“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Our region is supposed to be outside the danger zone—yet we see conflicting newspaper reports about whether the prevailing wind currents would make us vulnerable to the aftereffects of a meltdown. Even now local civil defense officials monitor the air several times daily with radiological survey meters—equipment similar to Geiger counters. Jonestown was far away, remote in another land, I said to Jane, but the potential mass tragedy of Three Mile Island hovers at the edges of our personal worlds. The whole affair has a sense of unreal immediacy, because there’s nothing to see, and because I don’t think most people really understand the probabilities involved. It would hardly be a coincidence, I added, that the mass events at Jonestown and Three Mile Island took place within less than six months of each other, and that they represented the two poles, or extremes, of mankind’s present main belief systems: religion and science.

It was hardly a coincidence that this particular situation arrived in the social climate first of all portrayed in a movie.

(The movie is The China Syndrome, of course, with Michael Douglas, Jack Lemmon and Jane Fonda, which opened to rave reviews perhaps two weeks or so ago. The short story referred to above was reported on a TV program about Three Mile Island: Jane and I caught a glimpse of, I believe, a local newspaper or magazine in the Harrisburg area that had printed a short story about a nuclear accident at that plant, on the same day that the troubles began at Three Mile Island. We hadn’t heard of the story. If I’m in error and the story was printed in a national magazine, for instance, we still haven’t heard of it. Nor have we heard or read about this amazing “coincidence” since seeing that one mention of it on that TV newscast.

(I might as well use this opportunity to point up what I think is an obvious connection between the nuclear mishaps at Three Mile Island, and the mass suicide at Guyana [Jonestown] earlier this year. It could hardly be a coincidence, I remarked to Jane this noon that both mass events had taken place this year, and represented the two poles, or extremes, of mankind’s present belief systems: religion and science. Then this afternoon Sue Watkins called Jane from Dundee—and proceeded to tell Jane about the “obvious connections” between Guyana and Harrisburg....)