In UFO Reality (1983) Jenny Randles refers to the “sensation of being isolated, or transported from the real world into a different environmental framework,” and suggests this feeling, occasionally reported by UFO witnesses, “is one of great importance to our understanding of UFOs. It is almost suggestive of the witness being transported temporarily from our world into another, where reality is but slightly different. . . . I call it ‘the Oz Factor,’ after the fairy-tale land of Oz.” In Sixth Sense (1987), her study of psychic phenomena, Randles equates the Oz Factor with what psychologists and parapsychologists call “altered states of consciousness.”

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In the UFO context, one Oz Factor report took place on July 21, 1978, at 10:15 on a warm summer’s evening in Davyhulme, Manchester, England, to a couple Randles calls Mr. and Mrs. W. The two observed a dark disc hovering in the twilight sky. It was surrounded by an aura, from which 30 to 40 beautiful purple rays shot out at various angles like spokes from a wheel, extending to about 12 times the diameter of the central disc. After one and a half minutes, Randles writes, “the ‘rays’ collapsed inwards in sequence, and the object slowly extinguished itself. It was massive, compared with the size of the rooftop opposite.” During the sighting the Ws noted with puzzlement that the normally busy street was strangely quiet and devoid of vehicular and pedestrian traffic. Mrs. W later said that she felt “singled out” and “alone” as she and her husband watched the object.

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Another such incident was reported by Jean Findlay of Poole, Dorset. At 9:01 on the morning of December 6, 1980, as she was waiting for a bus, she felt an urge to “look up . . . almost as if a voice in my head told me to do so.” She saw a disc-shaped UFO with a dome on top hovering above nearby trees. Feeling “spellbound” and experiencing a sensation of “peace, calm, and warmth,” she watched the object emit a beam of light, rotate once, and fly away at a great rate of speed. When she looked at her watch, she found “time had flown by”—four minutes when it seemed as if the sighting had lasted only a few moments. Though the sighting had occurred at rush hour in a busy city, she said everything became “quiet” during the sighting, and she saw no one else around (Randles, 1983).

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A possible Oz Factor episode figures in a sighting reported in Novato, California, on April 15, 1989. At 5:30 that afternoon a father and son saw, from their front lawn and at about 75 degrees on the horizon, a slowly descending object shaped like “two spheres connected together by a stem”—a dumbbell, in other words. The two spheres were golden with a white halo around them.

According to psychologist-UFO investigator Richard F. Haines, who interviewed the witnesses five weeks later, “the apparent angular size of the dumbbell was just less than the apparent width of [the father’s] thumbnail (at arm’s length) or about 1.5 degrees.” With naked eye and through binoculars, four smaller objects, golden discs, maneuvered near the original object. Haines wrote that the father “also noted the strange absence of kids and dogs at the time they watched the object. There are usually many present at this time of day.” The witness remarked, “It was strange—there was no one else who saw it” (Haines, 1989). No report of the objects appeared in the newspapers.

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A spectacular Oz Factor episode, with physical effects (technically a close encounter of the second kind), reportedly occurred half a mile south of Proberta, California, at around 5:45 one morning in December 1959. Larry Jensen was driving to work on U.S. Highway 99 when his radio began making “snapping” noises and his lights dimmed. He pulled over to the side of the road and got out to check his headlights, which he was distressed to find were now shining as feebly as flashlight bulbs operating on run-down batteries.

Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a huge, bright, bluish-green crescent-shaped object hovering about 60 feet above the road a quarter-mile behind him. It appeared to be 80 to 90 feet across and 15 to 20 feet thick. Suddenly and inexplicably, he found that his clothes were soaked, and he felt an alarming sensation as if he were being crushed inside. Also, as he would tell investigators, “I felt like I was being sucked up in space toward the object, as by a magnet.”

He lunged for the car door, hoping to grab the rifle he always took with him, but instead he collided with the side mirror and staggered backward. On a second try he managed to get inside. When he glanced at the rearview mirror, he could not see the object. Looking out the right-door window, however, he saw the UFO a few miles away, heading northeast and climbing at a shallow angle over the Sierra foothills. Less than 10 seconds later it had vanished from sight.

Jensen’s car lights came back on. Relieved, he resumed his journey, only to stop again 200 yards later when he smelled burning rubber. On lifting up the hood, he saw that his battery caps had blown out. The battery itself was “bulged out of shape,” the generator was not working, and the armature and field wires had melted together.

According to an investigative report, there was another bizarre element to the experience: Something else that stood out in his mind was that he did not encounter a single car on this highway from shortly before this episode until he was about 1/2 mile north of Proberta. He believes this is the only time in his life this has happened. U.S. 99 W is the main highway from San Francisco to Portland and Seattle. It carries heavy traffic. (Cerny, Tice, and Staver, 1968)

In Randles’ view, “The existence of the Oz factor certainly points towards the consciousness of the witness as the focal point of the UFO encounter. . . . Subjective data that override objective reality . . . could be internal (from a deeper level of ourselves) or external (for example, from some other intelligence). It may even be both.”

