Painting in the Background
It all began with an everyday ‘distress’ purchase, as the psychologists term it. I had to fill our car with petrol to get to Edinburgh so I had stopped at a wayside garage at St Boswells in the Scottish Borders, some dozen miles from our home near Kelso. I’d noticed the garage was an Austin-Rover distributor, so as I was paying for the petrol, the idea came to ask about a second-hand Montego estate car. Our Maestro was getting rather past its prime. But it had to be a low mileage, 2 litre version of the Montego estate. It was a ridiculous inquiry to make as money was very tight. It took us all our time to pay for the petrol and we were behind with the rent on our farmhouse home.

But it was as a result of that query, the garage owner rang a few weeks later, to tell me he had just got exactly the car I had asked about. when we went to look at the car, Jenny noticed that it had 557 chalked on the side of the engine. That was just the start. That 557 was a production line check. It indicated the car chassis to which the engine would be mated. The chassis number of the car was 7AM396557. And that chassis code encoded, in short form, all the major details of the disaster which was to come at Lockerbie, nineteen days later, 60 miles away. A Pan Am Jumbo jet, N739PA would crash at 7.3 pm at Lockerbie, 55º7’ N, because a US Navy cruiser (the USS Vincennes)  shot down Iran Air Flight 655 on 7.3, the year before, 3rd July 1988. For more details on our Lockerbie experience see Lockerbie and 557.

Because of this and also many other elements contained in and around this event, I had postulated that these numbers had been emphasised to us in the manner of a code by some Source of Intelligence that intended to indicate that it knows the future in detail.  For want of a better word God,  seen the only likely candidate.  For what else can possess information that would appear to come from beyond space and time?

In June 1990 came the pieces of the next jigsaw puzzle – with the Code 558 being emphasised. We were in Egypt, about to go to Abu Simbel, when, in the Seven Stars Bazaar in Aswan I flicked open a book to discover how, on just two days a year, the sun on its rising at 5.58 am, shone 65 metres down the length of Ramses II’s great temple, to transiently illuminate the high altar. Why was it ‘out by one minute’? I had wondered. But it turned out it wasn’t. the precision of the builders had been absolute, 3200 years before.  It came to pass that, 558 days after the Lockerbie air disaster, four days after our return from Egypt,  1426 pilgrims died in a stampede near the tent city of Mina,  when the air conditioning failed in a tunnel linking Mecca to Mina.

As with Lockerbie, other elements around us in Egypt, prophetically linked our personal experiences into key elements of the disaster, almost like pieces of a jigsaw. It was as though Something was saying “Here are some clues as to what is to come – bits as if part of ajigsaw puzzle. I give you these so that you might know that I know exactly what is to come. I have the full picture, which soon you will recognise as world events unfold.”

Code 559 did not come until January 1991. I noticed a strange error in the edition number of the Daily Telegraph on 6th January 1991, just the one day. 7th January was in the same sequence as 4th January. That ‘error code’ the addition number was 41550…It should have been 42156. I was suddenly reminded of Arthur Koestler’s account of the D-Day crossword clues of May/June 1944 in his section of the book The Challenge of Chance. Top secret code words for the forthcoming D-Day invasion appeared as solutions to clues in five crosswords between 19th May and 2nd June. The invasion began on the morning of 6th June 1944.

Was I being given a clue to the forthcoming Gulf War invasion in a parallel manner, I wondered? Had some compositor been caused to make an error, a significant error? If my Code theory was correct and 559 was the next in the series, 41559 would give me the date of the start of the invasion of Kuwait. That meant that date would be 17th January. And so it proved to be. A cross-correlation came from another air disaster, that at Kegworth on the M1, just three weeks after Lockerbie.  Two major air disasters in Britain in the space of three weeks was something rather noteworthy. This cross- reference gave the same date, 17th January 1991. Was it really just chance that the name Kegworth also indicated, cryptically  in true crossword fashion, the reason for the Gulf war? Is oil not measured in barrels, a synonym for keg? And worth is used as a loose synonym for value.  What is more, the International Herald Tribune, formerly the New York Herald Tribune, ran two editions that day. The front page of the early edition talked of the failure of last minute talks. Then later, around dawn, the front page was changed. It became the Invasion edition. Naturally, both editions carried the same edition number – 33557.

The progression of codes 557, 558, 559 was just the tip of the iceberg and very many more meaningful coincidences cross-threaded our lives over the next two decades, often serving to authenticate the communication we received form the spirits of the dead, far-fetched as that may seem to many in their cosy, arid world of rampant materialism. We have produced seventeen books to detail much of that research.

And now, as if finally to authenticate our research, exactly twenty years on from that first 557 code came a whole train of events apparently intended to fulfil the demands of science for repeatability, in order to validate our hypothesis. The code sequence 557, 558, 559 was repeated but very much truncated in time.


The Second Coming
It was twenty years, within a month, that that code repeat began, but it was now transposed 12,000 miles to New Zealand. As I am now domiciled in what the locals fondly call ‘Godzone’. ‘Godlesszone’ would be a closer approximation to the reality of New Zealand today. Richard and Ariana really would feel at home in this paradise for hedonistic consumers.

Shortly after lunch on 27th November 2008, the number 557 was emphasised to me twice. That afternoon, I just saw this as fragments of the global financial crisis, confirming my identification of the times in which we live, but now brought home to New Zealand. The information was contained in the two main stories on the front page of the Business News section of the New Zealand Herald, Auckland’s daily paper. The shares of Fonterra, the dairy giant of Anchor butter fame, New Zealand’s largest company and Fletcher Building, New Zealand’s third largest company, both now stood at $5.57. The Fletcher story was illustrated by a plunging graph and in black bold type the closing price of $5.57 on 26th November.  Fourteen hours after I read that article, an Air New Zealand Airbus A320 mirrored that graph, plunging into the Mediterranean Sea off Perpignan. Back home in New Zealand, the time was 4.46am on 28th November. Was it really just chance that brought Air New Zealand’s second largest plane crash on the very anniversary of its largest and worst? On 28th November 1979 an Air New Zealand DC10, Flight TE901, had collided with Mt. Erebus, in whiteout conditions. The airlines behaviour afterwards was shameful, as senior personnel tried to direct blame to the flight deck, turning whiteout to whitewash.

Once again that strange coincidence in the date proved to be barely the tip of the iceberg. Another powerful destiny element soon emerged, this one in space, as if to echo the one in time. The Airbus A320 had been born in France, at Toulouse, and had died in French waters just 100 miles away from its place of birth – Alpha to Omega, in a manner of speaking. The French pronounce English in a very characteristic way  In particular, they roll their ‘r’s…. This causes them to pronounce the word Airbus in a most significant way. We discovered this on the night of 28th November when, during the Six O’clock News reports, we heard a French woman reporter talk of the crash of the ‘Airrebus’….. She made a sound identical to ‘Erebus’….. Was this homophone really chance? Or was it design? Was it destiny?