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  Football players, race car drivers, Olympic divers, and others have described an extreme slowing of subjective time, so that they felt they had all the time in the world to perform what they had to do. Golfers, football players, ocean divers, sky divers, and mountain climbers reported drastic changes in body image; sometimes these changes were perceived by onlookers as actual changes in body shape and size. Football players have described how they seemed to have penetrated the solid wall of a defensive line by dematerializing and rematerializing on the other side. Runners felt inexhaustible sources of energy and had a sense of moving without real effort and without actually touching the ground. The great soccer player Pele confided that on a day when everything was going right, he felt a strange calmness, euphoria, and endless energy. He was absolutely confident that he could dribble through the opponent's defense and pass through them physically. Scores of reliable witnesses have testified that Morehei Uyeshiba, the inventor of aikido, appeared to transcend physical laws when he demonstrated his abilities. Facing as many as six attackers with knives, who were well-trained in martial arts, he appeared to change his shape and size and was able to disappear for instants, then reappear in other places. Some of these feats are evident in a documentary movie showing his artistry; his followers swear the film was never edited or in any way tampered with, though the master at times seems to disappear before our eyes as if photographic tricks are involved. Witnesses to the actual filming reported experiencing the same miraculous events that the film recorded.

Another large category of psychoid experiences, traditionally studied by parapsychologists, is that of spiritistic manifestations and Poltergeist phenomena. We have already explored transpersonal experiences that involve discarnate entities and spirits. These are often associated with various physical events that are synchronistic with inner events, or that can be observed and confirmed by numbers of people. Thus, for example, certain places in the world are considered "haunted" because many visitors to that place independently experience the same kinds of unusual events.

  In various spiritistic seances participants often shared certain strange experiences, such as raps and bangs on walls and floors, touches from invisible hands, voices speaking from nowhere, the playing of musical instruments, and gusts of cold air. In some cases, this also involved apparitions of deceased persons or voices of such persons coming through the medium. In certain cases, participants were able to witness telekinesis and materializations, levitation of objects and people, movement of objects through the air, manifestation of ectoplasmic formations, and the appearance of writings or small objects without explanation (so-called apports). The famous American parapsychologist R. B. Rhine called this "physical mediumship." Such events were particularly frequent in the seances with certain mediums, such as Eusapia Palladino and Daniel Douglas Home. These sessions were repeatedly studied by teams of experienced researchers.

  There is no question that at the time when spiritism enjoyed its greatest popularity, around the turn of the century, many participants were victims of cunning swindlers. Even famous mediums, including Eusapia Palladino, were occasionally caught cheating. However, we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater and conclude that this entire area is nothing but fraud. It is difficult to imagine that so many outstanding researchers would have invested so much time and energy in a field with no real phenomena to observe. There exists hardly any other realm where the expert testimony of so many witnesses of the highest caliber has been discounted as stupidity and gullibility and thus written off. We have to realize that among serious researchers were many people with outstanding credentials, such as, the famous physicist Sir William Crookes, the Nobel Prize winning physician and physiologist Charles Richet, and Sir Oliver Lodge, a Fellow of the Royal Society in England.

Another interesting phenomenon studied by the parapsychologists has been popularized by Hollywood in recent years. It is the phenomenon known by its German name
Poltergeist,
meaning "the tapping sprite"; the technical term for it is
recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis
(RSPK). RSPK refers to a wide range of bizarre events that can start happening spontaneously and for which there is no reasonable explanation. Objects are seen flying through the air, catching on fire, or falling and breaking. Articles are mysteriously teleported in and out of locked rooms and closed drawers or cabinets. An entire room or building can be filled with sounds such as raps, bangs, scratching, whistling, or even human voices. Investigations of Poltergeist cases typically result in the discovery of one person, often an adolescent, who seems to be the source of the unusual events. When a conflict with that person is resolved, or the person is removed from the vicinity, the Poltergeist phenomena tend to cease.

  It is interesting to note that patterns of psychoid manifestations seem to be changing with time. While physical mediumship has virtually disappeared in modern times, Poltergeist cases continue to be recorded and studied by highly credible parapsychological researchers of our times. In the past, the person causing Poltergeist phenomena was usually found to be a young woman whose average age was sixteen; present day phenomena of this kind reveals both sexes to be equally implicated, with the average age having risen to twenty.

  Aware of the extremely controversial nature of recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, the best investigators have subjected their cases to unusually meticulous scrutiny. Probably the most extensive research in this area has been conducted in Germany, at the Institute for the Study of the Frontiers of Psychology and Psychohygiene, under the meticulous direction of Hans Bender.

  One of the best documented cases of RSPK is one that was witnessed by over forty people, most of them highly qualified technicians, physicists, and other professionals. The Poltergeist events began in November 1967 at a law office in the Bavarian town of Rosenheim. It started as problems with the lighting fixtures that could not be explained or corrected by trained electricians. There were reports of loud sounds from unknown sources, of copy machine breaking down, and of the entire office phone system malfunctioning. Telephone monitoring devices were registering calls that were never made and the company's telephone bill skyrocketed. Pictures on the walls moved spontaneously, often a full 360 degrees. Fluorescent tubes fell from ceiling fixtures, endangering employees.

