It Happened to Me...

The Quantum Prank

Some rime ago, I had an exhibition in New York at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. After openings, the gallery often hosts a dinner for the artist, and they asked me whom I would like to invite. The only person that I could think of was David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame). Over the years he has attended several of my art exhibits, and I have talked with him at various art events. The scene goes like this: after the art opening, the gallery staff and various art luminaries head over to a café, not far from the gallery. The gallery has reserved the entire back room at the trendy establishment. One by one we file in and take our seats, and soon the entire back room is completely full except for one table.

After talking to the guests for a few minutes, my wife, artist Victoria Reynolds, notices that the last table is now occupied – and she recognises the back of David Byrne’s head by his coiffed shock of white hair. We’re happy to see artist Cindy Sherman is seated with him (and she seems to notice they’ve been spotted). I thank the gallery assistant for contacting Mr Byrne with the dinner invitation. With a perplexed expression she says, “That’s odd. No, we never reached David Byrne. We couldn’t find his address.” David Byrne had wandered into this café on the night of the opening at the correct time and found the only available table in our group – and he never received an invitation. What are the chances? What if I had noninvited Mick Jagger – would he arrive at the appropriate moment and take the only remaining table in the room? What about Jack Nicholson or Lady Gaga – would they arrive like clockwork?

This had to be more than a coincidence so I came up with a theory of synchronicity called The Quantum Prank. The theory presupposes that Jung’s collective unconscious exists and that it is outside of time and space – akin to the Akashic Records where ideas and all knowledge commingle. I suggest that when we dream, our souls travel to that place to access information and interact with other souls on the same quest. Since this realm is outside of time, you and another soul can plan a future prank on yourselves. Like if I meet the soul of David Byrne, I could tell him about the dinner invitation. He could say, “But I will never receive the invitation. But hey, I’m going to show up anyway. Wouldn’t that be funny? We will be so confused when it happens. Ha ha!” When the future date arrives, unconsciously we carry out our plan that will seem to be an incredible coincidence to us, because we cannot remember planning it. WE JUST QUANTUM PRANKED OURSELVES! The quantum prank could account for extraordinary incidents of synchronicity.

Jeffrey Vallance

Canoga Park, California

Faceless Figure

I am a police officer working 12-hour shifts, and on my early shifts I get up at 5.30am. In the third week of December 2019, I was driving my usual route to work basking in the glow of pre-leave euphoria as Christmas approached. The morning was dark but clear and not unusually cold as my car windows were not misted up or frozen. I drive an old diesel car that takes a while to warm up and the following incident happened less than a mile from home.

As I approached the bus stop just after Stourbridge Glass Cone (Google code FRGV+56) on the main road from Kingswinford to Stourbridge, I noted a lone cowled figure standing just up from the bus stop. The way it stood, inanimate, just didn’t feel right. As I approached I passed within 8ft (2.4m) of this figure and looked straight at it through the nearside window. I was acutely disturbed by the black void of a cowled head and a feeling the figure was inhuman.

Traffic was very light and there were no other vehicles on the road. A pedestrian crossing and local business lighting makes this area extremely well lit and I am certain that if the figure had had a face I would have seen it. The whole incident lasted no more than 15-20 seconds and I carried on to work telling myself that I must have been mistaken somehow. During lockdown I read about faceless entities, something I was not aware of before. I can still feel the fright/flight instinct of the incident and I can only really relate the oddness to the ‘uncanny valley’ of lifelike robots that move like a human but seem to have no ‘soul’. Andy [name on file] Stourbridge, West Midlands

Pool figure

I was struck by the account of a ‘ haunted’ lido [ FT401:72 – now exposed as fiction, see page 73], as I had a similar experience. In 2015 I was a science student writing my dissertation on the ethics of Nuclear Energy. I was on a break from university to run in the annual Inverness Half Marathon. However, the questions raised by my work were very much on my mind and I was fififinding it hard to switch off. On the morning of the race, the hotel breakfast room was crowded and I ended up sharing a table with another guest – by a weird coincidence my new companion turned out to be a nuclear engineer employed at a Scottish plant – no prizes for guessing our topic of conversation.

David Byrne had wandered into this café on the night of the opening...

My half marathon was a success and that evening I went to the hotel spa for a swim and a steam to wind down and soothe my aching body. To my initial delight I had the place to myself, but the feeling of pleasure didn’t last. Although I’d stayed in that hotel before and swum alone in the spa several times, this time I felt a strong sense of “staginess” as though a hidden audience was observing me attentively yet coldly.

I was swimming under water when some sense told me I needed to get out of the water at once. I surfaced to find a man standing by the side of the pool looking down at me. He was vivid enough that I was just about to speak to him when I realised that nothing made sense. My visitor was very tall and thin, dressed in an old-fashioned black suit and black hat. I was immediately reminded of the physicist Robert Oppenheimer – a vision quite in keeping with the theme of the day! I was only beginning to process all this when the figure disappeared. I didn’t feel that he was expressly malevolent, but I had a sense that the environment was very, very strange and that it was not in my best interests to remain there. I returned to my room as quickly as I could and didn’t feel safe until I was in bed with the TV on.

