Paranormal fires and UFOs

What's the connection between fires and paranormal entities?

A graphite-style digital drawing of a burning candle.

Like I mentioned on Monday, I'm currently reading Operation Trojan Horse by John Keel. I have plenty of notes about it and it's giving me lots of things to dig deeper into. But last night, I read a bit about the connection between fire and the paranormal, and I can't stop thinking about it.

Here's the passage:

Essentially, fire breaks down the molecules of the substance being burned, freeing some of the energy contained therein and producing intense infrared radiation.
One well-known, heavily documented type of poltergeist (noisy ghost) manifestation produces mysterious fires. “Haunted” houses often burn to the ground eventually. Fires of undetermined origin erupt suddenly throughout UFO flap areas. Many pyromaniacs set fires because “a voice” in their head told them to do so.
Although I have had neither the means nor the time to study adequately and confirm this fire factor, my experiences in flap areas have led me to believe that the energies of these mysterious conflagrations are being utilized by the UFO phenomenon. There may be a definite relationship between the numbers of fires and the numbers of UFOs seen in a specific sector. A community suddenly beset with fifteen or twenty major fires within the short span of a week or two seems to produce more UFO sightings in that same period than a place with no fires. Either the UFOs are somehow indirectly causing these fires, or they are directly feasting upon the energies produced by the flames.

On the podcast, I've talked about how fire has come up during significant moments in the last few years; in particular, I covered fire during one of my Randonautica episodes.

I recounted a strange fire that I encountered in August 2021 after doing a solo Estes session at the haunted Hell Gate (a part of the East River where I've had some unusual experiences.) As I walked home from the waterfront at Astoria Park early on a Saturday morning, a manhole cover in the street blew up in flames a few feet away from me. (Like, dramatic flames emerging in the middle of the street that I had to call the fire department to deal with. Multiple engines came out and they had to block off the entire street.)

The experience left me shaken, but I tried to move past it. However, in spring 2022, while working on my Randonautica series, some new ideas struck me. While reflecting on connections between the "despair meme" reported in some randonauting experiences and my emotions when visiting the Hell Gate, I realized that the fire might have had a greater significance.

At the time, I wrote (and said in the podcast episode) that:

When I think of the last year or so, that time [when I encountered the manhole fire] seems to be a bit of a pivot point for a lot of things in my life.
In retrospect, I’d almost describe the feeling as being like, if, on a summer day, the temperature suddenly dropped and standing water started freezing. I . . . am pretty unsettled, and as I head home to get a coat and dress for the weather, I look around, and no one else can see it. They don’t feel the drop in temperature, they don’t see puddles freezing over, and they don’t need a coat. I’m experiencing a winter day, and they’re still all experiencing a beautiful summer day.
. . . It was as if something was off, and that something was external to me, but other people just didn’t notice it.
. . . I almost wonder if I could interpret this as a sort of initiation experience, because it does feel like I crossed some threshold that day.
. . . After that, things felt almost dreamlike for a while. A few days later, there was a freak storm and a number of people died, or lost everything, in Queens. The storm has nothing to do with me, of course, but it felt really strange to encounter two somewhat dystopian environmental dangers in the space of less than a week.

As I was taking notes on Keel's writing about fire, another significant fire came to mind: In 2019, the building next to ours burned down. I live in New York City, where neighboring buildings typically touch, so our apartment building was attached to the flaming house.

I spent hours watching the fire department try to put out the fire and wondering whether the fire would spread. Luckily, the building I lived in was brick and was relatively unscathed. (As unscathed as it could be after the firefighters did their thing to keep it from going up in flames.)

I didn't think much about that fire (aside from being lightly traumatized by it, living next to a burned out husk for the next few years, etc.)

But while reading about UFOs and fire, I remembered that something significant and UFO-related happened shortly after that fire.

I won't go into all the details here, but two months after the fire, I had an upsetting abduction dream. In the dream, the aliens handed my fellow abductees eggs, which I refused to accept.[^1] I was so upset by the experience that upon waking up, I decided I would never eat animal products again. (Even though that caused some inconveniences with my wedding, which was a couple months away and hadn't been planned to be vegan-friendly.) That is the first and so far only time that I've made a major life change because I was upset about a dream.

The dream was one of three important UFO-related synchronicities or encounters that have had a pretty big (and ultimately very positive) impact on my life since then. That's why I've started digging into UFO lore a bit more over the last few months, after avoiding them before that because of my fear over the dream. It's too much to go into the details now, but when it comes down to it, the UFO synchronicities have led to things that have (directly or indirectly) dramatically changed my life for the better. So it felt like something I should explore more.

Anyway, all of this seemed notable because of Keel's theory about fire releasing energy for entities to use. There is a connection between fires and UFO sightings, and I have a suspicion that there may have been a connection between the house fire and my UFO dream a couple months later.

I run into fires fairly often, in fact. (More often than most New Yorkers who I know.) I've always felt that there was a paranormal connection, but I never really understood what it was. So that's something I'm going to have to keep an eye out for.

More recently, on March 29, 2023, I encountered a fire along the fence between the local Costco parking lot and Socrates Sculpture Park (was a more Queens-waterfront sentence ever written?) Luckily, someone else had already called 911, but it was bizarre to see the fire, which was about six feet in circumference, burning among the ornamental bushes and English ivy on the side of the parking lot.

I have no idea what that fire might signify, but maybe in six months to a year, I'll have constructed some sort of retrospective narrative for it. At any rate, I now have an eye out for other fire-related paranormal lore.

[^1] As a sidenote, I recently read a bit of A Trojan Feast: The Food and Drink Offerings of Aliens, Faeries, and Sasquatch by Joshua Cutchin, in which he talks about abductees being given eggs, which he theorizes were actually large pills.