My strange day began at three in the morning (as so many of them do) when I was awakened by the frenetic barking of my 2-year-old Airedale Mac.
I sat up and found Mac staring at a wall in my bedroom. It took a moment to focus but then I saw what he was barking at: Red lights were moving across the wall. They reminded me of the moving pattern car headlights make on walls – but these lights were the color of red brake lights.
At this time in my life I lived alone in a large house I had built at the top of a steep hill in a Costa Rican rainforest near the coastal town of Manuel Antonio. I owned 36 acres in an isolated area without traffic or neighbors – just lots toucans, sloths and squirrel monkeys.
Awakening from a sound sleep to find lights pirouetting in my bedroom was indeed disturbing. My first thought was “home invasion.”
While rare, these things did happen to people – especially “extranjeros” (foreigners) – living deep in the rainforest. Fearing this day might come, I had bought an “escopeta” (shotgun).
As the red lights continued to dance on the bedroom wall, I grabbed Mac by the collar, picked up the shotgun I kept nearby and slipped down the stairs in the back of the house with the idea of surprising whoever was out in front.
But the front of the house was quiet as well as the long dirt road leading up to the house. No one was there. It was a perfectly still night, moonless, with a full palate of stars filling the sky framed by the rainforest canopy.
I waited another five minutes just to be sure, but nothing changed. There was only the stirring of night hawks and the chirping and clicking of tree frogs and crickets.
I returned to bed. The red lights were gone. Mac fell asleep immediately. I was not so fortunate. I spent the rest of the night replaying what had happened and trying to figure out where the red lights could have come from living in such isolation.
Return of the Red Lights
A month later, to the day, it all started again – the barking, the red lights, three in the morning. This time I didn’t bother leaving the house. I did get up to check the bedroom windows and sliding door that led to a deck outside the bedroom. I reasoned if this was a light that was coming through the windows or glass door then if I stepped in front of it the light would stop.
It didn’t. I looked around – the deck, the ground, in the rainforest trees, even up in the sky. But the origin of the lights was nowhere to be found. I didn’t have any kind of security system installed that might have produced the lights.
There was absolutely no logical reason for the red lights moving around on my bedroom wall.
I mentioned this incident to a couple of Gringo friends living in nearby Naranjito. They couldn’t think of any reason for it either other than A) it was all a dream, B) too much tequila, or C) alien abduction –
They joked.
And Still More Red Lights
The lights disappeared for a couple of months – then returned, same day of the month at exactly 3 a.m. All told, the lights did their thing three more times on consecutive months. But the last time, there was something more.
I had slept poorly again because of the red lights. I woke up feeling a little light headed. It was the same feeling I had after donating blood without having breakfast first.
I stretched and that’s when I noticed it – a quarter-sized bruise mark on the inside of my right arm under the elbow. There were similar bruises on my left arm as well as on the inside of both knees under the kneecaps. These were the kinds of marks often experienced by blood donors. But when did it happen to me? I didn’t have the bruises before going to bed. I couldn’t think of any possible way I could have done this to myself during the night.
Then I discovered these were not ordinary, lingering bruises. By noon that day all the bruises disappeared as though they had never been there in the first place. My arms and legs looked normal, but I began to sense something extraordinary had happened to me – something not of this world.
The 11:11 Synchronicity and Alien Contact
In the year leading up to the red lights, another oddity occurred. Sometimes known as the 11:11 synchronicity, I began seeing 11:11 or 1:11 an inordinate number of times when just glancing at clocks. Like most people around the world who were experiencing this at the time, at first I assumed it was just a coincidence. But it began happening far too frequently. And it wasn’t just readouts on digital clocks.
I was seeing the one family (1, 11, 111, 1111) on jerseys, license plates, street addresses, billboards, documents, telephone numbers, receipts, taxis and bus schedules. Twice I had to take my truck in for repairs where it was necessary to disconnect the battery. When the battery was reconnected, the clock in my car flashed 11:11 – both times. Another time when I tried adjusting my satellite dish to another satellite, the only channel that came in was channel 11.
