My Transfiguration

 

I am briefly describing in this article some of my own experiences upon returning to Los Angeles in August 1995 following the eventful research trip to Oklahoma for interviews with a family experiencing so-called 'talking poltergeist' phenomena.  (Excerpts from interview transcripts with the family may be read in a blog article while other articles in the 2015 blog series offer photos, family notes and other data documenting the case: 1, 2.)
 

It was never a plan of my own to lead an 'over-the-top' life.  A case study book of the beginning of my bizarre yet metaphysically revealing spiritual awakening Testament was published in 1997.  A unique aspect of 'The Centrahoma Poltergeist' case is family testimonials that the manifesting spirit communication had involved not only people but also aliens from Saturn.  One mysterious entity was called 'Leader.'

 

This is a photo of my Echo Park condo (second and third floors, fourth from left) where I was living in August 1995.  On the hillside below the building can be seen the brown remains of the two clumps of bushes that inexplicably went up in flames on two separate occasions during the summer of 1994.  During this time in my life I was working as a publicity writer for  Paramount Pictures.

The date was August 14, 1995, a Monday in Los Angeles.  After the short trip in a shuttle van from Los Angeles International Airport, I (birth name Mark Gordon Russell) was again at home in my condo on the western hillside overlooking Echo Park Lake and Angelus Temple.  The strange things that had happened to me in Oklahoma would take time to place in perspective.  Something unconsidered was that the anomalous occurrences would continue to manifest in my presence.  Upon realizing this, I began making notes and continued keeping an audio journal via tape recorder to maintain a record of what happened.  
 
Those first days after returning to Los Angeles, my perspective of earthly reality underwent a momentous change.  It was a contemplative period as I considered possibilities and attempted to form conclusions about the unexpected yet metaphysically revealing turn of events.  Not all of my spontaneous impressions would be of lasting inportance, yet the unadulterated audio journal descriptions in Testament chronicle a process of discovery that each person must experience to some degree during one's Earth life. 

 

This is one of the Oklahoma family's photos documenting the phenomena.  Maxine's notation reads: "Rocks & pennies that hit inside my house Dec. 1st, 1990"; at other times family members would find small amounts of their own money missing.

Upon turning on my recently purchased state-of-the-art television monitor in my living room, a minute or so later it was startling when the screen suddenly went dark.  Although I’d never had any problem before, the TV set began going off shortly after whenever I turned it on.  Scrutinizing the device on one of these occasions, there was still a hum audible from inside although the screen was devoid of any picture.

 

There was a startling telephone conversation with my friend Marie.  I’d originally met her when she worked at the Ruth Webb talent agency as a temporary office assistant (where I worked before becoming a publicist).  We occasionally went to dinner and screenings together.  What she said jolted me.  She sounded frantic as she told me that her bank account had suddenly been cleaned out for no known reason.  Some of her checks had bounced as a result of this and an urgent meeting with a bank representative had been scheduled.  I told her something like: “When I was interviewing the family about their entity 'Michael,' they told me he was always taking small amounts of their money but do you think it could be conceivable that he could also do something like this?”  Marie agreed to come by and look at the photographs and other articles I’d collected documenting the existence of this enigmatic being named Michael.
   

Upon calling my friend Fiona—who worked as a Tarot card reader at a New Age Bookstore in the San Fernando Valley—to tell her about some of the unexplained phenomena I’d witnessed, I was flabbergasted during our conversation when she exclaimed, “A magnet just flew off my refrigerator."
  
I was accustomed to regularly telephoning my mother, feeling sorry for her in leading such a reclusive life after retiring from her career as a hospital medical records technician due to ill health.  On the phone, I told Ellen about the visit to Oklahoma, Marie’s odd situation with her bank and that a magnet had just flown off of Fiona’s refrigerator.  Then I said with growing curiosity: “Michael, if you’re there, give me a sign.”  
 
