Episode #20
Messages From The Vertical Plane
The Common Anomaly Podcast Stuart James What if one of the strangest “messages from the future” ever recorded has an unexpected connection to the modern AI industry? In this episode of The Common Anomaly Podcast, we return to one of the most bizarre cases in paranormal history: The Dodleston Messages ; a series of unexplained communications that allegedly appeared on a computer in a small English cottage during the 1980s. But this time, there’s a new wrinkle. The story begins in Dodleston, Cheshire , where schoolteacher Ken Webster and his partner Debbie Oakes moved into an old cottage known as Meadow Cottage. After acquiring a BBC Micro computer, Webster began discovering strange messages appearing on the machine messages apparently written by a man calling himself Thomas Harden , who claimed to be living in the same location during the reign of Henry VIII. Harden seemed equally confused by Webster, believing the computer itself to be some kind of supernatural device. A remarkable correspondence followed, seemingly connecting two people separated by centuries. Then someone or something else entered the conversation. Calling itself 2109 , this new correspondent claimed to be communicating from the future and appeared to know far more about what was happening than either Webster or Harden. Its cryptic statements introduced concepts including the mysterious “vertical plane,” surveillance, manipulation, and the possibility that the experiment was being deliberately controlled. Who or what was 2109? We trace the full Dodleston mystery, including the strange phenomena reportedly occurring inside Meadow Cottage, the messages attributed to Thomas Harden, attempts to verify Harden’s historical identity, the arrival of 2109, and Ken Webster’s extraordinary book The Vertical Plane . We also examine the major explanations for the case: an elaborate hoax, psychological or paranormal phenomena, communication across time, retrocausality, technological manipulation or something that doesn’t fit comfortably into any of those categories. Finally, we follow the story beyond Dodleston and ask whether the ideas buried inside these nearly forty-year-old computer messages look different in the age of artificial intelligence, large language models, digital consciousness and increasingly autonomous computer systems . Was 2109 simply part of an ingenious 1980s mystery? Or did Ken Webster receive a message from something whose true nature we are only now beginning to understand? https://a.co/d/0g0AtNGN Home | spr.ac.uk https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/townsend-brown-master-of-gravity/id1790015690?i=1000789209797 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-philip-experiment/id1790015690?i=1000733496421 Mysterious Package Company
