Your True Tales
April 2008 - Page 19

My Apartment Wormhole
by Donald P. Hutchins

The following is a statement and testimony of an experience that occurred about two months after my 40th birthday. On the 12th of April 1996, in Long Beach, California, an experience of the luckiest chance observation in the history of mankind occurred. The following is an account of the events that transpired:

It was a Friday night and I had been working at the computer since 6 p.m. It was around 10 p.m. and I had already shut down and was getting ready for sleep. I lived, at the time, in a studio apartment. My living room was also my bedroom and office. To get a decent night's rest, I often had to use earplugs. In my apartment I had several pieces of furniture. I had a 3' x 5', five drawer executive desk with an old rolling secretary's chair and a round, 22" high wicker table, the top of which was about 18" in diameter. The table had a skirt that went from the tabletop to the foot of the table that was pinched at the waist, like a 1940s woman with an hourglass shape. The top was one large coil of wicker, ¾" in diameter, with a spacing of about 1.5" between each turn of the coil. The coil was stabilized along two different diameters that were perpendicular to each other. I would keep a newspaper or some magazines on the top of the wicker table if I wanted to keep small items on the top of the table, like my earplugs for example.

Several months before my 40th birthday, late one evening, I was getting ready for sleep. I had left my earplugs in their usual spot on top of the wicker table. I went to reach for the earplugs and wound up knocking them off the magazine beneath them down on to the floor. What I found, though, was only one of them had made it to the floor, the other had seemingly disappeared. Eventually, though, after obtaining another pair of earplugs and several months later, I did find the missing earplug of the previous pair. It had been caught on the inside of the wicker table. I had picked up the table, before, to look at the floor under it once or twice to see if I could find the missing earplug, without turning it over. The last time I looked was when I looked inside the table skirt, where I had at last noticed the missing earplug. So in this case, one of the earplugs had just gone missing. It did not disappear out of existence. It had just been out of view for a while.

I had landed a good job at a company that made electronic circuit breakers in March of 1996. I had been there for about a month when a series of events started to occur at home. I had established routines at home. It was a Friday night. I don't go out a lot. I had been working at the computer since 6 p.m. I had shut down already and was getting ready for sleep. It was about 10 p.m. I went to grab my earplugs from off of a magazine that was on top of the wicker table, and as I reached with my right hand, the fingers had touched the earplugs in a grabbing motion, but failed to clench together to pickup the earplugs up. Instead, my fingers dragged the earplug across the magazine and off to fall through the wicker table top down onto the floor -- or so I had thought.

Having had the prior experience, I immediately bent over to watch their progress of their fall to the floor so that I would not lose sight of them and to be able to find/get them right away -- or so I had thought. As I bent to look through the table top to watch the earplugs fall to the gray carpeted floor, a circular interface with rolling black-and-white striped spheres, formed into a contiguous structure with an inside diameter of about 3 to 4 inches. It did not look like the gray carpet of my apartment floor. Instead the image in the interface was completely different, as it was a brightly lit cement sidewalk. I stared at the image for about three seconds and blinked my eyes several times as the image persisted. I wanted to reach in and touch the image; however, the wicker table was blocking my hand from touching it. Then the circle started shrinking and the image and light compressed and got brighter. So I lifted the wicker table out of the way. Then it was gone. So were the earplugs.

I lifted the wicker table up and checked the hoop at the waist of the skirt of the wicker table. I then proceeded to look at every nook, cranny and crevasse within, on or around the wicker table. They were not to be found. I looked carefully on the gray-carpeted floor that was directly underneath the tabletop. They weren't there. I expanded my search further. I searched the whole of the living room carpet and the furniture, inside and out. They weren't there. At about 3 a.m., I finally gave up and went to sleep.

When I got up the next day, Saturday, I vacuumed everywhere I had looked the night before. After finishing the vacuuming, I felt better and I was looking forward to my breakfast date with my girl the next day. At 10 a.m., my girl shows up to go to Sunday brunch with me. On my way out, as usual, I stop to smell the roses planted near the front of my door in the middle of the breezeway and check on the potted plants on either side of my front door underneath each side window.

