Image Conscious : Aided by his computer scanner, O.C.’s Mark Oyler sees haunting shapes inside his collection of rocks. It sounds crazy, but maybe it means something, he says.
“Do you see this here? There’s that, and that . Do you see it? Or this? I can see it clear as a bell. There’s just one after another over here.”
Mark Oyler was pointing to a laser printout of a stone he’s put on his computer scanner. For the past six weeks, the 42-year-old small-business owner has been obsessed with his rock, a fairly common hand-sized opaque fluorite crystal bought at a local swap meet.
He’s convinced that when he puts it on his high-resolution computer scanner, ghostly images are revealed in it: human faces, animal snouts, skulls and mysterious objects, including one that looks sort of like a motor home.
But while he was trying to convince me that he has heads in his rock, I was beginning to think the reverse was true.
“If you were wondering, I don’t believe in witches, goblins or fairy tales, OK?” he said. Oyler runs Dashield, an Orange company that manufactures and sells carpeted dashboard covers, a concept he claims to have pioneered some years back. No New Age for him, he’s a meat and potatoes kind of guy, and indeed, that’s what he was eating in Swansons TV dinner form as we spoke at his business last Tuesday.
Yet even before he scanned the stone, he said, things started going strangely around the office. He’s collected interesting rocks since his youth, and suddenly on Jan. 1 his crystallized lead galena stone began showing a magnetic repulsion to wood and pressboard. His dictionary keeps opening to a place where heaven is on one page and the other page is numbered 666. Then in early May, he put his fluorite on a Hewlett-Packard scanner, and he hasn’t been the same since. Even his eyesight, which previously required reading glasses, has cleared up, he said.
“I’m obsessed with this thing,” he said of his chunk of fluorite. “I feel like Richard Dreyfuss in ‘Close Encounters.’ My business has suffered; I’m spending at least four hours a day with this. I’ve been thinking of throwing these things in the ocean, just toss them off the pier so I won’t have to deal with them anymore. But I know I won’t do that.”
Unlike Dreyfuss in the film, Oyler’s family and co-workers are with him.
“I got goose bumps all over when I saw it,” said his brother Phil, a biker-looking Vietnam vet who works at Dashield. Oyler’s daughters and fiancee also see the faces.
Oyler seemed almost reluctant to get around to revealing the fluorite stone on the scanner. Instead, he showed off pyrite fool’s-gold cubes and the curious way they bounce off one another, then his galena stone, which just wasn’t behaving.
He said its weight varied, depending on whether it was set on concrete or wood, but an experiment with a UPS scale in his warehouse refused to verify that on this occasion. A small chunk suspended from a thread did appear to be slightly repulsed by his Formica furniture, but then, so was I.
He hooked up his souped-up Pentium-driven computer and the scanner, which has a resolution of 1,600 dots per square inch, as opposed to a TV screen, which has about 150 dots per square inch. To demonstrate its detail, he scanned a photo a friend took of the first space shuttle landing, enlarging sections to reveal distant aircraft and such. One blown-up section, he suggested, showed a UFO, though it also looked sort of like a cigarette butt.
None of which made me feel very encouraged about his stone revealing anything of note, and indeed, when he scanned it, I could see no more in its veins and cloudy depths on his computer screen than I ever can in those Magic Eye drawings.
There is supposed to be one particularly obvious face in it.
“That was the first thing I noticed right there,” Oyler said, pointing to a murky area, “thinking, ‘That sure looks like an eye.’ And then there’s another one right there, then the mouth, the nose. Do you see it?”
“I can see it from here,” said Phil, from across the room.
I still didn’t, but thought I could make out a kneeling figure on another surface of the stone.
“That’s the praying person,” Oyler said, and indeed, on closer inspection it looked like a weathered, stocky figure from a Grecian frieze, hands praying, curly bearded face turned up to the sky.
Then, left alone with the screen for a few minutes, I saw the eye Oyler had pointed out, then the whole face, faint and ghostlike, but human and staring straight back at me with a malevolent glare.