My mother responded by irately complaining that I was talking about nonsense.  Anything that could be equated with the ‘paranormal’ in any form beyond the movies was something fit for scoffing as the alternative was obviously something she had no intention of considering.  “Well there’s nothing happening,” she declared but then the following moment she said, “Just a moment.  There’s a wasp . . .”  She momentarily put down the phone as she gave her attention to the insect for a few moments.  I was reminded of the wasps that had been found inside the Mc Wethy house during my visit and informed my mother that this too could be construed as a signal from Michael.

I found myself in a quandary where this supernatural being 'Michael' was concerned.  Certainly, it was beyond any conceptualization of a ghost or an alien to have any influence upon the minds of insects.  Yet words such as spirit, ghost and alien are vague in themselves.  I was still coming to terms with just what was 'Michael' and what He wanted from me.  At times there were undeniable indications that an unseen being was mysteriously cohabiting with me.  These circumstances made it impossible to consider doing any of my usual publicity consulting work for the time being.  “Michael, please don’t talk to me,” I preemptively declared aloud, “because then people will think I’m hearing voices and diagnose me as a schizophrenic."

I recalled that as a child around the age of five, I'd woken one morning to hear a disembodied voice calling my name while my twin brother and mother were still asleep.  In recent years, there had been another occasion of voice hearing when in my condo one night as I began going to sleep, there suddenly was a soft male voice that said, "Father I have waited so long."  I've discovered that a vast number of people have related having a similar experience of hearing their name called by an unseen presence at some point in their lives.  Many Friends and acquaintances have mentioned this to me and when this happened to Sigmund Freud he called it a 'hallucination' as he wrote in Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901).  A Google search on this topic ('paranormal people hearing name called') brings numerous results.

 

In July 2016, I don't remember the precise sequence of occurrences yet the transcripts published in Testament help me remember what happened.  An example of how some of my spontaneous analysis and deductions were hasty is seen in the first two sentences of the following journal transcript excerpt of my comments when I spoke on the telephone to Barry, one of the paranormal investigators who had visited the family in Oklahoma. 

"Michael seems to be the spirit of an eight-year-old boy [at times] whose mother decapitated him.  The reason why he can have conversations with people is because of reincarnation . . . I'm not quite how to come to terms with the alien aspects because I don't know how they tie-in . . . I live in Echo Park right across from the Angelus Temple.  Get it — Angelus Temple.  Plus I live on Clinton Street [I'd moved there before Bill Clinton became President].  I mean the synchronicity to this is just amazing.  I've realized that it had been leading me all my life to do research in terms of the unexplained."
 
Transcribing the tapes by playing them on the same small machine I’d used to record them, I realized it was essential to find a way of listening to the tapes so that the contents were as distinct as possible.  A new type of unexpected spirit communication was experienced when I found words on the computer monitor’s screen that I hadn’t myself typed:

Are you nervous?

 

On another occasion, a second message was found that I didn't remember typing myself.

I'll help you.

One of the first times that I experienced the television malfunctioning was one night when I decided to take a break and watch TV for a few minutes while having a snack.  One of the shows I regularly watched was on, MTV’s “The Real World,” although I’d missed the start of the show.  I’d seen the previous episodes of this documentary-style series that brought together a group of youths as roommates, this year in a city of great appeal for me, London.  I started to watch and I realized that one of the roommates was complaining that their telephone had suddenly stopped functioning and he commented about how frustrating he found the situation.  As I remembered what Twyla had told me about the battery of the video camera going dead a moment before the rock had struck the car, I realized that Michael could affect technology.  My TV set then suddenly went off.  I thought that Michael had made Himself clear that He didn’t want me watching television.  He apparently wanted me to work on the case study of my recent experiences so that I could share the process implemented in revealing Himself to me.

 

Another program I tried to watch was the telecast of Barbara Walters interviewing Christopher Reeve after his paralysis.  As the program began, an opening clip from the interview showed the actor commenting “Something wonderful is about to happen” and then my TV went off again.  I accepted that it should be left off.  When I went against this policy, the result would be the same with the television soon shutting off.

