I’ve been in and out of hospital for what seems like forever and mostly have been too tired to write anything.

But rest assured, I will be back shortly!

Madam Ruth

Nearly 30 years ago, when I was a senior in high school and living in Taiwan, I had a dream.

I was on the roof of a skyscraper; suspended over the city was a ring of giant floating mushrooms. I figured these mushrooms were there as playground apparatus, so I jumped onto the first mushroom. Immediately I was struck by vertigo and began to slip. The city lights were below me and I was afraid of falling. So I jumped onto the next mushroom, but again had the same off-balance feeling.

Suddenly, my aunt appeared, leaping onto the mushroom in front of me with a fist raised, while she shouted a heroic war cry. I stared in amazement as she leapt from mushroom to mushroom, with great speed and perfect balance. But then she tripped. Her foot caught the edge of a mushroom and I saw her waving her arms, trying to regain balance. I wanted to catch her, but she was too far away.

The she fell. I felt myself falling with her.

When my aunt landed, I felt I was in her body – crashing into the earth with a big thump. And then I was standing over her, seeing her crumpled body.

“She’s not dead yet,” said my sister, who just appeared next to me. “She just feels the pain.”

I woke up shivering and sweating and gasping for air.

The next day, my mom had a telephone call. My aunt had just made the decision to take her daughter, who had been in a coma for ten years, off life support.

My aunt and my cousin lived in California at the time. My cousin had gone into a coma after a high fever.  I only had a vague memory of her, because the last time we met, I was only five years old. But I remembered I liked her very much. She was ten years old and she played with me like a big sister; I called her ‘Big Sister Sherry’.

About a month before my dream, my aunt had visited us in Taiwan and mom introduced us by asking, “Do you remember aunty M.?”

I immediately replied, “Yes, you’re Big Sister Sherry’s mom.”

My aunt said, “Oh, you remember Big Sister Sherry?”

And I said, “I remember!”

And that’s all we said to one another. But I think my aunt may have been touched by my spontaneous response and somehow we grew a psychic link. So on the day she decided to take her daughter off of life support, I felt her pain.

I figure our emotions must be like radio waves, which we send out into the atmosphere and our dream-state is like an antennae capable of picking up these signals. I’ve always wondered if it were possible to train ourselves to pick up these signals at will. But how? I’ve never looked into it.

If anybody else has a psychic experience to share, please let me know. Anonymity is fine with me.

Take a look at Allen’s amazing sculpture here: http://allenteng.com/

She had come to have her cards read to see if she should continue with her affair or not – an affair with a man 30 years her junior.

“He’s out shopping at the moment,” she said. “I brought him to the city for the weekend so that we could have some time together. It’s hard at home – we don’t feel we can go out in public.”

Being in my mid-20s at the time, I was staggered to hear her dilemma. Typical of people my age, I was secretly disgusted by the thought of a fat, older woman having a robust sex life.

“What I want to know is if I should break it off,” she said to me.

It turned out she was married. She didn’t think her husband would ever find out, but she did realise she was betraying him.

“It will have to end sooner or later,” I said. “Maybe you should end it sooner and get it over with.” 

She looked down at her hands.

“The problem is,” she said. “I’m not ready to give up sex.”

Her husband, more than a decade older, was in poor health and her role as wife was slowly morphing into a role as nurse. Naturally, this meant their sex life was dead – and it had been over for a long time. I hadn’t realized that women in their 50s still had love lives, much less that they could still long for hot, passionate sex.

Having recently crossed the boundary into mid life myself, I feel like smacking my smug, younger self – especially since I claimed to be an ardent feminist. But somehow, the thought of unattractive older people having sex seemed unnatural. That, for some women, hot sex may not be possible until they have their child bearing and general life responsibilities out of the way, never occurred to me. Or that guys might really get off on sleeping with uninhibited older women, who have learnt to be comfortable in their own skins – or even that the guys might have something to learn.

I’m not sure that we’ve progressed all that far since then. I see there is suddenly a lot of media about ‘cougars’ – a term for older women who go out with younger men. There are, in the US anyway, the inevitable reality television programmes about them. The women featured, from what I can see, are of the expensively-botoxed type, rather than the ordinary, middle-aged  variety. And even when they’re as beautiful as the women on Desperate Housewives, there is something slightly seedy and derisive about the way the phenomenon is described – older women who sleep with younger men are still being laughed at.

Which is very much an Anglophone phenomenon. Whenever I visit France, in particular, or the European Mediterranean countries in general, I’m struck by how many glamorous older women there are around, who remain elegant, despite their wrinkles – and who are treated as though they matter.

