It is almost exactly three years since I would go on a walk during the last lockdown, in the hills above Mount's Bay in Cornwall, commencing with the path depicted above. It was a circular walk, of various diameters but always culminating in another field by the house where I was staying. Often I would have the house dog with me. For most of the time she would be behaving normally, running around, sniffing, exploring, and slow to return when called. In this last field, she was a different animal, staying right behind, close to my heels and refusing to run ahead even when encouraged. I knew why she was like this, because I had sensed it too: an invisible presence right above the field. It was there for months, then had gone a year later when I returned to the area. Its absence could be clearly felt, and the dog now would run around the field normally.
Reading Robert Temple's A New Science of Heaven, this encounter actually starts to make sense. Temple's book is about plasma research. Plasma, known as the fourth state of matter after solids, liquids and gases, is made up of dust and charged particles. What I hadn't realised before reading the book is that it also comprises most of the known universe. The physical reality - of solids, liquids and gases - that we know, is anomalous. Plasma for the most part is invisible to us except in situations such as with the aurora borealis, when the solar wind (which is plasma) interacts with the Earth's upper atmosphere. Temple argues convincingly that plasma is a different - and predominant - form of life. Even ball lightning, another manifestation, demonstrates what could be construed as intelligent behaviour.
An area I used to investigate regularly in the 1990s was between Didcot power station and Oxford. The picture above was taken during one of my evening jaunts. I was drawn because of the proliferation of UFO reports from this area, a recurrence nobody else seemed aware of. One day the local paper reported a policeman being asked to investigate a strange phenomenon above the nearby village of Culham. He described something that sounded a lot like the aurora borealis. As I recall, he was quoted as saying something like, 'Whatever it was, it was very mysterious and very beautiful.'. To my knowledge, this was never explained, and neither did anyone put two and two together, that the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy also specialises in plasma research. If I were given to write a science fiction story here, it would be about scientists opening communication channels with a completely alien lifeform.
This year, a lot of seemingly disparate areas are coming together. There is the (literally!) field work such as the encounter described at the top of the page, plasma research, radically different approaches to the UFO phenomenon as in Trevor James Constable's The Cosmic Pulse of Life, startling spiritual implications such as detailed in The Coming of the Guardians by Meade Layne, and a new lecture by me titled Aerial Phenomena, UFOs and Geomancy being launched next week.
Meanwhile, I will return to the field overlooking Mount's Bay now and again, just in vague hope of glimpsing what cannot be glimpsed.
Note: This post is adapted from a longer one on www.patreon.com/sdanugyan