Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (28 page)

But what if it is not true that we are microbes in a drop of water?
Keel says that this superior intelligence can foresee the future.
In fact, so can many human beings.
‘Precognition’
ought
to be impossible, but it is not.
On 13 December 1949, for example, Mrs.
Eva Hellstrom fell asleep on a tourist bus as it left Heidelberg, and dreamt of a beautiful painting of a four-leafed clover in the shape of a cross, surrounded by spirals.
Waking a few moments later, she made a sketch of the picture, and wondered if she might encounter it in Egypt, which was her destination.
On her last day in Cairo, Mrs.
Hellstrom was taken to the Coptic Museum, full of ancient relics of the early Christian churches in Egypt and Abyssinia, and there she saw her picture, corresponding in detail to her sketch.
It was a stone slab, and the four-leafed clover was known as a ‘Coptic rose’.
She had dreamt of the slab as it had been a thousand years earlier, when it was in full colour).
[1]
Hundreds of such examples could be cited, all leaving no doubt that human beings possess the power of foreseeing the future—but seldom use it.
The same is true of many other powers—for example, the ‘travelling clairvoyance’ and levitation witnessed by John Keel in Tibet, or the simple ability to read someone’s mind.
In fact, Keel himself possesses this ability.
He writes in
The Eighth Tower:

In my early teens, I found that I could sometimes sense what other people were thinking, and I assumed that everyone had this ability .
.
.
Now and then I encounter someone whose mind is actually vulnerable to my own.
I can not only sense what they are thinking.
I can project my own thoughts into their mind and they accept these thoughts as their own.
In short, I can control that person’s mind on a modest scale.
There are people who have this power to a very developed degree.
They can control others, even from a great distance.
It is probable that some world leaders, especially the evil ones like Hitler, possessed and exercised this ability.
One famous psychic claimed he could hand a railroad conductor a blank sheet of paper and the man would punch it thinking it was a ticket.

So it seems fairly certain that we all possess a range of powers that extend far beyond our usual limited spectrum.
Then why do we not make use of them?
Because we take it for granted that the narrow spectrum is ‘all there is’.
We accept that our tunnel vision shows us ‘the reality’, when actually it shows us as little of reality as a mole sees, snuffling through its tunnel underground.

Then why do certain human beings seem slightly less blind than the rest?
Some seem to be born with a wider vision—the so-called psychics, while some experience a kind of suffocation that drives them to struggle instinctively for a wider vision: poets, artists, philosophers.
And some people experience a momentary glimpse of a wider reality which transforms their vision of the world.

Keel himself had such an experience when he first went to New York.
He described it to me in a letter of 18 April 1984.

For many years now, I have been quietly interviewing warlocks and trying to develop a book based on the actual experiences of natural witches and warlocks—people who are born with the ability to perceive and control the elementals.
They seem to be several steps beyond mediums.
Mediums are used by the phenomenon.
Warlocks, on the other hand, are able to use these forces.
Unfortunately, most of them seem to come to a tragic end—suicides, murders, bizarre deaths.
But it is apparent that thousands of people in each generation suffer from this uneasy talent.
I think that I had it when I was an adolescent but I diverted my attention by studying physics, chemistry, etc., and lost it by the time I was 18.
At 18, I woke one night in a furnished room near Times Square and had what can only be described as an illuminating experience.
For a few brief moments I suddenly understood
everything
and I was really one with the cosmos.
The next morning I could remember very little of it but I’m sure it was all entered into my subconscious.

Before writing this section I telephoned Keel in New York—a difficult feat since, apart from the time-zone difference between New York and Cornwall, John is an insomniac who stays awake all night and sleeps all day, so that it is hard to find a good time to ring him.
I succeeded by getting up at a quarter to five in the morning and catching him when he came home from dinner at midnight.
Among other questions, I asked him about his mystical experience.
He described how he had awakened in the middle of the night, and found his room suffused with a pink or orange glow, which led him to assume the house was on fire.
He was about to leap out of bed, but, for some reason, changed his mind.
Then followed the experience of thinking with amazing clarity, and seeming to know everything—the origin of the universe, the creation and purpose of human beings .
.
.
He felt he ought to get up and write it all down, but instead went back to sleep.
The next morning he could remember the experience, but not what he had ‘seen’.

