Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (38 page)

Kathryn went on to say that it was the greatest joy she had ever known, and that she felt cosmic consciousness.
Then she seemed to see the history of the human race flash past in a few seconds (an experience that has been confirmed by people who have been saved from drowning or survived some other life-threatening situation).
She said, ‘If everyone could see and feel as we do now, there wouldn’t be any more wars, starvation, or anything negative’.
Then she experienced a paradoxical insight: that all this didn’t matter because ‘that’s just part of the evolution’.

After this, they found themselves sitting on the sofa, having ‘lost’ about ten hours.

In 1986, Kathryn decided to try to regain the missing time by undergoing hypnosis.
In a trance, she recalled that the ‘legs’ had withdrawn into the craft, and that she had been somehow sucked into it, and was looking down through a lens at the Earth.
Then the Earth vanished, and she was terrified that she was being taken away permanently.
After that she thought she was on another planet, and that the UFO entities were transparent (Anders had said ‘semi-transparent’); she saw a cigar-shaped object taking off.
She felt she was wearing a kind of crystal headdress or helmet, and states that clairvoyants have sometimes seen this around her head.

The experience caused an ‘opening up’.
Kathryn apparently had insights into past lives, ‘and much more’.
She also had a vision of Earth burning, and knew this was the end of civilisation.
Subsequently, Kathryn felt that the experience had taught her that she had a message, to persuade people to open their eyes.

Certain things stand out clearly.
First, she and Martin
saw
the UFO—presumably Harvey was not looking up.
It seems, then, that the sight of the UFO may have triggered the experience.
When Kathie Davis was driving back to a night food store, she saw a shining balloon in the sky; after that the experience became dreamlike, and she felt that the store was really a spacecraft.
And, when Beth Collings’s father was on the beach in Virginia, his attention became fixed on a shell, then he looked up and found his brother had vanished.
Later, his attention was again fixed on a glittering object, and he found that his brother had returned.
Hypnotists also work by ‘fixing’ the attention of the subject, often on some shining object.
So it seems conceivable that, in Kathryn’s case, the experience began with some hypnotic induction, possibly telepathic.

The case recalls John Keel’s flash of cosmic consciousness in his New York bedroom (although, of course, this had nothing to do with UFOs), and Bucke’s mystical experience in the carriage.
Such ‘flashes’—as in the case of Kathryn—have a permanent effect.

We also note that Kathryn, like Anders and so many others, became ‘psychic’ after the experience.
It may be, of course, that she was already psychic, and that the experience simply released it or increased it.

John Spencer makes the point that, in these two cases, there was no suggestion of ‘leading questions’ in the hypnosis, which might lead to false memories.
It is certainly a valid point; a TV programme on UFOs—part of the 1987 fiftieth anniversary of Kenneth Arnold’s sighting—showed Hopkins asking a child ‘leading’ questions about whether he had ever woken up and seen strange figures in his bedroom.
But the hypnotic transcripts quoted in his books—and in
Connections
by Anna Jamerson and Beth Collings—seem to show that this is not his normal practice.
And we have seen that Beth Collings recalled her own abduction in the Virginia State Park without any help from hypnosis.
In fact, an enormous number of ‘abductees’ recall their experience spontaneously.

But the main point is that the two Swedish cases show that Spencer accepts the notion of abduction as
some
kind of reality, and is not trying to argue that the whole abduction phenomenon is simply mass hysteria.

All the same, scepticism about the abduction statistics is easy to understand.
In 1991, the Roper organisation polled nearly six thousand adults to find how many thought they might have been abducted.
Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs devised eleven questions, such as whether a person could remember seeing unusual lights in the bedroom, missing time, flying through the air, mysterious bedroom figures who could deal out paralysis, and unaccountable scars on the body.
The result showed that 119 people were possible abductees, or two percent.
Extrapolating to the population of the US, that meant about five million people.
That clearly sounds preposterous—even though, under hypnosis, Anna Jamerson had stated that there are eight million ‘changelings’ on Earth.

Patrick Huyghe, co-editor of
The Anomalist,
wonders if something of the sort could be true.
At the same time as Linda Cortile’s abduction, another Manhattan woman claims to have been abducted from her apartment, and seeing fifteen or twenty other women moving through the streets towards a UFO on the bank of the East River; she saw two others in the sky.

We may also recall John Mack’s case of Catherine, cited at the beginning of this book, who found herself in a spacecraft with between one and two hundred people lying on tables.

