Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (33 page)

Another friend of mine, Joe Fisher, had an equally disillusioning experience with ‘spirits’, which he describes in a remarkable book called
Hungry Ghosts.
He is a journalist in Toronto, and was one day contacted by a woman who, under hypnosis, had become the mouthpiece for ‘discarnate entities’.
He went along to see for himself, and a spirit with a reassuring Yorkshire accent spoke through her mouth and told him that he had a female guide called Filipa, a Greek girl who had been his lover in a previous existence, three centuries earlier, in a village called Theros, on the Greek–Turkish border.
Joe was inclined to believe him, since he had always had a powerful affinity for Greece.
Soon, like Jan de Hartog, he was in direct contact with Filipa.
He would relax, and a buzzing noise in his head would precede a feeling of bliss and communication.
Filipa was a sensual little thing who liked to be cuddled, and soon Joe’s present love affair broke up, his girlfriend feeling she was no match for a ghost.

But, although he trusted Filipa, he began to experience doubts about some of the other spirits who came through at the seances.
One claimed to be an ex-RAF pilot called Ernest Scott, who gave details of his wartime experiences.
On a trip back to England, Joe decided to verify these stories, having no doubt whatever that they would prove genuine.
The airfield certainly existed; so did the squadron with which Ernest Scott said he had flown.
But Scott himself was not in the squadron records; he had never existed.

Joe tried to track down the farm where the Yorkshire spirit claimed he had lived in the nineteenth century.
The geography was accurate; so were many other details.
But the basic facts were simply wrong.

Joe also tried to verify the background of a lovable World War One veteran named Harry Maddox.
Harry’s accounts of World War One battles were accurate; but Harry himself had never existed.

In spite of these disillusionments, Joe had no doubt that Filipa was genuine.
He felt that she ‘possessed more love, compassion and perspicacity than I had ever known’.
On a trip to Greece, he tried to locate the village of Theros, where he and Filipa had lived and loved.
It did not exist.
But he was able to locate a town called Alexandropouli, which Filipa told him had been nearby.
When he got there, however, he learnt that Alexandropouli was a mere two centuries old; it did not exist when he and Filipa were supposed to have been lovers.
Filipa, like the others, was simply a liar.

Now I agree that all this is extremely confusing: time slips into the past, glimpses of the future, poltergeists who play practical jokes, ghosts who do not know they are dead, entities who claim to be the spirits of living people, and who tell lies for the fun of it .
.
.
What is it all about?
How can we make sense of such a farrago of absurdity?

Only one thing seems to stand out with some certainty.
This normal, solid world around us is just a façade, and, while we believe that it is
the
world, the
only
world, we are deceived.
This assumption that we are in a perfectly ordinary, logical world, and that we know most of the rules, traps us in a kind of permanent tunnel vision.
Gurdjieff even used the alarming simile of hypnotised sheep, who are kept in a state of trance by a magician who wants to save money on fencing, and so assures the sheep that they have nothing to be afraid of, and that nothing bad is going to happen to them.
I am inclined to think his pessimism unjustified.
But there can be no doubt whatever that this ‘illusion of normality’ causes us to waste our lives and fail to grasp our potentialities.
If, instead of this vast façade of triviality that surrounds us, we could become aware of the complex realm that lies on the other side of it, we might stop wasting our lives.

Now it is this far wider, more inclusive view of reality that Jung and John Michell call ‘the flying saucer vision’—clearly not a particularly appropriate name, since it applies to far more than flying saucers.
John Keel seems to come closer to its essence when he says (in
The Eighth Tower
, 1975):

The extradimensional world is not a place where trees grow and politicians steal.
It is a state of energy.
All kinds of information about our trivial reality are stored in the energy field through a system of particles or units of energy in a negative or positive state, just as our brains store information by opening and closing billions of nerve switches called synapses.
The field is like a massive radio wave and certain human brains have the ability to tune into it.
Some of these brains are adjusted to the frequency of the bank of future data.
So they receive glimpses of the future in sudden thoughts, visions (images in the conscious mind), dreams (images in the unconscious mind), or a combination of all three.
Since the superspectrum is outside our time frame, its system for measuring time is different from ours, and few humans with precognition are able to unscramble the time cycle of future events.

