Spirit hands, song-propelled saucers, and A-P

Last night I finished the Shane Baldwin and Latter-day Chad podcast mentioned in "John emerges from a cave with the simplest of codices" and "These ladder days." One of the ideas it presents it that in the scriptures the title "Arm of the Lord" refers to the Holy Ghost, who is also called the Spirit or the Angel of the Lord. For example, around the 55-minute mark, Chad says:

So the Arm of the Lord dried the Red Sea. The Holy Ghost, the Angel of the Lord dried the Red Sea because they're one figure. Who hath believed our report? And to whom is the Arm of the Lord revealed?

They also talk about the Hand of the Lord, who they argue is a separate figure but is clearly conceptually similar to the Arm.

Immediately after finishing the video, I picked up Flying Saucers Have Landed and read this. Adamski's co-author, Desmond Leslie, is discussing the possibility that flying saucers are made to fly via something like psychokinesis:

The explanations given with other experiments when heavy furniture moves into the air without tangible support, is that 'spirit hands' are at work. Call them 'spirit hands' if you like, but would it not be safer to say that a second force opposite the earth's magnetic [i.e., gravitational] pull has temporarily been brought into action?

And what brings these other forces into action?

By all that one can see it appears to be activated by that little known force called the Human Will.

Spirit hands obviously syncs with the idea that the Hand of the Lord and the Arm of the Lord are specific spiritual beings. The podcast I had listened to is part of a series called "The Strange Work," and Latter-day Chad sometimes goes by Will; in some videos, he is labeled "Will aka Latter-day Chad." So that caught my synchromystical attention.

One the next page, I read Leslie's suggestion that saucers might be propelled by sound:

Can you see, in imagination, a highly developed being in his space vehicle uttering the correct vibration which will make the propelling forces obey and thrust him through the void towards our atmosphere? And then on entering this, our ocean of air, whose nature he perfectly understands, utter a second vibration that will smooth out and completely neutralise all the jagged rending disharmony of a solid body being thrust through by sheer brute force?

Leslie imagines this propulsive sound being vocal in nature -- something the extraterrestrials "utter" rather than produce with a machine or instrument. This made me think of the description in the Book of Mormon of the Jaredites singing continually during their voyage, so I took a break from my reading to look that up:

And it came to pass that the wind did never cease to blow towards the promised land while they were upon the waters; and thus they were driven forth before the wind.

And they did sing praises unto the Lord; yea, the brother of Jared did sing praises unto the Lord, and he did thank and praise the Lord all the day long; and when the night came, they did not cease to praise the Lord. And thus they were driven forth (Ether  6:8-10).

Doesn't that "thus" make it sound as if the songs somehow played a role in the propulsion of the vessels? Is it just a coincidence that while "they did not cease" to sing, 24 hours a day, "the wind did never cease to blow towards the promised land"?

The "ocean of air" reference had also served to remind me of the Jaredites. In "Tight like unto a saucer?" -- featuring the same noun as the title of Adamski and Leslie's book -- I discussed the hypothesis that the Jaredites were spacefarers, with outer space described metaphorically as the "great waters."

Then, just one paragraph later, I found this in Flying Saucers:

I was still musing on the possible sources of power when a very strange document came into my hands . . . . In this book were terms and expressions I had never heard of before, terms like 'etheric force'

This is the first occurrence in the book of any form of the word ether, coming right after a passage that had reminded me of the Book of Ether. The book he is referring to is The Story of Atlantis by W. Scott Elliott. In Daymon Smith's version of the story, the Jaredites come not from Mesopotamia but from Numenor (Tolkien's Atlantis). Leslie then suggests some Atlantis-related reading material:

Anyone interested in Atlantis for its own sake should read works of that title by Donnelly, Lewis Spence, Scott Elliott, . . . and particularly 'Letter No. XXIIIB' in The Mahatma Letters to A-P. Sinnett, to name but a few.

The last person referred to is the Theosophist Alfred Percy Sinnett. I'm not sure where the hyphen came from; perhaps an OCR artefact. Anyway, the reference to someone called "A-P." in connection with Atlantis caught my eye. In Tolkien, the last king of Numenor is Ar-Pharazon (with a hyphen), and I recently read some channeled material which repeatedly refers to this Atlantean monarch as "AP." (The title of the document itself also has the initials AP.)

