Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (32 page)

Dr.
Moon had experienced what is known as a ‘time slip’.
They are far less rare than might be supposed—in fact, Andrew Mackenzie devoted a whole book to them called
Adventures in Time
(1997).
It contains, for example, a detailed account of the experience of the two English ladies at Versailles, who in 1901 were apparently transported back to the Versailles of Marie Antoinette, and ten years later described it in their book
An Adventure.
Then there is the account of the three Royal Naval cadets who walked into a Suffolk village one Sunday morning in 1957, and found themselves back in a deserted medieval village, probably at the time of the Black Death.
Mackenzie also tells the story of the Scottish spinster who was returning to her home in the early hours of the morning when she saw flickering torches in the surrounding fields, and men in strange clothes examining corpses.
A lengthy historical investigation revealed that what she had seen was probably a re-enactment of the aftermath of the battle of Nechtansmere, fought in AD 685.

One of the characteristics of virtually all these stories is that the participants experienced an odd sense of oppression, of dreamlike unreality—which, in the Versailles case, Charlotte Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain assumed to be a slight fever—and which, as Jacques Vallee points out, is often experienced in UFO sightings.
(The contactee Angelucci reported the same thing.)

One of the oddest tales in the book, recorded by the Society for Psychical Research, concerned a Mr.
J.
S.
Spence, who spent several days in Devon in 1938.
He experienced the same dreamlike oppression, and an odd feeling of being watched.
At the top of a steep cliff he found a newly built dry-stone wall that stretched to the edge of the cliff.
The next day, visiting the same spot, he was puzzled to find a very old, ivy-covered wall in bad repair.

Thinking that he must have taken the wrong path, he decided to go back the next day and try to solve the mystery.
On the third day, he again found the new wall at the top of the cliff.
But he had an odd feeling of dizziness.
And as he moved forward, over apparently solid ground, he suddenly slipped and fell vertically.
He found himself on a narrow ledge near the top of the cliff, with a twisted ankle.
Far below, the sea was pounding on the rocks.
Mr.
Spence succeeded in climbing back to the top—and found the old and broken wall, much of which had obviously collapsed into the sea when the edge of the cliff gave way.
He had been trying to walk on ‘solid ground’ that had vanished in a previous century.

There are dozens of such recorded ‘time slips’—probably hundreds.
I myself collected one from a woman named Jane O’Neill, who visited Fotheringhay church with a friend in 1974, and was much impressed by a picture of the crucifixion behind the altar, with a dove over the cross.
But a friend who accompanied her saw no such picture, as they discovered later when they compared notes.
When they revisited the church, the friend proved to be right—there was no picture.
But Jane O’Neill also failed to recognise the inside of the church.
For she had seen it as it was when it was a collegiate church, which was pulled down in 1553.

There have been other recorded time slips at Fotheringhay.
In August 1976, a schoolmaster named Priest and his wife were approaching the church when they heard sounds of ‘a primitive kind of music’ with trumpets and drums.
They assumed some kind of rehearsal was taking place inside, but, when they opened the door, the church was deserted, and the music had stopped.
Back at the church gate, they again heard the music, this time more faintly.
They later discovered that they had visited the church exactly five hundred years after the funeral ceremony of Richard, Duke of York, but this may or may not be the answer.

In 1941, a policeman visiting the church with a female cousin heard the sounds of monks chanting, but the sounds stopped as abruptly as a radio being turned off when they opened the door and found an empty church.
The ‘ghost hunter’ Peter Underwood has accounts of several other time slips at Fotheringhay, always on hot August days.

Other time slips have also occurred at Versailles—Mackenzie details no fewer than seven.
In July 1908, an English family named Crooke, who lived in the village of Versailles, twice saw the same ‘sketching lady’ in old-fashioned dress described by Misses Moberly and Jourdain.
They realised she was a ‘ghost’ because ‘she appeared and disappeared several times, seeming to grow out of and retire into the scenery with a little quiver of adjustment’.
And, in 1910, Maj.
Robert Gregory—son of Lady Gregory—and his wife saw an ‘old-fashioned’ Versailles, including a thick wood.
When they read
An Adventure
a year later, they returned to Versailles to find that the wood had gone, and that they were unable to recognise a single thing.

Fotheringhay and Versailles have been the scenes of many important historical events, and have witnessed a great deal of tragedy.
Did Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain see a ‘ghost’ of Versailles as it was about 1750?
That seems unlikely—surely there is no such thing as the ghosts of a place?
Then could their experience have been a kind of ‘tape recording’, the events of the past having somehow impressed themselves on the scenery?
That is just possible—in 1960, in the cellar of the Treasurer’s House in York, a heating engineer saw a Roman legion with round shields marching through the walls and across the floor, and felt that they did not perceive him.
(Historians were later able to identify the legion, and verify that they carried round shields.) On the other hand, Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain talked to some of the people in old-fashioned dress.
And Dr.
Moon seems to have felt that the gentleman in the cloak and top hat actually looked at him.

So what is going on?
Is time past still present in another dimension?
Or is it present only in the minds of ghosts?
Or can the individual television sets inside our heads tune in to other times and places, so they appear to be real?
This would also imply that the world around us is perhaps not as real as it looks.

Then there is the baffling problem of precognition—the ability to foresee some event in the future in precise detail.
It may be the immediate or distant future.
A pianist friend of mine was returning along the Bayswater Road in a taxi after a concert when he knew, with total certainty, that, at the Queensway traffic lights, a taxi would try to jump the lights and hit them sideways on; it happened exactly as he had known it would.