Keel admits:

I’m embarrassed now when I recall how I stood in darkened fields with contactees who suddenly began talking in a deep baritone, declaring themselves to be from outer space.
No matter how devious and complicated the questions I asked, they always seemed to have a quick and reasonable answer.
They seemed to know everything about everything, just as demons in religious cases of possession know the most minute details about the lives of their exorcists—as Stanislav Grof discovered when he tried to exorcise the girl with the criminal record.

Keel summarises: ‘Demonic possession is just a game perfected by countless believers across the centuries.
Spiritualism is another.
And, of course, the outer-space game is the latest development, and currently the most important’.

Now we can begin to see why Jung thought that UFOs are ‘psychic projections’ which can nevertheless affect photographic plates and radar screens.
He did not make some hard-and-fast distinction between the physical and mental worlds, but recognised that they are somehow intermingled.
In 1928, Jung came upon alchemy in a Chinese work called
The Secret of the Golden Flower,
and came to the conclusion that alchemy is basically about the transmutation
of the mind,
and the discovery of the self.
He asked a Munich bookseller to find him as many ancient alchemical works as he could, and, as he struggled with these infuriatingly obscure texts, came to feel that alchemy is a strange mixture of the physical and the mental.
By sheer willed concentration, the alchemist can create states that Jung calls ‘active imagination’, whereby he can enter his own unconscious mind in a kind of wide-awake dreaming.
So stories of alchemists—like Nicholas Flamel, who actually turned mercury into gold—may well be true; alchemy operates by the same strange laws as ‘quantum reality’, where the observer plays an all-important part.

So what might be called ‘UFO reality’ would seem to be a realm like alchemy and quantum reality, where two apparently incompatible realities come together.
In fact, they are far from incompatible; they only appear to be so because we are trapped in our tunnel vision, which assures us that this world is physical, and that we are inescapably tied to it.
Yet we are always catching glimpses of a larger reality that tells us this is untrue.
Even as simple and commonplace an experience as setting out on holiday makes us aware of it: that curious feeling of happiness and excitement is far more than mere anticipation of leisure.
It is a glimpse of something far richer and bigger and more complex, a feeling that we are on the verge of discovering some secret.
And the secret somehow belongs to the same type as a young person’s discovery of music or art—or, for that matter, sex.
It is a promise of freedom,
of far more freedom than we believe we possess, and also of control over our own lives.

7

OH NO, NOT AGAIN!

We have already encountered Harold Wilkins, as the author of one of the best of the early books on flying saucers.
But in
Mysteries Solved and Unsolved
(1959) he recounts a tale that he certainly felt had no connection with flying saucers.

One day in the summer of 1906, three children went into a field known as Forty Acres, a mile outside Gloucester, and disappeared.
They were a boy, age ten, and two girls, age five and three, the children of ‘a rather uncouth railway guard, or brakeman, named Vaughan’.
Harold Wilkins joined in the search.
‘We paid particular attention to the northeast corner of the field, where the pasture was bordered by tall, old elms, a thick hedge of thorn and bramble, and a deep ditch, separating it from a corn-field.
Every inch was probed with sticks, and not a stone left unturned in the ditch.
Had a dead dog been dumped there, he would certainly have been found’.

The case was reported in the national press, and the Vaughan family received many postal orders from sympathetic readers.
But, when the vicar called to express commiseration, he was turned away with the comment that Vaughan ‘didn’t want no bloody parsons rapping at his door’.

Four days later, at six in the morning, a ploughman going to work in the cornfield looked over the hedge, and saw the three children asleep in the ditch.
The children simply had no idea of where they had been for three days and nights.

The ploughman was denied any share of the reward on the grounds that he had probably kidnapped the children to claim it—which was absurd, since the reward was not offered until after they had vanished.
Besides, he lived in a small cottage in a tiny hamlet, where everyone knew everyone else’s business, so it was impossible.

The missing boy was still alive after World War Two, and verified that he did not have the slightest idea of what happened from the time they went into the field to when they woke up four days later.
This, Wilkins comments, is ‘characteristic of the amnesia which marks these phenomena’.

Vallee would undoubtedly point out that the case bears an obvious resemblance to cases of abduction by fairies, as well as to the engineering student described in the introduction to
The Invisible College,
who was taken on board a UFO and spent some hours connected to a ‘teaching machine’—then returned to find he had been absent for eighteen days.