Sources

Cerny, Paul, Kenneth Tice, and Robert Staver. UFO Sighting Report. California: The Authors, 1968.

Haines, Richard F. “Daylight Dumbbell.” International UFO Reporter 14, no. 5 (September/October 1989): 12–13, 23.

Randles, Jenny. “In Search of the Oz Factor.” BUFORA Bulletin 26 (July 1987): 17–18.

———. Sixth Sense. Topsfield, MA: Salem House Publishers, 1987.

———. UFO Reality: A Critical Look at the Physical Evidence. London: Robert Hale, 1983.

The stranger walked around the table and briefly looked out the window, his back to Rojcewicz, then turned and sat down. He was dark-complexioned, tall, thin, sunken-eyed, and wearing a rumbled black suit too big for him. Speaking articulately with a slight accent Rojcewicz thought to be “European,” he asked what the young man was doing. A short conversation on UFOs followed as Rojcewicz, who was not much interested in idle talk, tried to return to his studies. When the stranger asked if he had ever seen a UFO, Rojcewicz said he was more interested at the moment in stories of flying saucers than in the question of whether UFOs existed as physical spacecraft.

These words seemed to set off the man, who suddenly shouted, “Flying saucers are the most important fact of the century, and you’re not interested?” Startled and afraid that he might be dealing with a lunatic, Rojcewicz tried to calm him, and the man lapsed into silence. Then he stood up “as if he were mechanically lifted.” He placed his hand on Rojcewicz’s shoulder and said (as close as Rojcewicz could remember), “Go well in your purpose.” Rojcewicz did not watch him go. But a few seconds later he became abruptly fearful as the strangeness of the encounter hit him.

1 got up, walked two steps in the direction he had left in, turned around, and returned again to my seat. Got up again. I was highly excited and finally walked around the stacks to the reference desk and nobody was behind the desk. In fact, I could see no one at all in the library. I’ve gone to graduate school, and I’ve never been in a library when there wasn’t somebody there!

No one was even at the information desk across the room. I was close to panicking and went quickly back to my desk. I sat down and tried to calm myself. In about an hour I rose to leave the library. There were two librarians behind each of the two desks! (Rojcewicz, 1987)

Rojcewicz here describes an odd impression some UFO witnesses have described but whose significance went unappreciated until British ufologist Jenny Randles took note of what she called the “Oz Factor”—“the sensation of being isolated, or transported from the real world into [another] environmental framework . . . where reality is but slightly different” (Randles, 1983). The Oz Factor figures in other, MIB reports for example this October 1981 report from Victoria, British Columbia:

Three days after a nighttime UFO sighting, a young man named Grant Breiland went to Victoria’s business district to meet a friend. When the friend did not show up, Breiland called him from a pay phone located between two glass doors which served as the entrance to a popular department store. When he put down the phone and turned around, he was surprised to see two odd-looking men staring at him.

Dressed in dark suits, they had “sun-tanned,” expressionless faces and unblinking eyes. When they spoke, their lips did not move.

The first asked, “What is your name?” Breiland declined to answer, nor would he offer any information to the second stranger when the latter asked where he lived. Undaunted, the second man posed another question: “What is your number?” Breiland remained silent, and after five seconds the two, moving with a stiff, mechanical stride, left through the main door and walked in perfect synchronization to a nearby roadway. Frightened yet fascinated, Breiland followed them at a close distance even though rain was pouring down. The strangers paid no attention to him, not even when they stopped briefly at the

Millions of people across our planet have seen UFOs. Some people see UFOs and also experience missing time. When a witness experiences missing time, this is a very strong indication of a possible onboard UFO encounter. In case after case, people who have a close-up sighting experience a period of amnesia, and are unable to recall what happened during the missing time.

Missing time used to be thought of as very rare, but now investigators believe it might be fairly common, involving perhaps as many as one in fifty people. If true, this would mean that millions of people have been taken onboard UFOs.

This video presents three cases of UFO encounters with missing time:

CASE ONE: A mother and her two daughters are confronted by three objects. As they rush home to get a camera and binoculars, they mysteriously forget everything.

CASE TWO: A man in Malibu begins meditating and trying to call down UFOs.    After a series of sightings, he experiences a mysterious event in which a UFO apparently lands in his backyard.

CASE THREE: Two friends driving along a remote desert highway late at night come upon a glowing object which strikes them with a beam light, causing missing time, followed by a radical shift in their lives.

What is it like to see a UFO close up and experience missing time?  How does it affect a witness? How do people deal with this kind of an encounter and still try to live a normal life? 

This video is a glimpse into the experience of missing time and the secret life of UFO contactees. While having missing time does involve amnesia, it is also ironically an unforgettable experience, one that witnesses think about every day of their lives. 

My Trip to Oz

Downloads are likely a part of this. UFO experiencers have found themselves receiving information and comparing it to downloads into their brains. Mediums interacting with spirits have used the same comparison. My personal anecdote I am about to share is innocuous, and perhaps not the same, or it is the same, but it likely adds another flavor to explore, such as consciousness may be more interactive than we allow for in normal life.

