"A WICKED SPIN ON E.T."
In the bonus DVD in the "director's cut" of "Donnie Darko" DVD set, a fan and film critic, in the British documentary "They Made Me Do It: The Cult of Donnie Darko," says of Frank, the Rabbit: "I think that Frank was a wicked spin on E.T., some kind of visitor from outer space with the message that can't be quite communicated."
This could be said, to an extent, of the RABBIT image and symbol recurrent in the "WOW! Contact" reports, as related in the "Project Wonderland Chronicles" e-book.
But here we have it re-set and re-cast in "Donnie Darko." As if Kelly did this on purpose, perhaps at some point in 2000, when our "WOW! reports were first told, maybe having glimpsed the S.P.A.C.E. website? More likely Kelly was "contacted" separately from us, apart from Gary in England, Anders von Bergen in Finland, myself and many others in many places, times and circumstances.
At the movie's beginning, Donnie awakes, having slept near a cliff and later, as noted before, he awakes at a golf course by the seventh hole. It was as if he was taken from his bed by an unkown "force," returned and placed somewhere else, although in the movie he "sleeps-rides" on his bike. This misplacement is reported in some close encounter experiences.
In a scene with Gretchen, his girlfriend, Donnie tells her about this sleepwalking-like experience: "Every time I wake up somewhere different. Sometimes my bike is laying there next to me. Like once when I woke up on the edge of a cliff up on Carpathian Ridge."
The golf course setting is interesting in itself. The famous transient "WOW!" signal, indicating a possible intelligent signal from a distant alien civilization. reported in August 1977, was detected by the "Big Ear Radio Telescope" of Ohio State University.
The Big Ear was closed in December 31, 1997 to be dismantled and replaced by an expansion of a nearby golf course, despite many vigorous protests, including by people like Arthur C. Clarke. Donnie wakes up near a golf hole, like a rabbit hole, and golf is a variation of croquet, as played by Alice in Wonderland.
UFO AS ARTIFACT
As Donnie bikes home (the first time), his little sister is bouncing on a tramboline as his mother reads Stephen King's "It," a novel about time travel. On the second ride home, from the golf course, he discovers that his family's house was hit by a jet engine that fell from an unknown source.
It is like the crash of a flying saucer, or like a "Cosmic Fed Ex" package of mysterious information that transmits a subtle message of riddles from another universe, world or dimension. Last year scientists published a paper in the British science journal "Nature" discussing the need to look for such "Cosmic Fed Ex" messengers nearby Earth or the solar system rather than searching exclusively for extraterrestrial radio, TV and laser broadcasts.
The close encounter experience is like a "Cosmic Fed Ex," with the interface producing "information," some of it known while much of it remains "hidden" for now for some reason. The "WOW! Contact" experience is like a big "Cosmic Fed Ex" package information.
The mysterious crashed jet engine is an "artifact" as mentioned in a fictious book in the movie, "The Philosophy of Time Travel" by Roberta Sparrow. She is an ex-nun who became a science teacher, relating to the subject of science and spirituality being linked.
And now, in 1988, she is a mysterious 101-year-old woman who lives as a recluse on the town's outskirt's, and she is called "Grandma Death." She constantly checks her always empty roadside mailbox. Much like SETI scientists have been doing for 45 years with their radio telescopes looking for messages that never come! Yet Sparrow is looking for a letter from an experiencer foretold in her time travel philosophy book... who will be Donnie Darko, an "experiencer" of the mysterious, at movie's end.
In the book, first mentioned in a film sequence with Donnie's physics teacher, there is a Chapter Four - "The Artifact And The Living": "Artifacts provide the first sign that a Tangent Universe has occured. If an Artifact occurs, the Living will retrieve it with great interest and curiousity... Their appearance on Earth seems to defy logical explanation."
In the movie, the artifact is a jet engine without a source, i.e., a jet aircraft. In our close encounter experience, an artifact from "a Tangent Universe" found in our "Primary Universe" could be a UFO sighting, a close encounter experience or recall, an implant, the crashed Roswell flying disc. The jet engine even has the rounds-within-rounds spiral design seen numerous times in Nature, on Earth and in spiral galaxies.
DREAMS AS ARTIFACTS FROM A "JOURNEY"
In Chapter Twelve -"Dreams"- in "The Philosophy of Time Travel," it is stated: "When the Manipulated are awaken from their Journey into the Tangent Universe, they are often haunted by the experience in their Dreams. Many of them will not remember..."
As discussed many times throughout S.P.A.C.E. accounts, dreams hold potent clues to the encounter engima.
When time "unwinds" backwards to October 2 from Halloween Eve in "Donnie Darko," there is a beautiful emotionally moving scene of therapist Dr. Thurman, guru Joe Cunningham (Patrick Swayze), teacher Kitty Farmer, student Cherita Chen, teen Frank (who will wear the Rabbit costume on Halloween Eve) and teachers Karen Pomeroy (Drew Barrymore) and Dr. Monnitoff waking up in their own bedrooms from vivid dreams which are memories of their interaction with the "Tangent Universe" in an alternate, but real, timeline, as told throughout the movie.
This seems to happen in the close encounter experience, and is re-inforced by shared dreams among experiencers.
There are also precognitive dreams, such as the one Donnie has before he is instructed by Frank the Rabbit to sleepwalk to Middlesex High School and break open the main water pipe. The dream shows a flood, with classrooms and school lockers, with an open sky above.
