Whether you're 2 or 92, most of us get a thrill out of Halloween ! Here at Madame G's Tea Room, we celebrate everything weird & unknown all year 'round because our readers are, to quote the movie Beetlejuice, "strange and unusual..." and we all appreciate the fact that our modern world does NOT always have a logical explanation for everything that happens in it.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your continued support. Feel free to email us your true stories at any time at: madamegstearoom@yahoo.com,

and we will publish them anonymously if you wish, or with your initials. The more everyone feels comfortable sharing weird phenomena, paranormal activity, time distortion, UFOs, angel sightings and the like from their own lives, the more all of us will benefit the world over. We will not rest until science declares the "super" natural to be real natural phenomena. Contributions from scientific, engineering and aeronautic professionals and investigators are welcome ! All essays and stories submitted are volunteered materials and property of its authors that each author has agreed to share here publicly without remuneration or payment of any kind.

Mme. G

                                                                                                  
August 2011: Time Travellers

Refer to YouTube video (from Chaplin film background footage) that surfaced in October 2010 of a supposedly 1920's street scene where a woman was holding what looked like a cell phone to her ear as she walked down the sidewalk. The most popular (and logical) explanation was that she was holding a cell-phone sized hearing aid from the era. OK, great, but if so WHY WAS SHE TALKING TO HERSELF while holding the hearing aid to her ear ? For that matter, what could she have been listening to with a hearing aid while walking down the street - who needs their hearing aid to walk ? The man in front of her acted like a random stranger passing by, and didn't seem to be talking to her at all. They didn't have portable radios that small then, either ! Odd. Also, this person doesn't even look like a woman to me. Very mannish, with an angular face and jaw, walks very stiffly.

I'll bet that in the nine months since this little video was posted at least a few of you snuck a peek at old family photos (your own or at a garage sale) to see if you'd find anything out of place, anything a little strange that didn't seem to belong in the picture. Well, before you start combing through the diaries, family bibles, antique stores and thrift shops for anachronistic snapshots you'd better know your history. Practical knowledge of bygone eras. Check out old (and I mean 50 years old or more) catalogs, ladies' magazines, even medical journals at your local library and notice how many advertisements picture small devices, cigarette cases, powder compacts or pill boxes that might be mistaken for a cell phone or a tablet device. I'm not trying to discourage you from seeking out the hiding places of chronospies or anything like that, just be able to recognize a look-alike when you see one. Hey, you might even start collecting antiques as a hobby !

Seriously though, let us suppose for a moment that our Earth has been visited by time travellers who pop up in at various eras in human history. For what purpose ? Are they time tourists from our future ? Dictators with a political agenda to mold or rewrite our history ? Beings from another dimension manipulating our race in some multi-dimensional war game ? My vote is for the time tourists. Ecotourism is all the rage now, so why not time travel ? Meet your own grandfather ! Witness the fall of Rome ! Watch with pride as your descendants terrafarm some lonely rock of a planet 3 million light years away ! Maybe it's not science fiction after all. Who's to say we won't discover the secret to time travel (if we haven't already), just give the physicists a chance. And when they do, watch out. Our great-great-great grandmothers will start popping up everywhere in old photos clutching their iPhones ! Except it won't much matter to us, because by doing so they may have already altered the future. Maybe even enough that we must go back in time to slip one of our future predecessors a 1920s hearing aid in exchange for her smartphone, so as not to upset the space time continuum. Whoa...

Mme. G

July 2011: Coincidence ?

On a personal level, we all have days when everything just "clicks" and falls into place. Days when serendipity or coincidence directs unrelated persons and events to help us accomplish what we set out to do. Let's say you want to take your nephew to a Knicks game next weekend, but the tickets are sold out and your boss just told you that you have to come into work that Saturday. Even worse, your nephew has just come down with the flu. Well, on Monday your boss decides to fly out early to the coast for a Friday presentation of your preliminary report and won't need you on Saturday. On Wednesday, your best friend George wins 3 tickets to the game in a radio contest and offers you 2 of them. On Friday your sister calls to tell you it turns out Jimmy just had a bad cold and he's so bored in the house that she's put him to work polishing the silver. So you go to the game with your nephew after all ! Then there are those days when nothing we seem to do comes out right. If you are out of sync with the world and rhythms around you, you will never be "in the groove" again until you come back into balance with your body, your senses and your emotions - let alone with your environment. This is not as simple as it sounds, as anyone whose entire day has gone from bad to worse can attest ! On such a day, anything you try to do to fix the situation just makes matters worse. You might as well give up, relax and let the day play out.