What if humans get what they ask for? That’s the message of the Secret. I suspect it’s more complicated than just wishing for something, as expectations and beliefs influence it, and probably unconscious beliefs and attachments also influence it. I have linked a ‘Hacking the Afterlife’ video below, that discussed this. You can, and are, participating in reality. Carl Jung explored consciousness and interacted with it to a degree that he started experiencing Philemon, his guardian angel. You can find more on that in The Red Book. Napoleon Hill, in his 1930’s book, Think and Grow Rich, interacted with consciousness in a similar fashion to Jung, calling it the Invisible Counselor Technique. You should really read up on that. Because you are either fine tuning your ability to interact with consciousness, with intention, or your allowing consciousness to have agency over you the same way dream characters seemingly have no agency.

I suspect dream characters do have autonomy, but until you learn to lucid dream, and practice your own autonomy, you will likely not discover the truth of this.

There is truth in you get what you ask for. You don’t get everything you ask for, because there are also other players connected to this reality, and if your wish impedes other players, there are likely caveats in play to interrupt or expedite wishing.

I asked for a Tulpa and that happened. Well, it was more difficult than just asking. The Invisible Counselor technique, it’s more than just picking people to be knights on your roundtable. There’s a process involved. Writing initiation letters to your preferred cabinet members, reading autobiographies on them, etc. Even Jung just didn’t sit down and say, ‘Philemon, we need to talk.’ Jung had a process, Active Imagination.

One day, while putting some eggs on to boil, talking to Loxy, my tulpa, I made a statement, out loud: I want to experience a Doctor Who fanfiction, with you and me in it. The intent was to write a fan novel. As I departed the kitchen, as easy as stepping over the threshold from one room to another, I found myself, and Loxy- in another world. There was no confusion. I didn’t question where I was or what I was about, anymore than you might find yourself in a dream and would question the dream reality. I went with the awareness of me as a character, while maintaining the perspective of me as a witness.

From both my experiencer and observer point of view, I had the sense that I was in that reality for days, not just hours. The finale of the story was a battle scene. There were explosions in the scene. Simultaneously with one of the internal explosions, I heard an external explosion. For a moment I was back on the threshold between two rooms, asking out loud, ‘what was that?’ I was a little mad, like waking from a good dream, but enough awareness to shift back into that battle scene because that movie playing out before my observer eyes was too precious to let go. There was another explosion, both internal and external.

This time, as I came out, I was mad. “What the hell is that?” I asked out loud. As clear as any conversation, I heard Loxy say, “Eggs!” I rushed back to the stove to find the water had boiled away, the eggs were exploding, and one had taken out the stove light. What felt like days and hours was only the breadth of time necessary for water to boil away and the eggs to explode.

Did I really cross the threshold into a fantasy world? Do other worlds exist? Is this world a Billy Joel fantasy?

Jacques Fabrice Vallée:

At close range the UFO phenomenon acts as a reality transformer, triggering for the witness a series of symbolic displays that are indistinguishable from reality.

Everything you experience in your consciousness is real. Even an illusion and hallucinations is indistinguishable from reality. If dreams were so easy to sort as dreams, more people would be lucid! Your thoughts are real, to you, even if they have no causal link to the external reality. Most of us, and I count myself in this, are not sufficiently linked to our external realities to make informed decisions. We just do the best we can. Such as yesterday, my emotional reality about real world threats was likely exaggerated and impacted me and my writing negatively.

If you write, don’t erase stuff you’re not happy with. Let that be a measure for your future self to know where you were. I know there have been storms in my past, but I mostly see a string of sunny days, ‘that I though would never end.’

It would appear that that the Oz state is a state of sensory deprivation in which the mind, separated from normal stimuli, concentrates its focus inwardly. As humans, we are either born with, or rapidly develop the ability to form a screen or barrier which can sometimes protect us from unwanted intrusions. Whether this form of traumatic amnesia, with the brain responding to events so utterly different to our normal cultural experience, or mechanically induced as a direct result of a UFO experience (paranormal experience,) the net result is to leave the person in a state of amnesia. If we accept that the experience is totally hallucinatory, we are faced with a major paradox. How can a hallucination leave ground and radar traces, cause radiation burns and affect the workings of aircraft and automobile engines?… How ironic is it while Seti desperately searches for signs of technological contact from out, other energies may be trying to contact us through our consciousness!

How ironic indeed. I am certainly an advocate for looking for outward evidence of technological presence, but if we go with the science of it, and the academics and scientists have been clear on this point, in a universe where the light barrier is an absolute, communicating with interstellar civilization by light is simply not practical.

If Remote Viewing is real, and there is overwhelming evidence it is, and there are nonlocal states of awareness, then communicating with any part of the universe, with anyone inside it, or participating with it, is as simple as going within. This is the point of most spiritual philosophies, especially Buddhism.