In a comment on "These ladder days," Debbie read 1/16 as OK. The idea is to reanalyze 1/16 as 11/6, then reverse the order to 6/11, and change 6 to 15 because 1 + 5 = 6. That gives 15/11, which is OK (the 15th and 11th letters of the alphabet). A pretty convoluted process. If I were to read 1/16 as two letters of the alphabet, they would be A and P.

The classic blunder

Barnhardt just posted this, calling it (with extreme hyperbole, in my humble opinion) the "Best Meme Ever."

I'm not entirely sure what the message is here. Presumably some sede vacante thing, but does anyone call Pope Leo "Peter"? Anyway, I post it here because it will have a completely different meaning to Bill -- relating to the question of whether or not the Vizzini character pictured symbolizes the reincarnation of St. Peter (but certainly not the Pope).

These ladder days

Today a young child told me, apropos of nothing, that her birthday is January 16. She repeated the date several times. Randomly saying that in the middle of May is unusual.

When I went into my study I saw that, now that Child of Fortune had been removed from the top of a stack of books, the book on top was now The Secret Language of Birthdays. As discussed in "Squaring the circle, and more red and blue eyes" (January 21), it has a picture and title for each day of the year, and the picture for my own birthday is a ladder.

Seeing that book just after being randomly informed of a January 16 birthday, I turned to that date just out of curiosity. The picture also includes a ladder.

I'm not sure what the coincidence means, if anything, but it's my general policy to note and publish such things.

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Update: As usual, after I post some minor coincidence like this, further syncs immediately begin to appear.

After publishing this post, I started to think about the possible significance of 3/15 and 1/16, and I wondered if maybe I should interpret them as scripture references. Are there any scriptures that are 3:15 or 1:16 and that refer to "heights" or "fulfillment"? I found a few vague matches -- for example, Matthew 3:15 includes the word fulfill, but that's the word the book associated with 1/16, not 3/15. In the end, I decided this was not a fruitful route of exploration.

Then, approximately an hour and a half after publishing this post, I continued listening to the Shane Baldwin and Latter-day Chad podcast I started last night, the one I mentioned in "John emerges from a cave with the simplest of codices." I had only been listening for a minute or two when, around the 1:02:15 mark, Latter-day Chad said this:

So this, Revelation 1:16, very interesting, 1:16. I'm born on the 116th day of the year.

So the same number, "one sixteen," is interpreted both as a scripture reference and as someone's birthday. Whose birthday? Someone who shares my own first name of William but who goes by Latter-day Chad. Before listening to that part of the show and learning that his birthday is connected to 116, I had titled this present post "These ladder days" -- referring of course to the illustrations in The Secret Language of Birthdays, but worded that way to make it a pun on the common Mormon expression "these latter days." Then, less than two hours later, I find this direct link to the birthday of someone who has made "Latter-day" part of his nom de guerre.

So what's the 116th day of the year? April 26, or April 25 in leap years. The post immediately before this present one was "God-whales on April 27 and Naples on May 11." This past April 27, I posted "Happy God Is a Whale Day," but April 26 also plays an important role in that post. I posted my whale dream on April 27, but the dream itself took place on April 26; and Brian Wilson's vision of God may have happened on either April 26 or April 27.

God-whales on April 27 and Naples on May 11

After finishing some other things I'd been reading, I returned today to Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953) by Desmond Leslie and George Adamski. The last time I posted about that book was in "Ugly flying starfish" (April 20):

1863 April 27th. Zurich Observatory. Dr. Wolf sees large number of shining disks coming from East. Some have tails, others are star-shaped.

This entry got my attention partly because of the date (April 27, the date of Dee and Kelley's whale vision) and partly because of the confusing description. How can "disks" be "star-shaped"?

"Star-shaped" things appeared again yesterday, in "Commander Toad and the Dis-asteroid," because asteroid literally means "star-shaped." Bill tied this to the star-shaped island of Numenor (flooded, like the asteroid in the story), and the story also includes a star-shaped star:

As noted, that passage from Flying Saucers Have Landed caught my eye because of the date. April 27, 1584, was the date of John Dee and Edward Kelley's vision of a many-eyed Whale that represented God.

Today, reopening my epub of Flying Saucers after a fairly long break, I immediately ran across another reference to the April 27, 1863, sighting, some 40 pages after the one quoted above:

On 27 April 1863 Henry Waldner saw a similar procession [of flying disks] which he reported to Dr. Wolf, of the Zurich Observatory, who told him that a similar performance had been witnessed by Signor Capocci, of the Capodimonte Observatory, Naples, on 11 May 1845.

