Strange Light
Eclipses and Other Aerial Phenomena
My neighbor Tom knows a lot about strange things in the sky. I ran into him on a walk the morning after Thanksgiving. “There’s Tom,” I said as his truck ambled down the road just like the time two weeks ago when I first met him. He slowed to a stop, waved to me and then launched into the tale that’s available to watch on Unsolved Mysteries, Berkshire UFO. “It was crazy,” he shook his head recalling his abduction at ten years old. “I got taken up in a beam of light.”
The correct term right now for UFO is UAP or unidentified aerial phenomenon. Since I’m an astrologer, I’ve been thinking about another aerial phenomenon — eclipses.
On November 30, the moon will be darkened by the earth’s shadow and the silvery brilliance will be stained at 8 Gemini. The eclipsed full moon at the north node gives us a volatility and unpredictability in the mutable air sign. It feels super heady and anxious. But at least it’s a penumbral or partial eclipse. It will set the stage for the total solar eclipse on December 14 when the sun will be obscured by the moon. The solar eclipse at the dragon’s tail sucks away excess, wipes our ambitions of needless fantasy, and brings the holiday cheer to a sober state.
After my walk, I got home and pulled the chart for that night in 1969 when Tom and several others in surrounding counties reported their encounters.
The chart has 22 Aries rising with Mars as the ruler of the Asc. in Sagittarius in the 9th whole sign house. Although Tom rejects the term “abduction,” Mars in Sagittarius certainly represents being stolen to a foreign, far away place by force. This Mars is also conjunct the current south node raking up past trauma. Venus in Leo in the 5th house of children aligns with the fact that most of those taken were in fact very young. The moon-Neptune opposition blurs the whole mystifying event from memory. The common thread in their accounts is the concept of “missing time.” To those abducted, the time stolen felt like 15 minutes but when they returned — to their cars, Lake Mansfield, in front of the drug store — they discovered that in actuality hours had passed. The planet of illusion and haze is working over time in this chart.
But what’s absolutely striking is that the reported alien encounter happened between a pair of eclipses. There was a lunar eclipse in Pisces on August 27th followed by a solar eclipse in Virgo on September 10. The missing time could be seen as a swinging door between the eclipses. The gateway between the obscuring of the moon and the sun brings strangeness, confusion, hallucinations?, aliens?!
Funny that this episode of Unsolved Mysteries was released in June 2020 just after the nodes ingressed into Gemini and Sagittarius, and thus squaring the nodes in the chart of the abduction.
And then to be here now, on the heels of the upcoming eclipse in a county where the nights, as my friend put it, are “a whole other type of darkness.” It’s the sort of night that fully surrenders to the howls of what I’m told are coyotes but whose screeches resemble a cackle of witches gathering in the woods. Mars sparkles in the sky. Last night, the full moon broadcast its white lamp as we sat outside with the flashlights dangling in our laps.
The unknown realms makes me feel both childlike and ancient. I grew up with one vivid tale of a UFO sighting retold annually by my dad from his days driving trains across the south west. From his retelling, I always imagined a great green glowing light shaking the tons of freight in his train. The supernatural, from both parents really, was made totally natural.
As an astrologer, I am a counter of degrees and planetary patterns but instead of feeling smarter about the future I am constantly in awe. Reality is just so much more creative than we assume! Not that long ago, it would have been totally wild to consider being out of Brooklyn and yet we settled in the woods just before the pandemic hit. I didn’t think I’d be checking my kids for ticks or scanning our yard for poison ivy (I still don’t really know what it looks like). My point is that the unimaginable can show up, beam its strange light on us and take us to where we’d never choose to go. It’s terrifying and mystifying but gives us tales of glory should we survive it.
Oh, and to my astro nerds out there curious about the event syncronicity to current transits — as I write this the moon is transiting the exact degree when the abduction took place -- 20 Taurus.
Wishing everyone just the right amount of eclipse voltage to invigorate any stagnant energy in life and take us to new fronteirs.
Inner Ring: Berkshire UFO Event Chart
Outer Ring: November 29, 2020 Transits