The world around us seems just as woven into a net of synchronicity as we are. Sometimes fortuitous, seemingly unrelated events work together to achieve a common goal. Live events with a highly emotional impact seem to trigger simultaneous broadcasts of similar movies, television shows, releases of new video games or even concurrent outbreaks of similar things throughout the world. These things occur in clusters without any prior planning or intent. It's as though our human collective unconscious, if focused on a particular theme, is causing real events to manifest. To give an example, I was watching an old movie last night about a plane crash involving children. Horribly, I awoke this morning to news of a similar plane crash that had just happened. Perhaps our modern expectations of disasters like plane crashes, epidemics, revolutions, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc. is actually causing them to happen more frequently. Or there may simply be naturally occuring periodic cycles of cataclysm and change in our dimension.

But what if we could consciously direct and influence what manifests in our world ? We can, and we do - already, without realizing it. Focus on the positive, think and speak positively to raise the energy of our collective unconscious. If we ALL think and act more optimistically, we will shift our emphasis to more positive events. The media is often to blame in this regard with their emphasis on negative and depressing news items. This imbalance of news reporting distorts our perception of reality, of the world. Many good, positive and happy things happen in the world everyday but we seldom hear about them - they're not considered interesting enough or "newsworthy".

At some point, you have to ask yourself if you really believe in coincidence. What are the odds that something will happen to make your "impossible dream" come true ? There are probably astronomically high odds against it, in fact. Yet, such "impossible" scenarios play out all the time. Events, people and things all come together somehow to make something happen. When it's a good thing, we consider ourselves "lucky". When it's a bad thing, we call it a "freak occurrence" or "bad luck". Yet in both cases the mechanism of synchronicity was triggered to bring about the desired end. Now you're probably thinking, "but who wants a disaster to happen ?" Probably no one, but the media's constant attention on catastrophes keeps them foremost in the public's mind to the point that we now actually EXPECT such things to happen on a regular basis. Can you imagine how strange it would seem if an entire month went by in the world without a single outbreak of war, pestilence, famine, genocide, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, or earthquakes ? We are so accustomed to such disasters that we don't give them a second thought when we listen to the news. It's never good news, they always seem to emphasize the bad news. What would our typical day be like if our news stations began reporting predominantly happy news ? Perhaps if we expected good things to happen in the world, we'd get more of them ! Like attracts like. Think about that.

Mme. G

                                                                                                                                     
                            

June 2011: What Does Spirituality Mean to You ?

You may or may not have been raised in a traditional religion, but by adulthood we all form our own concept of spirituality. What does the word "spirituality" mean to you ? Is it observing religious rituals or holidays ? Is it a belief in an all-powerful father figure in the clouds ? Or something more abstract ?

Spirituality is a very personal thing, and often evolves over a person's lifetime. A simple explanation that satisfied your curiosity as a child may no longer work for you once you reach adulthood. One's questions - usually the unanswered ones - form the basis of your spirituality. Emotions and intuition are just as important - if not more so - as philosophical or religious teachings in shaping a person's spirituality. Some people are content with the idea of a God in heaven, looking after His creation. Others reject this traditional concept in favor of the atheistic view of a universe operating purely according to physical laws. Most people's spirituality falls somewhere in between, and many form their own ideas.

Whether you believe in one or more, or no gods as your religion your spirituality is a separate process. The way you approach daily life and its challenges reflects your personal spirituality. If this life is just a temporary trial on your way to a higher plane of existence, you may be more inclined to take earthly troubles in stride. If you believe in reincarnation, you will see subsequent lifetimes as a means to master the life lessons required to "graduate" to another level of spiritual evolution. On the other hand, if you believe that this life is your one and only chance to serve your God, you may take every moment seriously as an opportunity to live a righteous life, attempting to avoid sin and help others.

Usually the idealism of youth becomes tempered by the experiences of adulthood until the spiritual ideas you held as a child are transformed into a more realistic version you have developed. Many people today don't really have a cohesive religious or spiritual phiosophy, though they may attend religious services. Take some time to ask yourself what it is you really believe. If you don't know, maybe it's time to explore your own soul, to ask important questions. After all, if a religious system no longer serves your spiritual needs, why serve it ? Don't just blindly follow along because you "always have". When you figure out WHAT you believe and WHY you will be at peace. Keep searching !

True spirituality involves a connection to the natural world as well as to the supernatural world, in my opinion. You should FEEL part of something greater than yourself - there is an emotional component to faith. Whether you are in quiet meditation indoors, or outside walking in a forest, you will feel a profound sense of unity with the Great Spirit Beyond when you have achieved true spirituality. This sense of connection, of utter peace, is a blessing bestowed upon you by the Universe. You cannot achieve it by signing up for a weekend workshop, buy reading every book in the library, or by donating all your money to charity. These are all good things to do, but unless you feel at peace deep down inside your soul you are not truly connecting with your spiritual nature. Let live and then let GO ! Namaste.