This must be a second reference to the same sighting, though the details are inconsistent. In the first telling, Dr. Wolf is the one who sees the saucers; in the second, the sighting is reported to him by someone else. Notice the "Naples, on 11 May." The first ever reference to Naples on this blog was published three days ago, on May 11, in "The secret rules of Wonderland."

Remember that the significance of April 27 is that it is associated with a vision of God as a Whale. Later today, I read this in Flying Saucers, commenting on possible motivations for governments to cover up UFO phenomena:

And if you were head of a slave state, and you learned one terrible day that there were greater gods in heaven than the ugly faces on your party posters, you would do anything to prevent the people finding out. For a big fish in a little pond can remain a big fish only as long as the little fishes know nothing of giant porpoise and ocean whale. The inopportune arrival of a mighty fish from the great beyond would reduce you to your proper size.

Here, "greater gods in heaven" and "ocean whale" are metaphors for the same thing: extraterrestrial beings of superhuman power.

John emerges from a cave with the simplest of codices

On May 12, Debbie left a comment on my post "Under" saying:

Didn't all prophets at some point emerge from a cave?

The next day, May 13, I checked The Babylon Bee and found an article, published May 11, with the headline "'There, It Couldn't Be More Clear,' Announces John After Finishing Revelation." It begins thus:

PATMOS — The Apostle John emerged from his cave earlier this week feeling confident that he couldn't have been more clear in his description of the revelation he'd received.

There is no reference in the Bible to John of Patmos ever having been in a cave, but apparently there is an extrabiblical tradition to that effect. The wording corresponds almost exactly to Debbie's.

The whole article is about how sure John is that he has expressed himself with perfect clarity, which should "keep anyone from coming up with weird interpretations" of his book. The joke is of course that Revelation is notoriously cryptic and confusing and has generated thousands of mutually incompatible interpretations. Calling it "clear" is so obviously false that it's comical.

On the night of May 13, some hours after reading the Bee article, I began listening to the latest installment in the series with Latter-day Chad on Zion Media:

At the 15-minute mark, host Shane Baldwin says:

Literally, John himself visited me when I was in prison in 2015, and he taught me this, and it's plain, and it's simple. And Revelation is, the Book of Revelation is one of the most plain and simple books you could ever read, once you have the codex.

I don't know what he means by codex here; I think it was a slip of the tongue, and he meant something like "they key to the code." Codex just means "book," though -- a modern-style book with pages as opposed to a scroll. Whatever Baldwin intended to say, what he actually said is that all you need in order to understand the Book of Revelation -- to experience it as "one of the most plain and simple books you could ever read" -- is to have the book itself.

The Bee article says the same thing:

When asked by a scribe the exact identity of the beast with ten horns and seven heads, John sighed with impatience and said to just read what he wrote.

"It's literally spelled out," said John. "All you have to do is read it. I can't make it simpler than that."

And, although the historical John would almost certainly have written on a scroll, the illustration accompanying the Bee article shows him with a codex.

Commander Toad and the Dis-asteroid

On May 9, something random from my childhood popped into my mind for no apparent reason: a story revolving around a misunderstanding of the phrase "beans swell" -- which was intended to mean that some beans had swollen to gigantic proportions but was understood to mean that beans are really "swell," in the dated slang sense of nifty or smashing. I searched the Internet in vain, finally resorted to consulting a Fake Intelligence, and found that the book I was thinking of was Commander Toad and the Dis-Asteroid by Janet Yolen, which I presumably read shortly after its 1985 publication.

The title's portmanteau of disaster and asteroid most naturally suggests the idea of an asteroid hitting Earth or something like that, but in fact the disaster takes place on an asteroid which is, despite its small size, an inhabited world. Responding to a cryptic SOS call ("Help. Help. Beans swell. Beans bad."), Commander Toad goes to this asteroid:

Ahead on the screen is a pleasant world. It is filled with water. There are no cities, no houses, no bus stops or barns. Just water everywhere. Above the water, calling softly as they fly, are thousands of doves.

They soon realize that this word is not as "pleasant" as it appears at first:

Mr. Hop thinks. "Everything is flooded," he says at last. "And that means that the pigeon folk who live here have nowhere to land."

Commander Toad looks out again. This time he understands. "I wonder how long they have been flying."

Doc Peeper looks out another peephole. "I will have to treat a lot of cases of tired wings," he says.