  Investigators included highly qualified physicists who were unable to identify the causes of the problems. They concluded, for example, that for the phone calls that had been registered to have been placed without the usual mechanical movements of the phone dials, it would require almost supernatural intelligence and technical knowledge, as well as the ability to judge time intervals in the range of milliseconds. Technicians replaced the fluorescent tubes with incandescent fixtures only to have bulbs explode in the latter. The disturbances became such a serious threat for the staff and clients that the law firm filed a suit with the criminal court against "Unknown Precipitators," thus protecting themselves from possible suits. Hans Bender was eventually able to trace the disturbances to a nineteenyear-old girl, Annemarie, an employee of the firm who had a strong emotional interest in her boss. When she was transferred to another job, the phenomena immediately ceased.

  The elusive nature of psychoid phenomena and the problems inherent in their study are illustrated in another famous Poltergeist case investigated in 1967 by the American researchers William Roll and Gaither Pratt. This case involved a nineteen-year-old bookkeeper. In connection with his job, this young man had to go regularly to a warehouse. Whenever he went there, objects flew off the shelves, some of them more frequently than others. The researchers were able to arrange experimental situations, wherein they could observe the objects moving. On many occasions, at least one of them had his eyes on the young man when the objects were moving. However, at no time were they able to see the objects at the exact moment they were falling; they fell either immediately before they intended to watch or immediately after they had been doing so. One can speculate from this that the same consciousness source that moved the objects was also aware of the intentions of the observers; anticipating their actions in ways that were quite extraordinary.

  Public interest in UFO reports was sufficient to prompt the U.S. Air Force to undertake extensive studies, headed by a special committee at the University of Columbia. The conclusion of these studies was negative, attributing most UFO reports to people with mental disorders or to "misinterpretations" of easily explained causes, such as weather balloons, meteors, flocks of birds, and unusual light reflections. This research failed to satisfy serious researchers or the public. Government records attest to the fact that the main goal of these studies was to prevent public panic at the possibility of visitation by extraterrestrials. Other material shows that the Air Force has, on occasion, started its own UFO rumors to cover up crashes of topsecret experimental spacecraft of their own.

  While many sightings of UFOs have been shown to be hoaxes, misperceptions of more easily explained events, or cover-ups of secret research, there continue to be sightings by people who are reliable witnesses—well educated, highly trained, emotionally stable, intelligent, and articulate. There are enough reports such as these to convince us that the UFO controversy is far from being closed and that it deserves further research.

  Discussion in this area is usually limited to the question of whether or not our planet has been visited by actual physical spacecraft from other parts of the universe. However, it seems that the situation is more complicated than that. Many UFO experiences seem to have a psychoid quality, meaning that they are not merely hallucinations, nor are they "real" in the ordinary sense of the word. It is quite possible that they represent strange hybrid phenomena, combining elements of mental life and the physical world. This would, of course, make these experiences extremely difficult to study by traditional scientific methods, which depend on sharp distinctions between real and unreal or material and psychological events. A comprehensive study of these possibilities would have to involve a simultaneous examination of both physical evidence and the psychological perspectives that have emerged from modern consciousness research and the new physics.

  As we have previously noted, encounters with alien beings, visions of physical or metaphysical spacecrafts, and extraterrestrial journeying have been reported throughout history. C. G. Jung, who was very interested in UFOs wrote a fascinating book entitled
Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of
Things Seen in the Skies.
This work was based on careful historical analysis of legends about flying discs and apparitions throughout the ages, many of which caused mass hysteria. He came to the conclusion that the UFO phenomena might be archetypal visions originating in the collective unconscious.

  The majority of UFO sightings are associated with visions of lights with supernatural radiance, similar to mystical raptures. The descriptions of the extraterrestrial visitors, alien cities, and spacecrafts certainly have parallels in world mythology and thus could easily be explained as belonging to the collective unconscious. However, that is only one aspect of the story. What interests us in our present context is the fact that in many instances UFOs have left physical evidence behind, thus relegating them to consensus reality. It is this aspect that gives modern UFO phenomena a clear psychoid quality. The nature of the evidence is often ambiguous and is thus left open to a variety of interpretations. However, this capricious, almost tricksterlike quality of some UFO sightings seems to be characteristic for psychoid phenomena, rather than being an argument against their existence.

  Many readers will remember a report, some years ago, of the UFO sightings by the captain and crew of a Japanese jumbo jet over Alaska. The entire crew saw a spaceship following them. At exactly the same time, a ground-based radar station registered an unidentified object in the location indicated by the crew. Later, when this sensational news made headlines all over the world, the embarrassed radar operator changed his report and announced that closer scrutiny revealed the image of the unidentified flying object to be a technical artifact. This strange error of an expert operator and its uncanny synchronicity with the sighting by a trained crew is characteristic of psychoid events. The confusion surrounding UFOs is also reflected in the approach of the news media, including the Soviet news agency "Tass," that alternates between reporting sightings and debunking them.

  The controversial physical evidence for the existence of UFOs includes impressions in the ground, burnt soil at reported landing sites, materials that cannot be identified by chemical analysis, photographs and amateur movies, stigmata-like marks on the bodies of people who have reportedly been abducted, mysterious cattle mutilations, and others.

  In comparing reports from people who claim to have been abducted by UFOs, there has been astonishing agreement in the abductees' descriptions of the alien life forms and certain symbols encountered during the contacts. Rather remarkable similarities have been discovered, even in abduction reports where the people involved had no knowledge of or interest in UFOs before their abductions. In follow-up research, people who have experienced close encounters have been hypnotized and examined by psychiatrists. The hypnosis has been used to clear the amnesia that many abductees seem to suffer. In many instances, independent reports of several witnesses to the same event fully concurred and were congruent with each other.