That woman didn’t get much value out of coming to see me. I wish I could sit down with her now, because my reaction would now be very different.

“Don’t break it off,” I would say. “For as long as it’s bringing you joy, why not?”

And if the guy one day dumped her?

“Find yourself another one.”

Nobody can accuse the Brits of not taking the threat of aliens seriously. A scroll through the archive reveals page after page of handwritten forms, filled in by officials who meticulously noted the most mundane aspects of each case: “He went and got wife out of bed to see ‘it’ (the UFO)”, says one.

There are more exciting reports in amongst them, like the one about the triangular UFO that hovered over the backyard of a Birmingham man in 1997. It then dropped a ‘milky white substance’ on his trees before flying off, which the man collected – unfortunately, the jar’s been lost to posterity.

Or there was the UFO that apparently hovered above the house of Michael Howard, the then Home Secretary (the minister for national security). In March 2007, six members of the public, including two firefighters, alerted the Royal Air Force to a triangular, “humming” craft above his home.

The official notes of the incident state the “MoD air defence staff have confirmed there is no evidence to suggest any authorized incursion of the UK air defence region on that date”.

But maybe they didn’t look very hard, because the MoD was getting sick of UFOs  – and the people who reported them. According to The Guardian, the MoD had to blank out “uncomplimentary comments” about the public before releasing the files.

Their exasperation occasionally shines through: “Abduction is a criminal offence and as such is a matter for the police to handle,” as one enquirer who reported an alien abduction was told. “The police can only investigate allegations of abduction if there is evidence to suggest that such a crime has taken place. “

Unfortunately, even as the MoD was giving up on UFOs, the public appetite for them was growing, fuelled by programmes like The X Files. According to Nick Pope, who used to run the British Government’s UFO Project, “at one time, MoD was receiving more FOI (Freedom of Information) requests on UFOs than on any other subject”.

So in 2007, a decision was taken to release the UFO files to the public, over three years. Sitting alongside the documents is chapter two of The UFO Files, a guide to the files written by UFO expert Dr David Clarke. His book details how the MoD came to be interested in UFOs in the first place – they were alarmed by apparent alien activity at Andrews Air Force Base in the US in 1952. Winston Churchill wrote a note about it, which is in the archives: “What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to?… Let’s have a report at your earliest convenience.”

As it turned out, many UFO ‘sightings’ were just blips on the radar. Until the 1950s, the path of migrating birds had never been tracked; the ‘angels’ appearing on radar turned out to be birds. To prove it, Clarke says, the RAF got hold of some dead birds, wrapped them in cellophane and whirled them around on sticks, to measure their ‘echoing’ area.

The UFO files will be available to download for another three weeks. Sadly, they’ve come too late for Gary McKinnon, a UK citizen facing extradition to the US for hacking. McKinnon hacked into 97 US military and NASA computers, seeking evidence of a UFO cover up. Unfortunately, his efforts not only shut down the US Army’s Military District of Washington computer network for 24 hours, but also deleted US Navy Weapons logs – in 2001 and 2002.

McKinnon has become a cause célèbre in Britain, with high profile figures fighting his extradition.

But the real question, of course, is did he find anything while hacking?

He certainly did. McKinnon, who has Asperger’s Syndrome, claims that not only did he find pictures of alien aircraft, but also an Excel spreadsheet headed ‘Non-Terrestrial Officers’.

Maybe somebody should tell Britain’s Ministry of Defence that it’s too early to shut Air Secretariat 2A1 just yet.

Tanya Nelson and her accomplice Phillipe Zamora stand accused of the murders and Ms Nelson – who was apparently enraged after Ms Smith’s love spell failed to work – may face the death penalty.  The murders were particularly gruesome – if you want to read about it, click here. After the stabbings, the victims’ bodies were splashed with white paint, possibly to hide the wounds.

Ha Jade Smith was, according to one report, a respected figure in her Vietnamese community in California. Not only was she a popular fortune teller, but she also charged up to $15,000 a time for ‘spell casting’. In this case, she had written to Tanya Nelson telling her that her spells couldn’t “change reality”.

She seemed to have made quite a bit of money from her supernatural skills, as she had large amounts of cash kept at home, which her murderers ran off with, along with her credit cards.

The whole story is unpleasant, but I don’t think it says anything in particular about fortune telling – it says a lot more about nut cases. The New Age attracts more than its fair share, both as practitioners and as clients. This time, it was the fortune teller got done, but I have read stories out of the US recently about psychics who have scammed big amounts of money out of clients.