Permit me to say: Aieeeee!!!
A crack runs just to the left of the nose, the image seems smeared beyond that, and some bits of shading need to ignored, but once you’ve gotten this face to emerge, it’s impossible to look at the image without seeing it and hard to believe it wasn’t obvious before.
*
Not everybody sees quite the same thing. To Oyler’s fiancee, Carolyn Cofer, it’s a baby’s face. To me, it’s the stern, disapproving face of an unforgiving intelligence sizing up what it’s looking at and finding it wanting. A disturbing thing when it’s me it seemed to be looking at.
So what the hell is it?
Oyler isn’t so gone on it that he can’t accept that the images might just be a combination of random light, shadow and willing minds. But he has lit the stone at differing degrees of intensity, and from a variety of angles, and always gets the same images. He can also accept that maybe his rocks are just telling him he needs a vacation.
But the images--revealed only to the high-resolution scanner and not the naked eye--are so haunting one can also see why he spends four hours a day probing them and why he wonders whether he’s gazing into the window of a vast mystery, one in which a rock has waited in the dark earth for millions of years, until mankind came up with computers to reveal its import.
He speculates: “Every time we’ve sent probes into space, they’ve had on board gold images of our civilization, our paintings, pop music, illustrations of buildings, all in gold, because gold will last such a long time, and we hope some other civilization might find it sometime. I think maybe that’s what this cube is all about.
“My feeling is that it’s possible that another civilization has somehow impregnated this fluorite crystal with their images so it could be found at a later date, to let the next civilization know that they aren’t the only ones who have been here, to leave a record.”
Does it trouble him that, instead of gold, he’s finding mystery in common rocks and fool’s gold?
“Not at all,” Oyler said. “I don’t care what they call it. I’ll still look at it. I’m possessed by this.”
*
He’s always been inquisitive, he said.
“When I was a child I had a microscope, and everything went under it, from grains of salt to the toenails of a frog, and I’m still like that. I’ve had a june bug on the scanner here.
“I’m a very observant person, always looking a quarter mile down the road. When I watch TV, I focus on what’s going on way in the background.”
He bought his chunk of fluorite three years ago from a retired couple who sell geodes and such at the Orange County Marketplace. A visitor to his business a couple of months ago pointed out a clear, window-like area on the stone’s opaque surface, and he got the idea of putting it on the scanner.
“It was after we closed, about 45 days ago,” Oyler said. “I’d been scanning these pyrite cubes out of curiosity and thought I’d see if I could see in that little window. And I couldn’t really, so I started looking at the other sides, and the second side I put it on, there was this face coming up on the computer screen. And I went, ‘Oh-oh, this is not my imagination,’ ” he said.
When Oyler mentioned it to his brother and older daughter, “They just looked at me funny,” so he kept it to himself for a while.
“Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. I kept looking at this thing, and it was a face. So I called them over and said, ‘You have to look at this.’ And they didn’t look at it and go, ‘Where?’ It was immediate. My brother got goose bumps all over and said, ‘Did you do that?’ because he knows how you can manipulate photos in these computers. But no, I didn’t touch it.”
Oyler doesn’t want people trekking through his shop like there is some vision of the Virgin there, but he is looking for some attention. He’s tried calling professors at local colleges but says they’re not interested in his stones. He started to call the National Enquirer but doesn’t want the images regarded as a joke or scam.
“What I want is to have somebody acknowledge it, to say it’s there. I’d like to have it be members of the scientific world, but I don’t know if they have their minds open to this kind of thing. Like one guy I talked to at Cal State [Fullerton] about the galena rock, who just said, ‘No, it can’t be.’
“I’m not limited like that, but I’m not some dream-weaver nut who thinks about a lot of weird things. I just feel like maybe I’m the guy to bring this to light, because I’m a very sound, stable person. And I feel that for some reason this is telling us it’s time to open our eyes and look at other things.”