Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (30 page)

Laughead announced the news to the press, and, since he was a respectable academic at Michigan State University at Lansing, he was given wide coverage.
With a band of believers, Laughead awaited the catastrophe—which, of course, failed to arrive.
Laughead lost his job.

The case of ‘Dino Kraspedon’ is even stranger.
I first heard the name when I came upon his book
My Contact With Flying Saucers
around 1960, and bought it to read on the train.
It was translated from the Portuguese, and is told in a simple, unpretentious style which impressed me with its air of truth.

He tells how, in 1952, he and a friend were driving in mountains near São Paulo, Brazil, when they saw five flying saucers.
They went back later and spent three days hoping to see more UFOs.
But on the third day, ‘after a series of episodes which we will not go into here for fear of digression’, a saucer landed, and they were allowed to go on board.

The phrase about avoiding digression struck me as having the ring of truth; a liar would insist on going into minute ‘factual’ detail.

They went on board, were shown the craft and told how it worked, after which the captain promised to pay Kraspedon a visit some time.

A few months later, Kraspedon’s wife told him that a parson wanted to see him.
Kraspedon was puzzled; being an atheist, he did not know any parsons.
When he went downstairs, he recognised the captain of the spaceship, looking very well dressed and wearing a dog collar.
He told Kraspedon that the deception was due to his desire not to cause Kraspedon’s wife anxiety.
The parson stayed to lunch, and proved to be a man of considerable learning; he was able to quote the Bible in Hebrew and Latin, and also spoke English and Greek.

He explained that he was from a satellite of Jupiter, then proceeded to lecture Kraspedon on the nature of God and the universe.

At this point, expecting fantastic adventures—like George Adamski’s trip to Venus—I was surprised when the book turned into a rather intellectually taxing dialogue.
Electrons were defined as ‘deformed magnetic space, propagated in wave form’, and God as ‘an oscillating charge superimposed on an infinite point, constantly causing a deformation in space’.
Matter, he explains, is always being created from nothing, which is why the universe is expanding.

Kraspedon explains, in a chapter devoted to physics, that flying saucers make use of a limitless energy available in the earth’s atmosphere.
‘The atmospheric ionisation on one side gives rise to a fantastic pressure on the other.
It is the detonator that unleashes a cyclone behind a saucer’.

And so it goes on.
If Kraspedon is a crank, then he is certainly not a confidence man.
The book is so dense with scientific discussion that few readers can have summoned the endurance to read right through it.
Yet the chapter dealing with social ideas displays a reassuring common sense.
He points out that even scientific progress has its dangers, and that if automation is developed (this was 1953) there would be a great loss of employment—a remarkable prediction of what has happened with the development of computers.

The space captain also suggests that most education could be conducted with the aid of sleep learning, and that criminality could be eliminated by the use of hypnosis.
He predicts that man will learn to live far longer when he recognises that it is the force of the spirit that sustains the body.
He shows considerable insight into the problem of atmospheric pollution, and how the atmosphere will cease to filter the rays of the sun.
He predicts the gradual rise in earth’s temperature, and the melting of the poles.
The apocalyptic scenario that follows is hair-raising.

Finally, Kraspedon describes how he took leave of the spaceman at the Roosevelt station in São Paulo, and how the captain promised to return in 1956, or—if anything should prevent this—in 1959.

And that was all I learnt about Dino Kraspedon for many years—in fact, until I read John Keel’s
Operation Trojan Horse
in the 1980s.
It was from Keel’s book that I learnt that Kraspedon’s real name was Aladino Felix, and that, in 1965, six years after publication of his book, Kraspedon began to make prophecies of disaster—for example, of floods that would take place later in the year.
He proved correct, and floods and landslides around Rio de Janeiro killed six hundred people.
In 1967, he appeared on television and foretold the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, which duly occurred.

When Aladino began to predict an outbreak of terrorist attacks and murders in Brazil in 1968, no one was surprised when he proved to be correct.
Public buildings were dynamited and there was a wave of bank robberies.
Finally, the police arrested eighteen members of the gang responsible, and learnt that they had planned to assassinate government officials and take over the entire country.
And the name of their leader was .
.
.
Aladino Felix, alias Dino Kraspedon.
Arrested on 22 August 1968, he explained, ‘I was sent here as an ambassador to the Earth from Venus.
My friends from space will come here and free me, and avenge my arrest.
You can look to tragic consequences for humanity when the flying saucers invade this planet’.

But of course, Felix’s space friends did not arrive to save him from prison, although no doubt they had assured him that they would.

John Keel himself almost became a victim of these strange hoaxers.
In 1966, after he had begun his full-scale investigations of the UFO phenomenon, as described in the last chapter, the phenomenon ‘zeroed in’ on him.

Luminous aerial objects seemed to follow me around like faithful dogs.
The objects seemed to know where I was going and where I had been.
I would check into a motel chosen at random only to find that someone had made a reservation in my name and had even left a string of nonsensical telephone messages for me.
I was plagued by impossible coincidences, and some of my closest friends in New York .
.
.
began to report strange experiences of their own—poltergeists erupted in their apartments, ugly smells of hydrogen sulphide haunted them.
One girl of my acquaintance suffered an inexplicable two-hour mental blackout while sitting under a hair dryer alone in her own apartment.
More than once I woke up in the middle of the night to find myself unable to move, with a huge dark apparition standing over me.

