Straight and crooked
IN popular Chinese ghost stories, vampires would hop along straight lines. These vampires may hop to turn, but would have to travel in straight lines. This reflects the Chinese cultural and feng shui belief that evil spirits and forces travel in straight lines. To block them, a path, especially to a house, should be crooked and winding. A bridge across a river should not be straight but be in a zig-zag pattern. Alternatively, the straight path must be fringed with protective devices. Western geomancers also believe that "spirit" entities travel along straight lines, known as leys in Europe.
In the early 1920s, Alfred Watkins, a Hertfordshire man, realised that the ancient sites in the English countryside could be aligned along lines. The sites include stone circles (megaliths), standing stones (menhirs), old crosses, barrows, tumuli, mottes and baileys, moats, hill forts and camps, earthworks, holy wells, old churches and cathedrals, abbeys and other religious buildings. Other features which would help confirm the alignment would be straight roads, cross-roads, mark stones, old buildings, solitary and prominent hills, skyline notches, hollows or green lanes or other traces of disused roads. Watkins called these alignments "leys". Various people have postulated that the ley lines are linked to ancient folklore of ancient sites and that some form of energy flows through the leys.
A zig-zag bridge in a Chinese garden. Feng shui calls for crooked paths and bridges.
Janet Bord and Colin Bord, who write books on the paranormal, note that there are links between appearance of spirit beings, like the black dog and Owlman sightings, and ley lines. Black dogs also appeared at ley points, like old churches. Before the churches were built, the areas were already sacred and there might have been stone circles or burial mounds. The black-dog ghosts seem to patrol set routes, giving rise to the suspicion that the routes could be ley lines. Bord and Bord found alignments with four points in 31/2, 61/2 in 16km to five points in eight km for some of the black-dog areas. Leys sometimes pass through gaps in hedges. These gaps are said to be necessary to accommodate footpaths. However, the significance may be that the hedge area crossed by the ley line may be adversely affected by negative energies from underground water under the ley and automatically is an area where the hedge could not grow well and thus forms a gap.
Earth currents in leys would ebb and flow. The spirit beings would appear only at times when the conditions of the current are optimal for them. Bord and Bord, speaking of the (spirit) black dog's ley associations, stated: "According to feng-shui, the correct inter-relationship of straight and curved lines was vital if the favourable influences were to be maintained."
Investigators have noted that, all over the world, sightings of spirit beings, like ghost dogs, ghost birds, Big Hairy Men (BHM), are often accompanied by sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) at the same time in the same area.
Paranormal writer Bruce L. Cathie's research into the patterns of movements of those mysterious things known as UFOs did show that UFOs also travel along straight lines. Despite years of research since World War 2, UFOs are still not understood by modern scientists. There is exciting evidence that there is a world grid of criss-crossing intricate network of energy lines along which UFOs travelled!
Bruce was a DC3 co-pilot on a flight from Auckland to Paraparaumu in New Zealand in 1956. It was about 6pm and the conditions were calm with unlimited visibility and the plane was just south of Waverley at a height of 7,000 feet when Bruce saw an object at an extremely high altitude in the east. It travelled east to west across the track of the flight and disappeared with a flash of light at about 10,000 feet in the vicinity of D'Urville Island. It appeared to travel across New Zealand in the vicinity or slightly to the north of Cook Strait.
It was so large that two streaks, similar to vapour trails, extended from either side of the pale green disc. When halfway across the Strait, a small object detached itself from the parent body and dropped, not along a natural curved trajectory with the parent body, but vertically at great speed until it disappeared. Bruce said that this indicated the object seemed to be controlled. Later calculations indicated the disc was rather large, of some 500m in diameter. A Nelson newspaper reported the following day that there was an explosion at high altitude north of the city and the shock waves broke windows in some glasshouses.
On March 12, 1965, Bruce had another sighting. He was undertaking a positioning flight from Whenuapai, Auckland's main airport at that time, to Kaitaia at 11am. There was no passenger except an officer from the operations department and the weather was clear. On climbing out of the Whenuapai area, the plane crossed the southern end of Kaipara Harbour, just north of Helenville. The tide was out and the waters over the mudflats and estuaries were shallow.
