Speaking of Men In Black...

My digital answering machine recorded nine beeps today (or possibly very late last night). The odd thing is that no one had called. The phone never rang; the beeps (accompanied by modulated static) were somehow recorded directly into the memory chip.

In UFO lore, this might qualify as a "phantom phone call." Similar calls are sometimes received by close encounter witnesses (see John Keel's "The Mothman Prophecies" for post-encounter weirdness galore). But what interests me is that I knew how many beeps there would be before counting them. In "Transformation," Whitley Strieber recounts how he was startled to hear "nine knocks" high on the wall of his cabin in New York. This spurred him to try to discover not only how the impossibly high knocks had occurred, but what the knocks represented -- if anything.

Strieber's knocks occurred in three sets of three. My mystery beeps didn't. Strieber, if he is telling the truth, has a history of unusual encounters with apparent nonhuman beings. I don't. However, the beeps took place in what I can only describe as a synchronistic framework. Months ago, right after reading Keel's book, I received my first mystery call (and although I thought it was weird, I erased the "message" before counting the beeps). Today's call was the second such I've ever received. The first incident took place in the midst of an alarming -- albeit subjective -- degree of synchronicity. Today's occurred while finishing a book that specifically dealt with phantom phone calls, so one could argue that there's an acausal relationship there, a Jungian "meaningful coincidence."

Or just possibly something stranger.