Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (4 page)

Even so, periods of intense depression were interrupted by flashes of the feeling I called—after a phrase of G.
K.
Chesterton—‘absurd good news’.
It often happened early on a summer morning, when I set out on a long cycle ride, with a bag of sandwiches and a bottle of lemonade in a knapsack: the feeling that the world was infinitely rich, and that the problem lay in
the limitedness of consciousness itself.
In this state, the feeling that all our human values are illusions seemed unimportant, for our values are part of our ordinary state of consciousness.
And these moments seem to offer the possibility of a far richer form of consciousness.
Even in my states of deepest depression, I could recognise that depression is merely another name for low pressure, and that our inner pressure depends, to a large extent, on our assumptions.
If we wake up feeling today is going to be futile, it probably will be.

These, it seemed to me, are the really interesting questions: how we could raise the intensity of consciousness, how we could cease to be what Nietzsche called ‘human, all too human’.
It seemed obvious that the feeling of happiness and expectation is a state of mind, which has nothing to do with the actual circumstances of our lives.
You could feel it as easily in a rubbish tip as standing on top of Mount Everest.
In that case the great riddle lay
inside
us, not in what happens around us.

All of which explains why I was totally uninterested in news items about flying saucers.
If they were visitors from another planet, no doubt they would finally make themselves known.
But I could not really believe that they were Martians or Venusians.
And, to tell the truth, I didn’t care much.

I felt rather the same when my grandmother had talked to me about spiritualism.
As a child, I had taken an interest in ghosts and spirits; now they seemed absurdly unimportant in comparison with this question about the meaning of human existence.

A few years later, when I read George Adamski’s claims that he had been taken to Venus in a flying saucer, I was confirmed in my belief that people who believe in flying saucers must be idiots.

In due course, events caused me to broaden my perspective.
In the late 1960s, I was asked to write a book about the paranormal.
As soon as I began to look into such matters as telepathy, precognition, second sight, out-of-the-body experiences, it became obvious to me that they cannot be shrugged off as delusions.
I remained convinced that most people are interested in the paranormal for the wrong reasons—out of a kind of escapism—but felt nevertheless that the evidence for ghosts or poltergeists or precognition is as strong as the evidence for atoms and electrons.

Towards the end of
The Occult,
I felt obliged to include a section on flying saucers—merely for the sake of completeness.
I discussed Kenneth Arnold’s sighting and the crash of Captain Thomas Mantell’s plane when chasing a UFO in January 1958.
Then I went on to discuss a case that, in retrospect, I now see to have far more significance than I realised at the time.

A Californian friend, Richard Roberts, told me the story of a Dutch yogic practitioner named Jack Schwarz, who was able to lie on a bed of long sharp nails, with a heavy man sitting on top of him.
The nails would sink deep into his body, yet the wounds would not bleed, and Schwarz obviously suffered no discomfort.

In 1958, Schwarz had been the welfare officer on a Dutch ship going through the Suez Canal.
The troops were being entertained by a magician.
Suddenly, a tall, thin Arab approached Schwarz, announced, ‘You are my master’, and kissed his feet.
Then he walked away.
Schwarz tried to follow him, but he had disappeared, and the watch at the gangway had not seen him.

A year later, as he was leaving a lecture in Los Angeles, a small man approached Schwarz and said he wanted to talk to him.
In spite of his wife’s misgivings, Schwarz got into his car.
The man kissed his hand, then reminded Schwarz that he had once kissed his feet and called him his master.
Schwarz was baffled; this little man bore no resemblance to the lanky Arab.
But the man—apparently reading his mind—said, ‘We can appear in any shape we desire’—and explained that ‘we come from a tribe of people who crash-landed in a rocket ship on Earth thousands of years ago’.
He then told Schwarz that he was bringing him a message from
his
master in Nepal.
The message was that ‘You should now begin teaching the spiritual truth that is being given to you inspirationally.
You are God’s vehicle to bring the truth that is meant to be’.
Promising to be in touch, the little man let him out of the car.

A few years later, Schwarz began receiving telepathic messages about his ‘mission’.
And a woman patient spoke in a metallic voice, telling Schwarz that he was from Pluto and that he—the voice—was from Venus.
The Venusian, who called himself Linus, went into technical detail about the ‘gaseous’ inhabitants of Venus, which was completely beyond the intellectual capacity of the woman patient (who was amazed when the tape was played back).
Two months later, Linus again spoke to Schwarz through the mouth of another patient.
And a psychic girl in Vancouver told him that she had travelled astrally to Venus the previous night, and that she had seen him there in company with Linus.

And that was the story, insofar as it had developed at the time I wrote
The Occult.
At the time it seemed simply baffling.
I now see that it fits a familiar pattern: men with some unusual ability begin to receive apparently supernatural communications assuring them that they are destined to become messiahs, and perhaps save the Earth.
Often, certain ‘signs’ are given—for example, prophecies of the future that prove accurate.
But, if the recipient of the message is naive enough to commit himself to total belief, what follows is chaos and confusion—for example, some prophecy of a tremendous disaster, or even the end of the world, which simply fails to materialise, leaving the ‘avatar’ feeling rather foolish.

My next encounter with this bafflingly ambiguous world of UFOs occurred two or three years later, in the mid-1970s.
The Occult
had been well received, and I suddenly found myself invited to take part in projects involving the paranormal—such as presenting a series on BBC television, and serving on the editorial board of a series of books called
The Unexplained.
It was in this latter capacity that I came to meet Uri Geller, who had achieved overnight fame for bending spoons by gently rubbing them.