 

One afternoon, there was a new development when the TV came on all by itself.  Colin Powell was shown on the screen yet in a few moments the television went back off, mystifying me as to the purpose for Michael identifying Powell in such a manner.
 
I felt that the intimacy with Michael wasn’t something new; it was only my awareness of Him that was new.  The condo now seemed even warmer than usual and I considered if this possibly had something to do with Michael.  Many extraordinary little things were constantly happening in my life.  One night, I was half-asleep in bed when it felt as if someone grabbed my leg.  It was obvious that Michael was letting me know that He was here with me.

  
One afternoon, the TV suddenly went on and I saw and heard what sounded like a portion of a commercial with a commentator’s voiceover saying “Love is the only religion.”  And then the TV went back off.  The TV going off and on occurred at other times, including eventually on New Year's Day when there was shown a Rose Parade float with an environmental theme.
 
I recalled some of the things that happened in Centrahoma as I considered past occurrences in my life.  Nobody had ever been able to place the 'talking poltergeist' cases into perspective in relation to other forms of anomalous phenomena and suddenly this outlandish data had become pivotal information for me in attempting to make sense of my own life.   Through contemplating these circumstances, the existence of a omnipresent Creator Spirit and Intermediary organizing Consciousness were becoming comprehensible.  I reflected that humans like animals and even extraterrestrial beings for that matter would all have in common having an individual consciousness as well as sharing influences from those mysterious mental states known as the ‘unconscious’ and ‘subconscious.’
 
I thought about the numerous times I’d watched the mountain and stars appear as the studio’s logo at the beginning of a Paramount movie. 

 

 

These images seemed a modern portent reminiscent of Moses’s mysterious trip to the mountain (and Muhammad's for that matter).  And then I remembered the burning bushes outside my condo.  Even the materialized nail that had bounced off my head in Centrahoma could be construed as offering a parallel in Christian symbolism.  The two times that I should’ve been injured in altercations on the Hollywood Freeway yet wasn't now seemed to have been confirmed as having a miraculous interceding aspect.  Eventually there was no other conclusion possible than a Loving and unlimited creative Superconsciousness or spirit being/emissary had found a way of revealing participation in my life.  I could only estimate that the predicament had something to do with reincarnation.

I felt joyous at the realization that all living beings from Earth, other planets or ascended realms are each a single aspect of the spiritual Source finding expression.  I now was able to distinguish the relevance of the term 'Holy Ghost' in signifying the Spiritual Force manifesting the Divine Will of God.  I decided that the mysterious Michael who had made His presence known to me could only be equated with the enigmatic Archangel Whose manifestations had inspired diverse cultural lore.  For decades, psychical researchers had estimated the diverse ‘poltergeist’ phenomena as somehow tying-in with the subconscious mind yet they seemed to have overlooked a simultaneous Superconscious aspect. 

I referred to a paperback on my bookshelves entitled A Dictionary of Angels including the fallen angels (1967) by Gustav Davidson.  Here are some excerpts.

Michael (“who is as God”)—in Biblical and post-Biblical lore, Michael ranks as the greatest of all angels, whether in Jewish, Christian, or Islamic writings, secular or religious.  He derives originally from the Chaldeans by whom he was worshipped as something of a god.  He is chief of the order of virtues, chief of archangels, prince of the presence, angel of repentance, righteousness, mercy, and sanctification; also ruler of the 4th Heaven, tutelary sar (angelic prince) of Israel, guardian of Jacob, conqueror of Satan . . .


In Islamic writings he is called Mika'il.


In Jewish lore (Ginzberg,  The Legends of the Jews II, 303) “the fire that Moses saw in the burning bush had the appearance of Michael, who had descended from Heaven as the forerunner of the Shekinah.”


In mystic and occult writings, Michael has often been equated with the Holy Ghost, the Logos, God, Metatron, etc.

