Art Bell Makes His Final Exit On Friday the 13th

Art Bell (Arthur William Bell III) was born June 17, 1945, in Camp Lejeune, Jacksonville, North Carolina, and died (cause unknown) on Friday, April 13, 2018. An autopsy will be performed next week, but the mere flashing of the announcement of a "mysterious death of the famed conspiracy radio show host" on such a significant date has social media a'buzzin'.

Art Bell was the creator in 1984 and former host of Coast to Coast AM, and the creator of Dreamland, Midnight in the Desert, Art Bell's Dark Matter, and other shows. Coast to Coast AM, at the high point of Art's involvement, before he semi-retired in 2003, and more permanently did so in 2007, was syndicated on over 500 radio stations in North America. His listenership reached from 10-15 million people per week, according to TIME, and was ranked the number one overnight radio show in America during Art's heyday.

I've known Art for decades, being a regular guest on Coast to Coast AM over 40 times, including many shows hosted by Art, before George Noory replaced the retiring Art. Art Bell and I "live on" during his classic hosted episodes repeated on Saturday nights, under the name Somewhere in Time.

Bell served as a forum for many Fortean and cryptozoological topics that will not be mentioned in the obituaries you read in the mainstream media. We discussed Bigfoot, Yetis, Chupacabras, Mothman, Thunderbirds, other cryptids, and the twilight language often. I jokingly would have to steer him away from his humorous questions about Sasquatch and whether they were being dropped by "flying saucers."

Friday the 13th

Bell decided to exit on a day considered unlucky in Western superstition. The radio host Art Bell, 72, died April 13, 2018, a Friday, at his Pahrump, Nevada home, the Nye County Sheriff’s Office announced.

Bell had suffered from health problems in the previous years. He posted on his website in July 2016 that he was hospitalized for pneumonia and revealed at the time that he suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Coast to Coast AM, UFOs, and Politics

Bell’s paranormal-themed show, Coast to Coast AM, was on North American stations in the 1990s before he left the nightly show in 2002. He broadcast the show from Pahrump’s KNYE 95.1 FM, a station he founded and owned. According to the Coast to Coast AM website, Bell was an FCC licensed radio technician at age 13. He also set a Guinness World Record for a solo broadcast marathon, at more than 116 hours, while working as a DJ in Okinawa, Japan.

Art Bell served in the the U.S. Air Force as a medic during the Vietnam War and in his free time operated a pirate radio station at Amarillo Air Force Base. He would make a point of playing anti-war music (like Eve of Destruction and Fortunate Son) that was not aired on the American Forces Network. In his broadcast years, his conspiracy world view included shows on Area 51, UFOs, aliens, intruders shooting guns on his property, his pro-Obama stance, and his pro-Trump conversations.

Knowing Bell personally, I never faulted him for his missteps regarding Heaven's Gate, as he was attempting to document a story, as others had pursued it.

Bell's reputation issued from his wide range of guests from the world of the unexplained to the realm of Hollywood and Las Vegas. His list of interviewees was vast. 

Personal life

Airyn Ruiz, April 11, 2006 – his death. Children: Asia Rayne Bell and Alexander William Bell.

Ramona Lee Hayes, August 4, 1991 – January 5, 2006. Ramona Bell died unexpectedly, from an acute asthma attack.

Vickie L. Baker, married March 1, 1981, divorced, July 3, 1991. Children: Arthur William Bell IV

Sachiko Toguchi Bell Pontius, married 1965, divorced 1968. Children: Vincent Pontius, Lisa Pontius Minei.

Books

Art Bell authored, or co-authored, the following books: 

The Quickening: Today's Trends, Tomorrow's World

The Art of Talk (an autobiography) 

The Source: Journey Through the Unexplained (with Brad Steiger) 

The Edge: Man's Mysterious Past & Incredible Future (with Whitley Streiber) 

The Coming Global Superstorm (with Whitley Streiber), which became the basis for the popular movie, The Day After Tomorrow.

Sadly, the voice of Art Bell has been silenced, for he has taken his final retirement. But the memories of the respectful and intelligent interviewer lives on, as well as the recordings of so many programs he shared. The one thing you knew about Art, if he asked you a question about your book, he had read it. That thought about the guy was enduring, and so I could always listen to interviews he had with others knowing that too.

Goodbye, Art.