You have always had the power to go home, Dorothy. With some caveats. You have to first go on the journey, cultivate friends, and have some experiences before you can realize for yourself, the magic is in you. This is exactly the story of Star Wars, the power is in you, it’s in all of us. Binds the entire Universe together! The reason the Wizard of Oz and Star Wars have so much staying power is the myth of it, the metaphor of it, is a reflection of reality. That’s the transformative power of Oz. You don’t go over the rainbow, you realize you are the rainbow.

Source: https://solarchariot.medium.com/the-oz-factor-and-the-paranormal-d826da4ed8e2

Our hero (MacManus) comes through again.  The first case was from MacManus' minister. He had a visitation to make and set off walking to the place. The walk was able to be shortened quite a bit by crossing a very large field. Though big, it was open and you could see the two large trees near the middle and the rough path leading to the distant exit stile far away. The priest opened the entry gate and started crossing the field as he had done dozens of times before. But when he reached the far side, there was no stile, no path, no cleared area which would allow him to even climb out.

Completely puzzled, he did the obvious: searching all along the hedged area for the missing stile and open patch. Nothing. As he went on he ultimately circumnavigated the entire area: no stile but also no original entry gate either. No matter where he arrived, there was the same impenetrable wall of thick plant staring back at him. He had, as the Irish say, stepped upon the Stray Sod and was trapped within its trickery. An hour or more later, he came to the spot where the exit stile should have been, and there it was.

What should we take from this? Although the field was familiar, and the entry was normal, certain pieces of the area, (the initial entry gate, the joining patch, and the exit stile) were gone. One's best hypothesis would be that this was imitative of the real field in the normal world, but NOT the real field. It could be walked into, but not walked out of until something changed to allow that. The priest also said that when he initially came to the spot where the exit stile should have been and found it changed, he heard a chuckling as if someone far off were laughing at him.

MacManus' second case was that of a young woman who was a housekeeper at a great house but was going to take the long walk back to her family in a nearby village. In order to get to that village, she had to cross over the hill called Lis Ard Fort, known as a "fairy fort" by the locals. She did that, and stood at the summit a while enjoying the view outward towards her own village in the distance. Down the hill she danced until she came to a ditch at the bottom. She headed for a gap in the ditch, but when she arrived she blanked a second and was walking in the precise opposite way. She composed herself and turned and walked to the gap. The same thing happened again. It kept happening. Frightened now, she searched along the ditch, always coming up against some "barrier" which refused to let her pass. This happened for hours. She began feeling a sense of hostility radiating toward her from the Fairy Fort.

Feeling hopeless, hours went by. People from the village got concerned and sent out parties. She saw the lanterns coming. She was standing shouting waving, but they showed no sign of seeing her, even though they passed within twenty yards. Finally hours more gone by, she realized that the barrier was gone, and scrambled quickly out and went to her village and family. This case is almost identical to the first with one added piece of information. She could walk in and ultimately walk out. Light, gravity, and other forces seemed to be normal. Time passed normally. The area was as she knew it. The "addition" to reality was the barrier; and the addition to our understanding was that she could see out of the Stray Sod though others could not see in.

MacManus' third case was one in which a man left a party at one house of an estate to go across a large field to another house for the evening. It was past midnight, and the walk began as usual, but very quickly the entirety of the environment changed. He was immediately aware that he was no longer in the familiar field. He as a good Irishman suspected fairy involvement, so he employed the old legend idea of turning his coat inside out. It didn't work. Nothing changed and he couldn't find any sign of a way out. He walked around and worried himself into a nervous sweat. Finally hours later, a glimpse of a way out occurred, and he hurried on. The opening was in the direction of the first house, so he took the opportunity and straggled back there, showing up at the door "in a state."

Again, walk in, walk around, environment changed but not changing the way things like light and gravity work. Could not see out until the very last moment. Time operated normally. This one seemed clearly like a separate Stray Sod bubble out of touch with the normal world. None of MacManus' three cases were of very large places-alongside, even though the priest's field was a very large multi-acre area. 

But, I am going to revisit one special case ... Helen Lane.

I'm going to repeat my telling of this encounter because it is not only inexplicable but the mere fact that it happened threatens to discombobulate almost any model of reality one chooses to lean upon.

I have several brothers. All of them are great fellows, and all of them are somewhat different. One of them is "grounded" in the real world of work, teaching, service, hammers-and-nails, small town orientation, etc. more so than most people I know. He is not a fool, and is not to be fooled. He goes very slowly to conclusions outside of the normal. His wife enjoys the thought of the unusual much more than he, but she is also an intelligent, substantive woman. I know them very well. There is certainty that the incident that they recounted to me was exactly as they experienced it, to their honest perceptions.

It was July 1998. My sister-in-law's grandmother was dying and she, my brother, her mother, and other family members had gone to the old home area to be with her in the last days. People were spread out, residing with other extended family members et al, some quite a few miles apart. My brother and sister-in-law got a call saying that the time was probably near, and late in the evening (c.11pm) began driving to pick up her mother at another location and then drive to the nursing home. My brother was driving. The trip to the mother's temporary residence was through a relatively non-built-up stretch but which contained suburban structures at intervals and was normally quite well traveled, even at night. (My sister-in-law grew up in this exact area.)