Mme. G

                                                                                                                                    
                         

                                                                                                

February 2011: My Monster Valentine

This month's column is a (serious) tribute to the monsters under the bed, in your closet, and in the wild, if you will. For hundreds of years, all over the world, legends have persisted about various monster sightings. From werewolves to vampires and Bigfoot, we love our monsters ! So this month as a special valentine to them, MGTR is allowing the possibility of their existence on Earth. But how can we prove this ?

Science. We HAVE the technology, folks ! For several decades now, the NOAA and NASA have been developing satellite imaging technology to take photos and pinpoint objects on a scale of within a few feet. Such imaging has widely been applied in our military's monitoring of Iraqui activity and construction. Advanced sonar technology is routinely employed in commercial fishing, oceanography, underwater salvage, metallurgy, mining and oil drilling. Underwater diving equipment and minisub engineering has vastly improved in the last decade. Police have had high-resolution night vision scopes for some time now. IR (infrared) thermal imaging cameras and photographic image analysis software is used in a variety of law enforcement, industrial and military applications. So why not apply all of these tools to detecting creatures unknown to exist at present ? And the technology is rapidly evolving to the point where very probably within the next 5 years (if not already), we will be able to obtain the thermal signature of an individual animal's height, weight and appearance, both photographically and thermally. Once a new species is located, its DNA can easily be obtained and compared to genetic databases, including the human genome in the case of primates. Nearly every month, biologists are discovering previously-unknown species in the oceans and rainforests of the world. Why not organize a full-scale search for "monsters" worldwide ? Funding. Who gonna pay for ? And how many scientists want to put their professional credibility on the line if they did have the bankroll ? The best approach will ultimately come from the private sector - investors backing the development of new high-tech devices. The discovery of an actual Abominable Snowman or Loch Ness Monster would skyrocket the stock price of a fledgling company into the stratosphere !

I believe that technology will eventually expose any creature hiding on the planet. We are now regularly finding "lost tribes" of primitive humans in the jungles and mountainous regions of the world, so it stands to reason that soon technology will advance to the point of tracking every living creature on the planet. For example, if there are any remaining pockets of Australopithecus, Neanderthal, Homo erectus, Homens gigantes or other intelligent giant apes still surviving in forests they will be located and subjected to our scientific scrutiny. Bigfoot, Abominable Snowman and Swamp Ape - explained ! Werewolves - trapped ! Nessie - surfaced !

As for "interdimensional" visitors rumored to be the alien greys, Mothman, angels, evil demon entities and the like, they too must be subject to the physical laws of the universe and quantum mechanics. So if they truly exist, if only for sporadic appearances in our three dimesional world - they too will ultimately be exposed. The military has been conducting well-publicized exercises in remote viewing for decades now, and it's a good bet they've encountered a few such "bumps in the night" in addition to the usual enemy military troop maneuvers in Middle Eastern deserts ! But such discoveries would be classified information, of course. For the public's protection. So --

Do monsters really exist ? Only time - and technology - will tell.

Mme. G

October 2010: Psychic Connections

Our topic this month is Psychic Connections. When I say "psychic connections" I mean any mental/emotional connection or bond between two people. They don't necessarily have to be related, just closely involved in each others' lives. There have been countless stories of moms who suddenly realized their child was in danger during a time the child was not with them. And this bond doesn't end with childhood - plenty of parents have had premonitions of danger regarding adult children, especially those serving in the military. You may even find yourself thinking about an ex spouse or former friend you parted from on bad terms. Suddenly the person pops into your mind in some regard and soon afterward you will receive news about them. These are connections of the mind, forged by emotional ties (good or bad) to a person, anyone with whom you have a strong bond. For example, a close friend of mine performs candle spells and I always know when they involve me because suddenly, out of nowhere, I'll get that unmistakable whiff of melting wax. I make note of the time. I've called her up on several occasions to check on this, and in each instance (3 so far) she's confirmed she was burning a candle at the exact moment I smelled it !

These types of telepathic or empathic connections are difficult to verify scientifically because of all the variables - senses used, distance, whether the connectee is dead or alive, etc. In the case of soldiers it may be easier to document the time of an accident or enemy attack, but sometimes the parties involved find out months or years later about a connected experience when they are finally reunited. The key factor in all these connections seems to be the emotional element, something difficult to reproduce in a laboratory setting. As long as there are strong feelings (love, hate, friendship, danger, imminent death, etc.) a bond seems to span the distance between two persons who know each other well.

The following story illustrates a case of emotional connection that transcends the mortal plane. This month, our story winner is JL from Indiana, who writes: