Apports

Dematerializing, Rematerializing, and Translocating Objects

With this week’s posting, I want to welcome the many additional new subscribers subscribers who came from Rob Brezsny’s shout out on his own substack account. I met Rob in 1972 when I came to teach at Goddard. He was a recent student there, an ex-student living in the area. For a long time, I thought he had graduated, but it is more accurate to say that he finished with Goddard but not with Vermont. He eventually moved to North Carolina for a while. I believe that it was there that he asked David Bowie to dance. I have a imaginal memory of this from his account. I picture him cutting in on Bowie while Ziggy Stardust was dancing with someone else (gender optional) and then finishing the dance with him. I think that was in the later 1970s that I published Rob’s essay “Qabalistic Sex* Magick for Shortstops and Second Basemen” in the anthology Baseball I Gave You All the Best Years of My Life, which I coedited with University of Delaware professor Kevin Kerrane. In the essay, Rob drew a mysterious relationship between Bowie and the distinctly non-magickal Larry Bowa of Rob’s hometown Phillies. Rob moved to Santa Cruz and then San Rafael while I was living in Berkeley in the later eighties, so we spent time together until I left the Bay Area for good in 2014. In 2000, I published his Televisionary Oracle, and in 2009, I published the first edition of Pronoia is the Antidote to Paranoia. Yet Rob’s and my connection runs deeper than essays and books and encompasses many multi-hour phone conversations, healing transferences and confessions, and two-hour meals, from a café in Santa Cruz that his brother managed to the vegetarian Tibetan Kitchen in Albany, California. Rob has been a priceless karma brother, voice of prophecy, and collaborator in sports. For Rob’s and other new subscribers, here is the Jovian Bricolage archive:

https://operajupiter.substack.com/archive?sort=ne

Apports

My own first experience with apports came last year, 2024, in August, when I had COVID, and my wife, Lindy, and I were in our Bar Harbor house. I experienced my wallet and cell phone disappearing for periods of time and then reappearing elsewhere. It got to the point where I would put them on top of a bureau and point out the spot to Lindy to have her witness where they were, and then in the morning they'd be gone, and they would appear later in another part of the house. I played enough April Fools’ tricks on her over the years that she wasn’t sure that this wasn’t a trick, even though it wasn’t April and I had COVID.

I do think that the apport was related to COVID in a mysterious sort of way, although COVID would not be apporting agent alone. I was the field through which it was operating. As I was struggling with COVID and my own survival, I somehow put a telekinetic spin on the objects.

At one point during the time I was sick, our older car that we rarely use, a blue 2007 Prius, began flashing its taillights in the driveway even though it had no key in it and hadn’t been driven for quite a while—remember that car because it plays a big role in this account. Lindy saw the flashing lights asked me to go look. I was still pretty sick, but I went out, opened the door, and got in the car. I had had my wallet and cell phone dematerialize from the bureau and rematerialize elsewhere three times by then. This time, the third, I had found my wallet in my office, but my cell phone was still missing. When I got into the car with the key, it began honking. As I stopped the honking by pressing the sound-alert button on the fob, my cell phone dropped into my lap inside the car. I don’t know where it dropped from. but it felt like the roof of the car, though that provides little space for a portal.

That was an explicit example of an object undergoing dematerialization followed by translocation and rematerialization. The mechanism was unknown, but it was outside the domain of physics. I didn't know the name “apport” then. That came later.

In December, we were in our Portland house. Now, each of us had a Classic iPod that synched off the same iTunes playlist on my computer. In September, I had sent my one to Repair Sharks in Long Island, New York, to get a new battery installed. I had just gotten it back, but I left it in Bar Harbor because I packed haphazardly, still being quite sick. So, when we were in Portland, we were using Lindy's iPod on a Bose dock that sat on a low built-in counter between the kitchen and the living room. I also took it to the ice-skating rink when Lindy wasn’t using it—I had just begun skating after being sick. I figured I'd reclaim mine when we went back to Bar Harbor.

Then around the middle of December, Lindy's iPod disappeared from the dock. We couldn't find it anywhere. It got to the point where I was looking under the carpet and clearing a bureau of teapots and cups in order to look behind it because it was close to the dock. We didn’t find it, so we figured it was lost for good and we should buy another while they were still available. We ordered it on Amazon. It came in three days. We synced it to the same iTunes.

Well, two weeks later, we drove 160 miles back to Bar Harbor and the missing iPod was the only object sitting in the center of kitchen counter. The location was relevant, and I'll get to that.

We were in Bar Harbor almost three weeks. When we were ready to go back to Portland, the iPod was no longer in its dock, and alongside the dock was an object we'd never seen, a dimmer for multicolored lights, which didn't go to anything in our house. That dimmer is still there because I don't want to mess with whatever portal is involved. In fact, I'd like to encourage it as an experiment of sorts.

When we drove back to Portland, I went looking immediately for the iPod to see if it was back on the dock or anywhere—if it had translocated back. By then, I had the word “apport.” I got it from Sean Esbjorn Hargens, who's a scholar of anomalies and the paranormal and particularly the myriad layers they can take on. On one of our many walks, he described a case in which Bigfoot activity around a house had stirred up fairy activity inside the house—they involved two different portals, but activity in one had activated the other.

Sean lives in Yarmouth, Maine, but I met him about twelve or thirteen years earlier ago he lived in Sebastopol, California. He moved to Maine with his family in 2020 during the pandemic in order to enroll his daughter in a private school they found on line. That itself is a remarkable COVID story but not on topic here.

When I told Sean about the translocating iPod, he recognized the phenomenon at once, and he explained the historical derivation of apports (like “séance,” from the French). Subsequently, Dan Drasin, a Berkeley friend who is also a long-time investigator of the paranormal, told me that he had made a whole movie about experiments involving apports, and he sent me a link to it: (www.bit.ly/scolemovie). That documentary is primarily about the sorts of apports that occur during séances, when spirits drop objects, usually from another century, a pocket watch or photograph in a frame, from within the séance, like my missing cell phone from the general direction of the ceiling. It would be dark during the séance, so you couldn't necessarily tell where an apport came from.

After watching the movie, I had a full-fledged notion of apports and excitement about them, so I suggested to Keith Thompson that he could write a book a book on apports for my Sacred Planet imprint at Inner Traditions. Keith was the author the most up-to-date summaries on the UFO landscaps. He did it in the late 80s, early 90s with a book, called Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination. He was going to revise it for Sacred Planet and Inner Traditions, but the revision turned into a new book that came out last year, The UFO Paradox: The Celestial and Symbolic World of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

I said to Keith, objects dematerializing and rematerializing sounds very much like UFOs. Maybe UFOs don't so much fly at incredibly high speeds, but translocate or dematerialize and rematerialize. He put together a proposal of which the following is a part:

“In parapsychology and Spiritualism, an apport is the transference of an article from one place to another, or an appearance of an article from an unknown source that is often associated with poltergeist activity or séances. Exploring in particular objects that self-transport to other sites, including across time as well as space, the book delves into the relationship between these objects and UFOs, with their paradoxical combination of physical features (showing up on radar, occupying positions in space consistent with geometry, causing indentations and burn marks) and what might be termed “anti-physical” traits (objects sinking into the ground, changing shape and becoming fuzzy or transparent, breaking into orbs of light, remaining observable visually yet disappearing from radar).

“By encompassing UFOs as not necessarily interstellar (UAPs as not only aerial) while not excluding either possibility, apports switch the emphasis from ‘flying’ to ‘unidentified.’ In a seminal 2003 paper on ‘the physics of high strangeness,’ astrophysicist Jacques Vallée and physicist Eric Davis emphasize: ‘[A] bridge could be formed between … disparate … [UFO communities if they ] would only recognize a simple fact: No experiment can distinguish between phenomena manifested by visiting interstellar (arbitrarily advanced) ETI and intelligent entities that may exist near Earth within a parallel universe or in different dimensions, or who are (terrestrial) time travelers.’

“By emphasizing materialization, he focused on the fact that apporting objects and unidentified flying and submerged objects alike are more substantially becoming objects or phenomena and thereby opening a whole new cosmology of ‘unidentified’ events that may also include previously unnoticed relationships between events such as synchronicities and JOTTS. The book will draw as well on Jung’s thinking about the ‘psychoid’ nature of archetypal reality, a term Jung borrowed from the neo-Vitalist thinker, Hans Driesch (1867-1941). For Driesch, Das Psychoid (1903) was an intra-psychic factor located in the meeting place between the psychological and the physiological, combining and transcending both. Jung’s later work (especially his alchemically resonant Red Book) proposed a unitary dimension to all experience, with his particular notion of the Unus Mundus.

After he began writing his book on materializations in general, Keith described the Scole experiment. He pointed out that during an informal séance on April 4, 1994, a penny from 1891 landed on the table with a clink. A silver Churchill crown followed a louder clunk. A newspaper followed the crown: the Daily Express, April 1, 1944, the headlines showing Allied troops in Italy. It looked fresh, as though it had been printed that day. Though it bore the qualities of wartime newsprint, it showed no signs of brittleness or discoloration The Paper Industry Research Association later asserted that it was genuine wartime newsprint.

Next came a brooch, a dog tag, a piece of quartz. The group named them ‘apports,’ gifts from spirit realm. As lights flickered across the cellar, tiny orbs darted from floor to ceiling. Several months later a camera loaded with fresh film from sealed boxes, rose off the table, snapping on its own 11 times in 20 seconds. After the film was developed, it showed a retroactive image of the glowing streaks they’d seen.

By late 1994, hands and arms in the dark of the cellar took shape, warm and palpable, reaching out with permission to touch Robin, Sandra, or a guest. Once permission was given, Robin felt the embrace of his late parents and sister. Their voices were soft but clear, speaking from the other side as if they’d never left.

To Keith, the phenomena suggested a link to extra dimensions—string theory or planes where energy vibrated differently and time looped instead of flowing in Heraclitus’ river forward forward. He thought ofPlato’s forms, Vedantic planes, implicate order.

Scole wasn’t unique—portals could open anywhere receptivity met intent.

So Lindy’s iPod, which had been lost once, had dematerialized or passed through a portal again. Two snowy winter months passed. I forgot about the lost object. And I also had gotten my own one back when we were in Bar Harbor, so we our original complement: two. A third was superfluous.

I was involved in following the Ottawa Senators then, watching videos of their games on my computer. They were trying to make the playoffs for the first time in eight years and playing on the West Coast, so it was past when I usually stay up. I was very sleepy, so between the second and third period of a game in Seattle or Vancouver (I can’t remember), I didn’t want to attempt anything productive. Instead, I went upstairs to get Lindy's iPod from her desk drawer because I was going to sync both of them with my iTunes file since we had added some new songs and poems. There was the missing iPod sitting right next to hers in the drawer.

In the morning, I asked her if she had brought it down. No, she said, she hadn't. She considered it lost anew.

We didn’t have any other dramatic Apports for a while, although in talking to people, I learned many of them had experienced apport-like events, like when they were moving to the new house far away, an object they were unable to find moved ahead of them and they found it there when there get there (for instance,. Berkeley to Seattle). Meryl Nass, a very astute doctor friend, told me that objects dematerialized and rematerialized in her life with some frequency but always reappeared a day or an hour later. People experiencing this they had been absent-minded or mistaken, especially as regards the refrigerator (since refrigerators have more fractal packing than rooms). Another friend, Paul Weiss, director of the Whole Health Center near Bar Harbor, told me that his cell phone had disappeared from the front seat of his car. A year later, he still hasn’t found it and has gotten a new one.

The next explicit apport in my life was a few weeks ago—August 2025. In Bar Harbor, we had a two bowls of a small informal set. We bought them at Rooster, a kitchen store in Ellsworth near our house. Lindy used the tiny one mainly to gather supplements to take. One day in July, she couldn't find the bowl in Bar Harbor, but it showed up about ten days after we got back to Portland, stacked among the cat's bowls under the sink.

This brings me pretty much to the spectacular incident that culminated yesterday, September 15th. In order to characterize this, I have to backtrack quite a bit because the largest layer extended over years. I'll mention also parenthetically that in doing his research, the most spectacular apport that Keith came up with, at least to me, was a Navajo tribal meeting at which 50 quarters appeared from nowhere all about, and each of them had arrived heads up. That suggested both a conscious and a trickster element, even an attempt to communicate. Séances are involved in communications between the dead and the living, and perhaps the dead send messages in the only way they can. Keith elucidated on this for me:

“Coins falling from thin air seemed like a cosmic wink. It evinced the notion of a ‘trickster’ dimension—a playful, elusive force that seems to challenge the boundaries of reality. The incident took place in an office building in Window Rock, Arizona. Before the quarters appeared, employees reported objects moving, voices whispering, and a phone that rang repeatedly with no traceable caller. The building’s history as a former morgue in the 1930s raised suspicions that the space was haunted. Around 9 PM, one of the investigators heard two voice voices to his left, speaking muffled, unintelligible, but unmistakable words. Seconds later, he heard a clink and found a quarter on the floor nearby, heads up. Through the night, coins fell continually—some striking them directly, others appearing in spots they’d just checked.

No matter what they hit or where they landed, each coin settled heads up. After an investigator felt one hit his back, he turned to find it on the ground, heads up of course, with no vents, holes, or pranksters to explain it. The investigator considered this a ‘trickster’ element, as if some intelligence—playful yet insistent—was signaling its presence: ‘Heads up, we’re here.’ The investigator mused: ‘It’s the universe winking at you—something knows you’re watching, and it’s messing with you.’