Friday the 13th = France's 9/11

The date is significant. It always is in a terror attack.

One media report dramatically summarized what happened, as if it was a cinematic plot. One eyewitness said the police on the street, creeping towards the Bataclan, looked like "they were in a movie."

"On a night when thousands of Paris residents and tourists were reveling and fans were enjoying a soccer match between France and world champion Germany, horror struck in an unprecedented manner. Terrorists -- some with AK-47s, some reportedly with bombs strapped to them -- attacked sites throughout the French capital and at the stadium where the soccer match was underway."

What do we know about November 13th?

• 1914 – Zaian War: Berber tribesmen inflict the heaviest defeat of French forces in Morocco at the Battle of El Herri.

• 1947 – The Soviet Union completes development of the AK-47, one of the first proper assault rifles.
• 1995 – A truck-bomb explodes outside of a US-operated Saudi Arabian National Guard training center in Riyadh, killing five Americans and two Indians. A group called the Islamic Movement for Change claims responsibility.
• 2001 – War on Terror: In the first such act since World War II, US President George W. Bush signs an executive order allowing military tribunals against foreigners suspected. 
• 2015 – the November 2015 Paris attacks, A set of coordinated terror attacks in Paris, France including multiple shootings, explosions, and a hostage crisis in the 10th arrondissement of Paris and the 11th arrondissement of Paris.

At least 6 coordinated attacks occurred. Sky News is saying 158 were killed in Paris. All attackers have been killed by law enforcement officers or died by suicide, states Fox News, after reports circulated all night that some were still at large.

Update: By November 14, 2015, the number of deaths was restated as 128 people killed by the terrorists. Reportedly, 8 terrorists were known dead, with 7 of them dying by suicide.

The Bataclan is a theatre located at 50 boulevard Voltaire in the 11th arrondissement of Paris.

Built in 1864 by the architect Charles Duval, its name refers to Ba-Ta-Clan, an operetta by Offenbach, but it is also a pun on the expression le tout bataclan(the whole caboodle), the oldest written use of which predates Offenbach in a journal entry of 11 Nov 1761 by Favart. The nearest Métro stations are Oberkampf on Line 5 and Line 9 and Filles du Calvaire on Line 8.

Some individuals escaping from the Bataclan mentioned they had to get back to their cars parked on the rue La Fayette. The Fayette factor?

My Friday the 13th tweet, send out a few minutes before 10 AM Eastern USA, I now find haunting: "Woke to a red dawn...."

We're there visual precursors, syncinematically?

Valentine's Day, Aurora, and Waffle Houses Again

Colorado's Aurora (literally "Red Dawn") is the site of a shooting on Valentine's Day, February 14, 2015.

Yes, another Aurora focus of violence. Another Waffle House. Another bloody Valentine's Day (see here). It followed a Friday the 13th.

Fast food in Red Dawn

You may recall that a Waffle House cook shot and killed a customer after an argument the morning of Friday, June 13th in 2014. That occurred outside of Atlanta. See more here on that incident.

As far as the Aurora event, here are some details:

A 19-year-old woman was shot early Saturday morning in the parking lot of an Aurora restaurant after shots were fired between two groups of people, authorities say.
The woman was taken to a local hospital with non-life threatening injuries, said Sgt. Chris Amsler, Aurora police spokeswoman. Her identity has not been released.
Aurora police have arrested a person of interest in the shooting. The name of the person has not been released.
Police are still searching for a second gunman who opened fire during the confrontation.
An argument flared between two groups of inside the Waffle House at 12880 E. Mississippi Ave. at about 4 a.m., Amsler said.
~For more see the Denver Post here.

Further information on Waffle House violence for 2014 (two shootings) and the 2002 Waffle House murders can be found here. See also, the 2012 article, "15 Strange Crimes That Took Place At A Waffle House."

Friday the 13th At Waffle House

Police say a Waffle House cook shot and killed a customer after an argument the morning of Friday, June 13th, 2014.

As you will recall, I was drawn to Eric Frank Russell's quote on June 12th, about death from the Martin Building.

It appears the suspect in the Waffle House shooting is a Martin. His name is Quintavius (which means "the fifth born") Martin (derived from Martis, the genitive case of the name of the Roman god of war, Mars).

