Top Synchromystics of the Year 2018: Jim Brandon and Alex Fulton

"Synchromysticism: The art of realizing meaningful coincidence in the seemingly mundane with mystical or esoteric significance." ~ Jake Kotze, The Brave New World Order, August 18, 2006.

Top Synchromystics of the Year 2018

by Loren Coleman, author Twilight Language, Mysterious America, Suicide Clusters, and The Copycat Effect.

Jim Brandon

Jim Brandon is the author of 1978's Weird America and 1983's The Rebirth of Pan: Hidden Faces of the American Earth Spirit. Both of these books have had a long-lasting effect on the thinking of Forteans and synchromystics, first in articles and books, and now in blogs, podcasts, and digital visual works.

The Fayette Factor, as I have characterized it, was first documented by researcher and writer William Grimstad back in 1977. Grimstad wrote about it in an article entitled "Fateful Fayette," Fortean Times, No. 25, Spring 1978, and in his two books shown here - Weird America and The Rebirth of Pan - credited as being authored by "Jim Brandon," who we know as Bill Grimstad.

In 2018, Jim Brandon/William Grimstad resurfaced with the reissuing of a revised edition of his audio book from 1974-1975, Sirius Rising, which he gave a new subtitle, Mr. Downard and the Synchromystical Boson.

Before Brandon became well-known in Fortean circles for his classic books, he had created and shared with associates his now-long-unavailable and difficult-to-obtain tape of his interviews with James Shelby Downard (March 13, 1913 – March 16, 1998). Yes, it was a reel-to-reel tape.

Renewed recognition of Sirius Rising was noted by me on March 30, and then bestowed as a formal critique on December 19, 2018, by Andrew W. Griffin of Red Dirt Report, in his review, "Magick Bullet: 'Sirius Rising: Mr. Downard and the Synchromystical Boson' by Jim Brandon."

Griffin gives a good overview of the entire contents of Siruis Rising tape, and there is no reason for me to repeat his words here. Griffin takes the reader along on the ride, and reminds us that Grimstad reinforces the definitions we are growing aware of ~ "Synchromysticism is the old study of 'name games' and 'Forteana,'" plus "All coincidences may have meaningful relationships."

Grimstad rightfully deserves to be one of the co-honorees for Top Synchromystics of 2018.

Following in the past tradition of receiving a small token acknowledging his award, Bill will be sent a cup with Lafayette and Washington on it.

Alex Fulton

Alex Fulton is the creator of Cryptokubrology on Twitter and the co-mastermind (in association with Robert Shawn Montgomery) behind various cryptokubrology contributions on YouTube and Facebook. (See their site here.)

During the fall of 2018, Alex Fulton began noting the Cryptokubrology hits were coming fast and furious.

Fulton further implied the cause behind this. The date 11/7/2018 "marked the beginning of the 237th month since Stanley Kubrick's death."

A Cryptokubrology "death watch" began.

Douglas Rain, the voice of HAL in 2001, died on November 11: "Here is the 11/11 Cryptokubrology hit," tweeted Fulton.

11/12/18 = Marvel Comics creator Stan Lee died.

11/16/18 = Alex Fulton's birthday.

11/16/18 = William Goldman, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, died.

11/16/18 = Pablo Ferro, graphic designer, film titles designer of Stanley Kubrick films (Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange), died..

11/24/18 = Another director died. Nicolas Roeg directed David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, and other important films.

11/26/18 = Bernardo Bertolucci died. He had directed The Last Emperor, The Dreamers, The Conformist, others.

11/27/18 = Samuel Hadida, with over 70 producing credits including the Resident Evil franchise, died unexpectedly at 64, in Santa Monica.

Alex Fulton deserves the recognition as one of the Top Synchromystics of 2018.

As a token of his award, Alex will receive a Christmas ornament fashioned after the key to room 237.