On Wednesday, August 16, I called my friend Cheryl, the current head of the Paramount Pictures publicity department and hoped she was somewhat prepared for what she would hear as I’d left her the Fortean Times magazine article about the Oklahoma case to read prior to my trip.  “Cheryl, I’m going to have to take a sabbatical for a while from doing any publicity work.  I have major supernatural phenomena going on.”  She asked me what was happening.  I answered: “Time and space mean nothing to this Entity.  He could destroy our world in an instant.  He just cleaned out Marie’s bank account.”
 
“Why me?  Why me?”  I recall telling her.  I attempted to explain how the Spirit had proven His powers to me.  I knew that Cheryl was accustomed to me being very reasonable and unemotional.  I knew that she probably thought I was acting a little crazy yet there was nothing else for me to say.  She reminded me that I was still her ‘womb-mate’ (she was born on August 8 too) but said she was late for a meeting with William Friedkin (director of “The Exorcist” who was at that time involved with “Jade”).
 
The entity seemed to be manifesting in ways that wouldn’t alarm or upset me or anyone else.  When Marie dropped by to see the photos and hear more about ‘Michael,’ she was sitting on a chair in the living room when she felt her lower right leg being tickled.  Thinking about the agency where I'd worked for seven years, I realized that here too was another symbol.  My expectation continuously was that I would be there only for a few more weeks but this occupation lasted for more than seven years.

 

 

Setting out to determine what opportunities were available for the clearest listening of the interviews and spirit utterances on the microcassettes, I decided to contact a local company called Group IV Recording and see what information regarding this matter was available.  My call went through to a sales representative who answered, “This is Angel.”  We talked a bit and he referred me to another company.  I soon decided the most reasonable alternative was to purchase high quality Dictaphone transcribing equipment that utilized a pedal and headphones.

 

Upon closely listening to the interview tapes, there were sounds and voices audible on the microcassettes that hadn’t been heard among interview participants in Centrahoma when the tapes were recorded.  I wondered how it could be conceivable for there to be spirit utterances heard on the microcassettes.  This startling recognition first came to me as I was listening to the third tape I’d recorded in the Mc Wethy house.  A succession of prominent and unmistakable words were audible in voices that were more emphatic than the usual human timbre.  These spirit messages included “SOUNDS GOOD” and “NICE” — they seemed to be commenting on my discovery of this audio phenomena. I’d never let the tapes out of my sight since recording them.
   
In 2016 just about every time I listen to radio interviews on NPR there are easily heard EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) instances of the word "NO" audible during interviews, overlapping the conversation.  These utterances are just as clear as the speech of the interviewer and guest.  One can only deduce the reasons that no one talks about this consistent anomaly in unedited radio and TV broadcasts.  Perhaps nobody knows what to say about the phenomena.  It seems that when the EVP word "NO" occurs frequently during someone's commentary during an interview, he or she is not expressing things correctly.  There have been previous blog articles on this topic (1, 2, 3, 4).

 
One Friday night, my brother and his friend James dropped by to see my trip souvenirs.  While standing in my condo, Mike suddenly grabbed his leg and said “Oww” as he rubbed it.

 

“That was Michael,” I told him.
 
Mike replied rather uneasily, “It was a muscle spasm.”
 
As they sat on the sofa, I was sitting on the floor talking to them when something mind-blowing happened.  When adjusting my position, there was a slight ‘swoosh’ sound in the air and a penny bounced off my foot and landed on the carpet.  I had actually seen this happen with my own eyes.  "Look,” I told James and pointed at the penny as more proof of Michael.

“Oh, that just fell out of your pocket,” James insisted.  I put the photos and other mementos away and then noticed a dime at the corner near where the penny had been found.  James saw it too and with a startled look said, “Well that wasn’t there.”  At one point during the visit, James reached over to a bookshelf and opened up a book of short stories by Carson McCullers.  We both were amused at the title of the story revealed on the page he had happened to open — it was the title and beginning of “The Aliens.”  