  
Officers said they were called to the Waffle House, outside Atlanta, Georgia, on Fulton Industrial Boulevard and Shirley Drive, south of I-20, right after 4:30 a.m.

"Three people came in and they were being unruly,” said witness Ontray Haley. “The female that was with them they asked her to leave so she left, but the two guys hung around and one of them got into it with the cook and the security guard. Next this I know shots rang out and it was a chaotic scene. Everybody was running and ducking.”

Fulton County police detectives said the customer, identified as 33-year-old Adrian Mosley, may have thrown water into 25-year-old Quintavius Martin’s face before Martin, the Waffle House cook, pulled a gun.

“The guy was threatening the cook saying he's from this side of town and (Martin) said you can take it outside because I’m going to fire you up, which I guess he meant he wanted to shoot him or whatever,” Haley said. “I didn’t know the cook had a weapon on him because I thought the security guard shot him.”

When the gunfire stopped, Mosley was dead, police said.

“I hit the floor, got out of the way of gunfire,” said Haley. “It was crowded. People were just coming from the club up the street.”

Martin is charged with murder, among other charges, according to police.

Police said they are reviewing surveillance video from the restaurant.

The Waffle House was open for business by Friday afternoon of the same day.

Waffle Houses seem to attract such events....

In the early morning hours of Saturday, May 31, 2014, Kevin Jordan, a 43-year-old Griffin police officer and father of seven was shot and killed outside of the Waffle House at 1702 North Expressway, in the Atlanta, Georgia area. He was working as an off-duty security officer, in full uniform.

Griffin police said three drunken white individuals accosted Jordan, an African-American, with racial slurs before one of them, Michael D. Bowman, 30, shot Officer Jordan multiple times in the back.

A rather infamous multiple killing occurred at a Waffle House that is east of Interstate 75 in Davie, Florida, about 10 miles southwest of Fort Lauderdale.

On March 11, 2002, robbers left two employees dead and one injured. The victims, one man and one woman, were found in a freezer area of the Waffle House. Gerhard "Chip" Hojan, 28, and Jimmy Mickel, 34, had robbed the Waffle House of $1,888, and did not wish to leave any eyewitnesses. They did shoot Christina Delarosa, 17, a waitress, Willy Absolu, 29, the cook, and Barbara Nunn, 38, also a waitress. Nunn, however, survived the bullet to the back of her head, and identified the killers.

One site says that due to these "Waffle House Murders," this location is now haunted.

There is something a little bizarre about Waffle Houses, perhaps.

See also, the 2012 article, "15 Strange Crimes That Took Place At A Waffle House."

Full Moon on Friday the 13th: PsyWar or SubGenius?

"There is a dark poetry to ritual murder, to twilight language, to the fantastic convergences known as coincidence. Most 'conspiracy researchers' miss this. The best investigator – of the occult or of almost anything else – has a child-like sense of curiosity and wonder about seemingly mundane things." ~ Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare by Michael A Hoffman II (IHR: 1989, rev. 2001, page 7).

PsyWar. Wag the dog. Psy Ops. Black ops. Political warfare. False flag. Astroturfing. There are so many words being used in common jargon today that few understand the depths or even reality of psychological warfare taking place. How much of it is actually activated by a third party? That hardly seems important any more, due to the mere fact that the copycat effect, behavior contagion keeps the cycle going within its own self-repeating process.

Sometimes people get a feeling deep in their bones. They don't know why or what's going on. But it is very real to them. They don't know where it's coming from. Among some folks, the ones triggered and vulnerable, who are pushed around and sparked by such things, this Friday June 13th may be especially troubling. There is the sense to some that this Full Moon Friday the 13th might be one in which the human mood is provoked by the tidal wave of lunacy and phobias that haunt some people.

Let us not get bogged down in theories, beliefs, and conspiracies. I suggest we look at the data, open our eyes, and watch what happens, but not in some analytic frozen state.

I say, "Be aware. Be alert. Be ready to act. Or react."

On February 13, 2014, The Washington Post observed that there "have been at least 44 school shootings on K-12 or college campuses in 24 states — an average of more than three a month — since the deadly 2012 attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn....Twenty-eight people have died and 37 have been injured."

But there's even disagreement on the numbers, it appears.

On June 10, 2014, Huffington Post published a map (below, click on it to make it larger) noting that there had been 74 school shootings during the 18 months since the Newtown event. (Some questions have been raised about this chart, and the reasons for the debunking can be examined here.)