Past Synchromystics of the Year

Synchromystic of the Year 2017: David Charles Plate

Synchromystic of the Year 2016: Joe Alexander 

Synchromystic of the Year 2015: Will Morgan

Synchromystic of the Year 2014: Alan Abbadessa Green

Master List of Synchromystics of 2017: The Living

Fayette Factor: First Quarter 2017

The Fayette Factor seems to be always be with us. There are a surprisingly high incidence of Fortean (inexpliable) events linked to places named after one of the USA's Founding Fathers--the Marquis de Lafayette. Fayette, Lafayette, Fayetteville. The locations are "special," in terms of the weird quotient.

The Fayette Factor is probably one of the strangest mysteries in American Forteana, first discovered by researcher William (Bill) Grimstad, back in 1977, and written about in "Fateful Fayette," Fortean Times, No. 25, Spring 1978.

Now in Bill's 40th year of tracking the phenomenon, he shares the following recent notices of the Fayette Factor yesterday, in a email to me:

Self-Immolation

It’s been a lively Lafayette, CO scene in the past few days. A man claiming FBI harassment burned himself to death at a Lafayette Wal-Mart on March 27.

Suicide

Only 12 days earlier, on March 15, a man publicly shot himself to death in front of police near [the Flatirons] church in Lafayette.

Infanticide 

Also on March 27, a man was charged with stabbing to death his two infant daughters from Fayetteville, NC.  

Tillman Freeman is accused of killing his 2-year-old and 4-day-old daughters, Genesis and Serenity.

~ Bill Grimstad

Phantom Clowns: Fayette Factor

The ripples in the media keep moving out from the original Greenville Phantom Clown sightings, and it was only a matter of time until other Forteana would get involved.

I have kept alive Jim Brandon's remarks on the impact of the Fayette Factor through tracking the incidents way beyond his first mentions of them in his The Rebirth of Pan and his private correspondence. They hold an intrinsic truth for synchromystic investigators, and these self-evident discoveries are key to gathering insights through time and space.

I expected the Fayette ("little fairy," "little enchantment") Factor to show itself in the midst of this current rapidly expanding Phantom Clowns flap. (The term "flap," by the way, comes from the use of the word in World War II, as in "there's a flap on" - an excitement or some especially chaotic event - first spread through ufology via a wave of flying saucer sightings, a "ufo flap.")

The only question would be will it be a Fayette, a LaFayette, a Lafayetteville, or a Fayetteville?

The winner? Fayetteville. In North Carolina.

Fayetteville police said around 10 p.m. Tuesday [September 6, 2016], a call came in for a sighting of a clown near the wood line at Fillyaw Road and Applewood Lane.
Officers responded but said they found nothing suspicious.
An anonymous call made the report and when law enforcement got on scene, they say they could not contact the caller.
“Definitely something out of the ordinary. We want people to report those if they see any clowns in the area. At this point in time, it is unconfirmed. We can’t say there was or wasn’t a clown but we will check up on any reports,” said Officer Shawn Strepay with Fayetteville police.
However, some people who live right at the intersection have no doubts about it.
“I think there really is someone out here dressed. I think someone watched too many clown shows, you know, American horror stories or something and they are trying to impersonate or do the same thing,” said Chris Brinkley who lives at an apartment complex right at the intersection where the sighting came from.
Other people aren’t as sure.
“I haven’t seen any sightings of a clown,” said Corrisa Corbitt.
Corbitt lives right across the street from where the sighting happened.
She says her 9-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter play outside all the time, she says regardless of clowns when she heard about the story…she told her kids to be careful.
“Anything could happen it could be a hoax it could be true but I still take safety precautions....” Source.