This night there were no cars at all. Out ahead, alongside the road, they could see someone walking dressed in white. As they passed, in a hurry to pick-up the mother to get to the grandmother's location, they saw that this was an older woman in a white nightgown. As they proceeded on down the road, they had a wave of guilt as they felt that this was almost surely an old lady, probably with Alzheimer's, who needed help. They picked up the mother and a cousin and retraced their drive down the still empty road. Up ahead again was the old lady. This time they slowed, asked a question, and the "simple" reply indicated that they must take the woman in and try to help her. Her comment to them was: "Oh God bless you. I am trying to get home". She sat in the rear of the car between the mother and the cousin, and was generally "normal", saying that her name was "Helen Lane" and giving an address and phone number.

My sister-in-law's family had originally lived in this area [some still did] and they knew enough about the place to find the street address. That did not work out due to there being no numbers on any of the houses, and not wanting to wake up the entirely unlighted neighborhood by trial-and-error. They drove instead to a fire station that the family knew was active at all hours. Still no traffic. The fire station was brightly lit as expected. They knocked at the door--nothing. They circled the building looking in windows and knocking--nothing. This was a major establishment as it served, among other locations, a wealthy area of town. But, feeling a little creepy now, they drove on, for up ahead was a police station that the family knew well. [by the way, they had also somewhere in this sequence tried the phone number and only gotten an irate individual who said he'd never heard of Helen Lane and that they'd woken him up].

The police station that they headed for was run, as Chief of Police, by another of their cousins. They didn't expect him to be there at midnight, of course, but they had confidence that the station would handle the old lady and her problems. [she had said a few "childish" things by now which convinced everyone that they were dealing with Alzheimer's]. The police station was there, as it should be, but still with no traffic. It was brightly lit but showing no activity. Through the large front windows, one person could be seen. Greatly relieved, my sister-in-law took Helen Lane up the steps while my brother watched closely. Within there was only this one person. She was a middle-aged woman dressed in civilian clothes. There were no policemen to be seen anywhere. When they came through the door, the woman said "Hello Helen." My sister-in-law told the story, in brief, and the woman said "We know Helen. We'll get her back home". Taking some information on paper, she said not to worry about anything, it would all be taken care of.

As I said, my sister-in-law was familiar with this station. It was far too empty. No dispatcher, no desk sergeant, no policemen of any kind. It just felt wrong---but who knows? They let it go and went back to their car and on to the nursing home where the grandmother had just died. The next morning, both my brother and sister-in-law wanted to lay this to rest. They called on the police station and asked. The Chief, their cousin, was in a position to find out. He told them the following: 1). the station had no record of their visit, nor any particulars; 2). there was no record of the existence of any person named "Helen Lane", as far as their files were concerned; 3). the station should have been busy and active with several uniformed officers on duty; 4). no such person as described as being behind the desk has anything to do with the station, nor does anyone know of such an individual being in the station.

What are we to make of this? Some people would like to say that this is "just" another instance of the "Phantom Hitchhiker" phenomenon. Well, if it makes anyone feel better to give it a name, then God bless you, but that's hardly very helpful. This case seems to be telling me that my relatives "slipped into" an alternate reality for an hour or so, wherein the circumstances were very close but not identical to our "real world". I have to believe that the details as stated happened--multiple witnesses, including some that I'd trust with my life. If they did, then it SEEMS that they were driving about in a world which was in imitation of ours but not quite identical. As my brother said: "we know the woman in the police station didn't exist." Well, what DID exist? What-the-heck went on here? This experience hardly stands alone. The illustration above is meant to picture a roadway encounter in the early 20th century, where after a brief interaction, the man dressed in olde-time clothing just vanished before the witness' eyes. In the UFO literature, cases of this "same-but-not-same" environment crop up now and again. And the mysterious "empty" road is common. I have no good "model" for this reality. I find it difficult to incorporate these displacements or slippages into a coherent way of thinking about anomalies. And there seems to be more than random accident here; more like an "intention". My brother said: "I think it was a test." Maybe, Bro, maybe.

This event, which I heard about from my family long before any study of Faery and Stray Sod, seems incredibly useful to me in understanding some bits of our current inquiries. My family members seamlessly drove into a reality of which they recognized nearly every aspect. Other than the emptiness of the usually busy road, everything was so much as it should be that there was no thought of something strange going on. Light worked; Gravity worked; the car engine worked; everything still worked. BUT it still was not our reality. Somehow a near perfect matching of familiar reality was in place, but my family and their car were not in our space. Their experience doesn't seem much like being in Faery, but if "someone" wanted it to be, then ... how much more would they really need to add? (By the way, the rate of Time seemed normal here too.)