Classrooms, school lockers and water are all classic elements which surface in encounter recall and dreams. Here they are first related in a precog-dream, giving us another close encounter association.
In the movie scene where Donnie and Gretchen go to see a horror movie, they are the only ones in the theater, and are joined by Frank the Rabbit. Gretchen never sees Frank, falling asleep throughout the entire movie, as if she is "switched-off." That switching-off happens to some people in close encounters as the experiencer being contacted interacts with the unknown. Experiencers interface with "two worlds."
In Sparrow's book, she writes in October 1944: "If I am still alive when the events foretold in these pages occur, then I hope you will find me before it is too late." Donnie Darko becomes the foretold "Living Receiver" (Chapter Six): "The Living Receiver is often tormented by terrifying dreams, visions and auditory hallucinations during his time within the Tangent Universe."
"Those surrounding the Living Receiver, known as the 'Manipulated,' will fear him and try to destroy him." While this is stated in the extreme, close encounter witnesses are much like the "living receiver" who has a "fourth-dimensional" interaction with "the Tangent Universe." They are often not believed and are ignored or ridiculed, or even denounced and marginalized by society.
There is also the "Oz Factor" in the movie, a term first used by UFO researcher Jenny Randles to describe the bizarre Land of Oz-like effects of the encounter and UFO interface.
In a scene where Donnie's father and a friend are watching a football game with a player named "Williams," his younger sister Samantha is running around dressed in a Dorothy from Oz dress singing "Follow the Yellow Brick Road" as Donnie experiences a time distoration and sees wormhole like "spears" extending from people.
FRANK THE RABBIT MESSENGER
And all throughout the movie is the RABBIT, as guide, messenger and trickster. Under hypnosis with Dr. Thurman there is this exchange about Frank when she asks Donnie if anybody else can see him:
Donnie: "I don't think so. It's like a TV station. And they're tuned into mine and no one else's."
Dr. Thurman: "Who is they? Is Frank part of some larger group?"
Donnie: "I don't know Gretchen (his girlfriend) has a theory. That Frank is a sign."
Earlier Donnie and Gretchen are talking about what Donnie describes as "a Force... that sends you someplace." Gretchen says of Donnie's dreams: "Well... maybe someone is like... giving you these dream steroids..."
It was startling to us who are experiencing the "WOW! Contact" that the RABBIT plays a big role in this spooky close encounter-like movie that is not, overtly, about the UFO experience.
One key book to this Rabbit-UFO connection is a non-UFO book from the early 1940's. Whch is strangely coincidently around the time when the fictional Roberta Ann Sparrow wrote her "Philosophy of Time Travel" book in 1944.
I refer to "The Lady of the Hare: Being A Study of the Healing Power of Dreams," mentioned in our e-book (see chapter on links list below), the classic early 1940s study by anthropoligist and Jungian analytic therapist John Layard. The book was again published in 2002 by Kegan Paul in London.
The book is in two parts: "The Dream Analysis" and "The Mythology of the Hare." The patient's breakthrough, achieved through theraputic sessions while analyizing her dreams in 1940, comes when she relates a dream in which she is she is told to kill a hare. Later, Layard, unfamiliar with the huge mythological literature on hares and rabbits, learns that a story of a hare sacrficing itself to feed a starving Buddha, who then sends its spirit to the Moon, is what the dream reflects, and that the Hare is an archetype that emerged into the patent's dream from the shared human unconscious.
The Swiss therapist and UFO dream researcher Dr. Remo Roth, in Chapter 13 of the "Project Wonderland Chronicles" sees the RABBIT as a sign of "a new creation, a new genesis." It represents breakthrough.
In "Donnie Darko," Donnie in the movie's climax by"the Cellar Door" shoots the real teenaged Frank, who had removed his Rabbit headress, in the eye, killing him after his car runs over Gretchen, killing her.
This destruction sets the stage for resurrection and new life (a theme of Graham Greene's "The Destructors") by the rapid unwinding of time backwards, resulting in creation, although Donnie must now die when the jet engine crashes through his bedroom. He is the sacrifice, laughing, after he kills "the rabbit."
With Donnie, we have a portrait of a participating witness who experiences two interconnected realities, our familiar "primary universe" world and an askewed "tangent universe" world parelleling and interfacing with the "primary universe." That is the setting that close encounter witnesses often find themselves.
There is much hidden meaning, strange inference and a food-for-thought feast in Richard Kelly's brilliant movie, "Donnie Darko." The close encounter connection cannot be dismissed, even if it was unintended by Kelly but only seeped through by some other means of "Knowing."
Ironically, Kelly's next movie is a science fiction film called "Knowing." He's not talking about it.
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The movie "Donnie Darko" by young director Richard Kelly is a popular film about a troubled teenaged boy haunted by a six-foot-tall rabbit and living, for over 28 days in October 1988, in an alternate timeline.
Saturday, April 2, 2005 -- With the passing of the supreme religious leader of over one billion of planet Earth's population today, Pope John Paul II, and talk about the future of the Roman Catholic Church and the new pope in the 21st Century, the prospect of a formal and official recognition by the world at large of intelligent life elsewhere in this century presents a challenge to all strata of society.
Friday, Aprl 1, 2005 -- As the comic TV show secret agent Maxwell Smart would say to the Chief and Agent 99: "Would you believe, a Soviet flying saucer?" No, he wasn't making an April Fools joke.