That was followed by this:

A 911 call reveals the moments after two women said they saw a clown standing near a Fayetteville intersection Tuesday [September 6, 2016].
“We just saw a man dressed up in a clown outfit on the side of the road trying to stop cars,” the caller told the dispatcher.
Fayetteville is the latest city in North Carolina with reports of a clown sighting. The past week, clown sightings have been reported in Greensboro and Winston Salem.
“We saw on the news about all this stuff,” the caller said.
The woman called 911 around 10 p.m. after seeing a man in red clown mask standing at the intersection of Fillyaw Road and Applewood Lane.
“I’m scared. I want to go home,” the caller said.
She described the man as wearing a red clown mask and a paintball vest.
“That was scary as heck,” she told the dispatcher.
About half way through the five minute call, the woman turns her vehicle around to confirm the intersection.
“Is he still standing there?” she said. “If I see him out, I’m going to flip the hell out.”
Officers responded but said they found nothing suspicious.
“Definitely something out of the ordinary. We want people to report those if they see any clowns in the area,” said Officer Shawn Strepay with Fayetteville police. Source.

h/t Robert S; Steve L. 

Nervous NickName™ Game

In Jim Brandon's 1983 book, The Rebirth of Pan: Hidden Faces of the American Earth Spirit, he wrote, regarding the "name game":

I'm not talking here of such spooky tongue-twisters as H.P. Lovecraft's Yog-Sothoth or Arthur Machen's Ishakshar, but of quite ordinary names like Bell, Beall and variants, Crowley, Francis, Grafton, Grubb, Magee/McGee, Mason, McKinney, Montpelier, Parsons, Pike, Shelby, Vernon, Watson/Watt, Williams/Williamson. I have others on file, but these are the ones which I have accumulated the most instances. 

In my 1983 Mysterious America, I observed:

Cryptologic or coincidence? Jim Brandon should be credited with calling attention to the name Watts/Watkins/Watson, and its entanglement with inexplicable things. Some other names involved in mysterious events pinpointed by Brandon are Bell, Mason, Parsons, Pike, Vernon, and Warren. The influence of such names as Mason, Pike, Warren, and Lafayette, for example, issues, in some cryptopolitical and occult way, from their ties to the Masonic tradition.

Nicholas Name Game

One of the hidden name games that seems constantly in battle for our attention, second only to the Fayette Factor, is the one with roots in the name Nicholas.

Jim Brandon, author of Weird America (1978) and The Rebirth of Pan (1983), emailed me on April 10, 2012,

I wanted to add a couple of candidates to the Names of Power list – which I’ve probably mentioned before: that would be Nicholas and permutations (from Old Nick and Santa Claus up), and U.S. presidential names.

Nicholas does have some interesting connections:

Nicholas = English and Dutch: from the personal name (Greek Nikolaos, from nikān "to conquer" + laos "people"). Forms with -ch- are due to hypercorrection. The name in various vernacular forms was popular among Christians throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, largely as a result of the fame of a 4th-century Lycian bishop, about whom a large number of legends grew up, and who was venerated in the Orthodox Church as well as the Catholic. In English-speaking countries, this surname is also found as an Americanized form of various Greek surnames such as Papanikolaou "(son of) Nicholas the priest" and patronymics such as Nikolopoulos.

For years, Brandon has noted the Nicholas name game. For example,  in 2012, he wrote:

I suppose y’all noticed that the successful walk over Niagara Falls brought a hot name-of-power into play, in this case Nervous Nick, which seems to be running a close second to Fateful Fay these days.
Nik Wallenda (aka Nicholas Troffer) reportedly made the only known walk directly over the falls, rather than over the river farther away. He wore a safety device at the insistence of ABC-TV. Incredible, nevertheless.

In recent years, Brandon has had fun with various catchy ways to characterize this special name-of-power, beyond "Nervous Nick" (June 16, 2012), to include "nasty nomenklatura" (October 8, 2012), "the Nicholas/Nick/Old Nick angle" (May 30, 2013), "Nickolauson" (April 29, 2015), and most recently, humorously, the "NickName™ nexus" (March 22, 2016).

Examining monikers, sometimes we find surprises. For instance, I discovered the name Nixon, which is an English baby name, is part of this name nexus. The meaning of the name Nixon is, literally, an abbreviation of Nicholas.

Nike (Winged Victory), Louvre, Paris, France.

The mythological Nike was a Greek goddess of victory and root origin of Nicholas. The Roman equivalent was Victoria. Depending upon the time of various myths, she was described as the daughter of the Titan Pallas and the goddess Styx, and the sister of Kratos (Strength), Bia (Force), and Zelus (Zeal).