He feels nevertheless that part of that ‘gnosis’ lodged deep in his mind, for he finds himself reading books and cosmology—for example, Hawking’s A
Brief History of Time—
and feeling he knows it all.

In 1969, the novelist Robert Graves told me of a similar experience, which he had described in a story called ‘The Abominable Mr.
Gunn’.
He had been sitting on a roller behind the cricket pavilion when he received a ‘celestial illumination’, and suddenly ‘knew everything’.
Graves describes it as ‘a simple method of looking sideways at disorderly facts so as to make perfect sense of them’.
He could actually remember it after a night’s sleep, but it vanished as he tried to write it down, and kept crossing things out.

Keel assumed that the experience was unique to himself until, in the 1960s, he came upon R.
M.
Bucke’s classic
Cosmic Consciousness,
in which Bucke describes how, driving home in a hansom cab, he suddenly found himself ‘wrapped in a flame-coloured cloud’ which made him assume that a nearby building was on fire.
This was followed by ‘an intellectual illumination impossible to describe’ including the recognition that the whole universe is composed of living matter.
The experience led Bucke to study the mystics, and to include in the book fifty studies of mystics through the ages, all of whom had had a similar experience.

All of which would seem to indicate that what human beings need at this point in history—perhaps at any point—is something to rescue them from the tunnel vision that prevents them from grasping the extent of their ‘hidden powers’ and capabilities.
It is interesting to note that the UFO experience sometimes seems to do precisely that.
As, for example, in the case of Jacques Vallee’s correspondent—with whom we opened this chapter—who experienced ‘novel insights into .
.
.
the Nature of Reality’ connected to her sighting of the shining disc.

Bucke summarised his own conclusions:

The simple truth is, that there has lived on the Earth, ‘appearing at intervals’, for thousands of years among ordinary men, the first faint beginnings of another race; walking the Earth and breathing the air with us, but at the same time walking another Earth and breathing another air of which we know little or nothing, but which is, all the same, our spiritual life, as its absence would be our spiritual death.
This new race is in the act of being born from us, and in the near future it will occupy and possess the Earth.

In other words, these new people exist in this same physical dimension as the rest of us, yet at the same time walk another Earth and breathe another air—as if living simultaneously in a kind of Fourth Dimension.

6

THE FOURTH DIMENSION

Vallee and Keel were not the first to recognise the connection between UFO ‘aliens’ and creatures of folklore.
In the mid-1960s, an Englishman named John Michell, who had studied Russian literature at Cambridge, became fascinated by UFOs, and also by Jung’s book
Flying Saucers—A Myth of Things Seen in the Skies
(1958).

Jung had spoken of the major changes that might be expected with the coming of the Age of Aquarius (due around the year 2000).
In fact, he felt that the human race was on the point of a leap to a new phase of psychic evolution.

He had noted that sceptical statements about UFOs were relatively unpopular compared with statements of belief, and reasoned from this that modern man experiences a sense of profound disquiet because of his lack of religious belief.
(Jung believed that the religious impulse is as essential to man as the sexual impulse—‘the soul has a religious function’.) He attached deep importance to the mandala symbol, a circle signifying completeness (and hence an image of God), and saw the widespread belief in flying saucers as an indication of man’s longing for belief and certainty.

In
Flying Saucers,
Jung appears to be saying that he believes UFOs to be a ‘projection’ of the collective unconscious of mankind—a projection being essentially a kind of hallucination, like a drunk’s visions of pink elephants.
They are a projection of mankind’s longing for a saviour—or for what Jung calls individuation, a state in which all the inner conflicts of the psyche are resolved.

John Michell’s interest in flying saucers was due partly to his interest in the environment, and the fear shared by so many in the 1950s that man might destroy himself with atomic radiation.
He points out that the ‘UFO visitors’ were warning of the increasing pollution of the environment long before Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring
suddenly focused awareness in 1962.

Michell’s starting point is not dissimilar to that of Erich von Däniken or Robert Temple.
‘The earliest myths describe the arrival on Earth of an extra-terrestrial race who, by their example, altered the whole course of human history .
.
.
Once we can accept the, at first sight, fantastic idea that our present culture is an inheritance from a former visit of people from space, a great deal of what is now obscure becomes clear’.

Evidence of these visitors from space can be found in myths, legends and folklore from all over the world.
‘The evidence of mythology provides a general account of the days when the gods were known on earth’.

