I can actually answer the ‘Is time travel possible for us?’ question more specifically than that but I choose not to coz I think it is better for people to actually think about whether it would be a good thing either way even if we could.

OK, I think that’s all your questions answered enough for now anyway, and apart from the ‘what is the meaning of life’ question I think I did pretty good at keeping my answers short, so I reckon I deserve a beer! (Which is what I am gonna do right now!)

[Dodir_Svile]

Now you're talking!

Thank you for your reply, and if I were any nearer (don't know whether you're still in Saigon), I'd buy you a beer.

So, basically, the Matrix movie is more or less true? I don't have a problem with that, I could grasp that.

Your explanations were really to-the-point (and even more interesting than the previous ones), but they raise a couple of more questions for me.

1. Why? Why are we needed as some virtual characters in a game? What's the purpose of us getting better level after level? Is that some kind of experiment that they're doing, or some kind of fun? What do they gain?

2. Can they "turn off" a character if they wanted to and have they done that before?

3. Do THEY exist or are they also some kind of virtual characters in a game?

4. What does the improvement mean? What do you mean by talent? How do we proceed to the next level? Is morality the key, or is it knowledge, or procreation, or changing the world (activism)? Because many different people have different comprehension as to what is good for the world.

5. If the reincarnation (or a type of) is true, then how come there's more and more people on Earth? Shouldn't it be the same people over and over again, or even less and less of them as some go "to the next level"?

6. Are there any glitches in "the Matrix" that we can experience? Maybe some of the paranormal stuff?

7. Is everything happening to any of us already written in "the Matrix"? For example, if we're only virtual, is cancer written in "the Matrix"?

8. I know you've spoken a bit about this already (logic being one of them), but what are the requirements for a person to be contacted by them? I'm asking this for obvious reasons (wanting to get contacted by them, should they exist outside your story), but also since most of the people who "hear voices" or are "mediums" or can "contact the dead/aliens/god" are not very logical.

I think I had more questions but forgot them along the way. Anyway, I think these will be enough, as I suppose you're busy enough even without them

EDIT: Oh! Oh! I remembered another one!

9. What are animals and why are they here?

Edited July 9, 2013 by Dodir_Svile

[MySummerJob]

You'd think they would make life more interesting than it already is if it was a Simulation... I mean look at what we have done with games, and movies when we make them.

I mean, where are the vampires I could be fighting, or Aliens I could be chilling with? What about super powers? Those would be cool to have.

Also it's a weird concept... Would that mean our computers, or programs have self awareness even though we control them, and they're just programs? Do we even really exist like them?

I'm not trying to be funny, or rude. I mean shouldn't we have more to reality if life is a Simulation?

Edited July 10, 2013 by MySummerJob

[scots_nomad]

You'd think they would make life more interesting than it already is if it was a Simulation... I mean look at what we have done with games, and movies when we make them.

I mean, where are the vampires I could be fighting, or Aliens I could be chilling with? What about super powers? Those would be cool to have.

Also it's a weird concept... Would that mean our computers, or programs have self awareness even though we control them, and they're just programs? Do we even really exist like them?

I'm not trying to be funny, or rude. I mean shouldn't we have more to reality if life is a Simulation?

Gotta learn how to walk before you can run! It is our limitations that we learn from!