Full moons and new moons send out tidal waves that humans have believed for centuries do impact them. "Lunacy" is in the mind of the beholder, in more ways than one. Is it real or drama? The Newtown school shooting happened on December 14, 2012, right after the New Moon of December 13, 2012. That Sandy Hook time was visited by a dark night/dark knight.

Newtown bookended a violent year that many will recall dawned with the mass shooting on July 20, 2012, at a midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises, leaving 12 dead and 58 injured, 15 minutes after the film began. The active shooting took place in Theater No. 9 at the Century 16 Movie Theaters, located in Aurora, Colorado.

"The night is darkest just before the dawn.

And I promise you, the dawn is coming."

~ The Dark Knight (2008)

The name Aurora means "dawn." The Roman goddess of the dawn was named Aurora, and her siblings are Sol (Sun) and Luna (Moon). These names in Latin and Greek are Aurora/Eos, Sol/Helios, and Luna/Selene.

While using the ridicule curtain to counter the "lunacy" thoughts that are reflective of full and new moon experiences of mental health workers and hospital ER front line workers, with jokes about werewolves, some notes from research demonstrates some actual data linked to pets too.

A 2007 study at Colorado State University found that veterinary ER visits by cats and dogs went up on full-moon nights. It's possible that owners and their pets simply spend more time outside on nights when the moon is bright, increasing the risk of injury, researchers reported in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association.
Perhaps for similar reasons, a study published in the British Medical Journal in 2000 found that emergency-room admissions for animal bites went up at one hospital on nights with full moons, but studies in other places have failed to find a similar link.

Considering the almost mythological fear that a few in our society have for Friday the 13th, what happens when a full moon is added to the mix?

How rare are they? From 1990 through 2030, according to one source, there are only two Friday the 13ths taking place at the same time as a full moon. One, of course, is June 13, 2014. The other happened on March 13, 1998. Almost a hundred years ago, there was a full moon on Friday, June 13, 1919. What occurred on the 1998 date?

Deaths are sometimes insightful. Hans Joachim Pabst von Ohain (born December 14, 1911) was a German engineer, and the designer of the first operational jet engine. He died on Full Moon, Friday, March 13, 1998. Alexander Minto Hughes (born May 2, 1945), better known as Judge Dread, was an English reggae, ska musician, and the first white recording artist to have a reggae hit in Jamaica. He died from a heart attack as he walked off stage after performing at The Penny Theatre in Canterbury on Full Moon, Friday, March 13, 1998.

One death, that of Philip Gale (pictured, born in 1978), was a dramatic and sad suicide of a young genius. At the time of his death, Gale was an American pioneering Internet software developer, computer prodigy, and sophomore student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was notable for having written Total Access while at MIT, and was hired by EarthLink at the age of 16 to work on its development. Since the age of eight, Gale lived and studied at The Delphian School in Sheridan, Oregon, a private Scientology boarding school. 

Years later, a friend at Earthlink would introduce Gale to the Church of the SubGenius, run by the fictional figurehead, J. R. "Bob" Dobbs (pictured at top).

On Friday the 13th of March 1998, on a full moon night, Gale's depression allegedly due to his father's death three years earlier and his sense of boredom, came to a head.

For weeks, Gale had been asking classmates how to get access to the roof of MIT's tallest structure, informally known as the Green Building and formally as the Earth, Atmospheric & Planetary Sciences Building. On March 13, 1998, at about 7:30 p.m. in an empty classroom on the 15th floor of the Green Building, Gale wrote and drew the following on the blackboard: Isaac Newton's equation for how an object accelerates as it falls, along with a sketch of a stick figure tossing a chair. He signed it, "Phil was here," picked up a chair and hurled it through the heavy glass window. Witnesses said that he cleared the glass shards away and then jumped out the window. (Source. For more, see here and here.)
Eric Plosky, a student at MIT, was inside an adjacent dorm watching television at the time of Gale's death, and heard a crashing sound. Plosky recounted to National Public Radio, "The windows of the building were sealed. So he actually had to throw a chair out the window to break it so that he could jump through. The noise that we heard was that chair hitting the ground. Some of the people in my dorm actually looked out the window in time to see him fall." 