Michell notes that, according to legend, the arrival of the gods on Earth was preceded by portents in the sky, such as fiery circles.
The Egyptian ‘eye of Ra’ is symbolised by a winged disc.
His first book,
The Flying Saucer Vision
(1967), cites dozens of parallels between UFO lore and mythology, arguing, for example, that the dragon of folklore represents fiery discs in the sky.

He is also inclined to believe that, like the fish gods of the Dogon, or the white gods who landed in South America, these ancient visitors brought wisdom to mankind; this belief has the corollary that mankind evolved very quickly, not—as Darwin believed—through slow stages.
In fact, man’s brain
did
evolve with incredible speed—doubling in size so fast that scientists call it ‘the brain explosion’.

The first thing that strikes the reader about
The Flying Saucer Vision
is the sheer range of its erudition.
Michell seems not only to have read everyone from the ancient Greek geographers to modern anthropologists, but to have found much of his information in obscure byways of literature.
This, he claims, was not due to a directed course of study so much as to synchronicities—Koestler’s ‘library angel’ directing his attention to books by chance.

One of these serendipitous discoveries was the work of Alfred Watkins, the Hereford businessman who, as he was riding across country in June 1931, noticed that old churches, standing stones, barrows and hilltops were often connected by ‘old straight tracks’.
Watkins called them ‘ley lines’.

He thought these ley lines were old trade routes.
But in the late 1930s, a dowser named Guy Underwood concluded that they are lines of some kind of Earth force, which is more powerful in the area of standing stones and other sacred sites—he speculated that the site was sacred
because
of this Earth force.
Michell noted that certain areas with a high level of UFO sightings—like Warminster in Wiltshire and Glastonbury in Somerset—were often crisscrossed with ley lines, and suggested some connection.
He also noted that the Chinese version of ley lines are known as dragon paths
(lung mei).
In effect, he was observing the tendency of UFO sightings to occur on straight lines—Aimé Michel’s ‘orthoteny’.

Michell’s interest in UFOs caused him to turn his back on the characteristic culture of the 1950s, in which most of the fashionable intellectuals were leftists who believed that socialism would bring about the millennium.
(My own first book,
The Outsider,
was regularly attacked by leftist intellectuals as a ‘fascist’ work, simply because it was not concerned with left-wing politics.) Instead, he pursued the subject of ley lines and sacred geometry, and his book
The View Over Atlantis
(1969) brought them to the attention of a wide audience, with the incidental side effect of making Glastonbury a centre of pilgrimage for ‘New Agers’.

The wide appeal of the book was due to its romanticism.
John Nicholson wrote in an essay on Michell:

Hippies turned themselves into the new guardians of ancient skills and wisdom by rejecting industrial society and communing at old sites, or going for mystical rambles along ley lines, keeping an eye open for UFOs.
Like Red Indians, they touched the Earth and felt the stones giving off psychic energies or ‘vibes’.
Some pop groups privately gave invocatory performances at the chosen time and place.
It was all mixed up somehow as cosmic consciousness, and it gave many people many happy hours.
[1]

The appeal of Michell was due, in fact, to what Jung called ‘the flying saucer vision’—the power to see the world with new eyes.
And here it is important to understand exactly what Jung meant.
He wrote in an abstract, scientific style whose purpose was to guard against accusations of mysticism or irrationalism, and the result is that he often left a great deal unsaid.
But what he left unsaid is made quite explicit by the illustrations.
A painting called
The Fire Sower,
by E.
Jakoby, shows a vast human figure towering above a city; the body and the head are made of fire, and the head, which is separated from the body, is a flaming ball that seems to be spinning on its axis.
Jung comments: ‘Like an immaterial essence the fiery figure strides through the houses of the city—
two worlds which interpenetrate yet do not touch’.
Another painting, called
The Fourth Dimension,
by P.
Birkhauser, shows a huge face hovering above a city.
This, and other faces, look as if they are painted on a veil that hangs down in front of the city, and Jung comments: ‘This painting, like the previous one, depicts the collision of two incommensurable worlds’.