The following day, I drove to my brother’s house for a party and slide show.  Party guests found me in a reflective mood yet eager to discuss my recent experiences.  Patty, an art dealer from New York, and Jonathan, an attorney, were two other friends at the party that I’d met through James.  I was appreciative of Jonathan’s help when earlier in the year Julia Pastrana, the subject of a screenplay I’d written and submitted to an assortment of local production companies, was announced in the media as a project written by another screenwriter.  Following my return from Oklahoma, I hired Jonathan to begin drawing up contracts between myself and the primary interview participants in Centrahoma.
 
At the party, dinner was served in a buffet style and I was seated with Charlotte, Patty and Jonathan when Patty told me that she’d heard something unusual had happened to me on my recent trip.  Becoming a little emotional, I told her: “God revealed Himself to me.”  Suddenly, Charlotte and Jonathan picked up their plates and went to eat in another room.  Jonathan offered a curt, “I don’t believe in that.”  Both Patty and myself were surprised by their reaction.  Patty said that she felt there were no experiences more important than spiritual ones and I eagerly described a few details of my trip.

During the slide show, bits of conversation struck me as ironic in offering parallels with my own trip to Oklahoma.  Charlotte commented about one of her slides: “The man in the Hawaiian shirt was our tour leader.”  A few moments later, Patty mentioned to me: “My new car is a Saturn.”  And then suddenly the lightbulb in the slide projector went out, ending the slide show prematurely because there was no replacement bulb available.  There was an obvious pattern presented with the expressed thoughts in relation to the anecdotes I'd heard in Centrahoma about 'Leader' and the aliens from 'Saturn.'

Returning home, I continued to contemplate my situation.  I decided that what we could only describe with the word ‘God’ couldn’t be a distant, aloof Creator but an all-pervasive Loving Consciousness and thought Source in Whose presence each living creature experienced every moment of their lives.  That night, I was startled as some kind of energy began flowing through me.  There was a sensation along the inside of my lower left leg where it felt as if something like electricity was rushing from me.  I immediately laid down on my bed.  I’d never read about anything comparable to such a condition yet there was a feeling of anticipation as the energy continued flowing out of me.  I considered if something physically was changing within me.

The next morning upon awakening I felt my usual self.  There was no further sensation as I’d experienced the night before.  I was aware more than ever that my recent experiences had changed me yet in addition to my expanded consciousness there now seemed to be an altered physical part of myself in some manner that was impossible for me to understand.

Eager to tell my brother more about my experiences, I agreed to go shopping with Mike and then accompany him to a movie in Santa Monica.  When we were at Nordstrom, the pianist began playing "Oklahoma" as we were on the escalator and I told Mike that this was the type of thing constantly happening to me.  The movie Mike wanted to see was a documentary about fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi who at one point mentioned having consulted a Ouija Board.

 

Among the flurry of telephone calls made as I wanted to see how my friends would respond to some of the unexpected things that had happened to me, I remember calling my friend Larry.  I’d selected Larry to be hired as an additional publicity writer at Paramount and he later was laid off at the same time as me during a major staff reduction.  He became a unit publicist, including for “Fire in the Sky” and "Poltergeist: The Legacy," while I became an independent contractor to the publicity department, working from an office in my home for what seemed to be even longer hours than before.  Larry had grown up in Oklahoma and once mentioned that his late father had worked in some secret military capacity within Oklahoma that he’d never been able to discuss even with his immediate family.  I suspected his work probably involved unidentified flying objects.  Now when I called Larry and asked him if he’d ever heard anything about Coalgate in connection with UFOs, he replied that he still couldn’t tell me anything regarding the matter.  There had been things the family in Oklahoma had told me suggesting a great deal of intrigue about this subject.  I told Larry about some of my experiences in Oklahoma and asked him if he would see what he could find out about his father’s clandestine work but to be careful about it because I didn’t want any men in black showing up on my doorstep.
 
