Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (52 page)

All this explains why T.
H.
Huxley felt he could not ‘get up an interest’ in psychical research; it seemed totally irrelevant.
Science would achieve the millennium without these remnants from a superstitious past.

A century later, scientists were still inclined to dismiss the paranormal as a superstition.
At a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1979, John Wheeler called for the paranormal researchers, whom he called ‘pseudos’, to be ‘driven out of the temple of science’.
Yet it was this same John Wheeler who suggested that the universe does not exist until we observe it, and whose student Hugh Everett argued that there must be billions of parallel universes—ideas that Huxley would have regarded as even more outrageous than a belief in ghosts and spirits.

We have encountered this notion of parallel realities elsewhere in this book—such as Vallee’s comment that ‘the UFOs may not come from ordinary space, but from a multiverse which is all around us’, or Air Marshall Dowding’s suggestion that UFOs ‘could be creations of an invisible world coincident with the space of our physical Earth .
.
.’.
John Keel believes that UFOs ‘move into our spatial and time coordinates’ by ‘gearing down from the higher frequencies’, and into our colour spectrum.
Again and again, there is the suggestion that some other reality exists on a level that is somehow parallel to ours,
but on a different vibration rate.

Now this suggestion was first made, as far as I know, by a retired Cambridge don named T.
C.
Lethbridge, who had been keeper of the Anglo-Saxon Antiquities Museum.
As an archaeologist, Tom Lethbridge had soon recognised the curious fact that a dowsing rod can not only detect underground water, but buried artefacts.
This sounds absurd; for while we can believe that our bodies possess some natural device, inherited from our remote ancestors, for detecting water, it is far harder to understand why a forked twig should respond to solid objects.
But Lethbridge found that it did, and used it constantly in his archaeological work for detecting potsherds, bronze artefacts and agricultural implements.

He also found that a pendulum—a piece of string with some sort of bob at the end—would do just as well.
And, when he retired to Devon in 1957, the eccentric old lady who lived next door told him that the pendulum would respond to different substances according to the length of the string.
Being incorrigibly scientific by temperament, he lost no time in conducting a long series of precise experiments.

What he did was to take some specific substance—like copper—and dangle over it a pendulum whose string was wound around a pencil, and could be lengthened or shortened.
When the length of the string reached thirty and a half inches, the pendulum went into a circular swing.
Silver was twenty-two inches, gold twenty-nine, tin twenty-eight.
When he tried it in his back yard, it soon located a small copper tube.
He discovered that truffles respond at seventeen inches, and used it to locate a truffle in his garden.

He wondered if these various substances give off some distinct vibration, which is picked up by the body, like a radio signal.
But he finally came to agree with Sir William Barrett, the founder of the Society for Psychical Research, and Prof.
Charles Richet, another eminent psychical researcher, that it is the
mind
of the searcher to which the pendulum responds, and the mind that somehow ‘picks up’ the substance by somehow tuning in to it.

Now it is worth pausing to look at this a little more closely.
I am not a particularly good dowser, yet even I know that a dowsing rod or pendulum responds as precisely as an ammeter does to a current.
Any good dowser can detect, say, coins hidden under a carpet.
What is more odd is that, if he places a mixture of copper and silver coins under the carpet, he can pick out which is which; if he ‘tunes in’ to copper, his rod will ignore the silver coins, and vice versa.

Even more odd is the ability of some people to hold an object in their hands and ‘sense’ its history.
It was discovered (and exhaustively investigated) in the nineteenth century by Prof.
Joseph Rodes Buchanan, who labelled it ‘psychometry’, and it has since been the subject of hundreds of investigations by paranormal researchers.
This is obviously simply a more sophisticated version of the ability that enables a dowser to respond to silver or copper coins.
[5]

Lethbridge soon realised that the pendulum was simply responding to some unknown power of the mind.
In which case, it ought to respond to thoughts as well as things.
He tried it, thinking clearly of such notions as love, anger, jealousy, even evolution, and found that the pendulum again responded to each at a distinct rate.
It responded to ‘death’ at forty inches, which seemed to be the pendulum’s limit.

Sometimes, several substances—and ideas—shared the same vibrational rate, so that at ten inches the pendulum responded to graphite, milk, fire, the colour red and the direction east.
But each item was characterised by the number of times the pendulum gyrated in a circle.

What would happen if he extended it beyond forty?
He tried and found that it simply started all over again, merely adding forty to all the previous ‘rates’.
There was one difference.
Held over a piece of copper—for example—it would not react directly above it, but slightly to one side.
Why?
Lethbridge speculated that, since forty was the ‘rate’ for death, the pendulum might be registering some realm beyond death where, for some reason, objects register as slightly displaced—like a pencil appearing bent in a glass of water.
(People who have experienced OBEs often report that they find themselves above and slightly to one side of their bodies—as in the case of Beth Collings mentioned on p.
214.
)

Beyond eighty inches, the same thing happened.
All the rates were repeated plus eighty.
Lethbridge concluded that there were probably any number of ‘parallel realities’ which could be detected if the pendulum could be made long enough.

These realities, Lethbridge came to believe, exist parallel with our own.
They are around us all the time, but undetectable because they are on different vibrational rates.
He cites an Indian tribe who believe that invisible people live among us.