Beyond the record of such deaths as Gale's, nothing, seemingly, Earthshaking took place on March 13, 1998, although the High-Z Supernova Search Team became the first group to publish evidence that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate.

Maybe I missed something historically. Maybe I didn't. Certainly, it may be the context of the moment in time, more than the actual date. In March 1998, President Bill Clinton was fighting off statements from new women coming out of the woodwork with accusations of sexual improprieties. That was a melodrama in and of itself.

But that above noted source was incorrect about the number of incidents, and there was a Full Moon Friday the 13th on October 13, 2000, as well. Indeed, here's better data on the Friday the 13ths that overlapped with concurrent Full Moons:

Source.

Taking that chart, and looking at other data and another list with historical deaths and events, we have the following overlaps (listed in the American style, month/date/year) during a few Full Moons on Friday the 13ths:

10.13.1905 - Sir Henry Irving, 1st English actor to be knighted, the inspiration for the title character in Bram Stoker's 189 novel Dracula (1838-1905).

11.13.1970 - Bhola cyclone: Speeds up to 190 km/h (115 mph), tropical cyclone devastates the densely populated Ganges Delta region in the East of Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Estimated 500,000 people die. The biggest cyclone catastrophe of the 20th century.

03.23.1998 - Hans Joachim Pabst von Ohain, designed first jet engine (1911-1998); Alexander Minto Hughes, a/k/a Judge Dread, first Caucasian singer with a reggae hit in Jamaica (1945-1998); Philip Gale, Netnerd genius, author of Total Access (1978-1998).

10.13.2000 - Tony Roper, NASCAR driver (1964-2000); Jean Peters, American actress, former wife of Howard Hughes (1926-2000).

###

He was strolling along West Fourteenth, New York, when for no particular reason he cast a casual glance up the sheer side of the Martin Building, saw a human figure falling past the twelfth floor. ~ Eric Frank Russell, Sinister Barrier* 1939.

###

In the last few days of May 2014 and first days of June 2014, hardly anyone would not acknowledge we have seen the unfolding of a bizarre psychodrama, verging on the scale of the Aurora copycat outbursts, which were activated by The Dark Knight Rises theater shooting. Over this past weekend, a couple from Lafayette living in Las Vegas, who occupied a comic book fantasy and anti-cop world, thought they could "start the revolution" by killing two innocent police officers. What's next?

What will happen on June 13, 2014? Does it really matter? After the last few days, the USA is overwhelmed and tired of such news. Maybe everyone feeling a bit awful will sleep in all day.

"What we are witnessing in the wake of the public enactment of these alchemical psychodramas, whose spiritual consequences for mankind are far more momentous than most have thus far guessed, is a process of global occult initiation." ~ Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare by Michael A Hoffman II (IHR: 1989, rev. 2001, page 92).

*Footnote: I found and shared the above quotation on June 12th. Perhaps it will be revealed over the weekend, in something that happens, why I would be drawn to quoting that specific passage from Sinister Barrier. Eric Frank Russell is credited as one of the earliest science fiction writers to pull mundane happenings and the spirit of the works of Charles Fort into his novels.

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LIVE UPDATES for June 13, 2014:

Car crashes into CNN Center

Talk about starting out the day with a bang, with an event hitting right at the heart of the media.

Atlanta police this morning were trying to determine what caused a car to slam into the lobby of the CNN Center downtown. The Mercedes-Benz convertible crashed through the glass facade on the Marietta Street side of the building shortly after 4 a.m. No serious injuries were reported, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Atlanta Police Officer John Chafee said the driver, 22-year-old Gerlmy Javon Todd, was taken into custody. Todd admitted to smoking marijuana earlier in the morning. He has been charged with DUI, reckless driving and marijuana possession.

Richard Rockefeller Dies in Plane Crash

This day just turned tragically personal. I knew, and had dined with Richard Rockefeller, through mutual friends in Maine.

A small plane crashed outside New York City on June 13th, killing a great grandson of Standard Oil co-founder John D. Rockefeller.
The single-engine plane took off just after 8 a.m. Friday and went down after hitting some trees west of the airfield.
Richard Rockefeller, of Falmouth, Maine, was the only person on board the Portland, Maine-registered aircraft.
The 64-year-old was a doctor and father of two. He had recently been working on a way to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in wounded war veterans.
Rockefeller was a nephew of Nelson A. Rockefeller, the 41st vice president of the United States and governor of New York from 1959 to 1973. On Thursday, he ate dinner with his father, David Rockefeller, in Westchester to celebrate the family patriarch's 99th birthday.

