(40a) Inventing the truth

V
On June 7th 2000, I was giving Coincidences its final proofreading.

I decided to amend the previous example by including, for the first time, the references to Dr Fletcher and his support for Geller. Then I moved on to check examples 12 and 13 (of Coincidences).

In this Blog these are now Entries (100) and (88).

I was then asked by my wife to come with her and our son to help out on her allotment, which lay on the West Hill. Just as we were about to depart she said that Sacha had changed our minds for us by announcing that he preferred to fly the kite.
So we went instead to the East Hill.

My kite was a present from Fiona on my fortieth birthday, and I think that we had only successfully flown it once before that. Having had some snacks and drinks I got the kite airborne. It was supposed to be like a UFO as it flew, spinning around in an unusual manner and coruscating in the bright sun.

At 5.30 p.m. a woman with a dog emerged from a wooded area over a hundred metres away and stood staring fixedly at my kite.
Some minutes later she came towards us and then asked if we knew Craig Sams. http://www.craigsams.com/
We said that we did.
She said that she thought so because he and his father Kenneth had invented that kite.

But we knew Craig as a (sometime) neighbour and friend — his main residence was in London but he retained a house in an adjacent street to ours.

We had no idea of any connection between him and the kite.

The lady introduced herself as Sally Moore and said that Kenneth (whom we had never met) had developed the design in the 1970s and would fly the thing for hours in London’s Regents Park.
She explained that she had known the Sams family in London. She had once had such a kite too, and would fly it in Hastings during the carnival.
The kite, she said, was called UFO SAM.

Fiona knew that, but, of course, had made no connection with Craig Sams.

A couple of years earlier Sally had bumped into Craig and his wife, Jo, by the Hastings seafront and hence knew that they had a house down here. She now had a home in Bath but was staying for two weeks in a place owned by her parents in the road at the bottom of ours whilst she tried to finish a romantic novel that she was writing. She said that she had also written, but not yet published, a book of dreams.

I said that I was finishing off a book on coincidences, and that she would now be becoming part of it!

I recalled that I had actually noted one coincidence involving Craig Sams himself from a few years previous, and that I had included it in my first draft of the book before later removing it.

I had even printed this example out for Craig when he had dropped in for a drink one morning.

And I also remembered that there was a Uri Geller link there too.

So I dug it out from my files for 1996.

This is it:

Uri Geller, Craig Sams, me and the experiments
On July 7th 1996, my wife informed me of an interesting dream she had just had. Here it is in her own words:
"I dreamt that James had invented something, or rather put together two ideas from two different books that made an invention when related. I thought that the fire brigade would try it out on the West Hill. They were using a light as bright as the sun to burn something. The invention was a form of power like nuclear fission. I had to look away.
They had reflector glasses to preserve their eyes. At the other end of the West Hill there was something the rest of the ring of spectators could look at — a fire in the shape of a steam engine burnt in powder on the grass.
After that I met Uri Geller. I thought he was interested in James’s invention. He seemed older in the flesh than he looks on TV. I retrieved the two books to take back to James."
A day or two later she was sorting through some of my books and noted The Geller Effect (see Entry 30).
She had not read it before, but now prompted by her dream did so.
The previous day she had visited two friends who spend most of their time in London but who also had a house around the corner from us: Craig Sams and Jo Fairley. She began a slow reading of it, at the rate of little more than a chapter a day.

On July 12th 1996 she came across the following line: "I met two people, Craig Sams and George Schrenzel, who were already in the health foods field."
He had developed a line of foods with them afterwards. Until she read this she did not know of any connection between Craig and Uri Geller.
This was in chapter seven of Geller’s book, which begins, "Ever since I can remember, I have been inventing things." He then goes on to detail some of the inventions which he devised and then helped to get produced and marketed by the small production company of his friend Meir Gitlis: Nachsol Electronics.
The day before she read that, and after she had related to me her dream, I showed her the account of example 30, also involving Geller.
Also on July 12th 1996 I received in the mail from Dr Roderick Main the two chapters of his thesis Synchronicity as a Form of Spiritual Experience which deal with my material. Fiona had briefly skimmed through those pages.
The introduction to this example was that Fiona had written a piece for her regular Allotment column in The Oldie (at forty-one, I felt she had a bit of a cheek to be a columnist for such a magazine!) where she had mentioned Craig Sams’s innovative approach to running an allotment. She wrote and faxed this piece off on July fifth, two days before having her dream.
In the article she three times referred to Craig and experiments. Having faxed it she left home to go to her allotment, and bumped into Craig returning from his. That was the first time that she had met him in around five months.
I looked up details of the UFO SAM kite which my wife had ordered by mail from the East Anglian firm of Hawkin. They specialise in unusual toys and curios.

Their catalogue blurb proclaims,
"Things you thought had gone for ever and things you never even knew existed." The UFO SAM is one of three kites they stock. They word the ad thus: 

"UFO SAM. The Holographic Kite That Spins! Is it really a kite? Some say not, but this latest-technology all-British flying- machine is classified as a ‘rotor-kite’… Its design and construction, however, are unique, and so, certainly, is its appearance as it performs ‘like a Catherine Wheel in the sky’.
Measuring some 18" x 9" its struts and frames are of tough carbon fibre and fibreglass, and its skin of strong holographic metalic foil which reflects every piece of available light and, when the sun shines, appears to change colour as it spins…"

... ... ...
I note these parallels:

i) Uri Geller.
ii) Craig Sams.
iii) Inventions.
iv) The invention features a bright light which holds the attention of spectators.
v) Hastings East Hill and West Hill.
vi) Hastings allotments.
vii) Father and son cooperation.
viii) Dreams in books.
ix) "I dreamt that James had invented something, or rather put together two ideas from two different books that made an invention when related."

The coincidence has input from chapter seven of Dr Main’s thesis and from chapter seven of Geller’s book. Both of these works are brought together in mine. The design of the kite is of two separate ovals which intersect at a cross.

x) "I thought that the fire brigade would try it out on the West Hill. They were using a light as bright as the sun to burn something." The catalogue states, "Its design and construction, however, are unique, and so, certainly, is its appearance as it performs ‘like a Catherine Wheel in the sky’… "
xi) "The invention was a form of power like nuclear fission. I had to look away. They had reflector glasses to preserve their eyes."