Even as I am writing this, Dan Drasin reported, “On my daily walk I pass two of these rent-a-bike racks. On several occasions one or another bike has flashed its headlight as I approach it.”

We got our 2007 Prius in California at Berkeley Toyota. Around 2008 or 2009, we were bringingour groceries home from Berkeley Natural Foods. I was carrying the car keys. When we put the bags on the kitchen counter, I also put the keys down, but we couldn't find them afterwards. That seemed absurd, so I searched everywhere, expanding the search even to places where I knew they couldn't possibly be. We finally gave up and considered that the only possible explanation was that they fell into the garbage and left with the pickup the next morning. We didn't think to look in the trash until it had been picked up. We had to get a new fob made. Unlikely an old-fashioned car key, they’re moderately expensive, about $300 with programming.

Then in 2021 in Bar Harbor, we came back from A & B Naturals market, put the groceries on the counter, the same counter where the iPod and dimmer would later appear, and set the car keys there there. After we put the groceries away, we couldn't find them.

I didn't think about the earlier incident then, and COVID had yet entered our own lives. I assumed we would find them eventually because where could they be? It was pretty much what I had felt the first time. And I even tried moving the car close to the house and putting the other fob far away to see if the car would start and give us a clue as to where the keys are.

The key ring for the 2017 Prius that we drive more often has an air tag, so we can always find it if it’s misplaced. We drive this other car so little, like less than a thousand miles a year, that its keys don’t merit an air tag.

We waited until we drove down to Portland, maybe two weeks after losing the fob the second time, and went to the Berlin City Toyota and got another fob made and programmed. That leads up to the present moment.

On Wednesday September 9, I drove the blue Prius into the center of Portland, to meet a buddy, Quinn, who was temporarily in town, to hit fly balls with him. The car’s battery had gone dead recently and I had had AAA put in a new battery. I wanted to drive it now, so I picked Quinn up n it, and we went out to a field off Park Avenue to hit fly balls.

After baseball and feeding geese, I dropped Quinn back at his house and continued to the Portland Co-op where I bought groceries. I came home, set the key ring with the fob on the table and, after putting the items away, couldn't find it. As I spent a total of around two hours on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, looking for it, I suddenly realized that this was a repeating phenomenon, and an apport. I emptied out the recycling, and it wasn't there. I took the garbage bag into the car and moved the other keys far away, but nothing in the bag started it. I checked pieces of clothing that I wore that day, then pieces I hadn’t, which reminded of the Sufi fable about the guy who appropriately lost his keys and was looking under a glowing streetlight. A friend came up and wondered what he was looking for; he said, I lost my keys.” The friend said, “Where did you lose them?” The guy pointed some distance away in the dark, saying, “I lost them over there. The friend said, “Why are you looking for them here? The guy said, “Because the light is brighter.”

Well, that's how I felt. Any place I could look, even if it was not where they were there, was appealing. I had gone bowling that morning and I had the keys subsequent to that, but I still put the bag with the bowling ball in the car and tried to start it. I went in rooms I hadn’t been in. I also looked in couches, I took up couch pillows. I retraced my step to the car multiple times. I looked under both cars multiple time. I looked in both cars even though if the fob was in the blue Prius, it should have started. Eventually I gave up.

Then yesterday I went back to the Prius place and ordered a new fob. They had it in stock, so I made an appointment for Wednesday, the next day, to have it programmed. I also stopped to see Jeff Bishop, who's my favorite customer service representative there. He's older than most of the others and, I think, a retired military guy, quite sober and funny. He has always been enjoyable to interact with, so we try and selected him when we can. I went up to his desk, asked if he had a minute. He nodded. I said,” Jeff, do you want to hear an amazing story? You may not believe this. I'm about to go order another key for our 07 Prius. But I want to tell you the story first.” After I told him, he just smiled. Then I said, “It's called an apport. I have an interview with Keith Thompson who's writing a book on them Would you like a link to it?” He said yes he would and pointed to his card in the holder; it has his email. I closed by saying, “If another customer has their fob apported, you know what to say to them.” He laughed.

I placed the order at the parts department and drove home.

That night, after dinner and after watching an episode of Outlander, which could be a mild synchronicity because it's about time travel, which is one possibility for how apports, Lindy went to start washing the dishes. I went to email Jeff, send him a link to the audio I made with Keith Thompson. And while I was typing the email, I called to Lindy, “I wish that the keys would rematerialize, like the iPods, instead of just dematerializing.”

The moment I said that, she said, “I found your keys.”

