(I wrote this article with the intention of sending it to the two TV3 News Anchors, Hilary Barry and Mike McRoberts. Only later did I see the great relevance of the term ‘Anchor’. But instead I sent a short summary to Mike McRoberts. (LINK) At the time I was in discussions with the producer of TV1’s daily magazine programme Close-Up for a not unrelated item on Spiritualism.(LINK). Mike McRoberts replied to my first e-mail and promised to talk to the producer of 60 Minutes. But he never came back to me with a final answer. I was left to draw my own conclusion from the deathly silence. I have found from bitter experience that that is the way New Zealanders always do business. If its not good news, and they have got nothing to lose, its best just to forget it. " Don’t bother to reply."  It’s the Kiwi way.  I had also intended to modify it fractionally and send it to the English Sunday newspaper,The Observer, for a couple of reasons. But my experience of writing to newspapers either in New Zealand or in England has never been good and in any case,my research turned out to have other priorities)

You make the claim that you don't just read the news, but that you find it. Well, here's something for you to ‘find’.

Introduction
Do you believe that coincidence is really just chance? Or does it have a deeper significance? Just don't ask Vicki Hyde or any of the other skeptics if you want an intelligent answer. Is it really just chance that before three significant plane crashes over the course of 20 years, the number 557 was emphasised to me each time in advance of the event?

The first time that '557' was emphasised was on three occasions over 19 days leading up to the Lockerbie air disaster in December 1988. I found out why this number had been emphasised to me when Pan Am 103 crashed at Lockerbie which ‘happens’ to be located at 55° 7’N. Did it indeed meet its destiny in the hills of the North? Did Something know precisely what was to come and chose to emphasise that code number to us? At the time we lived just 40 miles away in the Scottish Border hills.

The second time that 557 was emphasised strongly to me so precisely before an air disaster was on 27th November 2008, just 16 hours before the Air New Zealand Airbus A320 crashed into the sea off the French coast at Perpignan. The coded message sent to me was there for all to see. It was a code written in clear, on the front page of a newspaper, the business section of the New Zealand Herald. There were two separate articles about different companies, both of whom had shares priced at $5.57. The share price of Fletcher Building had closed at $5.57 on 26th November, 2008 . The $5.57 was in bold text, alongside a graph showing the plunging share price of Fletcher building over the previous year, since their unfortunate in the American company, Formica. Was that graph intended to symbolise the plunging New Zealand Airbus due to come so soon after that newspaper appeared?

New Prophetic Signs
The third time that code 557 was emphasised to me, clearly warning of a forthcoming air disaster, was on 27th May 2009. I had been at the Westfield Shopping Centre in Manukau City, a location which happens to be directly under the flight path into Auckland International Airport. I had just got back to my car when a van drove past me and I could not help noticing its number plate, DUE 739. That seemed to me an absolutely uncanny juxtaposition, because N739PA had been the Boeing 747 that was destroyed at Lockerbie. Was this, I wondered, an intended sign to me that another air disaster was due? I followed the van to get a better photograph of the number plate. It led me down Putney Way to the Inland Revenue offices which just ‘happen’ to be located in a building called The Twin Towers. And then more coincidences gave me code 557 twice, first in the location of where the van did a U-turn and secondly on the number plate of a car parked in splendid isolation in the city council car park, directly opposite the Twin Towers.

A man, who was just starting his car nearby, saw me photographing the 557 car and went to ask a security guard why I was photographing cars. On other occasions, paranoid observers have even called the police.  Following one 'distress call', two police cars had swooped in on the Roselands Shopping Centre in Papakura.  It seemed to be going to the opposite extreme from sending a taxi, as they had on one particularly notable occasion in response to an emergency call.  The young woman who made that particular emergency call was never found, dead or alive,  First two male cops,  resplendent in their flak jackets, accosted me, wanting to know why I was taking photographs in a public car park. But that's 'freedom' even in New Zealand now I suppose.  Taking photographs is obviously a very suspicious activity, one only undertaken by terrorists in the modern world, or at the very least thieves planning their next job.  One of the cops actually did listen to me a bit.  His mate was too busy on his phone trying to check from my driving licence whether I was a 'person of interest' wanted on their computer system.

