WAGblog

Lunar Eclipse

I dunno who saw the eclipse back in February but here in CT we had a completely unobstructed view and as it took place around 8:30pm-12am the timing was perfect too. Anyhow, watch it I did, starting at around 9:45 when things were really just getting going and the full moon had dwindled to a small crescent approaching totality. I had gone to the 11th floor, down from the 12th, to a window seat at the end of a deserted nonresidential hallway for a perfect place to view the eclipse, which happened to be right outside the window. I watched it steadily, almost without moving as the crescent moved into totality...What followed I described in a letter to my old psychiatrist (who happens to be an amateur but quite knowledgeable astronomer):

"First, I heard about an eclipse happening at around 9:30, so by the time I found a window I could look out of comfortably, there was only a small crescent of moonlight left, but enough to know that totality had not yet been reached. Knowing little more than the basics about eclipses, I was able to simply watch and experience, having no memories of seeing others, though I must have some time in my life...As the crescent grew smaller there was a lump on one side of bright light and a bright ring around the moon, then this too gradually disappeared. The moon went a flat-- note this, FLAT flaming orange for a brief time, and clouds seemed to pass over it, though the night was fair, then suddenly, there hung in the sky what I called the dead moon. The moon was hanging there, brick red and brown, round, NOT disk-like in the slightest, and dead, no light, and silent. DEAD. It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen, but insofar as it had been feared or revered but seen by humans for thousands of years, it was also beautiful.

Eventually, this process seemed to begin to reverse itself. The roundness disappeared when the flat flaming orange appeared again, with the strange clouds coming up to obscure the moon again. I expected the silver crescent would then appear on the opposite side in a while and the whole thing would be over (this was taking a long while, lt seemed a lot longer than a solar eclipse), when to my intense surprise and consternation, the dead red ball reappeared, hanging motionless in the sky amid once-hidden stars yet again . What? This was a surprise. Everything I knew about eclipses said that the proceeded seamlessly, from one phase through totality and out. Could it be that because the moon had two sides, somehow there were to be /two/ dead moon phases? Weird...Okay, I looked at my watch, It was 10:20 or so (somewhere around then-- I don’t recall exactly) and that was just about the time of totality, I later learned. So this dead moon was the RIGHT one. But what was the first dead moon? And was this to be the last?

This question would be answered soon enough, because after the wait for totality to end...or supposedly end, the orange flaming flatness came, and the cloudy blur, then...Yes, instead of the silver crescent on the opposite side from the first, the ball of silence appeared once again! THREE TIMES this rusty, brick red ball of a dead moon appeared after a period of flaming flatness. It was unmistakable and real, not some visual misperception. And it was NOTHING like what was shown on time lapse YouTube videos or astronomy site photographs. It scared the sh-- out of me. I ran upstairs and pounded out an email to the friend who had alerted me to the eclipse, asking her what was wrong with it...She never answered.

Back at the window I found Despina, a Greek woman, who barely knew what an eclipse was, let alone whether there was a period of three dead moons or only one...I asked her if she thought that thing out there was the moon or a UFO...I was no longer sure. I ran outside to take a closer look. It had to be the moon. I ran upstairs again to 11th floor North, the opposite hallway, and looked out their window.Finally, I saw the silver crescent, but it was on the /same side/ I’d first seen it on."

Now she took me seriously, which is more than I can say for Dr O, and she actually gave me the name of a friend of hers at NASA who is the eclipse expert, who she said would have the explanation. Well, he didn't, and sounded a bit annoyed with me for my imprecise language. Though he did go through a step by step analysis of my letters explainable points, he completely neglected the two major things that astounded me: the red dead moon and the flaming orange disk and their 3 times alternating phases...That was the whole point of the letter after all, which I had essentially copied to him, figuring it was the best explanation, the description I'd made at the time. Anyhow, I got no help from him at all, and Dr K has no other explanation...Though up till now she has been very sympathetic and certain there was one. Dunno what she now thinks. Dr O on the other hand, who I do not believe has much astronomical knowledge, just wrote it all off as a hypnogogic hallucination, the kind you have when you are about to fall asleep, esp if you have narcolepsy, though I was not in fact sleepy in the slightest. If I had been sleepy, Believe me I could not have sat there for two hours and simply gazed out the window. It would indeed have put me straight to sleep! But I was actually wide awake, enough to write a letter to a friend about the weird eclipse and to note the time on my watch and to count the times it did this weird thing and to note that I was noticing it, to take note of the fact that I was in fact noting it! (IF that makes any sense...I am sleepy now.)

I dunno what is going on...Some mighty weird things are, in fact, and that was just the start of them. I realized today that the person who had been filming us -- Lynnie and me -- two years ago, and then suddenly told us she lost some critical part of the tapes or something, something to do with something digital...and then suddenly gave up on it and dropped out of the picture entirely, she was LYING about it, and I realized that she and her People were up to something now...I dunno what They are doing -- through the cell tower above my apartment or high voltage lines nearby, but I know they are getting into my brain and doing things to me. What they want and why I don't...Oh god--

I've got to go to bed. This is what I woke up thinking about and now I'm going to bed thinking about it...

Posted by pamwagg at March 6, 2008 12:55 AM | TrackBack