It was not until
The Legend of the Sons of God,
the last of the ten books published in his lifetime (he died in 1971), that Lethbridge wrote about UFOs.
He had seen a UFO as early as 1931—a typical ‘ball of light’; driving through a heavy rainstorm, he glanced down a lane, and saw a shining disc or globe, about three feet across, descending towards the road.
Since it was raining heavily, he drove on without stopping.
The reports of post-1947 UFO sightings led him to conclude that Earth has probably been visited by ‘aliens’ in the remote past, although he speculated that they may have been from ‘another dimension’, separated from us by its vibration rate.
(We may recall Linda Porter’s comments to Linda Howe: ‘There are countless different worlds/dimensions occupying the same space without being aware of one another, because of having their own individual octaves’.)

Lethbridge knew little about physics; if he had, he would have realised that his own speculations were converging with those of modern science.
We now know that there is no such thing as matter—only energy.
Zero-point-energy theory tells us that there is no such thing as empty space, only surging tides of energy.
But quantum theory tells us that there is one more vital component in the universe, mind, and that mind seems to be able to somehow freeze waves into particles, or energy into matter.
Mind does not seem to be part of the energy system, but somehow separate from it and above it, as indicated by the fact that Lethbridge found that the pendulum responded to different vibration rates, but that, where an abstraction was concerned, he had to clearly envisage it in his mind before the pendulum responded.
His unconscious mind was reaching out and looking for something, and, when it had found it, caused his muscles to respond and the pendulum or dowsing rod to move.

In the same way, when he was dowsing for archaeological artefacts with a dowsing rod, the rod would respond to what he was looking for, and not to other things.
It was the mind that selected, then tuned in, to the vibration, just as a radio tunes in to a station.

This also implies that human beings are continually bathed in moving tides of energies, which they can select, and, to some extent, control.

We have all noticed how some people leave us feeling drained, while others seem to revitalise us; this seems to indicate that, without even being aware of it, human beings can exert some kind of unconscious control over vital energies, and possess some of the powers once attributed to vampires.

So even our science is beginning to point towards a strange new conception of the universe: as vast tides of energy, inhabited by minds that can tune in to it, and exert some control over it.
This energy somehow carries information, which explains how a psychometrist can ‘sense’ the history of an object.

It is clear that modern man has almost no conception of his power to tune in to these energies.
Thousands of years of left-brain dominance have left him completely out of touch with them.
And the extraordinary growth of science and technology has encouraged a feeling that he is merely a pawn in a game that is too big for him to understand.
In the meantime, our culture has developed an overwhelmingly pessimistic tinge which has been characteristic of the past two centuries.

Now it so happens that this was the starting point of my own work.
The Outsider
(1956) was about the number of men of genius in the nineteenth century who committed suicide or died of illnesses induced by ‘discouragement’.
The reason was obvious.
They would experience moods in which the whole universe seemed glorious, and in which they felt that life could be a continuous ecstasy.
Then they would wake up the next morning, and wonder what on Earth it had all been about.
And, since reality was very obviously cold, hard and problematic, they would conclude that the vision had been an illusion, and sink into depression.

What was happening was that in these ‘moments of vision’ they were experiencing the universe as pure energy, the energy that excites us in Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ or in the poetry of Goethe:

Es schäumt das Meer in breiten Fliissen

Am tie fen Grund der Felsen auf,

Und Fels and Meer wird fortgerrisen

In ewig schnellem Sphärenlauf.

And all the towering cliffs among

In spreading streams upfoams the ocean,

And cliffs and sea are whirled along,

With circling orbs in ceaseless motion.
[6]

It is the energy that excites us in the music of Wagner or in Van Gogh’s painting
The Starry Night.
Van Gogh enables us to see the essence of the tragedy.
In the later painting, we can see that he is experiencing this overwhelming sense of universal energy—the grass and trees and even buildings seem to surge upward like flames.
Yet after these visions he came back to a world of endless financial anxiety, and the feeling that he was a burden on his brother and sister-in-law.
This is why he killed himself, and left a note saying, ‘Misery will never end’.
The vision seemed a lie.

What is more, science told him it was a lie.
Huxley and Haeckel and Tyndall and the rest assured the romantics that the world could be explained in completely material terms, and that mind is a product of matter, in the same way as fire is a product of combustion.

Contemporary scientists like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking tell us the same thing.
The absurd thing is that science itself tells us the opposite.
It tells us that the universe is not made of matter but of vibrations of energy, and that mind seems to have some incomprehensible role in determining how this energy reveals itself.

It seems incredible that no one so far has noticed it.
But modern science is telling us that the vision of the nineteenth-century romantics was true, and that their notion that matter is cold, hard and unyielding is untrue.
Goethe, Wagner, Van Gogh and the rest were sensing the underlying reality of the universe.

Unfortunately, they did not know this.
It seemed to them quite simply that their visions of affirmation were illusions, and this thought plunged them into depression.
The result was a mood of self-pity, which became the main theme of much of the most typical poetry and art of the 1890s.
In the twentieth century, self-pity developed into a stoical ‘realism’ that was based upon acceptance of human weakness and vulnerability, and which culminated in the work of writers like Graham Greene, William Golding and Samuel Beckett—the last of these epitomising the notion that human life is totally pointless and meaningless.