Many trees on the Davidson College campus have metal identification tags nailed to their trunks. If it's true that plants have feelings, there may be some corrolation between our treatment of non-combattant maples and the frequency with which extraterrestrials shove probes up our butts.
GPS-assisted travel is similar to subway travel in that it narrows the traveler’s focus. It’s very goal-oriented and efficient. While maps broaden perspective and invite side trips, GPS units invite strict attention to the upcoming turn. I try to compensate for this by pressing the “detour” button on my Garmin GPS frequently.
By the morning of Saturday, November 21, everybody I’d invited to ride with me to the MUFON meeting in North Carolina had bailed for one reason or another, so I traveled alone with my Garmin to Cornelius. I located the Acropolis Café where the meeting was to be held and then, since I had an hour to kill, drove what couldn’t have been more than a few city blocks to Davidson where I discovered the Davidson College campus. I’d been looking for a coffee bar in Cornelius, unaware of Davidson or the college, so the sudden appearance of both came as quite a surprise.
About 25 people were in attendance at what some complained was a too-long-overdue statewide meeting of the North Carolina chapter of MUFON. State Director Richard Lang spoke at length about MUFON’s new (and, in my opinion, unfortunately named) rapid response investigative unit, the STAR Team, funded by billionaire Robert Bigelow. His generosity makes it possible for Lang, the national director of STAR, to dispatch investigators to close encounter sites within 24 hours of reports being filed.
Lang was followed by Granville Angell, head of what’s called “experiencer support” for NC MUFON. Angell talked about a place called the Monroe Institute where he’d had a brief, self-induced out-of-body experience and he stated his belief that human beings and extraterrestrials are all members of the same spiritual community … or words to that effect. Angell is, himself, an abductee, so I suppose he has more right to an opinion in these matters than most, but my attention wandered. Like Lang, I prefer corroborated testimony, preferably corroborated by physical evidence.
In any event, you’ve probably anticipated the “detour button” tie-in and here it is … I’m imagining some guy sitting in an office somewhere doing whatever it is people do in offices. He’s bored. So he opens a drawer and digs down through the debris there to the button at the bottom marked “DETOUR.” He presses it. And suddenly he’s in Cornelius where grown men and women, “normal” in every other respect, are discussing extraterrestrials and out-of-body experiences as givens. He feels better.
The detour button, my friends. Use it early and use it often.
.