Anna Jamerson also recalled, under hypnosis, seeing in the spacecraft a wall full of hollow spaces with people lying in them.

I have mentioned that, when I met David Jacobs at the Fortfest in 1995, he told me that he hoped he might be on the verge of solving the UFO mystery.
Patrick Huyghe tells of interviewing Jacobs in 1994, and how Jacobs mentioned a hypnosis session he had conducted the evening before, in which the abductee had seen fifteen other human beings on board the craft.
Jacobs went on to suggest that a massive abduction programme may be taking place, ‘twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week’, to populate Earth with hybrids.
This sounds as it might be Jacobs’s notion of the solution of the UFO phenomenon.

But, leaving aside for a moment this question of statistics, what can be said about Budd Hopkins’s theories in general?
His belief that the aliens are conducting some kind of genetic experiment seems to be borne out by a certain amount of evidence.
Aliens told Patrolman Herb Schirmer that they were conducting genetic experiments, long before anyone else suggested it.
Shane Kurz and Beth Collings and Kathie Davidson did not simply invent their vanishing pregnancies.
Villas-Boas had a sperm sample taken in 1957, Barney Hill in 1961—while Betty Hill had a large needle inserted in her navel.

What is so baffling about the evidence is that the UFO aliens seem to possess powers that are far in excess of our human powers—so much so that it is hard to see why they should want to produce hybrids.
Would human scientists want to produce hybrids of human beings and gorillas?

Another puzzle is that the aliens seem to possess powers that defy common sense.
They seem to be able to transport human beings through walls and windows, and suck them out of their cars into UFOs.
John Keel has explained how certain radio waves can stop car engines; but floating human beings through the windscreen of their cars sounds ridiculous.

Yet many cases also suggest that the entities also have some strange power over time.
Linda Cortile told Budd Hopkins how she had first met ‘Mickey’.
She had been in the cubicle at a swimming bath on Coney Island; her family were in adjacent cubicles.
The door opened, and, when she looked outside, she saw two men in skin-tight blue uniforms.
They told her that she had to go with them and, in spite of her protests, took her to some strange environment where she was introduced to a little boy.
As she left the swimming bath, people were standing as if in frozen animation.
But they had not been paralysed, for, when she was returned three-quarters of an hour later, the splashed water in the swimming pool was suspended in the air, as if caught in a photograph.
It seems that the aliens can somehow slow down time.
But the only way to do that realistically would be to speed up Linda’s psychological time, so a few seconds would seem to be a minute.
An alternative would be that Linda was not taken physically, but subjected to an out-of-the-body experience, or an OBE.
On the other hand, her physical body must have been present when she was impregnated by Richard in some alien environment.

When flying saucers first made headlines in 1947, writers like Harold Wilkins speculated that they came from Mars and were surveying Earth.
That was interesting, but hardly of great concern to the rest of us, since there might well be some other explanation, such as weather balloons or experimental aircraft.
Half a century later, the situation had suddenly become more menacing, with so many thousands of reports of alien abductions that it has become far more difficult to shrug them off.

Of course, it may be that this wave of UFO phenomena is, as Jung believed, some kind of ‘projection’ of our human need for religious belief.
Or it may be simply a new manifestation of the nineteenth-century wave of occult or paranormal phenomena.
Perhaps some semi-supernatural beings with whom we unknowingly share the Earth have been abducting humans—like the three children Harold Wilkins searched for—since the beginning of history.

But if—as that MIT conference on abduction seemed to imply—something new and strange is going on, then perhaps the human race ought to be looking for the answer with far more persistence and interest than we display at present.

8

HIGH STRANGENESS

In the 1850s, Paris was gripped by an amusing fashion called ‘table turning’.
People would sit around a light table—such as a card table—placed on a polished floor.
All they then had to do was to link hands and concentrate, and soon the table was sliding around the floor, or rising into the air in spite of efforts to push it down.
It would even answer questions by rapping in code with two legs.
Table turning was incredibly easy to do (as it still is).
If ‘spirits’ were responsible, then they must have been on duty all the time.

At that period, one of the capital’s best-known intellectuals was an educator named Leon Rivail, who was to Paris what John Ruskin and Herbert Spencer were to London—a tireless lecturer on all topics from astronomy and electricity to art and botany.

