Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (49 page)

In the 1950s, Hugh Everett, a pupil of the physicist John Wheeler, suggested a bewildering interpretation.
The fact that the photon becomes solid only when it is ‘watched’ suggests that, when it is not being watched, it still takes the form of Born’s ‘wave of probability’, and can go through both pinholes at the same time.
And the two ‘waves of probability’ interfere with each other.
It is as if Schrödinger’s cat existed in two universes at the same time, dead in one and alive in the other.
Once the box is open, the two possibilities coalesce in our solid universe, and it is either one or the other.

But why just two universes?
When a photon makes a choice between wave and particle, it is not, according to Everett, making a real choice: it is choosing
both
in parallel universes.
And since an electron wave coalesces every time it collides with a photographic plate, or another electron, this implies a new parallel universe every time—thousands, in fact, billions, of parallel universes.

The idea sounds like a joke.
Yet many scientists take it seriously.
For example, a younger member of the quantum-physics establishment, David Deutsch, devotes a chapter in
The Fabric of Reality
(1997) to explaining the double-slit experiment, and speaks of ‘tangible’ photons and ‘shadow’ photons—the former existing in our universe, and the latter in parallel universes.

Aristotle had a concept called ‘potentia’, a strange realm that exists between possibility and actuality.
It begins to look as if electrons—and cats—are perfectly comfortable in this realm.

The purpose of this detour into quantum physics is to make the point that, whether we like it or not, we have to learn to see reality in a completely different way.
Like our sense of beauty, like our sense of humour, like our sexual preferences, reality lies mainly in the eye of the beholder.
The physicist John Wheeler has even gone so far (in what he calls ‘the Participatory Anthropic Principle’) as to suggest that we
create
the universe in the act of perceiving it.

This is, of course, the notion to which Einstein objected so indignantly.
Yet Einstein himself had played a central part in creating this new universe of physics in which the observer is all-important.
And, by declaring that Planck was right about quanta of energy, he started a landslide that ended by carrying him away—cursing and shaking his fist.

Now it is true that this revolution has not yet affected you and me.
We go about our business as if we lived in the old, solid universe of nineteenth-century physics.
(In fact, a recent survey showed that one-third of all people in England and America do not even know whether the Earth goes round the sun or vice versa.) But it
has,
for example, troubled certain physicists, like Fritjof Capra and Fred Alan Wolf, and their books
The Tao of Physics
(1975) and
Parallel Universes
(1988) are devoted to a science that is becoming daily more like Eastern mysticism.
We may also recall that, when Stanislav Grof’s subjects were given large doses of LSD, they also had insights into the nature of reality that sounded like classic Eastern mysticism.
Gary Zukav says the same thing in his book
The Dancing Wu Li Masters
(1979).
We do not know it yet, but we are walking around in a different universe—a universe that seems to have very little connection with what we regard as common sense.
We are in the position of one of those Walt Disney characters, who walks over the edge of a cliff, and carries on walking—until he looks down, and suddenly begins to fall.

The amusing irony is that all this has happened as a result of a problem we discussed earlier: that, at a certain point in its development, humankind chose the way of the left brain—practical advancement, leaving mysticism and psychic faculties to its tribal shamans.
This choice is responsible for modern science and civilisation; it is also responsible for our tunnel vision and feeling of inadequacy.
And now, absurdly enough, modern science is telling us that we suffer from tunnel vision, and that, if we want to understand the universe, we shall have to remove the blinkers.

Now it cannot have escaped the notice of readers that the UFO problem has brought us to exactly the same point.
It began by looking quite solid and understandable.
Kenneth Arnold’s flying saucers raised the question: are we being observed by visitors from another world?
Is it possible that the aliens are trying to prepare us for a mass landing on our planet?

Faced with that question, Jacques Vallee and John Keel quickly came to the conclusion that something altogether stranger was going on.
Vallee concluded that it is a ‘control phenomenon’—that is, that an important part of its purpose is
the effect it has on us.
And it was as if a problem in classical physics changed into a problem in quantum physics.

And what is the effect it has on us?
John Mack speaks of ‘the inconsistency between these [abductee] experiences and the consensus reality’, and adds, ‘There is no way, I believe, that we can even make sense, let alone provide a convincing explanation of this matter within the framework of our existing views of what is real or possible’.
[1]

In other words, if an important part of the purpose of these phenomena is the effect on us, then that purpose would seem to be to
decondition
us from our unquestioning acceptance of consensus reality.

In many cases, that deconditioning can be both traumatic and strangely exciting—as epitomised in the case of John and Sue Day, who, on the evening of 27 October 1974, left the home of Sue’s parents, and set out on the forty-minute drive home to Avely, in Essex, where they intended to watch a play on television.
Their three children, aged eleven, ten and seven, were in the back of the car.
Their ten-year-old boy was the first to notice that an oval-shaped blue light was flying above them; they assumed it was an aeroplane.
Then things became strangely silent, and, as they drove into a bank of green mist, the car radio began to crackle and smoke; John pulled out the wires.
Then the engine went dead and there was a jerk.
A moment later, they were driving again, and for a moment John had the odd impression that Sue was no longer present, and said, ‘Is everybody here?’
before he realised she was beside him.

When they reached home, they found the TV screen blank, and the clock showed that it was nearly 1:00 a.m.
They had lost over two hours.