I have heard that nuclear installations can be prone to fortean phenomena, and I am aware of various (entertaining) theories that nuclear fission can open doors to other dimensions. Is it possible that my slightly obsessive focus on the subject did something similar? Therese Whitelock

Bristol

Editor’s note: FT correspondents have described encounters with such ‘shadow people’. For 10 first-hand accounts, see FT274:76 and FT335:7273. See also ‘They came from the shadows’ by Nick Parkins, FT335:54-55.

Spooky path

I was amazed to read Mark Sidwells’s account of seeing the Grim Reaper on the path between Brooklands technical college and the local railway station [ FT400:37]. In 1978 I was a teacher at that same college. I found the job hard, and on Thursday nights after work I went to the pub where a few of the other teachers gathered and complained about how terrible it was to be a teacher. I only ever stayed for a couple of drinks because I lived miles away, in north London, and had to take a couple of trains to get home.

One night as I was walking soberly along the path between the college and the station (the same path where Mark Sidwells had his experience, I think), I looked up and saw a long, bright, whitish thing moving slowly in the sky above the trees. It didn’t look like a plane or a helicopter or weather balloon; if anything, it looked like a glowing airborne submarine. It was undoubtedly an unidentified flying object in the sense that it was an object, it was flying, and I definitely couldn’t identify it. It was a strange sight but it wasn’t at all scary or threatening. After a few moments it wasn’t there anymore, and I continued on my way to the station. The event has stayed with me, and now I’m amazed – and pleased – to find that somebody else had a quite different but equally inexplicable experience on what appears to be the very same path.

Geoff Nicholson

By email

Black thing on the Med

In the summer of 1988 my wife and I and our two young daughters jetted off to Majorca for a short break in the coastal town of Santa Ponsa, which sits on a cove overlooking the Mediterranean. Our hotel was situated not in the town itself but further up the cove, which gave us a splendid view of the area. On our final night we settled down for a meal on our balcony. Later, with our daughters safely tucked up in bed, we had a few drinks and a natter. After a little while, a huge black oblong object appeared from nowhere, just beyond the cove. It was sharply defined from corner to corner and as black as the hobs of hell. Picture yourself in a darkened cinema – suddenly the film rolls but it’s projecting nothing but a widescreen black surface.

It was actually quite frightening. My wife was upset and rushed into our apartment. After a few minutes it suddenly disappeared. What on Earth was it? Over the years I’ve asked several people who have worked at sea if they have ever witnessed anything like it, but never had a satisfactory answer. I think one or two thought I was pulling their leg. Any ideas?

Stephen Collier

Liverpool

Walking the dog

Round about 2002, over a period of 18 months or so, I experienced a great number of coincidences or synchronicities, some of which involved long sequences of events with symbols, places and things turning up repeatedly in unexpected places or circumstances, while others were one-off occurrences. I got into the habit of keeping a record of everything until it reached the stage there was so much that writing it all down was taking up too much time. Eventually I felt I’d reached burnout with all the stuff going on and backed off, stopped writing it all down and the coincidences petered out, though they have never stopped completely.

I read a few of the more popular books around at the time about coincidence and one of them suggested that other people’s synchronistic experiences are never as interesting as one’s own. When I re-read some of those I recorded I could see that some of my coincidences weren’t all that mind-blowing, but what did make me wonder if “something indeed was going on” was the sheer number of them and the fact that, contrary to an accepted definition of synchronicity – coincidences which are meaningful (and sometimes helpful) to the person experiencing them – most of mine were totally meaningless and often quite bizarre.

Two of my one-off incidents are as follows: at one time I worked in an office overlooking Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow city centre and in those days I took my dog to work with me. One day around 11.30am I was in my room as usual when I suddenly smelt tomato soup. I knew it was only my imagination, as there was no soup anywhere around, but it was as if the smell of tomato soup had been somehow triggered in my brain and I could actually smell it.

About an hour later I took the dog out as usual at lunchtime – across the road and up a side street on a very steep hill. About halfway up on the pavement was a large, spilled carton of tomato soup. This could be put down to a premonition rather than a synchronicity, but the following coincidence can less easily be explained that way.

Again, I was in my office and around 11 or 11.30am a work colleague came in to show me photographs of her son’s wedding that had taken place in Mexico. One of the customs at a Mexican marriage is that the bride and groom have their handprints taken, made in the same way as fingerprints, but of the whole hand. She showed me photographs of the couple having the prints made and of the prints themselves. Later, around 12.30, I took the dog out, up the same side street as usual and lying in the gutter was a card – like a small playing card and bigger than a business card. On the uppermost side of it was a handprint. I turned the card over and found it was advertising a nightclub in the area.

It occurred to me some time ago that I might write to Fortean Times with some of my coincidence experiences, but never got round to it. I write to you now because of what followed shortly after I read the letters headed “star jelly” and “Nose pad windfall” [ FT396:68, 70]. I took the dog for a walk in the hills, our first time up there for over a year and on a not much-frequented path. Halfway up the hill I found some “star jelly”. As far as I can recall I have only once before come across this substance and that was in the Lake District fells a number of years ago. Further up the path, I found a pair of sunglasses. Cat Fleming

By email