Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (25 page)

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the phenomena, whatever they are, exist externally in space.
We assume, but we cannot by any means be sure, that they also exist in time as we know it.
Nor do we know whether they objectively occupy space in any meaningful sense of the term.
When the humanoid beings are perceived as occupying space, they appear to react in conformity to the laws governing perspective and optics.
They give the appearance of being three-dimensional objects, although they are manifestly neither physically solid nor organic in any known sense of the word .
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In other words, he has returned to the conclusions of
The Goblin Universe,
which means that the misgivings that made him suppress
The Goblin Universe
were not, after all, as important as he thought when he saw the underwater photographs of the Loch Ness monster and suspected that it might prove to be as unmysterious as a hippopotamus.

Now all this, admittedly, sounds slightly insane.
We seem to have left the baffling but straightforward world of UFOs for a world that seems to make no sense at all.
What have lake monsters, black dogs and the great god Pan to do with flying saucers?

What Ted Holiday is suggesting is that the UFO problem cannot be solved in isolation.
Those early attempts to explain it in terms of invaders from Mars or visitors from Sirius all collapsed as it became clear that the phenomenon is too rich and complex to be explained in such practical terms.
As Vallee pointed out, it seems to enjoy defying every category we devise for it.

The investigator who has come closest to creating a plausible general theory is the New Yorker John Keel, the man who told Ted Holiday about the UFO sighting of Jan-Ove Sundberg above Loch Ness.
The phenomenon has led Keel the same kind of dance it led Vallee.
But he did not approach it from the same angle as Vallee.
Keel was not a scientist, but a writer with an irresistible attraction to the unknown.

John Keel’s father was a bandleader and crooner who lived in Hornell, New York; when his band went out of business in the Great Depression, John—born in 1930—went to live with his grandparents.
His childhood hero was Houdini, and from the beginning he was fascinated by magic.
He delighted his schoolfellows with simple conjuring tricks.
When he was ten, he went to rejoin his mother, now divorced and remarried, on a remote farm, where entertainment was minimal.
There he lay in the hayloft, reading books on magic, hypnotism, ventriloquism, and the Black Arts, and daydreamed of travel to Egypt and the Himalayas.

When he was eleven or twelve, he experienced his own personal poltergeist.
He used to sleep in a room at the top of the house, and, when he heard knocking sounds on the wooden wall close to his head, he at first assumed they were due to squirrels.
But he found that, if he rapped back, the knockings imitated his rapping.
Then he discovered that he could ask simple questions—by speaking them aloud—and receive the correct answer in knocks.
Intrigued, he went to the local library and explored the section on ghosts and the paranormal.
But his invisible companion seemed to resent this research—or perhaps the phenomena had run their course anyway—for the knocks stopped about six months after they had started.

He was fourteen when he first saw his name in print over a humourous column in the local newspaper, for which he was paid two dollars a week.
At fifteen, he sold his first article for five dollars.
With an enormous appetite for knowledge, he spent all his days in the local library, and taught himself electronics, radio, chemistry, physics, aviation and a dozen other subjects, almost as if he was unconsciously training himself to work on the UFO problem.

At seventeen, he hitchhiked the four hundred miles to New York, and found lodgings in Greenwich Village.
There he made a scanty living writing articles with titles like ‘Are You a Repressed Sex Fiend?’
He was—and is—a natural writer, apparently incapable of writing a dull sentence.

Then the Korean War broke out, and he was drafted—fortunately, not to Korea, but to Frankfurt, where he worked for American Forces radio.
And there suddenly he achieved his first major success, with a Hallowe’en broadcast from Castle Frankenstein, where a monster
was
actually killed by Baron Frankenstein in the thirteenth century.
The programme had much the same effect as Orson Welles’s famous Martian Invasion broadcast of October 1938.
Three announcers were told that the monster returned every hundred years on Hallowe’en in search of his slayer, and were sent off in the dark to intercept it; some of their genuine terror (particularly when a fake monster came striding out of the night) conveyed itself to the listeners, and people all down the Rhine double-bolted their doors, while a convoy of military police with drawn guns converged on Castle Frankenstein.

The result was that Keel was offered a civilian job after his national service was finished, and was allowed to do what he had always dreamt of doing: roam around freely, making programmes—Paris, Berlin, Rome, and eventually Egypt, where he made a Hallowe’en broadcast from the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid.

Again, it was successful, and Keel’s taste of the Middle East awoke his old hunger to travel the world in search of mystery.
In 1954, when he was twenty-four years old, he resigned from his radio job, drew his savings out of the bank, and went back to Cairo.
He had decided to support himself by writing articles about the magic of the East.

The story of the next four years is told in
Jadoo
(a Hindu word meaning magic), one of the funniest and most fascinating travel books ever written.
As a conjuror, Keel wanted to know the secret of some of the most famous magic tricks of the East, such as driving hatpins through the tongue and cheeks, or chopping off a pigeon’s head and then restoring it.
He was later to discover that he could drive hatpins through his own cheeks without much inconvenience—the needle hurts momentarily as it goes in, but otherwise there is no pain.
The pigeon trick was done by sleight of hand—the pigeon’s head is tucked under its wing, making it look decapitated, while the magician flourishes the head of another pigeon.
Walking on water, Keel discovered, is accomplished by stretching a rope just under the muddy surface.
As to the Indian rope trick, he was informed that it has to be performed at dusk, when poor light prevents the audience from seeing the fine wire, on to which the rope is hooked, stretched overhead.