But the clearest indication of his meaning can be found in a woodcut called
The Spiritual Pilgrim Discovering Another World,
which Jung believed to be a Rosicrucian work dating from the seventeenth century.
In fact, later research suggested that it dates from the nineteenth century—but, in a sense, the nineteenth century, the century of romanticism, is even more appropriate.
The picture shows a rainbow (or celestial sphere) arching over a pleasant land of woods and meadows, with the sun, moon and stars in the sky.
But the pilgrim, crawling on hands and knees, has pushed his head through the rainbow, into a totally different world—a strange, symbolic landscape, with four great discs in the sky, two of which have spokes, and may be a reference to Ezekiel’s chariots.
The pilgrim has left ‘this world’ behind, and has broken through into another reality.
This is what Jung meant by ‘the flying saucer vision’.

What Jung has done is to make absolutely clear why flying saucers have exercised such a powerful influence on the human imagination in the second half of the twentieth century.
It is the romantic—and religious—craving for ‘another reality’.
We are all so accustomed to struggling with the world of practical necessity—what Heidegger calls ‘the triviality of everydayness’—that most of us have come to accept that ‘that is all there is’.
But, in the past few centuries, man has also developed the power of imagination.
Unlike our down-to-Earth ancestors, we have all become ‘mental travellers’, and those who have never been abroad can travel in an armchair watching a television set.
We have all learnt to experience escape from the triviality of everydayness through the imagination.

However, that only sharpens the contrast between this everyday world and the world into which we ‘escape’.
Our deepest secret wish is to see the
real
world transformed.
Rimbaud claims to have taught himself how to see ‘a mosque in place of a factory, angels practising on drums, coaches on the roads of the sky, a drawing room at the bottom of a lake: monsters, mysteries’.
But the increasing possibility that our planet is being visited by creatures from another world or another dimension seems to turn Rimbaud’s dream into reality.
Dozens of poets and artists of the nineteenth century committed suicide because they could not believe in their own dreams.
And now, in the second half of the twentieth century, it seems that the creatures of that ‘other reality’ have decided to pay us a visit.
And this is also what Jung meant by ‘the flying saucer vision’.

Now it might seem that Jung is entangling himself in hopeless contradictions.
He regards UFOs as hallucinations, projections of the collective unconscious, then admits that they are visible on radar screens and in photographs.
During an interview with the aviator Lindbergh in 1959, Jung made it clear that he thought flying saucers were factual, and was rather cool when Lindbergh expressed his own disbelief.

Lindbergh quoted his friend General Spaatz (of the US Air Force): ‘Don’t you suppose if there was anything true about this flying saucer business, you and I would have heard about it by this time?’
Jung countered with, ‘There are a great many things going on around this Earth that you and General Spaatz don’t know about’.

To disentangle all this, we need to know, to begin with, that Jung believed that the unconscious mind
can
produce physical effects—he called them ‘exteriorisation phenomena’.
In his autobiographical
Memories, Dreams, Reflections,
he tells how, as he and Freud were arguing about the reality of the paranormal, there was a loud explosion from the bookcase, which made both of them jump.
Jung’s diaphragm had begun to glow with heat as he and Freud argued, and Jung was convinced that he had caused the effect.
‘There is an example of an exteriorisation phenomenon’, he told Freud.
‘Bosh!’
said Freud.
‘It is not’, said Jung, ‘and to prove my point, I predict that in a moment there will be another’.
As he spoke there was another explosion from the bookcase.

Jung had been studying psychical research since his teens, and had no doubt of the reality of the paranormal.
One day as he sat studying his textbooks, there was a loud report from the next room.
He rushed in to find that a walnut table had split from the rim to the centre.
There was no obvious reason: it was a cool day, and the wood had had seventy years to dry out.
Soon after, there was a loud report from the sideboard, and Jung found that the breadknife had snapped into several pieces.
Jung took it to a cutler to see if he could suggest an explanation; the cutler said it looked as if someone had inserted the knife into a crack and deliberately broken it.

Then his fifteen-year-old cousin, Helen Preiswerk, began to develop mediumistic powers.
One day when the family was playing at ‘table turning’, she went into a trance, and began to speak in a voice totally unlike her own, and in literary German.
When she woke up, she had a severe headache.
Other ‘spirits’ later spoke through her, including a girl who chattered in a mixture of French and Italian—neither of which Helen could speak.
Later, Helen was taken over by a woman who called herself Ivenes, and who claimed to be ‘the real Helen Preiswerk’.
She was obviously far more mature and intelligent than Helen.
Eventually, Helen became a dressmaker, and she died at the age of thirty.