Tennessee Walts, plus that dog-stealing alien in New Jersey again

William Wright's May 4 post "Liberty Bell Follow-Up: The Liberty Bowl" begins with a reference to his "post earlier today on the Walts" -- meaning two different people named Walt: Walt Whitman and a TV character called Walter White. Walts sounds like waltz, and although there are obviously lots of different waltzes out there, the one that immediately came to mind when I read Walts was the 1950 Patti Page song "Tennessee Waltz." It started playing in my head as I read the rest of the post.

The post goes on to say that while William was finishing up his post on "the Walts," he glanced up at the TV and saw that it was showing a football game being played in Memphis, Tennessee.

William's two Walts -- both of whom have "white" surnames -- reminded me that a few years back I posted about another Walt in connection with the color black. My Leap Day 2020 post "A lost alchemical poem of Raleigh's" is about a dream I had in which I was reading a book called Ralegh the Alchemiste which quoted a line from Walter Raleigh -- "My Bodie will blacken and turne into Coale" -- and interpreted it as a reference to the alchemical process of nigredo, or blackening.

I then went on to note that, in the real world, that line is not Raleigh's but comes from a folk song sung by, among other people, Tennessee Ernie Ford. So yet another Tennessee-Walt connection.

Curious as to whether this was going to lead anywhere, I searched my own blog for tennessee. I didn't find any more Walts, but I did find a surprising coincidence in my August 2020 post "Synchronicity: Crop circle in Charlton." At the end of the post, I quote from Jacques Vallée's Passport to Magonia. Vallée tells the story of one Everett Clark, of Dante, Tennessee, who reported that a UFO had attempted to steal his dog on November 6, 1957, and then notes the "extraordinary coincidence" that "on the same day another attempt to steal a dog was made, this time in Everittstown, New Jersey." A footnote adds, "By yet another coincidence, the name of the town in the second case is similar to the name of the witness (Everett) in the first one."

If that sounds at all familiar, it's because I just quoted John Keel's account of the Everittstown dog-stealing incident two days ago, in "Hometo Omleto." I had no memory of having posted another reference to the same incident back in 2020, and I would have been none the wiser had the Tennessee Walt syncs not led me to search for tennessee. Both Keel and Vallée refer to lots of different UFO stories in their respective books, but the sync fairies singled out the same one twice.

Weights depending, and flying ships with anchors

Just a quick sync note. Last night I had a dream which I've forgotten most of, but I remember one scene in which I was paragliding over a beach -- or doing something similar to paragliding, but I could control the direction and altitude of my flight. I had a 14-kilogram dumbbell (it was labeled) which I wanted to give to someone standing on the sand. I didn't want to drop it from a great height, but neither could I afford to fly too low, so I tied it to a length of rope and lowered it. The rope wasn't long enough, so I still had to fly dangerously low. The person on the sand (who I think may have been my brother Luther) still couldn't quite reach it, so I let go of the rope and let it drop. It landed in the wet sand, and he was able to retrieve it just in time, before the rising tide made it impossible. I think there was also a magnet involved -- either the dumbbell was magnetic, or I wanted to give him a magnet as well as a dumbbell, or something like that -- but my memory of that part is too vague.

The sync is that today William Wright posted "Suspended in TIme: Loosening girdles and deepening weights, and the Grey Lady of the New York Times," which included this quote from him who must not be named:

The winds and waves took them withersoever, day and night, and by long store of provisions they were comfortably housed, if uneasy about their fates, to them known only dimly, but what was made known was this:  Zhera' [Jared-Faramir] would enlarge the girdle of Arda, and Izilba deepen the weights depending therefrom.

This begins with the wind carrying someone hither and thither (cf. paragliding) and ends with "weights depending" -- i.e. hanging down. If you wanted a visual representation of the concept of "weights," a dumbbell would be a natural choice.