Nigerian gospel singer Kefee dies

The Nigerian singer Kefee Don Momoh, who was reportedly pregnant, fell into a coma 15 days ago, while on a flight to Chicago, where she was working. The plane was forced to make an emergency landing and she was rushed to the ICU of an hospital in Los Angeles. Sources close to the family confirmed to Nigerian media that the Kokoroko crooner has died on the morning of June 13, 2014.

CNN to Drudge Report: The Iraqi situation is all over the news

Baghdad is in danger of collapsing, due to the advances of an armed group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

[Name Game: Isis (Ancient Greek: Ἶσις, original Egyptian pronunciation more likely "Aset" or "Iset") is a goddess in Ancient Egyptian religious beliefs, whose worship spread throughout the Greco-Roman world. She was worshipped as the ideal mother and wife as well as the patroness of nature and magic. She was the friend of slaves, sinners, artisans and the downtrodden, but she also listened to the prayers of the wealthy, maidens, aristocrats and rulers. Isis is often depicted as the mother of Horus, the hawk-headed god of war and protection (although in some traditions Horus's mother was Hathor). Isis is also known as protector of the dead and goddess of children.]

October 13: Ferrer, Fatima and Fatimah

The final apparition at Fatima took place on October 13, 1917. In five years, the 100th anniversary will be celebrated. In the meantime, let's ponder this guest blog by T. Peter Park, which is related to that and October 13th events, plus one tied to a lexilink. (I've added some other incidents that have occurred on October 13ths, following Park's remarks.)

October 13: Ferrer, Fatima, and the "Twilight Language"
This Saturday, October 13, should interest students of the "Twilight Language" and "Name Game." October is coincidentally (or perhaps not so coincidentally) the anniversary of two notable incidents in the 20th century history of Catholicism versus anti-Catholicism in the Iberian peninsula: the execution of the Spanish rationalist educator Francisco Ferrer on October 13, 1909, and the so-called "solar miracle" of the Virgin Mary in Fatima, Portugal exactly eight years later, on October 13, 1917.

On October 13, 1909, the Spanish anarchist and secularist educator Francisco Ferrer Guardia (1859-1909) was executed by a Spanish military firing squad in Barcelona on flimsy evidence as the alleged instigator of the July 1909 Semana Tragica ("Tragic Week") Barcelona riots where mobs burned churches and convents in protest against a military expedition to Morocco, widely believed to be motivated by a wish to protect mines there owned by the Jesuits. Ferrer's execution touched off a world-wide storm of anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic protests, and provoked a cabinet crisis in Spain itself. From 1901 to 1906, Ferrer had run an anarchist and anti-religious "Escuela Moderna" in Barcelona that inspired the founding of many similar schools throughout Spain and abroad, and it was widely believed that a reactionary, intolerant Spanish Church and State had framed him up on account of his radical and rationalist ideas.
Liberals, rationalists, socialists, and anarchists throughout Europe and the Americas hailed Ferrer as a judicially murdered martyr for rational thought and intellectual liberty, while conservatives and Catholics saw him as a revolutionary conspirator justly condemned and punished for his incitements to violence. Cities and towns throughout
Continental Europe named streets or plazas in Ferrer's honor, general strikes protesting the execution brought Italian cities to a standstill for several days that October, and rationalists, socialists, and anarchists founded "Ferrer Schools" or "Modern Schools" in his honor in the United States and other countries. The future historian Will Durant was a teacher at the New York Ferrer School in 1910-1911, and met and married his wife and future collaborator when she was one of his students there! In Spain itself, the international protests led to a cabinet crisis, as Prime Minister Antonio Maura's Conservative government was harshly criticized by his Liberal opponents for needlessly provoking foreign opinion by authorizing Ferrer's execution. The international polarization of opinion over Ferrer and his conviction recalls the Dreyfus Affair in France just a few years earlier. Although almost forgotten today, the Ferrer case probably received more public world-wide attention than any other single incident concerned with the history of anarchism, at least until the Sacco-Vanzetti affair of 1921-1927.