The red lights first appeared in January 2011. I remember it was the 11th day of month. The second appearance of the red lights was on the 11th of February. The lights returned May 11, June 11 and July 11.
In August 2011, Mark, a Canadian friend also living in Costa Rica, invited me for lunch at an open air restaurant in Quepos called Santana’s. We sat down at the bar. I looked up at an Imperial clock. The time, of course, was 11:11.
A few moments later a very attractive young Tica with a beautiful smile took our orders. I don’t remember what Mark ordered, but I had “arroz con pollo” (rice and chicken).
Santana’s became one of my favorite restaurants. I ate a lot of arroz con pollo – and got to know the young woman behind the bar. After being friends for a long time, we began dating, and then had a child together.
My son was born December 11.
The Power of 11
In numerology, 11 is a master number that is said to bring higher intuition, spiritual insight, supernatural abilities, increased sensitivity as well as empathy and natural intelligence. It’s also supposed to be a sign of enormous power both mentally and physically.
The No. 11 has been prevalent in science, history and politics over the past 111 years. The sun has a sun spot cycle of 11 years, the last one occurring in 2011. The millennium’s last total solar eclipse occurred on Aug. 11, 1999. On March 11, 2011, there was a major earthquake and tsunami in Japan off the Pacific coast of Tōhoku.
Hostilities of World War I were formally ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. Ground was broken in the first day of construction for the United States Pentagon building on Sept. 11, 1941. Sixty years later on Sept. 11, 2001, a hijacked American Airlines Flight crashed into the western side of the Pentagon.
There are many different ideas regarding the significance of the 11:11 synchronicity.
One common view is a spiritual one in that if you are continually seeing the numbers 11, 11:11, 111 or 1111 then you are experiencing Angelic communication, most likely from your guardian angel. It is said that the most common way that angels communicate is through the universal language of numbers and music.
Then there’s the idea that 11:11 is a gateway or portal – a kind of doorway between two worlds.
As a former medical writer, one of my favorite explanations involves genetics in that 11:11 represents the spiraling twin strands of human DNA coming into consciousness. In other words, 11:11 unlocks your DNA and opens the sub subconscious mind through physically seeing these digital numbers and remembering why your brain was coded to remember the importance of 11:11.
Some feel it might also have a connection with birth – or rebirth.
Then there’s the starseeds explanation. Starseeds are supposed to be people who are very much humans born in the physical world, but their soul origins are from another star system, planet, dimension or galaxy. Key characteristics of starseeds is that they feel a little like a stranger in a strange land during their earth existence, and, they experience number synchronicities.
But what does any of this have to do with my encounters in the rain forest with enigmatic red lights?
Perhaps this:
Many years ago I interviewed Courtney Brown, an associate professor in the political science department at Emory University known for promoting the use of nonlinear mathematics in social scientific research.
But before he was a professor, Brown was a remote viewer – a kind of psychic secret agent – who was employed by the U.S. military in Project Stargate to psychically spy on secret Russian military facilities during the Cold War. I interviewed Brown who had decided to write and promote a book about his remote viewing experiences, “Cosmic Voyage: A Scientific Discovery of Extraterrestrials Visiting Earth.”
During the interview, Brown told me that something quite unexpected happened during remote viewing sessions when remote viewers were supposed to be focused on gathering intel from afar on enemy military bases. Instead, the remote viewers suddenly found themselves in communication with beings from a subatomic realm – beings like angels and extraterrestrials.
The extraterrestrials told Brown and other remote viewers that they were the ones who seeded the earth, creating humans with their own DNA injected into animals.
If you buy into that idea, that not only explains the duality of existence humans experience, but also accounts for evolutionary discrepancies among individuals – as in those with more alien DNA have a more evolved consciousness.
Brown said he also learned that the extraterrestrials were worried that the less evolved humans would destroy the planet. So, in an attempt to speed up human evolution to prevent annihilation through technology and avarice, a reseeding process was underway where select humans were injected with additional extraterrestrial DNA …
What has become commonly known as “an alien abduction.”
Was it then possible that those chosen to be abducted were in contact with extraterrestrials (whether they knew it or not) through the awareness of repetitive numbers like the 11:11 synchronicity?
