A Frenchman Vanishes

      4.30 am 26 November 1979, Cergy-Pontoise, northwest of Paris, France: Frank Fontaine, 19 is loading a station wagon with clothes for an open market at Gisors. He is accompanied by Jean-Pierre Prevost, 25 and Salomon N'Diaye, 25 who I presume is of African descent. Just then they saw a long, opaque trail of white lights similar to stars, and watched it for three or four minutes, when Fontaine made a prophetic remark: "I'm going there; I want to know." The other two rushed home to find a camera. When they returned, they found the car 200 metres down the road surrounded by a halo of light like a thick fog, with three or four small spheres moving around inside it. Their friend was nowhere to be seen. Then the luminous mist shot up towards the sky, but as for Fontaine, it appeared he had vanished literally off the face of the earth.

Why You Should Follow Your Dream

       I'm getting addicted to the game show, Deal or No Deal (Australia) on Channel 10, and have only just watched Episode 34, which aired on Wednesday 13 March 2024. For those unfamiliar with the game, there are 22 boxes, each of which denotes a prize ranging from 50c to $100,000. First of all, you will be asked to pick a box, which you hope will denote the $100,000. It remains unopened until the end of the show. If you make no deals, you get the prize. You then get to pick one box after another, and you see various prizes disappear from the screen. At intervals, the banker will offer you a "deal" ie an amount of money less than the maximum. Most people eventually accept a deal, because the choice is between money in the hand, and the possibility of winning a lot or winning very little. For example, last week there were only two boxes left on the screen. One denoted 50c and the other $100,000. The contestant accepted a deal of $50,001. He would have been a fool not to.

        Well, on Episode 34 a woman called Kim Boucher picked box 17, because she said she had dreamed about that number. Eventually, when there were still four boxes in play, she accepted a deal of $11,890. Guess what! No 17 denoted $100,000. She should have followed her dream.

        Update 9 April 2024. It happened again. The contestant chose box 14 because his adult daughter had dreamed of it, although she could not remember how the dream ended. Remember, people put their names down as contestants, and it is only on the night that one of them is chosen. She must have dreamed of the game when her father told her he had entered the draw. Anyhow, on the night it came down to the wire, with only two prizes left in play: $75 and $100,000. He accepted the deal of $47,277 as a compromise; he would have been a fool not to. Just the same, it turned out box 14 denoted $100,000. His daughter's dream was correct.

Balloons of the Fairies?

       In 2017 the new fairy census was published containing 500 alleged encounters with these remarkable entities. Five years have passed, and now a second fairy census is available, also containing 500 entries, starting from number 501. Although I haven't performed a statistical analysis, my impression is that the second census contains more dubious material. It seems that the site has been brought to the attention of more people who are uncritical, who see things out of the corner of their eyes, or in the penumbra surrounding sleep, or in altered states of awareness, or who have strange, visionary, New Age type ideas. And I am still puzzled that so many adults remember encounters when they were children as genuine. I'm not saying that children may not be more psychically aware than adults. It is just that, if I had seen a real fairy when I was a little boy, I'm sure that by now I would have convinced myself that I had been mistaken, or had imagined it.

      Unless, of course, the experience was as vivid as these.

In the Jungle: Serpents, Sorcery, and Salvation

     The drunk throws away the empty bottle, the smoker discards the empty packet, but a book addict never throws away anything. Thus it is that I still have many of the books I read and enjoyed fifty years ago, and since my backlog of reading material is almost finished, I have had the chance to read and enjoy them once again. One of these was Mitsinari, twenty-one years among the Papuans by André Dupeyrat (translated by Erik and Denyse deMauny for Beacon Books, 1957). A version was published in the US as Savage Papua. Some of the events he recorded were quite unforgettable, and ten years ago I shared with you his story of the man who apparently turned himself into a cassowary. However, on rereading it, I came across other very strange happenings.