Yet Keel did encounter real magic.
A sheik called Abdul Mohammed sat in front of him, and told him the precise amount of money he had in his pockets, including his reserve in his watch pocket.
The same old man pointed out that there was a desert viper under Keel’s chair, and, when the snake lashed out with its fangs, held out a hand over its head, and killed it merely by staring at it.
Keel examined the snake and verified that it was dead.

It was on a trip to Aswan and Upper Egypt that Keel encountered the greatest mystery of the twentieth century.
Above the dam, in broad daylight, he saw a metallic disc, with a rotating outer rim, hovering for several minutes.
As it happened, Keel had already produced a radio programme about flying saucers, and his research had convinced him that they had been around on Earth throughout human history.

In a later article on UFOs, Keel was to write: ‘Although many UFO believers choose to assume that most UFO sightings are random chance encounters, there is evidence to show that
witnesses are selected
by some unknown process, and that strictly accidental sightings are rare, if not non-existent’.
Certainly, the sighting of the UFO over the Aswan dam was to have important consequences for his own future.

In Bombay, Keel learnt snake charming, and almost died when bitten by a cobra.
In Benares, he allowed himself to be buried alive for half an hour, surviving by rationing his breath.

Crossing the Himalayas, Keel heard a great deal about the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman, and caught a glimpse of two of them, enormous brown hairy creatures who fled up a mountain at his approach.
In Tibet, he sat in a roomful of lamas, and heard one of them describe a fire in a northern village, which he had just seen by ‘travelling clairvoyance’—the ability to project the mind to other places.
Later, Keel was able to check, and discover that the lama had been telling the truth.

Finally, at Singhik, he met Nyang-Pas, a lama he had been seeking, who was reputed to be able to levitate.
And, within a few minutes of sitting in Keel’s bungalow, he revealed that it was more than a rumour.
Placing one hand on top of his stick, he pushed himself up off the floor until he was sitting cross-legged in the air.
Then he conducted the remainder of the conversation sitting in midair.
He then offered to read Keel’s mind.
‘Think of an object’.
Keel thought of a tree.
‘That is too easy’, said the lama.
‘You’re thinking of a tree’.
Keel switched his mental picture to a pair of boots, and the lama said immediately, ‘Now you are thinking of a pair of boots’.

The trick of mindreading, the lama explained, was to choose a good subject, who can clearly visualise the object he is thinking about.
Then the mindreader must concentrate and focus his mind on the subject, and, after a moment, the object being thought about will pop into his head.
Keel found that these instructions worked, and that he was slowly able to perform mindreading.
(Uri Geller clearly used the same technique when he read my mind and duplicated my drawing.)

Nyang-Pas claimed that travelling clairvoyance, or
kinga sharrira,
depends on relaxing deeply, and imaginatively conjuring up a familiar road, following it mentally and visualising every detail.
Then the aspirant must continue to visualise some part of the road with which he is unfamiliar.
One who is skilled in this discipline—which is virtually what Jung calls ‘active imagination’—can finally see places that he does not know and events that are taking place at the moment.
Many years after Keel’s visit to Tibet, the New York clairvoyant Ingo Swann demonstrated travelling clairvoyance under scientific conditions at Stanford University, while Prof.
Robert Jahn (of whom we shall have more to say in chapter 9) undertook a series of investigations that left no doubt that the ability can be found in many ordinary people.

Keel also heard about the ability of some lamas to create mental objects—known as
tulpas—
by concentration, although he was unable to witness any demonstration of this ability.
(But the British traveller, Alexandra David-Neel, learnt how to do it, and describes in
Magic and Mystery in Tibet
how she once conjured up a phantom monk who looked so solid that a herdsman mistook him for a real lama.) Again, the concept proved to be of basic importance to Keel.

When Nyang-Pas took leave of Keel, he said, ‘I hope you will never stop asking questions’.
The rest of Keel’s life has shown that he took this comment to heart.

His departure from Tibet was not the end of his travels.
In late 1955, he stopped in Italy, then went to Barcelona and found himself another radio job with the wire services.
There he lived in a hotel on a hilltop with his girlfriend, Lite (pronounced Li-ta), and wrote
Jadoo,
which is dedicated to her.
He had met her in Frankfurt, and she had accompanied him on some of his travels (when he was solvent).
However, the American publisher who accepted
Jadoo
thought the book was better without romance, so Lite was deleted.

The publisher also insisted that Keel should return to America for publication, for interviews and television appearances.
And the book had the effect of making him a celebrity—for a while it was impossible to open a newspaper without seeing photographs of him performing the Indian rope trick or handling snakes.
Now there was a healthy market for his journalism and short stories, and, for most of the next decade, he worked in a variety of jobs, including television and publishing.
And, as usual, he continued to investigate mysteries wherever he found them—he and Jacques Vallee were in Costa Rica at the same time, studying the giant stone balls whose purpose is still unknown.

Inevitably, if rather reluctantly, Keel became interested in UFOs.
He was inclined to feel that the subject had been marking time for a decade or so, and there was nothing new to investigate.
But at least the public had become more interested.
Before Keel’s departure for Germany in 1950, UFOs had been of only moderate interest to most Americans.
But the death of Capt.
Thomas Mantell, chasing a balloon-like object, in January 1948, gave impetus to Project Sign, the air force study of UFOs, with Allen Hynek as adviser; this in turn became Project Grudge, which—as we have seen—was more intent on soothing and misinforming the American public than in uncovering new information.
Eventually, this blatant cover-up irritated Keel into action.