To be honest, I have no idea how anybody gets this kind of control over other people, unless they’re deliberately setting themselves up like a cult group. In all my New Age days – and there were plenty of them – I never met anybody who could compel other people in this way, or who could trick money out of them. The closest I came to it were dealing with some ethnic groups, particularly those from post-Cold War Eastern Europe, who were occasionally said they were under a curse that they wanted removed. But they were also tough people, who I can’t imagine would hand over large wads of cash just because someone was a fortune teller.

The moral of this story is to stay well away from spooky people – the tattooed, lank-haired criminal types, rather than ladies with Tarot cards.

Like the time he was out enjoying an after-dinner stroll. Framed against the starry night, he saw an unusual craft swooping and diving, twinkling with lights. The craft would appear – and promptly disappear, as though it had been beamed out of the sky.

Being a good citizen, Keith went home and rang the Air Force, alerting them to what he believed was a small-scale alien invasion. Luckily, he lived close to an out-of-the-way military base, so he was certain the Air Force would be able to take appropriate action at top speed. I think he had some idea that they might scramble fighter jets.

Then Keith went to bed, pleased that he had seen such a spectacular example of UFOs in action.

He was even more pleased when an Air Force officer knocked on his door before 8.00am the next morning, demanding that he sign the Official Secrets Act. The officer was in full military uniform, and wouldn’t leave until the document had been signed.

“And don’t EVER tell anybody what you saw,” the officer when he finally left.

So, of course, for the rest of his life, Keith told absolutely everyone who would stand still and listen.

“And that’s how I know the government is covering up UFOs,” he would say at the end of every telling.

“Keith,” I remarked once. “Do you think there might have been another explanation for what happened that night?”

Keith didn’t even pause.

“I think they wanted the UFO for themselves,” he said. “They didn’t want anyone else having the technology.”

Or the military might have been upset that a civilian had seen their newest experimental hardware in action. But it worked out perfectly for them, because the person who saw it was Keith, who turned their special project into a tale of little green men. People would listen with a smile – and then promptly forget it.

A crucial moment in any reading was choosing which Tarot pack to use. I had two packs: the Rider Waite, and the Mythic Tarot. In this case, I got the man himself to choose which pack appealed to him the most.

Tarot cards, it seemed to me, reflected their designers’ bent. The Rider Waite was designed a century ago by occultists, who strongly believed in the power of symbols to predict the future. It was the pack I used the most, because it offered concrete interpretations. So, for example, if the Two of Cups came up, it could literally mean the person was going to fall head over heels in love with someone.

Another Tarot pack I tried for a while, the Shakespeare Tarot, was created by someone who talked about both Shakespeare and life itself in a superficial way and I could never make the cards ‘work’ for me. Sadly, I eventually threw the pack away – sad, because I’ve recently been told it’s now worth several hundred dollars.

Liz Greene, the woman behind the Mythic Tarot, is a Jungian astrologer, who believes that the unconscious communicates with symbols. Her Tarot pack is based on Greek mythology and I could never make it work for ‘predictive’ Tarot readings. Lay out a spread demanding to know what was happening in six months, and the cards that came up would all be about confronting the maternal archetype, or something like that.

I often wondered about the way Tarot cards seemed to have their own personality. Did I feel like that because they really did, or because I read the books that came with them, and absorbed the style of the author?

In any case, this particular client chose to go with the Mythic Tarot, so we shuffled the cards and I laid them out in a Celtic cross.

The ‘base’ of the matter was a woman. The artist had drawn her with brunette hair and a blue flowing robe. I explained to the man that this very powerful woman would be an integral part of his new business and that he should listen to her advice.

“I don’t think I’d bring another woman into my business,” said the man. “I’ve only just let my wife in on it!”

There was a laugh from the couch and I looked around.

There she was! The woman from the Tarot cards. Same brunette hair, same hair style, and wearing exactly the same colour of blue. I even took the Tarot card over and held it up to her dress to compare.

She was in her mid 30s, I think, and had natural, glossy brown hair. Her clothes were loose – an ethnic skirt, sandals, a cotton top. She was no different from countless others who came, smelling of patchouli or incense, wearing clothes woven in India or Indonesia. Her accent was a broad Australian one, of the kind that women adopt when they want to seem tougher, making their voice artificially deeper and flatter.

I cast her chart and we discussed it. She was going through tough times – she and her husband were divorcing but they were so broke, neither could move out of the house they shared.

“It’s not a good situation, put it that way,” she said with a crooked smile. “But what can we do?”

She was an artist, she said, making so little money that her main income was the dole. But what to other people might have been failure was to her a triumph, because only a few years before, she’d been illiterate.

“Yeah, I had to learn to read from scratch,” she said. “Did an adult learning course and really worked at it.”