He was about one-third the way across the harbour when he saw a grey-white whale-like object on the harbour bottom. This "whale" was definitely a metal fish and was perfectly streamlined and symmetrical, estimated to be 30m long and 5m wide. The navy confirmed there was no submarine there.
In April 1965, Bruce contacted a UFO organisation called New Zealand Scientific and Space Research, which had data collected over a period of 12 years. The materials included UFO sightings reported for March 26 1965. Most reports gave the time as 9.45 p.m., and the maximum variation in the times of the sightings was 15 minutes. The analysis of the sightings showed that the UFO track began 70 nautical miles north of New Plymouth at an altitude of 10,000m. The track passed over just west of Mount Egmont and finished at D'Urville Island at about 3,000m.
The location of his UFO sighting on March 12 1965, Bruce realised, was in line with what he saw on March 26. The report also showed that, on March 2 1965, some fishermen just north of the coast of New Plymouth saw a large object plunge into the sea and disappear. They thought it was an aircraft and reported to the authorities. But no aircraft and personnel were missing.
It also occurred to Bruce that his 1956 UFO sighting was along a track at 90 degrees to the March 26 1965 track. Both objects were travelling at 90 degrees to each other and disappeared in the same illuminating flash at D'Urville Island.
The UFO files noted that a Frenchman, Aime Michel, was studying UFOs for a number of years and had found small sections of tracklines in various parts of Europe. Saucers were hovering at various points along the tracks. Michel observed that the average distance between the points were 54.43km.
A great number of sightings occurred around the area of Blenheim, which had UFO activity even before the coming of the aircraft. When the March 26 1965 trackline was extended, it cut a 90 degree line from Blenheim. The distance of this point from Kaipara was 300 nautical miles (one nautical mile equals one minute of an arc of the circle of the globe). Michel's average of 54.43km equals roughly 30 nautical miles.
Thus, it is possible that the UFO sightings were along a grid with lines running north-south perpendicular to lines running east-west, spaced 30 minutes of an arc apart (30 nautical miles along north-south lines and 24 nautical miles along east-west lines). When other sightings were plotted against this grid of 30 nautical miles, the result was spectacular, as a great number of UFO sightings could be fitted into this grid. Bruce found 16 stationary and 17 moving UFOs plotted on grid intersections and tracklines.
From further research, Bruce concluded that this grid could be further divided into smaller patterns of lines 7.5 minutes apart (about 7.5 nautical miles or 13.6 km). The agreement between Aime Michel's observations in Europe of a grid of 54.43 kilometres and Bruce's New Zealand's grid of 30 minutes of an arc indicated a global grid along which UFOs travel.
Bord and Bord noted several reports that UFOs are often found around electro-magnetic installations like microwave towers, high-tension power lines, nuclear power installations, hydro-electric dams, bodies of water, missile silos and railway tracks. The famous UFO Foo fighters appeared after the event of high flying jet planes. UFOs were also found to be active during full moons, foggy nights and natural electro-magnetic disturbances, like electric storms. Some have postulated that electric disturbances create these UFOs and so-called spirits. Being only energy masses, these UFOs and spirits would be attracted to travel along energy lines which are normally straight. This indicates that the earth's terrain has energy lines, as postulated by feng shui and Western geomancers.
So feng shui has advocated that a path should be crooked and winding, with the objective of preventing a malevolent spirit force from travelling down it. Otherwise, a straight path should have a spirit screen placed across it, or be guarded on both sides by spirit guardian sentinels. All these feng shui measures will not only keep the evil spirits away, but they will also enhance the beauty of the landscape!
Dr Ong Hean-Tatt is a specialist on Chinese culture and Oriental strategic management science. He is a newspaper columnist and has authored several books on Chinese culture and feng shui. He currently runs the Gui management centre ( www.guiculture.com ).
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