The passage above was actually quoted earlier, in William's January 15 post "The Anchorwoman: Dream 2 of 3," which lessens the synchiness of my dream somewhat. Still, the original post was more than two weeks ago, and my dream came just the night before he decided to post the same quote again. In this earlier post, the "weights depending" are associated with "lowering anchors and ropes." Combining this with my dream imagery, I am reminded of various accounts of anchors being lowered from flying ships in the "vintage" reports of UFOs avant la lettre collected in Jacques Vallée's classic Passport to Magonia, for example:

In March [1897], an object of even stranger appearance was seen by Robert Hibbard, a farmer living fifteen miles north of Sioux City, Iowa. Hibbard not only saw the airship, but an anchor hanging from a rope attached to the mysterious craft caught his clothes and dragged him several dozen feet, until he fell back to earth.

From a month later:

Merkel, Texas, April 26. Some parties returning from church last night noticed a heavy object dragging along with a rope attached. They followed it until, in crossing the railroad, it caught on a rail. On looking up they saw what they supposed was the airship. . . . After some ten minutes, a man was seen descending the rope. He came near enough to be plainly seen; he wore a light blue sailor suit and was small in size, he stopped when he discovered the parties at the anchor, and cut the rope below him and sailed off in a northeast direction. The anchor is now on exhibition at the blacksmith shop of Elliot and Miller and is attracting the attention of hundreds of people.

After reporting the above incident, the Houston Daily Post goes on to note its similarity to something that reportedly took place in Ireland "about 1211 A.D. or earlier":

There happened in the borough of Cloera, one Sunday, while the people were at Mass, a marvel. In this town is a church dedicated to St. Kinarus. It befell that an anchor was dropped from the sky, with a rope attached to it, and one of the flukes caught in the arch above the church door. The people rushed out of the church and saw in the sky a ship with men on board, floating before the anchor cable, and they saw a man leap overboard and jump down to the anchor, as if to release it. He looked as if he were swimming in water. The folk rushed up and tried to seize him; but the Bishop forbade the people to hold the man, for it might kill him, he said. The man was freed, and hurried up to the ship, where the crew cut the rope and the ship sailed out of sight. But the anchor is in the church, and has been there ever since, as a testimony.

In Gervase of Tilbury's [early 13th-century] Otia Imperialia, the same account is related as having taken place in Gravesend, Kent, England. An anchor from a "cloudship" became fastened in a mound of stones in the churchyard. The people heard voices from above, and the rope was moved as if to free the anchor, to no avail. A man was then seen to slide down the rope and cut it. In one account, he then climbed back aboard the ship; in another, he died of suffocation.

No idea what to make of such stories. I simply note them as possible sync links.

Synchronicity: Crop circle in Charlton

I have been reading Passport to Magonia, Jacques Vallée's seminal 1969 book on UFOs and fairy lore, which I have known about for ages but somehow never actually read until now. There is a bit comparing fairy rings and "saucer nests" (the now-familiar term "crop circle" had yet to be coined), and one account of the latter is introduced as follows:

July 16, 1963 will long be remembered in the annals of British ufology. Something appeared to have landed on farmer Roy Blanchard's field at the Manor Farm, Charlton, Wiltshire. The marks on the ground were first discovered by a farmworker, Reg Alexander. They overlapped a potato field and a barley field. The marks comprised a saucer-shaped depression or crater eight feet in diameter and about four inches in depth. . . .

Shortly after reading this account of one of the earliest crop circles (dubbed "the Charlton crater"), I checked Bruce Charlton's blog, as I do almost every day, and read a post called "Experiencing the animated world - what, specifically, do we need to Do?" In the post, he refers repeatedly to a lecture by Stanley Messenger called "Crop Circles: gateways to new worlds." As you can see in the comments on the post, Bruce has little interest in crop circles, and it's not the sort of thing he often writes about.

The coincidence, of course, involves crop circles being mentioned in connection with both a town called Charlton and a person called Charlton. Keep that in mind, because here comes a meta-coincidence.

Returning to the Vallée book, I read of how one Everett Clark, of Dante, Tennessee, reported that creatures from a UFO had attempted to steal his dog on November 6, 1957. After recounting this strange story, Vallée writes,

In another of the extraordinary coincidences with which UFO researchers are now becoming familiar, on the same day [November 6, 1957] another attempt to steal a dog was made, this time in Everittstown, New Jersey.*

The asterisk takes us to this footnote: "In yet another coincidence, the name of the town in the second case is similar to the name of the witness (Everett) in the first one" (italics mine).