A dove flying over a flooded world is symbolism right out of Genesis -- both the Creation, where "the Spirit of God," later symbolized by the dove, "was hovering over the waters" of a world with no dry land (Gen. 1:2), and the Flood, where Noah sends a dove out of the ark but "the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth" (Gen. 8:9).

In each case it is a single dove, though. For many birds flying over the flooded world and getting tired, we must turn to the Flood as portrayed in my Yes and No, quoted in "Ark in the dark" (December 2020).

The lions, tigers, bears, and horses

All were turned to bloated corses.

The cattle and the creeping things,

The fowl as well, whose worn-out wings

Had not at last the strength to keep

Them safe above the rising deep --

In short, all things in which was breath

Succumbed to universal death.

And God's own image, which had crowned

His whole creation, also drowned.

"Ark in the dark" coming up now is interesting, since I just posted "Voyage d'ark" yesterday.

In the story, it turns out the the asteroid is inhabited solely by intelligent doves, who has for some reason put let beans get in all their storm drains, where they swelled to enormous size, blocking the drains and causing the entire planet to flood. Stands to reason.

Last night I was listening to "Wild Roses" by Of Monsters and Men, and it occurred to me to wonder whether Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir had ever done any solo work. Wikipedia informed me that before OMAM she had performed as Songbird, and the most recent solo single mentioned in the article is "Disaster Master." Birds and disaster -- a  bit of a sync, though a rather weak one. I looked up the lyrics, which begin thus:

Take me out into the chaos

Waiting up for Helios

Bottled up with my emotions

Another drink to calm the ocean

The "chaos" and "ocean" references tie in with the doves over a flooded world, since in Genesis 1 this primeval ocean represents the chaos before Creation. Another line says:

Even Pluto was a planet, was a planet

Today Pluto is considered to be too small to count as a proper planet, though in the past it was classified as one. Asteroids, too, are too small to be planets, but in Commander Toad the asteroid is a "world."

Still relatively minor syncs, but I'm posting them anyway because it seems like they might develop into something.

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Note added: In a comment, Bill points out that a flooded asteroid suggests Numenor, which was star-shaped (the literal meaning of the word asteroid). One of the illustrations in Commander Toad shows a "shooting star" that is actually star-shaped:

There's certainly a resemblance:

That particular way of anthropomorphizing a star foreshadows the SpongeBob character Patrick Star.

"Shooting" has come up before, for example in "Hello. Goodbye. Shoot this man" (July 2025 but recently linked in "Just-ice and Al-ice") and in Angelina's approving reference to Melville as a "straight shooter" in "Terry the Giant Irishman critiques my supposed literary preferences" (also July 2025).

Shooting stars feature in "All Star," a song which due to the Mandela Effect is now, it pains me to report, the signature song of what was in the old timeline a perfectly respectable ska-punk band. I posted about it in "All Star music video sync" (March 2025), a past that begins with a reference to "vulture bees." Vultures are the last birds mentioned in the closing paragraph of The Rot (see Laeth's comment below).

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Second note added: I just checked todays Barnhardt Meme Barrage and found this:

Bill in the comments mentions Pluto being the god of wealth, but he's also the god of the Under world.

A golden fist raised to heaven

On May 9, I posted "Joseph Smith and Michelangelo's Creation of Adam," in which I described the montage with which every UltraMormonChan video ends. I specifically mentioned this image:

This ends with a closeup of the Angel Moroni's hornless hand (it was dislodged in an earthquake in 2020, a sign the church studiously ignored), as if a fist raised to heaven.

Here are the two Moroni images shown in the montage:

Today, May 12, I discovered (via a couple of Babylon Bee articles making fun of it) that a golden statue of Donald Trump was unveiled on May 6, as reported in The Daily Beast. Here is the lead photo from that article:

The resemblance to Moroni -- without, ironically, his trump -- is obvious.

Even more interestingly, Debbie has often commented here about what she calls her "Where's My Horn?" dream, which she interpreted as foretelling the Trump presidency due to the trump/horn connection. An angel who has lost his horn is an even more direct link to that dream.

A further coincidence is that I fairly recently (thought I don't know the exact date) added to my sidebar images of golden statues of Joan of Arc and Moroni, together with an image of the Judgement Tarot card (which has a trump like Moroni and a flag like Joan). Back in 2021 I called that card "The Trumpiest trump" and wrote extensively about how it singles him out: "Name, birthdate, hair color -- it might as well be his damn driver’s license!" ("Who is Joe Biden?") I haven't had political syncs for some years now, but perhaps they're about to start again.