We also note its resemblance to the herd of cows that vanished and reappeared near Warminster in 1967.
And John Mack would certainly point out its similarity to modern abduction cases.
For example, one evening in 1943, as a normal American family was having dinner, the father—a violin teacher—stood up and said, ‘I’m going to get a pack of cigarettes’.
His family stared in astonishment—he was a nonsmoker.
But he had been odd for some time, suffering strange lapses of memory.
He drove away, and his car was later found parked outside the local grocery store.
But he was never seen again.
Nine years later, he was declared legally dead.

But why assume that he was ‘abducted’?
Because of the events that followed.
More than half a century later, in June 1992, John Mack and other academics organised a conference on abduction at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and two of the many abductees who came to tell their story were women who lived and worked together on a horse farm: Anna Jamerson and Beth Collings—the latter the granddaughter of the man who vanished in 1943.
And Beth Collings had reason to believe that she was at least the third generation that had been abducted, and that it might be happening to her son and granddaughter.

Years later, her father told her of an incident that had happened in 1930, when he was twelve.
One morning, he and his brother were playing on a beach in Virginia, and he bent down to pick up a shell.
When he looked up, his brother had vanished.
Suddenly, dense sea mist rolled in.
He walked up and down the seashore, calling to his brother.
A shiny object caught his eye in the sand, and he bent to look at it.
When he looked up, his brother was back.
But his brother had also been searching up and down the beach .
.
.
When they got home, their grandmother was frantic, and had called the police.
The time was 3:45 p.m.—although only a short time before it had been 10:00 a.m.
They had lost several hours.

After that, her father admitted, there had been frequent episodes of ‘missing time’.
In fact, he had shared one with Beth.
In 1954, when Beth was five, she accompanied her father on a business trip to Doylestown, Pennsylvania.
It was a hot day, and they were on a dirt road between fields when the car stopped.
Her father got out to look under the bonnet, and Beth felt inexplicably nervous, and longed for him to come back.

Then, suddenly, the car was full of freezing air, and she began shouting in alarm.
Her father put his arm round her shoulder, and, as he was soothing her, the car started of its own accord.
Yet he seemed unsurprised.
When they finally reached Doylestown, there was a note on the office door saying, ‘Sorry I missed you’.
They were many hours late—yet the place where the car had stalled was only a short drive away.

Her father would later admit to many strange episodes of missing time—but said that he had thought he was dreaming or hallucinating.
He also told her that his own father had been a concert violinist.
But he had begun to behave erratically, occasionally failing to show up for concerts.
He began teaching the violin to students in his own home, but still missed appointments.
Then, that evening in 1943, he walked out and disappeared.

Beth had started to become aware of episodes of missing time in 1989.
But they had obviously been going on since her childhood.
When she was fourteen, she began to experience all the symptoms of pregnancy—cramps, morning sickness, tender breasts.
Yet she was a virgin.
Her father took her to a doctor, who performed pregnancy tests, which proved to be positive.
She insisted that she could not be pregnant—she had never experienced sex.
She had a boyfriend, but the affair was platonic.

One night, she went out to meet the boyfriend in a bus park.
He was not there.
She climbed on a bus, and woke up the next morning to find herself in Little Rock, Arkansas.
A woman pointed out a restaurant that would soon be open for breakfast.
But as she sat outside, on a bench, her father’s car pulled up.
She climbed in, and she was driven home, without a word being spoken.
Years later, when she was asking him about the ‘missing time’, she asked him how he had found her so far from home.
He admitted that he did not have the slightest idea.
He had simply ‘known’ where she was.

The same thing happened several times more during her teens, and each time her father somehow knew how to find her.

The implication would seem to be either that her father was ‘psychic’, or that he was somehow being
told
where to find her.

A few months after the Little Rock episode, she was taken for her prenatal examination, and the doctor announced that she was no longer pregnant—nor even showed signs of a miscarriage.
Oddly enough, that was the end of it.
No one else ever mentioned it again.

In 1987, after she had been married, divorced, and brought up a son alone, Beth saw an advertisement for a stable manager at a horse farm in Virginia.
It was run by a woman of about her own age called Anna Jamerson.
The two liked each other immediately, and Beth moved in.
Oddly enough, Anna felt she had met Beth before; years later, they realised that they
had
met as children—in England—encountering each other by chance and having a long conversation.
Such ‘coincidences’ occur with curious frequency in abduction cases.

