I’m not a Christian (or a Catholic; I don’t make a distinction but apparently some do, as our local Letters to the Editor section reminds us every couple of weeks) but I remain fascinated with the gory, colorful lives of the saints, the holy cards, rosary beads, and BVMs. (Blessed Virgin Mary.) Probably in large part due to my eight years of Catholic school indoctrination. (If you want to grow up defiant, confused, persecuted, bewildered, philosophical and pretentious, be Jewish, raised in a Bohemian Buddhist family where Mama read the Tarot, told us which life we were currently reincarnating in, and go to Catholic school.)

Being a Jewish Native Wiccan Pagan Buddhist (in other words, typical American New Ager; or at least, nodding towards them in appreciation) and non-Christian, I know that the Virgin wasn’t a Virgin, just a woman that experienced some very weird alien type stuff. Still, I remain riveted to any research into Marian Apparitions, probably because of my childhood education, but also because I am convinced there is a UFO and/or Ultra Terrestrial cause behind such manifestations.

Which brings me to the glowing virgins. I have two plastic BVM statues on my altar that glow in the dark that I picked up at the Goodwill. The other night I was in bed, idly looking at the softly glowing skinny forms, and wondering, why do they make glow in the dark Virgins? What does the glowing represent? A light, a beacon of illumination in the darkness? Which presumes that darkness is a negative. Is it because of the other world associations with the BVM? Holy, spiritual, above and beyond mere mortal? But, wasn’t Mary mortal? Yes, but touched by God. Ah, so only those touched by God glow. Yet, we’re -- according to Christian doctrine -- all created in “his" image. Which means we should all be glowing.

That got me thinking about something else that glows: raccoons. (Yes, this is how my mind works.) Specifically, the raccoon that Dr. Kary Mullis saw on a Friday night in April 1983. This is one of my favorite ‘high strangeness’ encounters of all time:

On another Friday night, during the summer of 1985, Dr. Kary Mullis drove up to his cabin. Arriving around midnight after driving for about three hours, Mullis dumped groceries he bought on the way, switched on the lights (powered by solar batteries) and headed, with flashlight in hand, to the outside toilet located about 50 feet west of the cabin. He never got there that night. Quoting from his 1998 book Dancing Naked in the Mine Field, Mullis encountered something extraordinarily weird on the way. “...at the far end of the path, under a fir tree, there was something glowing. I pointed my flashlight at it anyhow. It only made it whiter where the beam landed. It seemed to be a raccoon. I wasn’t frightened. Later, I wondered if it could have been a hologram, projected from God knows where."

Unlike my silent and glowing virgins, the raccoon not only glowed, but spoke:

“The raccoon spoke. ‘Good evening, doctor,’ it said. I said something back, I don’t remember what, probably, ‘Hello.’ The next thing I remember, it was early in the morning. I was walking along a road uphill from my house."

Dr. Mullis didn’t know what happened, how he ended up on the road, or what happened to his flashlight, which never turned up. It seemed that about six hours of “missing time" had occurred, the items from the grocery bags were still strewn about, and, like many encounters of this kind, once comforting and pastoral parts of the woods were now to be avoided completely, (I remember when my husband and I saw a UFO -- a silver craft, hovering, with beam of light coming from it above a field -- a highway that I loved to drive on now became a source of severe anxiety whenever I passed by that place.)

Dr. Mullis wasn’t the only one who experienced missing time, Louise, his daughter, couldn’t account for three hours while walking in the same area.

In his own book Mullis concluded, “I wouldn’t try to publish a scientific paper about these things, because I can’t do any experiments. I can’t make glowing raccoons appear. I can’t buy them from a scientific supply house to study. I can’t cause myself to be lost again for several hours. But I don’t deny what happened. It’s what science calls anecdotal, because it only happened in a way that you can’t reproduce. But it happened."

Was it necessary for whatever force was behind this strange encounter to have the raccoon glow? Wasn’t it enough for it to talk? Whatever the intelligence behind this, it certainly wanted to be sure to get Dr. Mullis’s attention.

It sounds like what often occurs during so many other abduction cases. Whitley Streiber has written about the anomalous animals that appeared at his cabin, and witnessed by others, in connection with UFO and/or alien encounters, and Hopkins has discussed this as well, among others. (Or, what we commonly interpret as abduction cases.) It could have been something else; some sort of encounter with the faery realm, perhaps it's that ‘daimonic reality" Patrick Harpur delves into so majestically. Whatever it was, animals that talk, that appear much larger than normal size, figure often in these kinds of experiences. It seems that whatever it is, doesn’t want to frighten us as it “hypnotizes" us and brings us into their reality.

(Which brings up another question: why do some of these abduction encounters involve large animals that talk and sometimes glow, or appear as a holy icon, while others are more clinical; mute gray aliens coldly taking us into extraterrestrial examining rooms?)

Glowing anything will get someone’s attention. The apparitions that many interpret as the Virgin Mary are very likely another aspect of the same phenomena behind the glowing raccoons, and other high strangeness animal encounters.

Recommended Reading:

UFO Resource Center: The Blessed Virgin Mary and UFOs: UFOs and Marian Apparitions

Heavenly Lights: The Apparitions of Fátima and the UFO Phenomenon, ed. by Andrew D. Basiago anc Eva M. Thompson, forward by Dr. Jacques F. Vallee

The Great Apparitions of Mary: An Examination of the Twenty-Two Supranormal Appearances, by Ingo Swann

When Millions Saw Mary, by Francis Johnson