Prepared to believe that Geller was—as his critics alleged—merely a skilled conjuror, I was quickly convinced of his genuineness when he read my mind, reproducing a drawing I had made on the back of a menu card while he sat with his back to me—a sketch of a grotesque little creature that I invented to amuse my children.
After I had turned over the menu card and covered it with my hand, Geller turned round, and asked me to stare into his eyes and transmit the drawing.
Suddenly, he reproduced it on his own menu card, slightly less precise, but undoubtedly the same little cartoon character, with big floppy ears and huge eyes.

At that point, I asked him a question that had been troubling me ever since I had read
Uri: A Journal of the Mystery of Uri Geller,
by Andrija Puharich.
Like most people, I had found the book extremely difficult to finish.
The problem, quite simply, was that it was too unbelievable.
It was not that I felt that Puharich was an out-and-out liar—simply that I found it impossible to take him seriously.

I wanted to know whether everything described in the book had really happened.
Geller, I knew, had now broken with Puharich, not without some ill feeling, so would have no reason not to answer my question truthfully.

In fact, he told me with obvious sincerity, ‘
Everything
happened as Andrija describes it’.

‘And do you believe that your powers come from some extraterrestrial source?’

‘I don’t know.
I don’t know where they come from’.

‘But don’t you feel that they could be a manifestation of your own unconscious mind—in other words, a kind of poltergeist effect?’

He shook his head.
‘I find that hard to believe because whatever lies behind my powers seems to be intelligent.
Sometimes it plays jokes.
In my book
[1]
I say that maybe it is a Cosmic Clown’.

The reason for my question can be found in chapter three of Puharich’s book.
He describes how one day, under light hypnosis in a hotel room in Tel Aviv, Geller said that he was in a dark cave in Cyprus, where he used to sit and absorb learning.
‘What are you learning?’
asked Puharich, and Geller replied, ‘It is about people who come from space.
But I am not to talk about these things yet’.

Geller went on to describe how, in 1949, just after his third birthday, he was in a garden in Tel Aviv when he saw a huge, bowl-shaped light in the sky.
Then a radiant figure appeared in front of him, its hands above its head, holding something that shone like the sun.

And it was at this point that I had begun to find Puharich’s book frankly unbelievable.
For he goes on to describe how, in the midst of the hypnotic session, Geller stopped speaking, and a strange, metallic voice began to issue from the air.
It stated that ‘it was us who found Uri in the garden when he was three’.
‘They’ had programmed him to serve their purpose, although his memories of contact have been erased.
Their purpose was to avert a world war, which would begin as a war between Egypt and Israel.
Geller would somehow be an instrument of their purpose.

‘They’, it would emerge later, were a group of superhuman beings called the ‘Nine’.
Puharich had first come across them when he was studying a Hindu psychic called Dr.
Vinod, who had suddenly begun to speak in a voice quite unlike his own, with a perfect English accent.
The being was highly articulate, highly intelligent, and explained that it was a member of ‘the Nine Principles and Forces’, whose purpose is to aid human evolution.

Four years later, in 1956, Puharich had met an American couple, Dr.
Charles Laughead and his wife, who also passed on a lengthy message from ‘the Nine Principles and Forces’, which referred back to the earlier messages through Dr.
Vinod.
Unless the new message was some kind of trick, it certainly looked as if the ‘Nine’—or at least their spokesman—was some kind of disembodied intelligence.
(But Laughead himself would later prove an example of the danger of getting mixed up with ‘channelled’ messages—he was to lose his post at Michigan State College after he announced that the world would end on a certain date, and the date passed without incident.)

All this explains why Puharich was inclined to accept the metallic voice in Tel Aviv as yet another manifestation of the Nine.

When Geller emerged from the hypnosis, he had no memory of what had occurred.
When Puharich played back the tape recording describing what had happened in the garden, Geller muttered, ‘I don’t remember any of this’.

When the metallic voice began, Geller suddenly ejected the tape and ran from the room.
Puharich swears he saw the tape vanish from Geller’s hand as he seized it.
When Geller was found, half an hour later—apparently still suffering from shock—the tape was nowhere to be found.

This is the beginning of a series of events so apparently preposterous that the reader begins to suffer from a kind of astonishment fatigue.
Geller causes a ring in a closed wooden box to vanish, then to reappear.
Puharich decides that this curious power to materialise or dematerialise objects might lead them to what they want to know.
‘If we could be certain that the power of vanishing objects resided solely in Uri, it would simplify our problem.
However, if this power was controlled by an extraterrestrial intelligence, we would be faced with one of the most momentous revelations in human history’.

So, by way of finding out, Puharich scratched code numbers on the three parts of a Parker pen.
Then the pen was placed in the wooden box.
Geller held his hand above it for nine minutes.
When the box was opened, the pen was apparently intact.
But, on closer examination, its brass cartridge had vanished.

Later in the day, while Geller was under hypnosis, the metallic voice spoke again, explaining that ‘they’ were in a spacecraft called
Spectra
, ‘fifty-three thousand sixty-nine light ages away’.
Puharich is told to take good care of Geller, who has an important mission to fulfil on Earth.
The voice adds that they have the missing pen part, and will return it in due course.