The Holographic Universe (46 page)

Others have also agreed
that belief in Mary is the motivating force that causes these projections to
coalesce into being. For instance, Rogo points out that in 1925, while the
Coptic church that became the site of the Zeitoun manifestations was being
built, the philanthropist responsible for its construction had a dream in which
the Virgin told him she would appear at the church as soon as it was completed.
She did not appear at the prescribed time, but the prophecy was well known in
the community. Thus “
there existed a forty-year-old tradition that a Marian
visitation would eventually take place at the church,
” says Rogo. “These
preoccupations may have gradually built up a psychic ‘blueprint’ of the Virgin
within the church itself, i.e., an ever-increasing pool of psychic energy
created by the thoughts of the Zeitouniaris which in 1968 became so
high-pitched that an image of the Virgin Mary burst into physical reality!” In
previous writings I, too, have offered a similar explanation of Marian visions.

There is evidence that
some UFOs may also be some kind of hologramlike phenomenon. When people first
started reporting sightings of what appeared to be spacecraft from other
planets in the late 1940s, researchers who delved deeply enough into the
reports to realize that at least some of them had to be taken seriously assumed
that they were exactly what they appeared to be—glimpses of intelligently
guided crafts from more advanced and probably extraterrestrial civilizations.
However, as encounters with UFOs become more widespread—especially those
involving contact with UFO occupants—and data accumulates, it becomes
increasingly apparent to many researchers that these so-called spacecraft are
not
extraterrestrial in origin.

Some of the features of
the phenomenon that indicate they are not extraterrestrial include the
following: First, there are too many sightings; literally thousands of
encounters with UFOs and their occupants have been documented, so many that it
is difficult to believe they could all be actual visits from other planets.
Second, UFO occupants often do not possess traits one would expect in a truly
extraterrestrial lifeform; too many of them are described as humanoid beings
who breathe our air, display no fear of contracting earthly viruses, are well
adapted to the earth's gravity and the sun's electromagnetic emissions, display
recognizable emotions in their faces, and talk our language—all of which are
possible but unlikely traits in truly extraterrestrial visitors.

Third, they do not
behave as extraterrestrial visitors. Instead of making the proverbial landing
on the White House lawn, they appear to farmers and stranded motorists. They
chase jets but don't attack. They dart around in the sky allowing dozens and
sometimes hundreds of witnesses to see them, but they show no interest in
making any formal contact. And often, when they contact individuals their
behavior still seems illogical. For instance, one of the most commonly reported
types of contact is that which involve some sort of medical examination. And
yet, arguably, a civilization that possesses the technological capability to
travel almost incomprehensible tracts of outer space would most assuredly
possess the scientific wherewithal to obtain such information without any
physical contact at all or, at the very least, without having to abduct the
scores of people who appear to be legitimate victims of this mysterious
phenomenon.

Finally, and most
curious of all, UFOs do not even behave as physical objects do. They have been
watched on radar screens to make instant ninety-degree-angle turns while
traveling at enormous speeds—an antic that would rip a physical object apart
They can change size, instantly vanish into nothingness, appear out of nowhere,
change color, and even change shape (traits that are also displayed by their
occupants). In short, their behavior is not at all what one would expect from a
physical object, but of something quite different, something with which we have
become more than a little familiar in this book. As astrophysicist Dr. Jacques
Vallee, one of the world's most respected UFO researchers and the model for the
character LaCombe in the film
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
, stated
recently, “It is the behavior of an image, or a holographic projection.”

As the nonphysical and
hologramlike qualities of UFOs become increasingly apparent to researchers,
some have concluded that rather than being from other star systems, UFOs are
actually visitors from other dimensions, or levels of reality (it is important
to note that not all researchers agree with this point of view, and some remain
convinced that UFOs are extraterrestrial in origin). However, this explanation
still does not adequately explain many of the other bizarre aspects of the
phenomenon, such as why UFOs aren't making formal contact, why they behave so
absurdly, and so on.

Indeed, the inadequacy
of the
extra
dimensional explanation, at least in the terms in which it
was initially couched, only becomes more glaring as still further unusual
aspects of the UFO phenomenon come into focus. One of the more baffling of
these is growing evidence that UFO encounters are less of an objective
experience and more of a subjective, or psychological, one. For instance, the
well-known “interrupted journey” of Betty and Barney Hill, one of the most
thoroughly documented UFO abduction cases on record, seems as if it were an
actual alien contact in all ways except one: the commander of the UFO was
dressed in a Nazi uniform, a fact that does not make sense if the Hills’
abductors were truly visitors from an alien civilization, but it does if the
event was psychological in nature and more akin to a dream or hallucination,
experiences that often contain obvious symbols and disconcerting flaws in
logic.

Other UFO encounters are
even more surreal and dreamlike in character, and in the literature one can
find cases in which UFO entities sing absurd songs or throw strange objects
(such as potatoes) at witnesses; cases that start out as straightforward
abductions aboard spacecraft but end up as hallucinogenic journeys through a
series of Dantesque realities; and cases in which humanoid aliens shapeshift
into birds, giant insects, and other phantasmagoric creatures.

As early as 1959, and
even before much of this evidence was in, the psychological and archetypal
component of the UFO phenomenon inspired Carl Jung to propose that “flying
saucers” were actually a product of the collective human unconscious and a kind
of modern myth in the making. In 1969, and as the mythic dimension of UFO
experiences became even clearer, Vallee took the observation a step further. In
his landmark book
Passport to Magonia
he points out that, far from being
a new phenomenon, UFOs actually appear to be a very old phenomenon in a new
guise and greatly resemble various folkloric traditions, from descriptions of
elves and gnomes in European countries to medieval accounts of angels to the
supernatural beings described in Native American legends.

The absurd behavior of
UFO entities is the same as the mischievous behavior of elves and fairies in
Celtic legends, the Norse gods, and the trickster figures among the Native
Americans, says Vallee. When stripped to their underlying archetypes, all such
phenomena are part of the same vast, pulsating something, a something that
changes its appearance to suit the culture and time period in which it
manifests, but that has been with the human race for a long, long time. What is
that something? In
Passport to Magonia
Vallee provides no substantive
answer and says only that it appears to be intelligent, timeless, and to be the
phenomenon on which all myths are based.

What, then, are UFOs and
related phenomena? In
Passport to Magonia
Vallee says that we cannot
rule out the possibility that they are the expression of some extraordinarily
advanced nonhuman intelligence, an intelligence so beyond us that its logic
appears to us only as absurdity. But if this is true, how are we to explain the
conclusions of mythology experts from Mircea Eliade to Joseph Campbell that
myths are an organic and necessary expression of the human race, as inevitable
a human by-product as language and art? Can we really accept that the
collective human psyche is so barren and jejune that it developed myths only as
a response to another intelligence?

And yet, if UFOs and
related phenomena are merely psychic projections, how are we to explain the
physical traces they leave behind, the burnt circles and deep impressions found
at the sites of landings, the unmistakable tracks they make on radar screens,
and the scars and incision marks they leave on the people on whom they perform
their medical examinations? In an article published in 1976,1 proposed that
such phenomena are difficult to categorize because we are trying to hammer them
into a picture of reality that is fundamentally incorrect. Given that quantum
physics has shown us that mind and matter are inextricably linked, I suggested
that UFOs and related phenomena are further evidence of this ultimate lack of
division between the psychological and physical worlds. They are indeed a
product of the collective human psyche,
but they are also quite real
Put
another way, they are something the human race has not yet learned to
comprehend properly, a phenomenon that is neither subjective nor objective but
“omnijective”—a term I coined to refer to this unusual state of existence (I
was unaware at the time that Corbin had already coined the term
imaginal
to describe the same blurred status of reality, only in the context of the
mystical experiences of the Sufis).

This point of view has
become increasingly prevalent among researchers. In a recent article Ring
argues that UFO encounters are imaginal experiences and are similar not only to
the confrontations with the real but mind-created world individuals experience
during NDEs, but also to the mythic realities shamans encounter during journeys
through the subtler dimensions. They are, in short, further evidence that
reality is a multilayered and mind-generated hologram.

“I'm finding that I'm
drawn more and more to points of view that allow me not only to acknowledge and
honor the reality of these different experiences, but also to see the
connections between realms that, for the most part, have been studied by
different categories of scholars,” states Ring. “Shamanism tends to be thrown
into anthropology. UFOs tend to be thrown into whatever ufology is. NDEs are
studied by parapsychologists and medical people. And Stan Grof studies
psychedelic experiences from a transpersonal psychology perspective. I think
there's good reason to hope that the imaginal can be, and the holographic might
still prove to be, perspectives that can allow one to see not the identities,
but the linkages and commonalities between these different types of
experiences.” So convinced is Ring of the profound relationship among these at
first seemingly disparate phenomena that he has recently obtained a grant to do
a comparative study on people who have had UFO encounters and people who have
had NDEs.

Dr. Peter M. Rojcewicz,
a folklorist at the Juilliard School in New York City, has also concluded that
UFOs are omnijective. In fact, he believes the time has come for folklorists to
realize that probably all of the phenomena discussed by Vallee in
Passport
to Magonia
are as real as they are symbolic of processes deep in the human
psyche. “There exists a continuum of experiences where reality and imagination
imperceptibly flow into each other,” he states. Rojcewicz acknowledges that
this continuum is further evidence of the Bohmian unity of all things and feels
that, in light of the evidence that such phenomena are imaginal/omnijective, it
is no longer defensible for folklorists to treat them simply as beliefs.

Numerous other
researchers, including Vallee, Grosso, and Whitley Strieber, author of the
bestselling book
Communion
and one of the most famous and articulate
victims of a UFO abduction, have also acknowledged the seeming omnijective
nature of the phenomenon. As Strieber states, encounters with UFO beings “may
be our first true quantum discovery in the large-scale world: The very act of
observing it may be creating it as a concrete actuality, with sense,
definition, and a consciousness of its own.”

In short, there is
growing agreement among researchers of this mysterious phenomenon that the
imaginal is not confined to the afterlife realm, but has spilled over into the
seeming solidity of our sticks-and-stones world. No longer confined to the
visions of shamans, the old gods have sailed their celestial barks right up to
the doorstep of the computer generation, only instead of dragon-headed ships
their vessels are spaceships, and they have traded in their blue-jay heads for
space helmets. Perhaps we should have anticipated this spillover long ago, this
merging of the Land of the Dead with our own realm, for as Orpheus, the
poet-musician of Greek mythology, once warned, “The gates of Pluto must not be
unlocked, within is a people of dreams.”

As significant as this
realization is—that the universe is not objective but omnijective, that just
beyond the pale of our own safe neighborhood lies a vast otherness, a numinous
landscape (more properly a mindscape) as much a part of our own psyche as it is
terra incognita—it still does not shed light on the deepest mystery of all. As
Carl Raschke, a faculty member in the Department of Religious Studies at the
University of Denver, notes, “In the omnijective cosmos, where UFOs have their
place alongside quasars and salamanders, the issue of the veridical, or
hallucinatory, status of glowing, circular apparitions, becomes moot. The
problem is
not
whether they exist, or in what sense they exist, but what
ultimate aim they serve.”