A few years ago I was working as an expat contracts manager in Vietnam for a German multi-national engineering company on a multi-billion dollar power station project, however, having become completely disillusioned and disgusted by the behaviour of my company and our client on that project in the wake of a fatal accident on the site, myself and one of my close friends decided that we would leave the construction industry behind and instead open a bar together somewhere in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) when our assignments were completed.
After completing our assignments we set about investigating the process and looking around for suitable premises (as well as taking a bit of a well earned breather!), however after spending most of the first month or so just lazing around a swimming pool and twiddling my thumbs I decided that I would use some of the spare time that I found on my hands seeing if I could write a book.
Having spent most of the previous twelve years working on various power projects throughout the world, and with the experiences of the Vietnam project fresh in my mind, I felt that I had at least a basic skeleton for a story, and I certainly had no shortage of bizarre characters around me both at work and in my personal life in Vietnam to fill a book ten times over, but the one thing that was missing was a 'big ending'.
As I idled my way along with that project - which was always supposed to be little more than a time filling hobby - I began to notice more and more 'coincidences', both in my day-to-day life and in my reflections on my past. At first I just put that down to the fact that I was thinking about 'everything' more than I ever had done before and the fact that I was paying far more attention to what was going on around me than I ever had before, but it didn't take me very long to realise that the 'coincidences' that I was noticing seemed to go WAY beyond anything that could be dismissed so easily - And I say that as a previously 'devote agnostic' with no religious faith, a healthy skepticism of all things psychic, and what most people would describe as a 'gifted' scientific/mathematical/logical brain with a high IQ!
As the days went on I noticed that rather than diminishing, as I had expected them to once I had decided to set my logical brain on the look out for an explanation for those coincidences, the coincidences seemed to get more and more frequent AND more and more bizarre and extreme. As someone who had studied ‘Probability and Statistical Significance Testing’ as part of my tertiary education I struggled more each day to find any kind of logical explanation for the events which I was experiencing almost constantly with my own eyes and my own ears.
Within weeks I had reached the stage where what had started as a curious observation began to worry me quite a bit - Could I possibly be heading down the same road John Nash (The guy played by Russell Crowe in 'A Beautiful Mind')? I wasn’t sure, but it was certainly beginning to feel that way! I longed for the strange phenomena to go away and let me get my focus back on opening the bar, but rather than going away, it continued to get escalate, crossing over from the bizarrely improbable to the downright impossible!
I couldn't begin to list the number of bizarrely improbable things that happened here, but I will give you a taste of one (of the many) impossible things that happened to me:
At that time I was preparing to pack up my belongings from my 'company provided' house, as I intended to head back to my home in Scotland for a holiday before returning to Vietnam to pursue the bar idea. One morning I was packing away the CDs from my living room (about two or three hundred or so of them), but rather than just packing them into a box as I would normally do when moving house, I had decided to take time to organise and pack them properly for once. I was taking my time and listening to music whilst deciding how best to organise that part of my CD collection - there were at least another hundred CDs around various parts of my three bedroom, three storey house, but I planned to collect them together later and fit them in to their appropriate places once I had decided how best to organise the ones from the living room.
Anyway, before starting on what I expected to be a fairly easy, relaxing and enjoyable task, I decided to make myself a cup of coffee, however I noticed that I had run out of milk, which meant that I had to nip along to my local shop to buy some more. The shop was only a hundred yards or so from my house so I was gone for only a few minutes, but when I returned I found that all of the CDs from every room of my house had been gathered together in my livingroom and laid out in a perfectly formed, stunningly geometrical pattern on my floor!
The pattern was a six armed spiral shape. The curve of each arm was identical, even though formed out of square boxes which over lapped each other, and each arm of the spiral was perfectly equidistant from its neighbours, however what was particularly striking and impressive was the fact that each arm was also colour coded - one red, one yellow, one green, one blue, one black and one white, with each of those arms looking like a single-coloured spectrum, with the darkest shaded CD covers to the centre of the spiral gradually fading out to the lighter shaded covers at the tips of the arms!
The pattern was stunning - so intricate and yet so imposing, so mathematical and yet so beautiful, so organic and yet so precisely formed! I would have been extremely proud to have been able to have created such an impressive arrangement myself, but the truth is that even if I had been artistically minded enough to have imagined such a thing in the first place I would guess that it would probably have taken me at least a week to achieve anything like that level of visual and mathematical perfection…And yet ‘something’ had been able to gather all my CDs from all over the house and lay them out so creatively and so precisely on my sitting room floor all within just a few minutes!
That event really freaked me out quite a bit! I had sort of got used to bizarre and even 'impossible' things happening around me, but this had happened IN MY HOUSE, and whatever had done it was obviously WAY more 'able' than I could even imagine! I suppose that if I believed in poltergeists or things of that nature, then that would have been my best explanation of what was happening to me, but I was still sure that this was something 'mathematical and logical', something that could be explained somehow, so I steeled myself to stick around and try to work out what the hell was going on!
The following day, with my spiral shape still intact on the floor - I wasn't going to move it until I could understand it! - I continued with my packing chores, playing some CDs in the background, having removed them from the spiral with great care and ensuring that they were returned exactly as I had found them once played, but then a CD started to jump. I took it off and played another, but after a while that one also started to jump. My first thought was, "Oh no, not my CD player too!", as one of the 'coincidences' that I had been living with for the previous few weeks had been that all kinds of electrical and electronic devices had started to selectively go haywire around me!
I chose another CD but that one started skipping too but then for some reason it crossed my mind that maybe I should actually be trying to listening to what words the CDs were playing as they skipped around, as I had noticed that the CDs weren't simply skipping across from beginning to end, but were instead jumping both forward and backward, playing a line from one song, a few words from another, a couple of words from another, and so on. I decided to let the skipping CD play and I tried to make out what, if anything, it/they/whatever was saying, however the frequent changes in tempo, volume and background noise made it impossible for me to keep up with the frequent jumps.
Frustrated at being unable to follow the words that were playing, I shouted out (to no one in particular),
"Oh for f**k sake slow down!"
Much to my complete astonishment the CD slowed down immediately! It slowed way down - far slower even than if you were to play an old 45rpm vinyl single at 33 rpm. That really freaked me out! Not only were ‘they’ in my house – whoever or whatever ‘they were - but they could apparently both hear me and understand me!
I thought for a couple of seconds, as I really didn't know what to do next, but then my frustration took over again and I shouted out,
"Look! If you want to talk then let's talk, but for f**k sake stop messing around with my head like this!".
The CD stopped playing immediately and then a voice from nowhere and from everywhere around me said in a very calm, very monotonic voice,
"OK, let's talk...But it would be easier if you would step outside into your garden."
What happened next is a very long story but to summarise it very briefly, for the next three weeks or so I had many long, open, informative, two way conversations with 'the intelligence' that had contacted me. We discussed how, why, who, and every other question that I could think of asking, and all I can say here is that I got very sensible, logical, scientific answers to every question I could think of asking, as well as many answers to questions that I would never even have thought of asking.
During those three weeks we also spent a lot of time while they taught me 'other forms of communication' that we could use when it wasn't convenient to talk so openly including methods that most people would call 'telepathy', methods involving 'signs' that I would recognise but that most others would overlook, messages sent in dreams, and a whole lot more besides.
Despite any impression you may have formed from the foregoing, I make no claim to be psychic nor to have any kind of paranormal powers or ‘special’ skills. I am just an ordinary guy whose life was changed forever by a series or extraordinary events.
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