Not All Alien Abduction Claims Are Crazy
While this may seem far-fetched, are alien abductions and extraterrestrial seedings really any more “out there” than Noah’s Ark or Jonah and the Whale?
According to a Roper Poll, 4 million Americans claim to have been abducted by aliens. Some of those alien abduction claimants offer cogent testimonials.
Arizona forestry worker Travis Walton’s account of his alien abduction by a UFO Nov. 5, 1975, was particularly credible – especially since he passed innumerable lie detector tests to verify his alien abduction experience.
The way the story goes: Walton, then age 22, was working with a timber stand improvement crew in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest near Snowflake, Arizona. While riding in a truck with six of his co-workers, they encountered a saucer-shaped object hovering over the ground approximately 110 feet away, making a high-pitched buzz.
Walton said that after he left the truck and approached the object, a beam of light suddenly appeared from the craft and knocked him unconscious. Walton claimed that he awoke in a hospital-like room, being observed by three “short, bald creatures.” He claimed that he fought with them until a human wearing a helmet led Walton to another room, where he blacked out as three other humans put a clear plastic mask over his face.
Walton, now 67 years old, has always maintained he remembered nothing else about his alien abduction until he found himself walking along a highway, with the flying saucer departing above him.
The 1993 film “Fire in the Sky,” focused on Walton’s alleged alien abduction based on Walton’s book “Fire in the Sky: The Walton Experience” now in its third edition.
I never spoke to Walton during my journalist days in Arizona, but I did talk to another famous possible abductee, novelist Whitley Strieber, author of horror novels “The Wolfen” and “The Hunger” as well as movies “The Day After Tomorrow” and “Aliens: The Complete Truth: Aliens Among Us.”
But without a doubt, Strieber’s most controversial and famous book was “Communion,” a memoir of his account of a close encounter with what he calls intelligent non-humans.
According to Strieber, On Dec. 26, 1985, at a secluded cabin in upstate New York, he ate Christmas dinner leftovers with his family, then went to bed early. At some point during the night he was awakened by a peculiar noise. He opened his eyes to see a small non-ordinary creature rushing toward his bed. The next thing he knew, it was morning and he was feeling disoriented and angry – but he didn’t know why.
A few months later, he recalled (under regressive hypnosis) a series of terrifying events including his abduction and being physically assaulted by unknown visitors.
I can say this about Strieber. In addition to being a brilliant writer and researcher, I found him to be thoughtful and very down to earth. I never for one moment felt he was jerking me around about an alien abduction.
If Not Abducted, Then What?
So back to my own non-ordinary encounters. Was I abducted by aliens in the Costa Rican rainforest? Since I have no recall of big-eyed aliens or life inside a mother ship, I can’t really say for certain that is what happened. On the other hand, maybe the abduction wasn’t to a spacecraft but rather a transference to another dimension. But I can’t remember anything like that either.
To this day I have absolutely no empirical explanation to account for the dancing red lights on my bedroom wall and short-term bruising on my arms and legs.
I certainly can’t rule out the possibility of an alien abduction, especially given the immensity and intensity of our known universe. Just looking at the unfathomable number of stars on a clear night is dizzying.
I don’t know if Walton or Strieber experienced number synchronicities, but Strieber said he did have a tendency to meet enigmatic strangers. One in particular had a trenchant impact on Strieber’s ontological perceptions. This mysterious visitor showed up in Strieber’s hotel room in the middle of the night in 1998. He had a lot to tell Strieber, including information on the true nature of the universe.
In Strieber’s own words, the unannounced visitor, whom he called the Master of the Key, said:
“There are more galaxies in your universe than there are stars in your galaxy, and more universes in the firmament (arch of the sky) than there are galaxies in your universe.
There will come a day when mankind will learn how to detect universes beyond. But most are so far away that their light has not yet reached your universe since the day of its inception.”
Strieber never saw the stranger again, nor does he know if he was human, extraterrestrial or inorganic being.
I suspect the conundrum of red lights in the rainforest is on track for a similar fate …
Friggin’ weird, man. Gave me chills!