I know that you cannot buy the Helen Lane mystery with the assurance that I can. Maybe the MacManus and Quinn and Fairy Census and all the other displacement tales can fill in that credibility gap. I hope so. Because for me, the Helen Lane event broke the barriers of stubborn skepticism. Also, it about exhausts what I can usefully say to you about all this "other dimensional" stuff. I could utter pseudo-scientific vagueness about the Quantum Front of the Universe-to-come surging into the Uncollapsed Sea-of-Indeterminism (Ouch!) and the possibility of more or less Likely universes being "crystallized" (our own but also slightly less endowed realities) or twin universes with variable particle spins, which only become interactive via exotic force situations in boundary interfaces, or Block theories of Time and re-running of fixed matter relationships a la filmstrips, etc etc until we all went completely insane or at least went out for a drink.

 But I'm not falling for that. The truth, if ever we find it, resides in only one area: The Case Reports, The Actual Experiences of Real People. Never drift too far from that. Anyone can dream up neat sounding BS.

I have been blessed with just the happy amount of great anomalistic experiences. A good UFO close encounter (which is irrelevant here since advanced aero-tech is part of normal universal behavior), a great Trickster (my watch) translocation, and Helen Lane (plus poltergeists et al) from my family. Helen Lane and the translocation(s) pretty much end discussion for me regarding the existence of another space-time. The translocations and the Trickster pretty much end discussion for me that at least some of these experiences are "intentional" and not by us.

Source: https://thebiggeststudy.blogspot.com/2020/07/summa-faeryologica-part-eleven.html

Not sure about the oz factor but my late husband, who had spent a lot of time in the woods hunting deer and elk, told me how he felt the only time he was afraid out in the woods. He was sitting beside his small campfire, alone except for black lab. He was in his late forties and he had come to love the peace and stillness of the forest and the feeling of being close to nature. He was also a commercial fisherman and had fished the waters of Alaska, Washington state, Oregon and sometimes Canada. Except for getting caught in storms he had never felt afraid or threatened.

He always was responsible and respectful of the woods. Until this one time when his dog became terrified of something just outside of the campfire light. I have already posted the full story awhile back. But as to his emotions and deep, gutwrenching fear. His truck was close by and he had his rifle at hand, but he said he suddenly felt his gun would do him no good and he felt there was a power in the trees around him and that something was watching him and he was afraid he was just going to disappear.....forever.

His mind was spinning, his thoughts were fast and disconnected. He did not want to see what was getting close to him and he actually shut his eyes. Our dog began to back up toward the truck, whining. My husband became so terrified he couldn’t breathe. He felt like he was going to pass out but he knew that would be a maybe a fatal thing. He had shot at bears and mountain lions before he felt threatened him in the night out in the deep forest.

He also said the darkness became blacker all of a sudden and the night colder. He felt like he had no power and that he was being stalked. He said it passed through his mind he would never take our daughter hunting in the woods as he now knew there was a danger there no one knew out there, something no one had ever talked about but it had his emotions gripped in a cold, cold vise. But his strongest fear was that he did not want to look into the trees and he felt the shadows had gotten darker and were shifting.

The truck was within a few hundred feet and he got up slowly and backed all the way to it, the dog had already jumped into the back and waiting for him. He said he felt that if he stayed there any longer he would never leave the woods. He was afraid of being taken by more than one thing. That whatever was there was alive and thinking and so far just watching.

He made it to the truck and having left the keys in it he called to the dog to come in through the back cab window and locked everything and got the hell out of there. He only told me and one or two other people about it but he never again hunted alone, which is always the smarter way for many reasons. He said he felt like he was going to pass out during the time this was happening, maybe half an hour. He knew it was not a bear or big cat as the dog would have been all over that but the dog was afraid too. He thinks it was not a regular animal. He left all his gear there and next day took a couple buddies and went back but it was all gone, no tracks, nothing. His friends got creeped out just being there. He only hunted daylight hours after that and never wanted to take me with him again. Sorry so long, got carried away. Oh yes and when the kids and I would want to out camping in the woods as a family he would only go with a large group. He would always say there were things out there we should be stay away from but he could never say what. Makes me think of Shakespeare quote in Hamlet : “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio. Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (science)

Sadly my husband has passed away twenty years ago but I can give you my opinion. Bearing in mind he was a strong, not emotional type man and not given to watching horror movies and never read science fiction nor believed in it I felt he was admitting to thinking there was something in the woods that was not human and that is why he was so terrified. He had hunted his whole life and it was his favorite thing, yet he gave up his way of hunting alone and enjoying the freedom of nature as he felt there was something out there that didn’t belong and he wanted nothing to do with it. But he did not want to believe it himself. But I knew him so well I could tell he thought it was something he could not defend against and he wanted his family not to be exposed to it. He remarked tome once, a few years after the incident, that he knew if he went into the woods alone, it would still be there, waiting. When he would read about a person lost in the woods or we would hear it on t.v. he would look at me and comment, “No one really knows what is out there” and I think he saw something but didn’t want to say so. He just didn’t want to talk about it even to me. But he never took me hunting again, not even in daylight and he became mostly a duck hunter. No more long hunts after deer and elk alone. Also I kind of teased him once and said at least the big bad monster didn’t eat you up and he snapped back at me “Oh but he did” very seriously. I know whatever was in the woods was not human, not animal, just predator and it caused my husband to become afraid of his beloved hunting grounds even though he was part Indian and he felt so connected to nature and the outdoors. When I asked him why he didn’t want me to out there with him he said he couldn’t protect me anymore because he knew it was still there. Sorry my posts so long but it is good to talk about it.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/BackwoodsCreepy/comments/l6ueql/oz_factor/