I thought, ‘That's not possible.’ I couldn't imagine where she found them since I had checked everywhere and she was in the kitchen, a prime site I had canvassed many times. She had found them in the garbage disposal after turning it on and hearing a clatter.

Now, remember the quarters that landed heads up and the fact that we considered not the disposal but the garbage two of the three times, the first and then this time, as a possible place for the lost keys. It's as though the apporter is making a joke, not “heads up” but “There is more than one kind of garbage than is dreamt of in your philosophy, Richard.”

Could they have been in the garbage disposal all the time?

No, because Lindy had run it several times since the key ring with the fob had disappeared five days earlier on the 11th. And on one of the interim days, a spoon that had fallen into it was ruined.

She brought it to me. It had the bright yellow sort of plastic tag attached to the key ring. And the keys were destroyed. None of them worked. One of them was bent totally out of shape. I didn't think of this at the time, but in combination with the spoon it seems to me another joke, a reference to Uri Geller as if to say, ‘There is more than one way to bend a spoon (or to apport keys).;’

The operating part of the fob was encased in hard plastic, so it seemed unharmed. I took it immediately to the car and it started up. Then I called Keith and told him the story.

Going to get the keys to photograph and attach them to post with a photograph on Facebook felt weird. I hesitated, as though I were about to handle something touched by a ghost.

Laura Aversano, author of Affirmations of the Light in Times of Darkness and The Light of God Divine Locutions on Evil, Karma, Reincarnation, and Healing emailed me after reading my post:

“Yep. They still are ‘holding’ onto the keys energetically. Leave them a gift—some food or candy or something. They will either literally physically take it or energetically. Also sometimes the little people play like this—take things and put them back. I do have a feeling, a strong one, you are on sacred land in Maine where the little people roamed and they just have attached themselves to you both.”

After Laura’s email, I put part of a chocolate bar in the garbage disposal and three malted milk balls in the cup holder of the blue Prius. Two days later, the malted milk balls are still there.

However, right after I placed the candy, I heard a noise in the living room and went to check. The radiator cover had partially opened, and a cat toy that had been missing for almost a month was sitting in plain sight beside it.

I keep thinking about the fob that disappeared and ended up in the garbage disposal. I know that it had to be in some sort of quantum uncertain state, other planet, or fairy keep, but a lifetime habit of expecting continuity of objects keeps imposing itself on me. I think of the fob as somewhere ordinary in between. I continue to handle it with trepidation because I don’t know if the fairies or interferers are totally benign and also if their touch is contagious in some way. Keith writes:

“If reality is not a fixed, binary construct of mind and matter but a fluid continuum where the two interweave, might there be a deeper physics—a hidden architecture of existence—where what seems “paranormal” is simply an expression of principles not yet grasped? Quantum mechanics has already unsettled our notions of space, time, and causality. If particles can be entangled across vast distances, if observation itself shapes the outcome of an experiment, what larger implications might this hold? Could anomalous events be the signatures of consciousness interacting with an extended, multidimensional reality? Might apports emerge from a liminal realm where matter and information are more fluidly linked?”

As long as apports are neither theoretical or science-fiction, then they have to be incorporated within our world-view and we have to give up notions of reality and continuity that we have held for a lifetime.

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Dan Drasin, author of A New Science of the Afterlife: Space, Time, and the Consciousness Code:

If you should suddenly find a 3-inch diameter reel of recording tape let me know. It disappeared in my NYC apartment in 1967. I had made up a silly song about John Keel and and the Mothman, and recorded it on that tape. Took the tape off the recorder and put it on the table next to it. Went to bed. Next morning it was gone. Never found it. Later that year I met a man who, it turned out, had been dead for two years. I'd heard about such materializations... and now often wonder how many of the people we see walking along a busy street are "just visiting."

In 1986 a red Tibetan neck cord appeared in my Oakland apartment. The kind worn by monks. The knot was intact and even shiny—as in well worn. I still lhave it. Given the intact knot, one wonders how it got off the head of the wearer.

I wear a belt back as my wallet and phone holder, and keep all my credit, etc., cards organized in it. Went to Kaiser today and when I got there I couldn't find my Kaiser card. First time that's ever happened. Went through all my cards and every pocket in the beltpack several times, and it was gone. Dang. I'll order a new one.

Samantha Treasure: author of Cyborg Phantoms and Haunted Technology:

I love that idea about UFOs and apports being linked or working similarly. It never crossed my mind but it makes so much sense!

Mary Stark, medical anthropologist:

My friend Fran is a psychic medium and has had experiences with apports. What you describe also sounds like a sort of playful poltergeist type thing going on.