Then reinforcements arrived from a second car, in the form of a policewoman. Again, she wanted to know why I was taking photographs, and again I had to explain what I'd already explained to the other two. Then she told me that I didn't actually fit the profile of a car thief. Wow, with such an analytical mind, she was clearly destined for higher things. I told her that that was no surprise to me, as I didn't actually steal cars. Her profiling was spot on.  I merely photographed them on occasion, where the juxtaposition of numbers struck me as significant. I pointed out to her that I fit the profile more of a harmless mad professor.  But perhaps that was not one of the profiles they had in their system. I was left wondering whether they had had a particularly slack afternoon and had nothing better to do with their time.  I really couldn't see how it justified two cars and four cops.  But perhaps they had to surround the 'criminal' in the vegetable department. I suppose it counted as a solved crime though, so that probably bumps up the statistics.  It is a lot easier than investigating stolen cars or house burglaries.

Anyway, back to Manukau, I asked the inquisitive driver whether he had seen the recently released film Knowing, but he hadn't even heard of it, so there no simple way to explain my photographic interest. But then he didn't know the car park was situated beside a building called The Twin Towers, even though his brother apparently owned No. 15, Putney Way, the building next door to The Twin Towers. I explained briefly to him that code 557 had been emphasised to me before both the Lockerbie air disaster and the Perpignan plane crash and that the signs that day indicated to me that another plane crash was due. Furthermore it would be an Airbus, probably an A340. Why it should be an Airbus I did not bother to explain, but it is explained in our book Balanced Observations, Volume 6 of our series Fragments of an Outer Mind. This book describes both the prophetic indications which came before both these disasters and the very meaningful coincidences which were orchestrated around them. It then goes on to derive the messages which people are intended to take from the crashes of those two Airbus A320s, the one at Perpignan and the one in New York, the so-called miracle on the Hudson.

Life After Death
On my way home, the producer from TV1’s early evening magazine programme Close-Up rang me. He had been given my name as a scientific expert on Spiritualism. They were thinking of doing a Close-Up item on Spiritualism and wondered if I could give a scientific appraisal. I was ideally placed to do this as I have investigated Spiritualism in depth over some twenty five years. We had quite a long conversation and he seemed to find what I had to say quite interesting. I pointed out that meaningful coincidence could sometimes authenticate psychic information, but all too often demonstrations in the Spiritualist churches were rubbish and demonstrated little other than the gullibility of the people who were present, who seemed perfectly happy to accept the garbled and incoherent connections given to them. The odd uncooperative recipient who refused to accepts a link that didn't make sense would be told to ‘Hold onto it. Perhaps you’ll understand it later.” But it is possible to obtain convincing evidence of communication from the spirits of the dead. It just very rarely happens in Spiritualist churches.

In addition, my research had shown quite convincingly that there is Something beyond space and time, which would appear to know the future in detail. I referred to the role of coincidence codes anticipating both the Lockerbie and Perpignan air disasters. The producer said that he found my approach interesting and quite different from that of the sceptics. He said he would like to follow it up in the next week or two and asked whether I would be available for interview, He also asked me to write a piece about my background in psychical research and about my experience of the Auckland Spiritualist churches.

A little later, when I arrived home, my eye was drawn to the mileage on my car as I got out to open our gate. The reading on the speedometer was precisely 232557 km. Was this intended to be another reminder of the plane crash soon to come? Was it really just chance that it had reached 557 exactly at our gate? This was an ‘arrival’ gate, but for the Airbus to come there was to be no arrival gate, just its date with destiny and a watery grave. A few minutes later, the identity of the flight which would see no arrival gate, was shown to me on the TV1 Six O'clock News.

