My Own Kind of Miracle: Part II

After about two weeks, my ability to foretell winning numbers ceased. I don’t know why, any more than I know why the ability came the first place, but the timing of the cessation may have been related to my preparations to move quite soon from Florida to England in order to continue writing “Saint” books.

My sea voyage to England plays a part in this ongoing personal story of “things that can’t happen”. Before departing on the ocean liner from New York to Southampton I bought an astrology textbook. My fascination with the esoteric had extended to astrology, but I had learned little more about it than the supposed characteristics of my Sun sign, Sagittarius.

So, during those days on the ship I looked through the textbook (my inculcated notion that one should take a book on a vacation or ocean trip almost never results in the book actually being read), and when I had settled into a rented house in Beaconsfield I really began to study it. I bought more publications on calculating and interpreting horoscopes, and before long I began traveling by train to London to attend meetings of the Astrological Association.

There came a time when I could “cast” horoscopes correctly and calculate the transits. For those who don’t know, “horoscope” generally refers to the “birth chart” – a map of the positions of the planets and other factors at the time of a person’s birth. This is interpreted in terms of character traits and tendencies, as well as potential kinds of events. The birth chart never changes, and so when an astrologer wants to discern the most likely trends of events for a particular time, he or she calculates the positions of the planets during that particular time and superimposes them over the birth chart in order to discover the "transits".

What I’ve just said is oversimplified, but those basic ideas are needed to understand what happened to me next.

I decided that I would look at the transits at the time of my experiences at Pompano Park months before, to see if I could find any astrological “trigger”. As I was poring over the charts, concentrating on planetary positions during those days of knowing which horse would win the next race, the words “Hully Gully” popped very distinctly into my head. Hully Gully? To me those words meant a dance. Why would I suddenly think of the name of a dance?

Then the context made me ask myself, could Hully Gully be a horse?

I went down the road for the necessary paper and to my absolute astonishment found that a horse named “Hully Gully” was racing at a track in northern England that afternoon! I couldn’t have been more surprised or excited. I drove to one of England’s convenient betting shops for the first time since arriving in the country and wagered more money than I could afford on Hully Gully, at odds of 12 to 1.

Of course Hully Gully won the race. How could it lose, with all that fanfare? If my attitude toward life had not dramatically and permanently changed at Pompano Park, it changed now. There is a point beyond which lingering doubt and skepticism taught by parents, schools, compulsive naysayers, and scientists cannot survive. The idea that it was a “coincidence” that I perceived the words “Hully Gully” at that particular time, on the day when a horse unknown to me was running a race and won, is ridiculous. The universe was much different from what I'd been taught. Now I was certain of it.

That isn’t the end of the story. I began to think, “I wonder if I could use this ability for something more important than gambling?” An opportunity came soon.

I can place the date of the event fairly closely. On May 21, 1968 the American submarine “Scorpion”, having left the Mediterranean Sea to return to the United States, was last contacted about 50 miles south of the Azores. Within a couple of days the “Scorpion” appeared in the British news for the first time. It was missing. A search was underway.

When I read about the missing submarine, a string of numbers popped into my head, and I wrote them down as quickly as I could.

“What is this?” I asked myself. And then I realized that the numbers might designate latitude and longitude, and therefore could be related to the submarine.

As I searched a map for the coordinates I thought, “This spot is probably in the middle of the Sahara Desert.” But once more I was amazed. The location was in the Atlantic south of the Azores. The only problem was that the location was several hundred miles south of the Scorpion’s last reported location and its assumed course. In addition to that, the navy was speculating that the sub had probably drifted northward in the ocean currents. (I’m basing the report of the drift on memory and can’t find an original source.)

I felt triumph (latitude and longitude not in the Sahara Desert or Australia) mixed with disappointment (far from the Scorpion’s projected course and even farther from the presumed drift location), but I gave my information to the U.S. Navy in London because there was still hope there might be survivors on the sunken submarine. I thought I might be laughed at, but I received a nice letter of thanks, saying, “We need all the help we can get finding this submarine.”

The hull was eventually found on the ocean bottom about 400 miles southwest of the Azores, in the area of my coordinates.