Last Time I Saw Paris? Time Slip #3

Another time slip-related post (see also Tuesday's and Wednesday's posts for others) ....

This comes from an article by Amelia Crater at Mysterious Universe :

"For most of us, timeslips happen randomly, perhaps due to finding ourselves in a setting where dramatic incidents from the past have imprinted deeply on the landscape or when our own state of consciousness is altered by unusual stress, exhaustion, or novelty, suddenly pitching us head first back in time."

She includes an account from Colin Wilson’s book Beyond the Occult, recounting a timeslip experience of biologist Ivan Sanderson from his More Things, a book mainly about zoological oddities.

After stating that he has never been interested in the occult, Sanderson tells how he and his wife were living in Haiti, engaged on a biological survey. One day, on a drive to lake Azuey, they made the mistake of taking a short cut that landed them up to their axles in mud and had to spend the night walking back. He and his wife were walking together, their assistant Frederick G. Allsop walking ahead, when:

"…suddenly, on looking up from the dusty ground I perceived absolutely clearly in the now brilliant moonlight, and casting shadows appropriate to their positions, three-storied houses of various shapes and sizes lining both sides of the road. These house hung out over the road which suddenly appeared to be muddy with patches of large cobblestones. The house were of (I would say) about the Elizabethan period of England, but for some reason I knew they were in Paris! They had pent roofs with some dormer windows, gables, timbered porticos and small windows with tiny leaded panes. There and there were dull reddish lights burning behind them, as if from candles. There were iron-frame lanterns hanging from timbers jutting from some houses and they were all swaying together as if in a wind, but there was not the faintest movement of air about us….

I was marveling at this, and looking about me, when my wife came to a dead stop and gave a gasp. I ran smack into her. Then she went speechless for a time while I begged to know what was wrong. Finally she took my hand and, pointing, described to me exactly what I was seeing. At which point I became speechless. Finally pulling myself together, I blurted out something like, ‘What do you think’s happened?’ but my wife’s reply startled me even more. I remember it only too well; she said, ‘How did we get to Paris five hundred years ago?”

We stood marveling at what we apparently both now saw, picking out individual items and pointing, questioning each other as to details, and so forth. Curiously, we found ourselves swaying back and forth and began to feel very weak, so I called out to Fred, whose white shirt was fast disappearing ahead. I don’t quite remember what happened then but we tried to run towards him and, feeling dizzy, sat down on what we were convinced was a tall, rough curbstone. Fred came running back asking what was wrong but at first we did not know what to say. He was the ‘keeper’ of the cigarettes, of which we had about half a dozen left, and he sat down beside us and gave us each one. By the time the flame from his lighter had cleared from my eyes, so had fifteenth-century Paris, and there was nothing before me but the endless and damned thorn bushes and cactus and bare earth. My wife also ‘came back’ after looking into the flame. Fred had seen nothing…”

I don't have any date for the Sandersons' experience, but I do have Ivan's birth data, and have discovered more about him. (Photo below from e-bay).



Ivan T. Sanderson, born in Edinburgh, Scotland on 30 January 1911 emigrated to the USA and became a US citizen.



His natal chart (set for 12 noon as time of birth isn't known) shows that he was a "triple Aquarian". Sun, Moon and Venus all in the sign of mental acuity and invention. Moon would have been somewhere between 4 and 17 degrees of Aquarius depending on time of birth. It's no great surprise that the man had a brilliant brain then...(this from Wikipedia:)

....attended Eton College, and, at 17 years old, began a yearlong trip around the world, focusing mostly on Asia. Sanderson earned a B.A. in zoology, with honors, from Cambridge University, where he later earned M.A. degrees in botany and geology. On a New York area radio talk show on WFMU in 1965, he said he had "three PhD's"...

During World War II, Sanderson worked for British Naval Intelligence, in charge of counter-espionage against the Germans in the Caribbean, then for British Security Coordination, finally finishing out the war as a press agent in New York City. Afterwards, Sanderson made New York his home and became a naturalized U.S. citizen. In the 1960s Sanderson made his home in rural northwestern New Jersey, where he owned approximately 8 acres. He later lived in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen until his death in 1973.

Sanderson's specialty was cryptozoology, the study of creatures whose existence has not been proven or of those considered extinct. He also had interest in UFO theories and the paranormal in general, but not the occult, he was always careful to point out.

Another of his interests was in "patterning mysteries"....this from The Planetary Grid - A New Synthesis by William Becker and Beth Hagens. Illustrations are available at the website.

... Returning to the maps of Piri Reis, Buache, and the ancient sea kings, what kind of planning models would an ancient mariner need to construct such maps? Ivan Sanderson, researcher into the unexplained, asked such questions in the 1960s and 70s — and with several associates, he set out to "pattern the mysteries" by taking full advantage of modern communication technology and statistical data analysis. His success was startling.

His 1972 article in Saga magazine, "The Twelve Devil's Graveyards Around the World," plotted ship and plane disappearances worldwide, focusing attention on 12areas, equally spaced over the globe, in which magnetic anomalies and other energy aberrations were linked to a full spectrum of strange physical phenomena.

Sanderson had identified what he called Vile Vortices or electromagnetic energy disturbances located equidistant over the surface of the globe, best-known being the Bermuda Triangle and the Devil's Sea off Japan..


(There's much more about Ivan Sanderson in a long and detailed Tribute written by Richard Grigonis.)



So....bearing in mind Dr. Sanderson's background, I'm not 100% confident that I should take that experience of his in Haiti exactly as read. Certainly the mental and physical exhaustion he and his wife were experiencing might have brought on a common hallucinatory experience of sorts. The fact that we're told that both he and his wife experienced the same vision is curious though. And yet, due to his main areas of interest one might have expected any hallucination to have included extinct animals, monsters, or UFOs, rather than medieval France....hmmmm. Here's that pesky France AGAIN! What is it about France that it has impinged upon these time slips? Did that bloody Revolution of theirs make such an indelible impression upon the waves of space and time ?

Perhaps I'm being unfair, but when I saw some of his books at Google Image, I began to wonder if, as well as having a brilliant but overactive brain, whether Sanderson also had an overactive, and lucrative, imagination.

One more time slip post is still to come - on Saturday.