A Positive ID
Some little way down the news, there was an item about the parlous state of New Zealand's dairy industry and the fact that Fonterra had once again reduced its payout to farmers. Now they could only expect $4.55 per kg. The average New Zealander, having been fleeced by Fonterra for the past year with ‘world prices’ for butter and milk, was hardly heartbroken. But what drew my attention in that news bulletin was the Anchor milk tanker leaving one of the Fonterra factories. Its number plate was xxx 447. Why did I notice that you may wonder? Code 447 has long been significant for reasons other than air disasters. It is a code that relates to the succession to the throne of England. It just happens to be the difference in years between two 11-14 events. However, I was a little puzzled as to what relevance that had to Fonterra. But then, there had been a closely related reference before the Perpignan air disaster, to the same succession elements.

Incidentally the other $5.57 share price in the Business News section of the New Zealand Herald for 27th November 2008 had been the ‘fair share’ price of Fonterra. Just as with Fletcher Building, it had been precisely $5.57. Is that just chance? Or was this Fonterra connection intended to be a code repeat? Don’t real scientists consider repeats to be evidence of pattern? Code 447 was to be the specific identifier for the disaster to come.

The Prophecy Confirmed
It was at the beginning of the late evening news on the New Zealand Queen’s Birthday Bank Holiday, 1st June 2009, that I saw the news flash about the loss of another Airbus, this time an Air France Airbus 330. It was Flight 447, from Rio de Janeiro to Paris and even the death toll was very significant. 228 people had died. I had just been watching the British TV spy drama Spooks, which is incidentally a slang term for both spies and ghosts. It was the episode of the bomb on Remembrance Day, 11-11 with its connotations of ‘lest we forget’. But it is Kipling's version not the MoD's which really matters. See Recessional . What is more Queen's Birthday also carried with it other connotations linking directly into our earlier Airbus experiences. That aspect will be explored in more detail in the seventh and final book of our series Fragments Of An Outer Mind. That volume is entitled Going West.

A few days later in the New Zealand Herald coverage of the Air France disaster, there was little summary box showing the times of the final automatic messages from the doomed plane’s computer control system. I was strongly reminded of HAL in its death throes. Remember that film 2001 - A Space Odyssey? And which year did the twin towers fall? It was 2001. The last line of the box gave that the time of the very last message from the Airbus’s dying computer. It was 11:14 pm. Get out your calculator and divide 1114 by 2. And remember that I only noticed the 447 on the Fonterra milk tanker number plate because it is a time interval between two significant 1114s.

Are you really sure it can all be safely dismissed as just chance? Or is there Something whose power and knowledge we cannot even begin to comprehend? Is it all intended to be evidence that Something knows the future in precise detail? Does this Something choose to communicate with me through codes and meaningful coincidences? Was the French writer Malroux correct when he said ‘Coincidence is when God does not want to show His hand’? So, could that Something be God?

And think back to the 447 milk tanker. Was that very meaningful coincidence intended to be an indication of how the end would come for Flight 447? Fonterra's main brand is Anchor. You see the little Anchor sign on the blue ‘long life’ Anchor milk packets and the road vehicles which are sometimes made up to look like larger versions of these. And the little Anchor also appears on the packets of New Zealand Anchor butter, the object of critical counter-advertising in England recently. But what exactly do you do with an anchor? You throw it into the sea, of course. And that's exactly what happened to Air France Flight 447.it was thrown into the sea by a combination of the storm and its computer control system. 

And remember the $5.57 share price of Fonterra drawn to my attention on the day before the Air New Zealand Airbus A320 crash off Perpignan. There again the Anchor symbolism was appropriate. It was another Airbus thrown into the sea, like an anchor. In that case the Airbus ended up with its nose buried 2 metres into the seabed, exactly like an anchor.

But is it too much to read into symbolism? Why should it be? Many hundreds of millions of people around the world have been introduced to the concept of religious truth through symbolism in Dan Brown's novels and the derived films. Yes, they're just stories. There's not actually much religious truth to be found in these novels, but the concept is there nonetheless. And why should symbolism be the preserve of priests? Is God choosing to play the priests at their own game? 14/06/2009 1:39:31 p.m. 1610w