After this odd experience, the Days showed personality changes.
John became more self-confident, more creative, and began writing ‘poems about life’.
Sue also became more self-confident.
And the ten-year-old, who had been backward at reading, suddenly improved.
They became vegetarians and almost gave up drinking.
John, who had been a heavy smoker, gave up smoking.

Then poltergeist activity began to take place in the house.
The back door flew open violently and crashed against the wall.
Items would vanish, then reappear days later.
There were unaccountable smells, such as lavender.
Finally, under these bizarre trials, John had a nervous breakdown and lost his job.

When he heard a radio programme about UFOs, he contacted the researcher Andy Collins, who went to the house in Avely, and also witnessed poltergeist phenomena.
Collins introduced John to a hypnotist named Leonard Wilder, and, under hypnosis, John began to recall what had happened.
To begin with, Sue was unwilling to be hypnotised, but began to recall spontaneously; later, she submitted to hypnosis.

John recalled a white light surrounding the car, and a sense of rising.
He seemed to lose consciousness, then found himself on a balcony in a kind of hangar.
He was looking down on a blue car which he recognised as his own, although his own was white.
Two people were asleep in the front, and more in the back.
Sue, who recalled standing beside him, saw John and her ten-year-old standing beside the car, although they were also beside her on the balcony.
(John Spencer has suggested that this seems to indicate that the Days were actually undergoing an out-of-the-body experience.)

John was taken to an examination room, where he lost consciousness, then woke up on a table, being scanned by some apparatus.
Three tall beings were watching, and two small, incredibly ugly creatures, rather like traditional goblins with huge ears, beaked noses and triangular eyes, were examining him with penlike instruments.

The tall beings wore silvery one-piece suits, and communicated by what John assumed was telepathy.
When the examination was over, they showed John the rest of the craft, and the recreation area and the control room.
In the latter he was shown images of the solar system (which flashed by very fast), and a holographic image of a planet that had been destroyed by pollution.
Finally, left alone in another room, he was startled when an incredibly beautiful woman walked in, then vanished.
At this point, he found himself back in the car.

Sue recalled being taken to an examination room and strapped on a table, where she was painted a mauve colour and physically examined—she found she was wearing a gown, although she had no memory of being undressed.
When the examination became too intimate, she screamed.
One of the tall beings placed a hand on her forehead and, ‘I went out like a light’.

Later, she was taken on a tour of the ship, and she was also shown images on a screen, including Earth from space, and the place where she lived.

At this point, she apparently told her captors that she did not want to go back, and they agreed she could stay.
But when she saw John climbing into the car, and the car dematerialising, she changed her mind and said she wanted to go.
Then she found herself sitting in the car.
This may explain why John thought he was alone in the front of the car for a few moments before he realised Sue was there.

The Days struck everyone who spoke to them as exceptionally forthcoming and honest.
It should also be borne in mind that the usual objection—that an abductee has been influenced by other stories of abductees—does not apply in this case, since this all took place in 1974 (although they were not hypnotised until 1977), when there
were
no other abductee reports in Britain (and even in America they were rare).

A number of important observations emerge from the case.
The first is that the ‘aliens’ apparently intended no harm; apart from the uncomfortable physical examination, they seemed friendly, and treated the Days as intelligent fellow beings.
The aftereffect was to make both of them more self-confident, and to cause them to become more aware of their own health and that of the planet.
John’s nervous breakdown was apparently brought on by vivid dreams, and by the poltergeist activity.
(Poltergeists have been responsible for more than one nervous collapse.) But he subsequently found another job involving more ‘artistic’ activity.
Their ten-year-old improved at school.
And the youngest, asked what he wanted to do when he grew up, declared that he intended to build a huge spacecraft to take thousands of people from Earth.

In general, then, the case seems to support John Mack’s view that abduction experiences ‘open the consciousness’ of abductees.
Mack also comments that his own experience of working with abductees provides a rich body of evidence to support the idea that ‘the cosmos, far from being devoid of meaning and intelligence, is .
.
.
informed by some kind of universal intelligence .
.
.
one to which human intelligence is akin, and in which it can participate’.

But why the poltergeist activity?
The likeliest explanation is that the poltergeists had nothing to do with the aliens, but that the experience had somehow ‘opened up’ the Days, weakening the divide that seems to separate human beings from other realms of reality—for example, Monroe’s ‘Locale II’—and making them vulnerable to attack.
This again underlines the connection, noted so many times in this book, between UFO phenomena and the realm of the paranormal.

For me, the most interesting thing that has emerged during my research for this book is the connection between the UFO experience and the experience of wider—or deeper—states of consciousness: such as Jacques Vallee’s case of the woman who experienced ‘novel insights into the nature of reality’, and who changed ‘from an agnostic to a gnostic’, after seeing a UFO on her way to Oxford.
(This was followed, as in the case of John and Sue Day, by a ‘supernatural’ experience.) I have always been preoccupied with the oddly limited nature of human consciousness, and in my first book,
The Outsider,
I labelled it (rather arbitrarily) ‘original sin’.
In a later book on Gurdjieff, I expressed it rather more precisely in the comment, ‘Human beings are like grandfather clocks driven by watchsprings’.
Human consciousness seems too feeble to take advantage of our occasional flashes of insight.