Goethe, in his autobiography, tells how, having just said goodbye to his sweetheart, he was riding along a road in Alsace when he saw, coming to meet him, his own double (or doppelganger), dressed in a grey and gold suit.
Eight years later, on his way to visit the same girl, he realised that he was now dressed in the grey and gold suit.
He had ‘seen’ his future self.

It would seem, then, that the commonsense view of time is somehow mistaken: the past and the future are in some sense present.
There is also much evidence from psychical research that ‘spirits’ often confuse the past and future.
During World War Two, an English woman with psychic gifts, Mrs.
A.
M.
Kaulback, conducted a series of telepathy experiments with her two sons, who were in the forces, and concluded that many of her impressions came from ‘discarnate communicators’, including her deceased husband.
On one occasion, her husband told her that her son Bill had just been given command of a battalion, and described the scene in some detail.
He was right—except that the events he described occurred a month later.
When she asked her ‘guide’ to explain this, he told her, ‘It is not easy grasping time between two planes’.

John Keel also found that his UFO entities were often confused about the sequence of events they predicted.
The explanation might be that they were not actually UFO entities, but some of the more dubious denizens of the ‘spirit world’.
But, as Jacques Vallee points out, it cannot be assumed that the UFO entities encountered by ‘contactees’ like Herb Schirmer are telling the truth.

It seems clear, then, that there is a type of entity that enjoys deceiving and misleading.
Why this should be so is a mystery, since it is hard to see how they can benefit from it.
Perhaps they simply enjoy their contact with human beings, trying to impress, like some casual pub acquaintance who launches into self-glorifying autobiography.
But, in the case of many of these entities, the result may be a kind of long-term confidence trick.

The novelist Jan de Hartog has described how this can come about.
In a lecture to the American Society of Dowsers—and on another occasion, to me—he described how he had become interested in dowsing when he made the acquaintance of an animal healer at a health farm.
The healer used a pendulum to make diagnoses.
(It usually swings back and forward to indicate yes, and in a circle to indicate no—or whatever code the dowser chooses.) Together, they went to visit a ‘druid’ on the Cheddar Downs, and, practised dowsing and searching for ‘energy spots’.
Then the druid told his friend that he ought to speak to a disembodied woman called Imogen, who was standing ten paces away.
His friend took ten paces forward, then stopped, apparently absorbed.
Hartog learnt later that he had not only become aware of a female presence, but that Imogen was able to communicate with him.
His friend remarked, ‘I don’t know who that was, but it was definitely a woman’.

Jan de Hartog describes the immense excitement that he and his friend felt, the sense of embarking on an amazing adventure.
He went back to his farm in Pennsylvania, and his friend came and stayed, and taught him how to use the pendulum to receive messages.
He would ask, ‘Are you there?’, and his pendulum would spin like an aeroplane propeller—there could be no doubt that he was not doing it himself.
Then the message would be spelt out letter by letter.

Jan quickly learnt that the entity who was communicating with him was called Eleanor, that she had been a White Russian doctor, and that he and she had been lovers in a previous existence.
And while his friend was receiving messages from Imogen—assuring him that he should give up animal healing and concentrate on humans, and that he was destined eventually to heal the whole human race—Jan was having long sessions with Eleanor, who was explaining how to lose weight by eating certain foods and avoiding others.
Eleanor had a strong personality, and their relationship was stormy—on one occasion, when she ordered Jan to restrict his dinner to one hard-boiled egg, he threw his pendulum at her.

He also found himself in contact with an Indian called Old Oak, who instructed him about nature, and, on the whole, made more sense than Eleanor.

Soon Jan found he could abandon the old slow method of spelling out messages letter by letter; he became more and more intuitive about what Eleanor and Old Oak were trying to tell him, and would write as fast as his hand could cross the paper.

When winter came, both Eleanor and Old Oak advised him that there was going to be a cold spell, and it was time to invest in an electricity generator.
He baulked at the cost, and eventually proved to be right—the cold front stopped a hundred miles away.

The family decided to go to a dude ranch in Montana, where his daughter could ride.
There Jan lived in a little cabin, and his wife and daughter in another.
And now Jan learnt that he had a new companion—Imogen had also joined him.
His friend had told him that Imogen was the ‘controlling spirit of all healing in the natural plane’.
And Imogen lost no time in assuring Jan that he was a far more powerful healer than his friend.
He was going to be one of the greatest healers of all time.

All this, Jan confesses, filled him with misgivings—he felt that it was somehow ‘too big’.
Yet it was all so fascinating—to be in communication with a disembodied intelligence—that he had no thought of giving up.
He obviously felt as Geller and Puharich felt as they received messages from the Nine.

Imogen declared that it was time he embarked on his healing career.
The next day, she explained, when a group of them rode under a waterfall, a horse would stumble, and a woman would be badly hurt.
Jan was then instructed—in precise detail—how to heal her, exactly how far away to hold his hands, etc.
All this would leave him in no doubt of his powers.

The next day, the riders approached the waterfall, and Jan prepared for the accident.
But nothing happened.
That night, in his cabin, Jan asked Imogen why.
She explained that the spirit who had been detailed to trip up the horse had not turned up.
Jan was horrified.
‘You mean to tell me that some perfectly innocent woman was going to be thrown from her horse, merely so that I could heal her?’
And, when it seemed that this, indeed, was what Imogen had intended, he suddenly knew beyond all doubt that he did not want to know her any more.
He told her so, and suddenly all his powers vanished; the pendulum ceased to spin out messages, and he was once again alone.