Names stemming from Nike include among others: Nikolaos, Nicholas, Nicola, Nick, Nicolai, Niccolò, Nikolai, Nicolae, Nils, Klaas, Nicole, Ike, Niki, Nikita, Nika, Nieke, Naike, Niketas, Nikki, Nico, and Veronica.

Nicholas in the News

How do names aligned to "Nicholas/Nick" slip into some of the violent stories we track?

Let's take the shooting on Sunday, May 29, 2016, on the west side of Houston, Texas. An active shooter began firing shots around 10 a.m. at 13200 Memorial Drive, at the corner of Memorial Drive and Wycliffe. (See more details, here.)

When the story was first published, no names of the shooter or the victims were published. A day later, the identities began surfacing in the media.

The gunman fired 212 rounds during a rampage at an auto detail shop as he killed one and injured several. He was shot dead in the event, and was identified as Army veteran Dionisio Garza III from Rancho Cucamonga, San Bernardino County, California.

In and of itself, "Dionisio Garza" is quite a name.

Garza is a Galician and Basque noble surname and the Spanish language equivalent of Heron (bird). Garza has also become a part of many placenames. Garza was the surname of many Sephardic Jews that settled in Monterrey, Nuevo León and the name is still found in many famous people from that Mexican state.

Dionisio is the Spanish and Italian form of Dionysius. The Greek name Dionysius, deriving from the name of the Greek god Dionysus, was exceedingly common, and many ancient people, famous and otherwise, bore it. It remains a common name today in the form Dennis (Denys, Denis, Denise). The modern Greek form of the name is Dionysios or Dionysis. The Spanish form of the name is Dionisio.

The cult of Dionysus was closely associated with trees, specifically the fig tree, and some of his bynames exhibit this, such as Endendros "he in the tree" or Dendritēs, "he of the tree". The original meaning is suggested as "he who runs among the trees," or that of a "runner in the woods". Some analysts propose the more cosmological interpretation of "he who impels the (world-)tree." This interpretation explains how the name could have been re-interpreted from a meaning of "tree" to the name of a mountain: the axis mundi of Indo-European mythology is represented both as a world-tree and as a world-mountain.

Dionisio Garza III, 25, was an Army vet and had spent two tours in Afghanistan.

The owner of the auto detail shop saw the bare-chested man with a crew cut (Garza) stride calmly up to his wife Sunday morning as she chatted with a longtime customer at their family-owned car wash off Memorial Drive. He reached around her, shooting Eugene Linscomb in the head while the 56-year-old sat in his Mercedes. (Linscomb is an English name from a Devon location called Lincombe, named in Old English with lin "flax" or lind "lime tree" + cumb "valley.")

"That man's the devil," the gunman declared.

The owner's wife sank to the ground, reciting the Lord's Prayer.

"Y'all calm down. I'm not going to kill y'all, y'all are Christians," Garza said.

Railing against gays, Jews, and Walmart, Garza then walked back toward his car to grab an AR-15 assault rifle, yelling that the world was coming to an end. The owner, who has run Memorial Hand Car Wash for the past 13 years, seized the opportunity to escape. Grabbing his wife's hand, they sprinted across the street to a Chase Bank and jumped a residential wall.

A law enforcement officer shot and killed Garza.

The names of the owner and his wife, who survived this event: Paris and Felicia Nichols.

The Nicholas/Nick/Nike/Nichols phenomenon was in evidence again. The NickName™ Game lives on.

Let's Talk About Pan

Note the panpipe or pan flute around the neck of this new Peter Pan?

I'd like to commence a conversation involving the considered conclusions of Forteans and synchromystics. Specifically, I wonder how we all are feeling about the new Pan film? The movie is placing itself to the forefront with the use of the subtle marketing of the old Greek god of the wild, rustic music, and companion of the nymphs, Pan.