On October 13, 1917, a crowd of 70,000 pilgrims and curiosity-seekers gathered at the small Portuguese village of Fatima, where three peasant children had allegedly seen visions of the Virgin Mary on the 13th of every month for several months. While the three visionary children knelt, prayed, and chanted the Rosary as they had been doing on the 13th of each month, many people in the crowd reportedly saw the Sun "dance," spin, and change color for several minutes and then return to normal. Devout Catholics ever since have claimed the phenomenon as a miracle, while skeptics, and also liberal and middle-of-the-road Catholics unenthusiastic about apparitions and alleged modern miracles have interpreted it as a mass hallucination or unusual but quite natural atmospheric phenomenon. In the past few decades, some occult, "New Age," and Fortean writers have also seen the "dancing Sun" as a UFO! Since 1917, Fatima has become a major Catholic Marian shrine, rivaling Lourdes in popularity as a pilgrimage site, with "Our Lady of Fatima" as one of the most popular Virgin Mary devotions. Lourdes, Fatima, and Medjugorje in Croatia (formerly Yugoslavia) are probably the world's three most popular Marian pilgrimage shrines today.

Nobody to my knowledge has ever noted this coincidence of dates. Yet, it does seem an odd coincidence that the October 13 date, a few years apart, should have marked noteworthy episodes in the religion/irreligion conflict in the same part of Europe, in two neighboring countries. I have often wondered if it's just a mere meaningless coincidence, or if there might be some obscure connection after all. It's the sort of coincidence that easily inspires speculations about the "Twilight Language," about Carl Gustav Jung's "synchronicity," or about Fatima as perhaps somehow triggered by a memory of the Ferrer case in the Iberian "collective unconscious"!

Also, the place name Fatima recalls the Prophet Muhammad's daughter Fatimah, wife of his chief disciple Ali, revered by many Muslims (especially Shi'ites) as a sort of Islamic Virgin Mary figure. One of the best-known modern Marian apparitions took place in a village named for the Muslim counterpart of Mary! Portugal, like Spain, was occupied by the Muslims in the Middle Ages, we may recall. Again, could there possibly be
some sort of obscure connection here in this odd "name game" coincidence?
Could this Fatima-Fatimah connection be more "Twilight Language" at play?

Stimulated by T. Peter Park's essay, I note that October 13ths have, in the last forty years, been linked to aircraft crashes and disasters. For example:

1923 - Death of Alexis Maneyrol, French aviation pioneer, killed when his Peyret monoplane broke up in the air at Lympne Air Races, Kent.1972 – An Aeroflot Ilyushin Il-62 crashes outside Moscow killing 176.

1972 – Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crashes in the Andes mountains, near the border between Argentina and Chile. By December 23, 1972, only 16 out of 45 people lived long enough to be rescued. Survivors resort to eating dead passengers before their rescue two months later.
1976 – A Bolivian Boeing 707 cargo jet crashes in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, killing 100 (97, mostly children, killed on the ground).
1977 – Four Palestinians hijack Lufthansa Flight 181 to Somalia and demand release of 11 members of the Red Army Faction.
1983 – On night of October 13/14, Coastal Airways 707-436 was destroyed by fire at Perpignan, France.1992 – An Antonov An-124 operated by Antonov Airlines registered SSSR-82002, crashes near Kiev, Ukraine killing 8.
2009 – UN General Assembly decided to designate October 13th as the official date for the International Day for Natural Disaster Reduction. International Day for Natural Disaster Reduction encourages every citizen and government to take part in building more disaster resilient communities and nations.
2010 – The Copiapó mining accident in Copiapó, Chile comes to an end as all 33 miners arrive at the surface after surviving a record 69 days underground awaiting rescue.

Freemasonry/Templars Addendum:

As noted by Enki in a comment below, and MB in a communique:

On Friday, October 13, 1307 ... [King] Philip [IV of France ] ordered [Jacques] de Molay and scores of other French Templars to be simultaneously arrested. The arrest warrant started with the phrase: Dieu n'est pas content, nous avons des ennemis de la foi dans le Royaume ["God is not pleased. We have enemies of the faith in the kingdom"].  ~ Source.

Some have theorized that this event was the origin of the superstition that Friday the 13th is an unlucky day. It has also been suggested that the Templars, who had been exposed to Islam in the holy land, named Fatima, Portugal after Muhammad's daughter Fatimah. ~ Enki.