Every once in a while you run into a town or city that seems to have what everyone these days calls “vibes.”

Here we speak about New Age or occult, witchy vibes.

We’ve written about this as regards Sedona, Arizona; Crestone, Colorado; Big Sur, Bohemian Grove, and Mount Shasta in California; parts of New Orleans; the Chelsea area of Manhattan; Savannah, Georgia; and obvious places such as Salem, Massachusetts, Lily Dale, New York, and Cassadaga, Florida (to name a few).

But sometimes you’re caught off guard. This happened to us a year ago in Asheville, North Carolina.

Most recently, it occurred upon visiting what seems an unlikely candidate: Cocoa Beach, Florida.

On the surface, you don’t attach a dark undercurrent. When thinking of Cocoa Beach, the mind goes to a beach and party town. Located here are a famous surf shop (advertised for more than  a hundred miles) and the nearby and far more famous Kennedy Space Center.

Astronauts have frequented restaurants and bars here. Several of them built a hotel. Space motifs spot the vicinity. There’s an office owned by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.

There’s also an artsy, avant-garde, and “hippie” element.

Unusual?

Along the shore is sometimes bioluminescence from the chemical reactions in plankton.

But back to the deeper, darker vibe.

In downtown storefronts are psychic readers, New Age items, and in one, bizarre mannequin art, including one of a man slouched in a cushioned chair with a cigarette butt in one hand and a gun pointing to his head in another.

Not exactly typical, and perhaps, along with the deluge of a thunderstorm, a warning, for after visiting, as has happened before—as happened after Sedona and Salem and Asheville—we experienced a series of strange dreams and unpleasant events.

But in Cocoa Beach, a fascinating question: Is there a hidden entwinement between the surf culture, the New Age, and even the reach for the stars—the space center?

When we asked a friend who’d worked at the space center and is spiritually attuned and is now at Blue Origin if he felt the “vibes” there, our friend texted, “Yup. Welcome to my world.”

Technology? New Age?

Life is more complicated and mysterious, it seems, time and again, than we usually imagine.

Indeed, and so it is that Heaven always waits and watches and so it is that “prayer without ceasing” is the only way to traverse the grounds of this testing ground called earth.

(Much better, when it comes to mystery: a Jesus wooden wall plaque that washed ashore south of Cocoa Beach in Melbourne on September 14, 2019, thanks to waves from Tropical Storm Humberto.)

[resources: Lying Wonders, Strangest Things]