(
Our Haunted Planet
)

Travelling all over America to check UFO stories, he came upon dozens of people he called ‘silent contactees’, who regularly experienced UFO contact, and kept it to themselves.
And the contactees acted as intermediaries.
When a contactee was being visited by one of these entities, he or she would ring John Keel, and he would sometimes converse with it for hours.

His later conclusion was that the phenomenon was slowly leading him from scepticism to belief—then to disbelief.
‘When my thinking went awry and my concepts were wrong, the phenomenon actually led me back onto the right path.
It was all an educational process, and my teachers were very, very patient’.
In other words, it was, as Jacques Vallee has said, a ‘control phenomenon’ whose purpose was to alter his thinking habits.
He notes: ‘Other people who have become involved in this situation have not been so lucky.
They settled upon and accepted a single frame of reference, and were quickly engulfed in disaster’.
He has in mind people like Charles Laughead and Dino Kraspedon.

Keel had reason to be suspicious.
The entities played absurd practical jokes.
They would ring up Keel’s friends, using Keel’s voice, and impart disinformation.
He once sent an article to an editor, who told him next time he saw him that he could not use it; Keel read it and was appalled: his article had been switched for a ‘real piece of garbage’, sent in one of Keel’s envelopes.
His phone bills became enormous, and he found out the reason one day when a friend accidentally misdialled his phone number, using the wrong last digit, and still got through to Keel.
Keel discovered he was paying for two telephones.
And the other was usually answered by someone who offered to take messages for John Keel.
When Keel rang the number, and asked if there were any message, there was a gasp, and the receiver was slammed down.

In May 1967, the entities promised many of the silent contactees that a big power failure would occur.
On 4 June 1967, there was a massive power failure in four states on the East Coast.
The contactees were then told—and in turn told Keel—that there would soon be an even bigger power failure across the whole country, and that the New York seaboard would slide into the sea on 2 July.

The day came and passed without incident.
But now the entities repeated the strategy.
Two plane crashes were predicted, both of which occurred.
The rumour was spreading in hippie circles, and trance mediums and automatic writers repeated them.
It was predicted that the Pope would be assassinated in Turkey, and that a three-day nationwide blackout would occur after that.

When Keel learnt that the Pope
was
scheduled to visit Turkey in July, he began to feel nervous.
In the various ‘flap areas’—where contactees had spread the word—hardware shops had sold out of candles and torches.

Finally, Keel decided to move to one of these flap areas to await the blackout.
Leaving Manhattan for Long Island, he bought three quarts of distilled water, reasoning that a three-day power failure would be accompanied by a water shortage.
On Long Island he called on a contactee, and was told that he had just received a visit from a UFO entity, and that the entity had left him a message: ‘Tell John Keel we’ll meet him and help him drink all that water’.
No one but Keel knew he had the water.

The Pope was not assassinated, and the power failure did not occur.
That weekend, Keel saw several UFOs.

The accurate predictions continued to occur.
One ‘UFO entity’ called Mr.
Apol, who talked to him on the phone predicted a major disaster on the Ohio River, and that, when President Johnson pulled the switch on the White House lawn to turn on the Christmas lights, there would be a major blackout.
On 11 December 1967, a mysterious phone caller informed Keel that there would be an aeroplane disaster in Tucson, Arizona.
The following day an air force jet crashed on a shopping centre in Tucson.

The Ohio River was of particular interest to Keel, because—as already noted—he had spent a great deal of time during the past year at a place called Point Pleasant, in West Virginia, following up a UFO investigation which involved a strange winged figure who became known as Mothman, and every day he crossed the bridge from his motel on the Ohio side of the bridge into Point Pleasant.
For a whole year, Point Pleasant had been virtually the UFO capital of America.

On 15 December Keel was sitting in his apartment with a friend, watching the television, which was showing the ceremony on the White House lawn.
He was surrounded by candles and torches.
Another visitor, a TV producer who was making a programme on UFOs, had decided to return to his own home to watch the programme and await the blackout.
President Johnson threw the switch, and the tree lit up.
And the lights stayed on.

A moment later, the programme was interrupted by a news flash.
A bridge connecting Gallipolis in Ohio and West Virginia had just collapsed.
Keel knew that there was only one bridge on that section of the river—the one he crossed regularly to Point Pleasant.

It was as if the UFO entities had wanted him to be watching television at that precise moment, and had told him the absurd story about the national blackout.
If they had predicted the collapse of the Silver Bridge, he might have done something about it, for everyone knew that the traffic it was now carrying was far too great for its size (it had been built in 1928, when traffic was lighter), and a campaign in a Point Pleasant newspaper might have averted the tragedy.

A few hours later, the Australian prime minister, Harold Holt, went for a swim from a beach near Melbourne, and disappeared.
The UFO entities had also predicted his disappearance.

Keel comments, ‘I was lucky.
I didn’t cry their warning from the housetops.
I didn’t surround myself with a wild-eyed cult impressed with the accuracy of the previous predictions’.
If he had—using his syndicated newspaper column—he would probably have found himself in the same unfortunate position as Charles Laughead.