The next time that I met my brother for dinner, the restaurant was The Old Spaghetti Factory on Sunset Boulevard.  While waiting for a table, the names called out before mine were Angela and Christian.  There was also "Happy Birthday to You" sung to a restaurant patron named Michael that evening.  I would later find bumper stickers and personalized license plate symbols and numbers to be frequently meaningful.  It is usual for me to see happy symbols in traffic, such as a heart symbol or bumper stickers with Christian symbols and messages.

 

During a conversation with Marie, I remarked that perhaps I should use an author’s pseudonym for my planned book because of the political satirist seen on PBS also named Mark Russell that people occasionally mentioned while conversing with me.  Soon after that, one morning my phone rang and it was Marie.  “It’s Mark Russell Bell,” she declared.  She described how she’d been crossing Sunset Boulevard at the corner of Laurel Canyon when she heard a disembodied voice say “Mark Russell Bell.”  After taking a few more steps, she looked downward to see a Bell Telephone Book on the sidewalk.  “I knew I had to call you right away,” she told me.

I now had a new pen name without any inkling that the gamut of phenomena I was experiencing was about to escalate in further otherwise unimaginable ways, as chronicled in Testament.  The anomalous events in my life created a pattern showing the importance of each person becoming a 'christed' one and realizing the importance of the decisions that we each individually make in our daily lives.
 

Something that at least one person with whom I've interacted didn't seem to like in relation to Testament was some of my spontaneous commentary involving the nickname 'Mabus.'  As chronicled in the book, I'd noticed my channeled 'Mark Russell Bell' persona of the written page had the anagram 'Mabus' and have sometimes humorously, sometimes philosophically mused about different potential orientations and perspectives related to the archaic metaphor of the 'Antichrist' over the years.  My incessant spoken reflection was intended to keep a record of my experiences.  Usually, like many writers, I’m very quiet and introverted but to analyze and talk about the experiences chronicled in Testament—which I knew could be upsetting to certain people with rigid fundamentalist orientations to their selected dogmas—I usually affected a simultaneously bantering yet aloof manner that became more pronounced in situations that made me nervous.  What was finally presented in a later transcript of the book (Tape #49, Side #2) was this introspection (EVP utterances heard on audio tapes are in parantheses):

. . . ("SO")  Mabus.  Son of Man.  The Antichrist.  Bel-Marduk.  It's like I'm all these entities rolled into one.  But I'm nice.  I definitely am close to the symbol ("OF") of Jesus.  I hope.  I try to be nice and ("YOU KNOW") volunteer for APLA and give money to homeless people.  (sighs)  What else do I do?  ("UH-HUH")  I don't know.  ("I")  I try to always be honest.  Even if I don't know what the right solution is.  ("I MEAN")  I do read the morning newspaper.  You don't know what the solution is to these problems, I mean.  ("BUT")  Everyone has their own opinion.  So people should allow people to have their own opinion. 

In the sequel to the book published in an original Internet edition, I tried to bring further clarity to the predicament of an experiencer of spiritually symbolic and metaphorical so-called 'paranormal' or 'anomalous phenomena.'  The concluding sentence of the book's introductory excerpts is an excerpt from an audio tape transcript that clarifies further my perception that my experiences could be symbolic for everyone  —

"It's like when I'm saying something negative or judgmental I'm the Antichrist and when I'm saying something sweet and pleasant I'm Jesus."  

As I've mentioned before, I don't consider 'Mabus' to designate 'the Antichrist' yet there are some people that may, based upon sensationalized commercial books, etc.  Fear and superstition are known to influence the mass media, influencing the interpretation of news about metaphysical topics.  To some extent, I've had to overcome this indoctrination, myself.  Like everyone else, aspects of my beliefs and understanding are continuously evolving, based upon new information sources and experiences.  My case study shows the spiritual predicament confronting myself—and each human being—in relation to the necessity of one's spiritual development.