Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (13 page)

‘Are you interested in UFOs?’

I explained that I had been commissioned to write a book on extra-
terrestrial life, and that I suspected it was going to turn into a book about UFOs.

‘We’ve got a big section on UFOs.
You may remember, it’s a subject we specialise in’.

I didn’t, because I hadn’t been particularly interested in UFOs last time I had seen John.
But now, as I began to look through a whole corner of the room devoted to them, my heart sank at the sheer number of books I had never heard of.

Some of them looked so weird they made you doubt the sanity of the authors—huge self-published volumes, some of them several inches thick, devoted to such propositions as that the aliens came from inside the Earth, or that they had gigantic underground bases in locations like South Dakota, and that these had been built with the connivance of the US government.
There were dozens of volumes and even magazines about ‘conspiracy theories’.
But there were also dozens of volumes with titles like
UFO Report, 1991; Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind; UFOs: African Encounters;
and
UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union,
the last by my friend Jacques Vallee.
It was obvious that the subject had so many remote byways that I could spend a lifetime exploring them.

As if to increase my depression, John’s assistant Ramon told me that a local New Age bookstore, with even more books on UFOs, was closing, and that all books were being sold at a 60 percent discount.
With a sense of plunging even further out of my depth, I agreed to let him take me there.
The owner, whose lease was running out, cheered me by telling me that most of the UFO books had already gone, but that the few remaining could be found on the shelf between yoga and vegetarian cooking.
In fact, there must have been a hundred or so titles.
And Ramon, who was highly knowledgeable in the field, kept holding out volumes to me and saying, ‘That’s very important’, or ‘That’s a real classic’.
So, having established that the books could be airmailed back to England, and that I could pay by credit card, I ended by buying a couple of dozen.

Back in John Wright’s bookshop, Ramon was equally helpful about books I ought to read, and I ended with a pile of fifty or so on the counter.
My credit-card bill for that morning was approaching a thousand dollars.
But, as I took a taxi back to my motel, I felt that at least I had made a start on the research for my book.

On the plane back to Heathrow, I read a remarkable book called
The Holographic Universe
by Michael Talbot.
Its early chapters are about the brain and the theory of holograms, but towards the end Talbot devotes a few pages to the UFO phenomenon, and they left me more confused than ever.

Summarising the views of a number of writers, like Jacques Vallee, Michael Grosso, and Kenneth Ring, he seems to conclude that UFOs are largely a subjective and psychological phenomenon.
He points out that in that classic early abduction case of Barney and Betty Hill, the commander of the UFO was dressed in a Nazi uniform, which sounds as if the event was closer to a dream or hallucination.
He goes on:

Other UFO encounters are even more surreal or dreamlike in character, and in the literature, one can find cases in which the 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.

(Talbot, The Holographic Universe, 1991)

But at least Talbot’s book provided me with a possible explanation of one thing that had bothered me since I read Hopkins’s
Missing Time
:
why the aliens seem so inefficient at blotting out human memory.
As noted earlier, abductees are often unaware that anything has taken place, but cannot understand why several hours out of their lives have gone missing.
Then a few vague memories begin to return, and they often undergo hypnosis—or the memories return spontaneously—and recall that they have been kidnapped, subjected to medical examination, then returned to their cars or bedrooms.

Talbot begins
The Holographic Universe
by describing Karl Lashley’s attempt to locate the source of memory in the brain by training rats to perform certain tasks, and then surgically removing various parts of their brains, in an attempt to eradicate the memory.
But, no matter how much of the brain he cut away, he was unable to destroy the memory.

To explain this baffling result, his student Karl Pribram came up with a fascinating and plausible explanation: that the memories are stored in the brain like a hologram.

Everyone knows that a hologram is a three-dimensional figure that looks quite solid, but which turns out to be a mere projection of light, like an image on a cinema screen.
This is done by passing two beams of laser light (light in which all the waves march in step, like a platoon of soldiers) through a photographic plate creating a kind of ripple pattern.

The ripple pattern is made when two beams of laser light interfere with each other.
It is rather like throwing a stone into a still pond, and watching the ripples spread outward, then throwing in another stone, and watching the two lots of ripples interfere.

Imagine now that the two beams interfere with each other on a photographic plate, and one of them has just bounced off some object, like a human face or an apple.
The pattern on the plate does not look in the least like a face or an apple—merely like rings of ripples—until a direct laser beam is passed through the plate or bounced off it, making the face or the apple suddenly appear, hanging in space, and indistinguishable from the real thing.

That pattern on the plate is actually the hologram.
But it has a strange quality.
If you break the plate in half, and shine a beam through it, the result is not half a face, but the whole face, only slightly less distinct.
You can even break off a small corner of the plate, and the result will still be the complete face.
The only difference is that it will now look far blurrier than the original made from the whole plate.
In other words, every part of the plate contains the whole hologram.
And if, when we learn something, the result of that learning is somehow photographed in the whole brain, then it would explain why Lashley could not eradicate the rats’ memory—to do so he would have had to destroy the whole brain.
So long as there was even a small part of the brain left, the rats remembered.