Two years after Beth moved in, they saw three lights, in triangular formation, over the horse farm.
It could have been an airliner, but there was no sound.
Then the lights halted above them and one broke away, and disappeared.

On 15 December 1991, Beth was driving back after spending the day with her parents when she saw three bright lights over the top of the trees.
She halted her car, feeling oddly alarmed.
The lights were dazzling, and she got out to look more closely.
One of the lights moved away from the others.
And, quite suddenly, she found herself driving at a dangerous speed, five miles away, with no knowledge of how she got there.
When she arrived back at the farm, she realised that it was far later than she thought—she was missing about two hours.

It happened again a few days later.
Driving along, she saw the lights and groaned aloud, ‘Oh no, not again!’
She blinked, then found she was eight miles farther on, having passed the farm.
Strangest of all, a Christmas package she was carrying had been opened, and resealed with masking tape in a crude and clumsy manner.
Apparently someone had opened it to find out what it contained, but had not touched the cookies in it.

Beth’s parents received a visit from two air force officers.
They explained that it was a routine check, due to the fact that Beth’s son Paul had just been promoted in the intelligence branch.
But, instead of asking about him, they asked questions about Beth; her father finally told them to go away and ask her themselves.

In April 1992, Beth woke up feeling sick, and discovered that she was bleeding from her navel.
Over the next days she began to show all the signs of pregnancy—morning sickness, sore breasts, and obsessive house cleaning.
But pregnancy was impossible—she had had a hysterectomy when she was twenty-three.
Finally, she went to see a doctor, and tests showed she was three months pregnant.
Her vagina was so inflamed that he asked her if she had been raped.
The following day, her navel was bleeding again, but all signs of pregnancy had vanished.

The day Beth’s symptoms disappeared, Anna went through the same experience—morning sickness and enlarged breasts.
A home pregnancy test showed she was not pregnant—but she learnt later that, when an embryo is implanted direct into the womb (as is done in surrogate pregnancies), it does not show up on pregnancy tests.
Then one morning she woke up to find herself normal again.

One day, Beth was sitting with her four-year-old granddaughter when she noted that the child was drawing a ‘flying machine’ with a red light, and faces looking out of the windows.
Down in the corner was a small man; the child explained that this was ‘Nu’, and that he had taken her through a long tunnel.
Nu, she said, was grey all over and had big eyes.
As they were going to bed, the child turned to the open door and said, ‘Goodnight, Nu’.
Then she added, ‘Nu is saying goodnight to you too, Grandma’.

Anna woke up in the night to find a huge man in her room.
She felt no fear, but simply switched on the light.
There was no one there.
Then both of them woke up to see small grey figures in the room.
It was at this point that Anna decided to contact a UFO help organisation.
And this, in turn, led to their appearance at the UFO conference at MIT.
There they met the newspaperman Courty Bryan, who would write about them in
Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind,
and also Budd Hopkins, who would invite them to New York and hypnotise them both.

During the conference, Beth had an odd experience.
As she sat in the hall, everything suddenly became totally silent—as if she had become deaf.
Then she found herself on a landing with a blue-tiled floor—she felt it was elsewhere on the campus.
Someone seemed to be urging her to go back, and she resisted, then gave way.
She found herself back in the conference hall, looking at herself and Anna (from above and slightly to one side, as has been reported by many people who have had out-of-the-body experiences), then she felt herself sink back into her body as if it was a feather mattress.

As they returned to the motel, the row of motorway lights blinked out in unison as they drove past.
Beth was surprised, but Anna commented that it happened to her all the time—she records as much in the book
Connections
which she later co-authored with Beth.
This book also contains an enormous mass of material for which there is no space here; unexplained electrical failures in their bedrooms but not in the rest of the house, lights and televisions turning themselves on, even when unplugged, pillows rearranged during the night.
When Courty Bryan was tape-recording the two women, the tape recorder switched itself on when there was no one near it, and later the tape jammed in the machine and refused to come out; it looked as if it would have to be taken out by force—until the women left the room, when it immediately ejected normally.
There are as many of these small and relatively trivial events as in Puharich’s
Uri,
and they would make equally exhausting reading if summarised here.