In the world of new movies, Pan is an forecoming synchrocinematic effort, directed by Joe Wright and written by Jason Fuchs. It stars Hugh Jackman, Garrett Hedlund, Rooney Mara, Amanda Seyfried, and Levi Miller as the title character. As an anonymous writer put it, Pan is "an invented origin story for Peter Pan and Captain Hook."

Pan is scheduled for release in the USA on October 9, 2015, and in the United Kingdom on October 16, 2015. I'm assuming worldwide distribution will follow.

I asked the author of The Rebirth of Pan and Weird America, Jim Brandon, to share some thoughts about the forthcoming Pan film:

Looks a bit misleading to me, since it's really about Peter Pan, of which there have been around ten versions, starting with Walt Disney’s in 1953, according to Netflix. Of course some are spinoffs like Hook (1991, with Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams) and Finding Neverland (2004, with Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet).
The best treatment of the mythological character that I’m aware of would be the Spanish-made Pan’s Labyrinth (2006, with unknown players but good special effects). 

Craig Heimbichner, the co-author of Ritual America, forwards his reaction to Pan:

To the cognoscenti, Pan is not a benign or benevolent member of the Hellenic pantheon--Wiccans to the contrary--but a dark figure and a betrayer. The encoding of Pan symbols in the Group Mind fits the general pattern of the ignorant, seemingly playful, self-destructive behavior of the human race as the Kali Yuga winds down. 

Adam Parfrey, the lead coauthor of of Ritual America, notes that he once wrote about the modern-day manifestation of "Pan" in what I feel is today a classic article, "Pederastic Park?".

Also, he mentions an extension of his "Pan" sense of such cinema by Jimbo X in "Steven Spielberg: The King of Child Exploitation Cinema?"

As far as is known, Steven Spielberg is unattached to this version of the story.

Insights from others are shared by Matthew Bell:

According to the one of the 20th century's leading experts on ancient Rome, R. E. A. Palmer: "In Rome Pan, an old Greek god ..., was thought of as a deity of good health."
(Robert Everett Allen Palmer II, "Northern Campus Martius" [Studies of the northern Campus Martius in Ancient Rome], Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 80, no. 4, 1990, p. 36)

Here is the famous "Pan is dead," as cited in Hamlet's Mill: "Everyone has once read, for it comes up many times in literature, of that pilot in the reign of Tiberius, who, as he was sailing along in the Aegean on a quiet evening, heard a loud voice announcing that 'Great Pan was dead.' ...On the one hand, it announced the end of paganism: Pan with his pipes, the demon of still sun-drenched noon, the pagan god of glade and pasture and the rural idyll, had yielded to the supernatural. On the other hand the myth has been understood as telling of the death of Christ in the 19th year of Tiberius: the Son of God who was everything from Alpha to Omega was identified with Pan = 'All.'"
(Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time, paperback ed., 4th printing, Jaffrey, N.H.: David R. Godine Publisher, 1998, p. 275.)

There is a Socratic angle that is personally interesting to me. In his dialog Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates report that he could not remember his own past remarks on "love" (see also the Symposium): "...I can't remember at all because I was completely possessed by the gods..." (Socrates, Phaedrus, 263d; John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson, eds., Plato: Complete Works, Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publ., 1997, p. 540.)

Which "gods"? "Then I perceive that the Nymphs of Achelous and Pan the son of Hermes, who inspired me, were far better rhetoricians than Lysias the son of Cephalus." (Socrates,Phaedrus, 263d; B. Jowett, ed., Dialogues of Plato: Translated Into English With Analysis and Introductions, 3rd ed., vol. 1, New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1892, p. 472.)

Don't forget James Shelby Downard's "All that is hidden will be made manifest."

"All" in Greek is of course pan. Therefore, we may say: "Pan that

is hidden will be made manifest." ~ Matthew Bell.

In the realm of stream of consciousness linking of one thought to another, where Pan and Peter Pan turn up in the middle, Wayne J. Bush's Tricked by the Light blog captured an array of good illustrations and associations for the 2013 illustrated "Tricksters & the Trickster God."

What are your thoughts?