It started as a headache, but soon became much stranger. Simon Baker entered the bathroom to see if a warm shower could ease his pain. “I looked up at the shower head, and it was as if the water droplets had stopped in mid-air”, he says. “They came into hard focus rapidly, over the course of a few seconds”. Where you’d normally perceive the streams as more of a blur of movement, he could see each one hanging in front of him, distorted by the pressure of the air rushing past. The effect, he recalls, was very similar to the way the bullets travelled in the Matrix movies. “It was like a high-speed film, slowed down.”

• See readers' stories of how they experienced time standing still

The next day, Baker went to hospital, where doctors found that he had suffered an aneurysm. The experience was soon overshadowed by the more immediate threat to his health, but in a follow-up appointment, he happened to mention what happened to his neurologist, Fred Ovsiew at Northwestern University in Chicago, who was struck by the vivid descriptions. “He was a very bright guy, and very eloquent” says Ovsiew, who recently wrote about Baker in the journal NeuroCase. (Baker’s identity was anonymised, which is typical for such studies, so this is not his real name).

It’s easy to assume that time flows at the same rate for everybody, but experiences like Baker’s show that our continuous stream of consciousness is a fragile illusion, stitched together by the brain’s clever editing. By studying what happens during such extreme events, researchers are revealing how and why the brain plays these temporal tricks – and in some circumstances, they suggest, all of us can experience time warping.

Although Baker is perhaps the most dramatic case, a smattering of strikingly similar accounts can be found, intermittently, in medical literature. There are reports of time speeding up – so called “zeitraffer” phenomenon – and also more fragmentary experiences called “akinetopsia”, in which motion momentarily stops. For instance, travelling home one day, one 61-year-old woman reported that the movement of the closing train doors, and fellow passengers, was in slow motion and “broken up”, as if in “freeze frames”. A 58-year-old Japanese man, meanwhile, seemed to be experiencing life like a badly dubbed movie; in conversation, he found that although others’ voices sounded normal, they were out of sync with their faces. There may be many more unreported cases, says Ovsiew. “Since it’s a transient phenomenon, it could often be overlooked.”

Such experiences almost always accompany problems like epilepsy or stroke. Baker was only 39 at the time of his experience, which seems to have been caused by a weakened blood vessel that began bleeding while he was carrying some heavy boxes. The result was a relatively large patch of neural damage in the right hemisphere. “In the scans, it looks like there’s a cigar in my head,” he jokes today.

Yet why did this affect Baker’s time perception? Some clues could come from studies that have attempted to pinpoint the regions responsible for our perception of time. Of particular interest is an area of the visual cortex, called V5. This region, which lies towards the back of the skull, has long been known to detect the motion of objects, but perhaps it has a more general role in measuring the passing of time. When Domenica Bueti and colleagues at the University Hospital of Lausanne, Switzerland zapped the area with a magnetic field to knock out its activity, her subjects found it tricky to do two things: they struggled to track the motion of dots on a screen, as would be expected,  but also found it hard to estimate how long some blue dots appeared too.

One explanation for this double-failure is that our motion perception system has its own stopwatch, recording how fast things are moving across our vision – and when this is disrupted by brain injury, the world stands still. For Baker, stepping into the shower might have exacerbated the problem, since the warm water would have drawn the blood away from the brain to the extremities of the body, further disturbing the brain’s processing.

It is just one possibility; not all patients with time warping experiences have damage to V5, so other cogs in the brain’s time-keeping apparatus may also play a role.

Another explanation comes from the discovery that our brain records its perceptions in discrete “snapshots”, like the frames of a film reel. “The healthy brain reconstructs the experience and glues together the different frames,” says Rufin VanRullen at the French Centre for Brain and Cognition Research in Toulouse, “but if brain damage destroys the glue, you might only see the snapshots.”

We may all experience the normal smooth picture breaking down occasionally. For starters, if you’ve ever looked at overtaking cars on the motorway, their wheels can seem to stand still. This happens because the brain’s intermittent snapshots fail to capture the wheel’s motion fully. If, for example, it has made a full rotation between each “frame”, it will seem to be in exactly the same position each snapshot, giving the illusion that it is stationary.

And users of LSD often report “visual trails” following moving objects, a bit like the trails of bullets in The Matrix movie. VanRullen suspects this might arise because the brain somehow overlaps those sensory snapshots, rather than refreshing its picture anew.