Which would seem to explain why aliens cannot totally eradicate the memory of the abductee—they only seem to be able to block it, rather in the way that a hypnotist can block a memory by suggestion.
But, when a hypnotist does this, another hypnotist can unblock it, and hypnotists can apparently do the same with the abductee.

The books arrived a few days after I returned to Cornwall, and were soon cluttering up my bedroom floor.
I always get up between 5:00 and 6:00 in the morning, so that I can get a couple of hours’ reading before it is time to make breakfast for my wife.
I plunged in head first, taking books virtually at random: Hynek’s
The UFO Experience,
Linda Howe’s
Alien Harvest,
Charles Bowen’s
The Humanoids,
Jacques Vallee’s
Messengers of Deception,
Hans Holzer’s
The Ufonauts,
Michael Craft’s
Alien Impact,
Timothy Good’s
Beyond Top
Secret,
Arthur Shuttlewood’s
The Warminster Mystery,
Whitley Strieber’s
Communion
, Kevin Randle’s
The UFO Casebook,
Ralph Noyes’s
The Crop Circle Phenomenon,
and more than a dozen others.

As I read, I began to find all this research unexpectedly exciting and satisfying.
This is because I had started out with memories of the scepticism inspired in me by Andrija Puharich’s
Uri,
and Stuart Holroyd’s
Prelude to the Landing on Planet Earth,
and I more than half expected to find all this reading an exercise in ‘believing six impossible things before breakfast’.
But I very soon began to feel exactly as I had when researching the paranormal in 1969: an intuitive conviction that this all made sense, and that it rang true.
I found my feelings expressed in a book called
Tapping the Zero-Point Energy
by Moray B.
King, a systems engineer who remarks: ‘It was in the summer of 1974 that I had the misfortune of reading
Beyond Earth,
a book about UFOs.
I picked it up just for fun, to read like science fiction.
But what impressed me were the witnesses.
Many were credible, such as airline pilots and police, who had everything to lose by reporting what they saw’.

And it was the sheer credibility of witnesses, and their testimony to the ability of UFOs to make hairpin turns at incredible speeds, that led King to wonder about the possibility of antigravity.

Now I found myself reacting in exactly the same way.
Whatever else they were, these people were not liars.
Their total honesty and normality came over again and again.

And, as with the paranormal, this not only rang true, but it all seemed to fit together.
This could not be explained away as hysteria, or some kind of misunderstanding.
There might be huge pieces of the jigsaw missing, but you got a feeling that the puzzle made sense; you could see a half of it, and you knew there must be missing pieces that would make up the rest.

Not long after the Los Angeles visit, I discovered a bookseller in Sidmouth who specialised in second-hand flying-saucer books, and picked up such classics as Edward J.
Ruppelt’s
Report on Unidentified Flying Objects
and Harold Wilkins’s
Flying Saucers on the Attack.
I bought these solely for the sake of reference, suspecting that they would now be too out of date to provide any interesting ideas—then quickly realised that this was a naive error.
For reading some of these early works not only brought a sharp sense of perspective, but made me clearly aware of basic facts that should be the starting point of any investigation of UFOs.

For example, Ruppelt—official head of Project Blue Book—describes an encounter of May 1952, when a Pan American World Airways DC-4 was flying towards Puerto Rico.
Over the Atlantic, about six hundred miles off Jacksonville, Florida, the copilot noticed a light ahead, which he took to be the taillight of another aeroplane.

That was odd, since they had just been advised by radio that there were no other planes in the area.
He glanced down at the controls, and, when he looked up again, was horrified to see that the light was now directly ahead, and was much larger.
As he and the pilot watched, the huge light closed in on a collision course.
Then it streaked by the left wing, followed by two smaller balls of fire.

The pilot said later that it was like travelling along a highway at seventy miles an hour when a car from the opposite direction swerves across into your lane, then swerves back so you miss it by inches.
‘You know the sort of sick, empty feeling you get inside when it’s over?
That’s just the way we felt’.

Which raises the obvious question: why should the UFO have set out to give them a scare?
For it certainly looks as if it changed course for precisely that purpose.
What point was there in behaving like a juvenile delinquent in a stolen car?
There seems to be only one obvious explanation: to get themselves noticed, and to add one more to the hundreds of reports of such encounters that were pouring in to the air force.

The same suspicion seems to fit another case described by Ruppelt.
Soon after the DC-4 episode mentioned above, Ruppelt was called to Washington, D.C., where a crowd of top military brass had witnessed a UFO incident.
One of the most senior officials in the CIA was throwing the party at his hilltop home in Virginia, with a panoramic view of the surrounding countryside.
While he was engaged in conversation, he noticed a light approaching in the dusk.
At first he assumed it was an aeroplane until, as it came close, he realised it was soundless.
It began to climb almost vertically, and he drew the attention of other guests to it.
It climbed farther, levelled out, then went into a vertical dive, before it levelled out again and streaked off to the west.