At the end of the hour, she asked me if I would read for her eleven year old daughter.

“I loved the way you did my chart,” she said. “I reckon she’d get a lot out of it.”

The Orb had a policy of not doing psychic readings for anyone under 18, so I said no.

“Go on,” said the woman. “She’s a great kid.”

And then she told me something amazing. Her daughter had, a couple of months before, played with the guillotine that the woman used for her art. And the little girl had sliced off her finger.

“They couldn’t sew it back on,” said the artist.

She’d cut off the ring finger of her left hand – the finger which, as an adult, she’d use for her wedding and engagement rings. My flower reading insights were fresh in my mind – that we betray ourselves symbolically all the time – so I wondered how toxic the atmosphere was in the home to result in a little girl cutting off her wedding ring finger. Even today, when I’m not as sure about peoples’ psyches as I used to be, I find it hard to believe that it was an accident. It would be very difficult to put that finger under a guillotine and chop it off, unless it was done deliberately.

“Oh she’s a good kid,” said the mother, shrugging. “It was just an accident, that’s all.”

She didn’t seem bothered by it.

“So can I bring my daughter along?” she asked me.

I said yes. During the week I rang a friend who worked in child welfare and had a long conversation about what I should do if the woman brought the girl in, and how I might tactfully suggest she go to counselling of some sort.

But the woman never came back. It still troubles me.

Even in my wildest New Age days, I was never interested in little green men, because I didn’t find them either plausible or romantic. It didn’t seem likely that aliens would waste all that fuel to get here from another galaxy, just to beam a few humans into their ship and insert anal probes into them. Also, UFOs simply didn’t have the uncanny, somewhat romantic quality of ghosts and spirits.

What killed my interest altogether was reading somewhere that the first ‘modern’ UFO sighting was in 1947, soon after the first wave of flying saucer films came out. Thereafter, whenever Hollywood produced a new type of flying saucer, it would soon be seen in the skies. In other words, people were seeing what popular culture had primed them to see.

But you can’t be around the New Age community for long without coming across people who are absolutely passionate about UFOs, who will tell you that aliens are a benevolent race, come to impart their wisdom to chosen earthlings.

Unfortunately, the alien messages are invariably dreary ones – instead of handing out secrets like how to cross the space/time barrier, they deliver lectures on how humanity is on the verge of destroying itself and must mend its wicked ways or suffer the hideous consequences.

I always listened to Keith’s stories, because UFOs gave him so much pleasure. Not only had he seen a great many, but he’d had some run-ins with various bodies that wanted to censor his sightings. Being privy to cover-ups made him feel like he was an insider.

“We were making a documentary on UFO sightings,” he told us at the first ever clairvoyant meeting of The Orb. “A team of us went all around the country speaking to eye witnesses. Air force pilots, commercial pilots, astronomers, you name it. They had the most amazing stories.”

The camera crew also got lucky, because one evening they caught trails of fire in the sky – clearly left by a speeding UFO.

Pleased at their material, the crew took it back to the television station and began editing. As their work came close to fruition, the team were surprised to find the channel’s managing director paying them a visit. He watched the documentary in grim silence. After it was finished, he rose to speak.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “This is explosive stuff and we can’t show it on television. It would cause a mass panic.”

Keith says that was the last time any of them ever saw the film canisters. “They were all taken away to the Department of Defence vaults, where they’ve been ever since.”

That story has stuck in my mind for all these years, because even at the time something didn’t sound right. Now that I’m in the media myself, I know what the problem is.

If a television station thought they had ‘explosive’ footage, they wouldn’t give it up to the government, especially not for a principle as weedy as protecting the public. They would heavily promote it, run it in prime time and then sell it to overseas networks for a premium. A week later they’d convene a special program full of experts, to discuss what was in the documentary, and would use it to drum up as much controversy as possible. That’s the way television works.

What I think happened was this: the managing director came down and saw a series of middle-aged talking heads, telling anecdotes about their lost youth in the air force, when they saw something odd after too many hours of solo flying. As for the ‘trails of fire’, they were probably contrails. My guess is that the managing director decided to cut the station’s losses there and then, before any more work was done on a production that was doomed.

And then the rolls of film went to the steel vaults out the back – the ones that get taken away by the garbage men each week.

It was probably a good thing the film vanished. It let Keith believe he had been in on some great government secret, while saving the rest of us from another fuzzy documentary. Anyway, I didn’t mind Keith’s UFO stories. He was a gentleman who seemed to attract a better class of alien – so I never had to listen to him give blow-by-blow accounts of anal probing.

Not like some other New Agers I could mention.