Reports of time standing still are also common during a life-threatening accident; in one survey of people who had skirted close to death, more than 70% reported the feeling that the event occurred in slow motion. Some researchers claim that they are simply an artefact of memory, since the intense emotions lead us to lay down more details, so that we believe that the event lasted for longer only in hindsight. But the descriptions certainly sound close to those reported by the neurological patients, suggesting there may be some overlap.

For example, one person told researchers in the 1970s how they vividly remembered seeing the face of a train’s engineer during a near fatal collision: “It was like a movie run slowly so the frames progress with a jerky motion – that was how I saw the face”.

What’s more, Valtteri Arstila at University of Turku, Finland, points out that many of these subjects also report abnormally quick thinking. As one pilot, who’d faced a plane crash in the Vietnam War, put it: “when the nose-wheel strut collapsed I vividly recalled, in a matter of about three seconds, over a dozen actions necessary to successful recovery of flight attitude”. Reviewing the case studies and available scientific research on the matter, Arstila concludes that an automatic mechanism, triggered by stress hormones, might speed up the brain’s internal processing to help it handle the life or death situation. “Our thoughts and initiation of movements become faster – but because we are working faster, the external world appears to slow down,” he says. It is even possible that some athletes have deliberately trained themselves to create a time warp on demand: surfers, for instance, can often adjust their angle in the split second it takes to launch off steep waves, as the water rises overhead.

For Baker, the experience was a one-off, and after surgery to remove the damaged blood vessels, he has now made a full recovery. He remains remarkably upbeat about his condition, pointing out that in some ways it has actually been of benefit. Beforehand, he had been somewhat taciturn, particularly around strangers – a tendency that had even been labelled a disability by his school. But today, his shyness has gone – a fact that is clearly evident as he chats happily during our telephone conversation. “It was more than just feeling a little more forthcoming – I suddenly felt compelled to talk,” he says. Ovsiew has verified the report with Baker’s wife. “She confirmed that he was calmer, more talkative, and more friendly in social situations,” says Ovsiew.

The experience of time freezing around him, meanwhile, has given him new wonder at the fragility of our conscious experiences. “It was a really concrete example of how something very localised in brain can change your whole perception of the world,” he says. “One minute I was fine, the next minute I was in an altered reality.”

We told the story about one man’s extreme experience of time warping; when he entered the shower, water droplets seemed to freeze in the air – an experience that he compared to bullet time in the The Matrix films.

Since some researchers suspect the strange feeling of a time warp may be surprisingly common, we asked our readers to send us their own experiences of time slowing down. We were amazed by the response.

Phill Healey, for instance, described a terrifying car crash:

"I turned a corner to see a tow truck stopped suddenly in front of me. I put on the brakes just in time, only for my passengers to tell me we were about to be hit by a bus from behind. I recall looking at them listening to their explanation and then looking behind me to see the bus hit the car and knock us into the tow truck. The event seemed to happen very slowly yet our actions occurred at normal speed. How I was able to talk to my passengers and see the bus hit us and then turn around and see the tow truck in front of us come closer, I do not know. I've always described it as time appearing to go slowly." 

Ijuaigi Emmanuel, felt something similar while sitting with some friends under a live electric cable. Hearing a spark above them, he looked up, to see it falling in slow motion, before they ran to safety.

Some researchers suggest that when we are confronted with danger, the rush of stress hormones could accelerate our thought processing, which makes the outside world seem to move slowly in comparison. The idea would certainly tally with Andrew Arthur Prescott’s lightning-quick reactions that saved his son. As he put it:

"I do not have good reactions and am somewhat uncoordinated, poor at sports. When my son was small we put him on a high playground slide, when he was still too top heavy. He seemed to fall to one side and over the edge, and I seemed to have all the time in the world to move to catch him."

Occasionally, the feeling of super-human power can end in bathos, as Wendy Crossley describes:

"My foot gave way, which it is apt to do from time to time. I felt I was flying like superman, arm out stretched. It seemed like a lifetime that I was floating in air slow motion. I eventually collapsed in an unladylike manner onto the pavement in a heap with a twisted ankle and hurt pride."

For most people, a time warp is a one-off experience, but David Bull says he has seen the world in slow motion on numerous occasions. Like Healey, he saw a car crash in excruciating detail, and saw everyone on the stairs in the London Underground moving abnormally slowly. He also describes a more prolonged experience, after surfing, where he found it strangely difficult to judge the speed of his car. “I would drive at 100 kph which for the first 30 minutes of driving felt like about maybe 5-10 kph.”

If you have never seen the world stand still, Olumide Olaoye points out an illusion that is a little more mundane, but that everyone can do: 

"Sometimes it seems to my eyes that the 'second hand' of the clock stops for a second or less. Or at other times it seems to move backwards before it picks up again."

This is known as the “stopped-clock illusion” and is thought to be caused by tiny eye movements, known as saccades, that temporarily slow our perception, leading it to look like the hand of the clock is jammed before it picks up again.

As the patient in our original article pointed out, it doesn’t take much for us all to get the feeling that we are living in an altered reality.