On the way back, we had fallen into silence just before we got to the breezeway that leads to the front doors of all of the apartments. As we approached my door, she spoke just as I had noticed, "What are those?" she said, pointing to two new objects on the concrete sidewalk against the west wall near the flower pots underneath the side window of my apartment door, nearest to us as we approached. As I looked in bewilderment, I saw the two yellow earplugs that had just disappeared right in front of my eyes, the night before last, after falling through the wicker table top, never hitting the carpet, just sitting there against the wall, guessing that they had appeared earlier, just before Gen made her usual sweeping rounds, in the middle of the walk, and Gen just swept them to the side against the wall, as I remembered the image inside the ring. I bent over and picked them up and put them into my pocket and said, "Nothing."

The light of enlightenment had just been turned on to full. I then fully re-realized just what it was that I had seen the night before last, then just a glimmer of a strangled thought after the experience wanting to deny the experience, wanting to the experience to have been just an illusion, an induced flashback, anything other than what it truly was. If she hadn't said or seen anything, I could have continued to believe that it didn't happen. Instead, it had all just become very real.

"Wormhole?" was my thought. The event had the desired effects of the macroscopic wormhole that was mentioned in the Scientific American "Ask the Experts" section on their website, but without the obvious problems of said suggested macroscopic wormhole. A pair of yellow foam earplugs had made an instantaneous non-linear transition through space and time. They went from Point A in space time to Point B, in a non-linear fashion. They traveled, or were displaced, through space, a distance of about 3.65 yards east, and through time, a difference of about 36.5 hours, just by falling through the center of the anomaly that I observed.

What does this say about the true nature of the universe? There is more.

Almost a month went by. Everyone and everything seemed normal, or the same, yet there was a new light on in my brain. It had been just a once-in-a-lifetime event with no real witnesses, nothing to get too excited about. Then "IT" came back. It was late at night, and I had been asleep. I have a sinus condition. With constantly congested and swollen nasal passages, the congestion is best relieved with 4-Way nasal spray. I can go back to sleep once the congestion starts to recede. I had been repeating that ritual about three to four times each night for a number of years. I awoke at about 4 a.m. with clogged nasal passages, as usual, and sat up on my futon mattress. I would keep the bottle of nasal spray, on the executive oak desk, within reach of sitting up.

I reached out for the bottle and grabbed it, opened it, used it, closed it. I then placed it back in its usual spot on the solid desktop. After about five minutes, I sat back up, not happy that the congestion hadn't yet started to recede. I reached out for the bottle to grab it again. All I grabbed was thin air. I looked carefully in the dark at the spot where the bottle had been just a few short minutes ago -- nothing. I got up, I went and turned on the living room ceiling light, I again started to search; I looked carefully at, near, around, and underneath the desk -- nothing. I carefully moved my bedding, checking every square inch of it. I looked on the carpet where my bedding had been -- nothing. I looked under, behind, and on top of both dressers, and the desk again -- and again, nothing.

I looked at the time: 4:30 a.m. I, again, realized what had happened, again, that an anomaly had come by, maybe the same one, and formed directly underneath the bottle, within the surface of the desk, to allow gravity to cause to fall, and the bottle fell through, to land in a different place at a much later time....

It was about eight months later, or about 36.5 weeks, that the bottle returned. I was coming back from a Sunday breakfast, which I had left for at 10 a.m. at about 12 noon. I had been sitting in the rolling secretary's chair for most of the morning while working at the computer. I had just opened the door to get inside the apartment, to which my vision was adjusting, when I looked at my desk and computer and chair. And -- eureka! -- there it was, the long lost nasal spray bottle had returned to find its way to the knee of the rolling secretary's chair, eight months later, and a distance of about 36.5 inches to the north by northeast.

I still have both bottles in storage for when dating methods become more accurate, to say, maybe, within one month of accuracy. You would think that the story would end here to learn some of life's greatest lessons. Nope. Object four. Object four turned out to be another nasal spray bottle. On this occasion, I had decided to leave the bottle home at its customary spot on the desk top before going to breakfast. When I got back from breakfast, it was gone from off of the desktop, approximately 3.65 months after the previous one had returned. For some reason, I had thought at the time that it would return, probably about eight months later. Well, eight months later I was kicked out of my apartment, and the second nasal spray bottle hadn't returned. I now figure it may have returned about 36.5 months later.

This is the end of the statement of discovery.

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