Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, August 2024
The Oz Factor and Reality Blinks. What or Who is the Oz Behind the Curtain?
by: Brent Raynes
Thumbing through back issues of the Mufon UFO Journal, in one particular edition from back in August 1990, I stumbled upon a very high strange incident written up in the Current Case Log feature by Dan Wright. It read:
4/10/90, 10:50 p.m. event in Pensacola, Florida; investigators Carol and Rex Salisberry. A couple was crossing north over the Bay Bridge when they spotted an object ahead and to the east near the Pensacola shoreline. It was described as a long isosceles triangle with a centered red light on the bottom and pairs of white lights at the three apexes. Immediately, they could neither see nor hear the other autos and pedestrians along the bridge. As they neared the end of the bridge, the object crossed over their path to the west. They turned west also and, fearing a collision with unseen traffic, pulled into a parking lot. Exiting their car, they watched the object hover, then move off over the bay and out of sight. The normal traffic was then again visible and audible to them. Duration was estimated as 2-3 minutes.
In reported instances called the Oz Factor, a phenomenon noted decades ago by British researcher Jenny Randles, an inexplicable silence and a sudden absence of human and vehicular traffic occur, giving the experiencer a potentially dreaded feeling of being isolated and alone in the face of being suddenly thrust into a strange environment. And that environment periodically includes a UFO sighting and/or strange beings lurking nearby.
But to think that perhaps some of those people and cars who are missing from their normal perception could actually be present, but be invisible instead, and that an accident could result, as the Florida couple described was their fear, is indeed quite a disturbing notion. Fortunately, such instances that might suggest something like this could happen seem very, very rare.
A public relations officer for the United Nations, named Donald Estrella, accompanied Keel on one of his trips to West Virginia back in 1967. Back then the UN was quite interested in UFOs. In my communications with Dan Drasin, a film producer who also made some trips to West Virginia that same year with Keel, had verified for me that he had also met Estrella at some point. In The Mothman Prophecies, Keel wrote how Estrella had told him, "Seven or eight years ago, I was taking a vacation trip with four friends though the New England states. We were riding in a high-powered car along a deserted country road somewhere in New Hampshire, I believe. We were going quite fast when suddenly we hit something. This was in broad daylight, and it was as if we suddenly crashed into an invisible brick wall. The whole front of the car was smashed in. Luckily, none of us were hurt but we were a bit stunned. We got out and looked around. There was absolutely nothing on the road. We never could figure out what had happened."
In a recent issue of the Fortean Times (May 2024) in an article entitled "Reality blinks again," Jenny Randles herself throws what she calls "reality blinks" into the mix with the Oz Factor. She admits she first coined this term ten years earlier in Fortean Times because of a number of cases that had come to her attention. Then more recently, to her surprise, a Reddit poster used the same term explaining how his reality had "blinked." He was cutting carrots and listening to an audiobook when suddenly the sound of the reading faded out and then returned, like a blink in his senses. "In response, at least a dozen people added their own accounts, in which reality similarly switched, from their perspective - seeing objects move or appear and then disappear," Jenny wrote. "The consistent theme was that in a sudden if subtle way, their local reality permanently changed."
Her own blink, her own "glitch in the Matrix," occurred one day when out of nowhere she noticed a "dark mark" appear on a wall. "Oddly, so did my cat, which was sitting on my knee," Jenny added. "We both turned just as it 'blinked' into place. I thought at first it must be a fly or spider that had landed. But it was just a mark that 'must' have always been there. Yet we both seemingly noticed it 'arrive' at that moment - as if we were seeming if for the first time. Or it had just magically appeared within our reality."
Next Jenny recounted the case of a man named Roy who was walking to work in Colchester, England, on November 10, 1971, when he noticed a milky white and fuzzy egg-shaped light ahead of him and also noticed how the sound around him disappeared. "Nothing around him in this busy part of town was moving, no people, no noises," she added. "The Oz Factor has always included this kind of shift, but I had presumed it was a psychological one caused by the mind focusing on the strange experience. In Roy's reality blink it coincided with the arrival of a UFO."
"This baffling experience lasted unknown moments as time became immeasurable. Then: 'I turned the corner, and it was like opening a door and entering a party.' The silence, the lack of sensations all ended, and reality instantly returned - in a blink."
The author has understandably struggled to isolate and determine what components of these unusual experiences are psychological and physical. Was it all some sort of altered state of consciousness? A seizure of some kind? Was perception distorted due to energy generated by the UFO? Could it have even been a sort of shift in dimensional space?
Roy had other experiences too. His first such experience happened as a teenager one winter evening as he was walking through an alleyway, and he sensed someone was coming up from behind him. He stepped aside and instead of a person he saw a small floating light. Shortly afterwards he blacked out and came to at the end of the alley, alone and soaking wet. "Like I had stepped in the bath with all my clothes on," he recalled.
"I keep coming across 'haunted people' like this whose story feels much deeper than a routine account of fleeting lights in the sky," Jenny continued. "It implies the possibility of a much richer human component to what is going on. The kind of thing we are dealing with in these edge cases may be the key to close encounter experiences and particularly the alien abduction phenomenon."