Rivail had a friend called Becquet, and Becquet’s daughter Christina was not only skilled at making tables dance around the room, but in automatic writing: both she and her sister could hold a pencil, and it would race across the page, filling it with many varieties of handwriting quite unlike their own.
Moreover, the pencil seemed to be perfectly willing to answer questions.

Rivail had none of the modern prejudice about such academically incorrect activities.
He saw no reason why the realm of the ‘spirits’ should not be added to the many other subjects that fascinated his omnivorous mind.
He asked the sisters if they would collaborate with him, and, when they agreed, proceeded to bombard the ‘spirits’ with questions.

If Rivail had been less of an ignoramus about the ‘occult’, he would never have done it.
As we saw in the earlier brief digression on poltergeists, they seem incapable of telling the truth.
But Rivail struck lucky.
Armed only with enthusiasm and naivety, he proceeded to ask questions like ‘What is God?’
and What is matter?’
and got sensible and coherent answers.
In fact, some of the answers were well ahead of their time.
When he asked if matter was naturally dense, he was told that this was true of matter as understood by man, but not of matter as a ‘universal fluid’.
‘The ethereal and subtle matter which forms this fluid is imponderable to you, and yet is nonetheless the principle of your ponderable matter’.
This remark would not make sense for another half-century, with the discovery of electrons.

Recalling some recent poltergeist disturbances in the rue des Noyers, Rivail asked Christina’s ‘control’ (or Master of Ceremonies) if he could speak to the spirit that had smashed all the windows.
Soon a rough voice spoke from Christina’s mouth: ‘Why do you call me?
Do you want to have some stones thrown at you?’
But after a while, the spirit grew more polite, and admitted that he liked playing tricks—he had been a drunken rag-and-bone man during life, and now wanted to get his own back on the people who had treated him with contempt.

Did he have any help in creating the disturbances in the rue des Noyers?
asked Rivail.
Certainly, said the spirit, he used the energy of a maidservant in the house.
And was she aware of what was happening?
asked Rivail.
Oh no, said the spirit, she was the most terrified of all.
He explained, interestingly, that he ‘joined his electric nature to hers’, and made things fly through the air.

When Rivail asked about the subject of ‘demoniacal possession’, he was told that the influence of spirits is far greater than most people suppose; they often influence our thoughts
and
actions.
‘A spirit does not enter into a body as you would enter a house.
He assimilates himself to an incarnate spirit who has the same defects and qualities as himself...’.
These comments would certainly have struck a chord with Stanislav Grof, whose experience with the ‘possessed’ woman is described in chapter 1.

In due course, Rivail wrote down all he had learnt via the Becquet sisters in a work called
The Spirits’ Book,
under the pseudonym Allan Kardec.
In Brazil, where ‘Spiritism’ is one of the most widespread religions, it is still regarded as a kind of bible.

And why discuss Rivail and poltergeists at this point?
Because some of the material that follows raises ‘the bar of credibility’ so high that it is important to remind the reader that it is not quite as insane and unprecedented as it sounds.
Rivail, a typical child of the materialistic nineteenth century, a believer in science and reason, suddenly found himself confronted with ghosts, poltergeists and demoniacal possession, which certainly struck him as no less extraordinary than the UFO abduction phenomenon strikes us.
To Rivail’s credit, he wrote it all down, studied it, and did his best to make sense of it.

A contemporary scientist called Brian O’Leary has shown the same kind of courage.
O’Leary, born in 1940, started life as an astronomer and a trainee astronaut for NASA.
Carl Sagan invited him to become an academic at Cornell University, and he later moved to Princeton.
But, in his late thirties, he began to experience a vague dissatisfaction with being (as he puts it) a ‘high priest of modern science’, who mixed on a daily basis with some of the world’s top physicists.
And in the spring of 1979, he decided to use a five-day leave of absence attending a ‘human-potential workshop’ in Philadelphia.

Lying on the floor, beside a randomly selected partner, he decided to test his ability at ‘remote viewing’.
His partner, a woman from Allentown, Pennsylvania, gave him the name, address and age of a neighbour, and asked O’Leary to describe him.
Although feeling pleasantly relaxed, he had no belief whatever in his own ‘psychic’ powers.
Nevertheless, he felt he was looking at a man in his forties, who was walking alone on a beach in Maui, Hawaii, and who seemed rather forlorn.
They had a kind of imaginary conversation—about the climate and weather—which seemed oddly real.
When it was over, his partner told him that the man had just lost his wife, lived in Maui, Hawaii, and was a meteorologist.

Of course, it is conceivable that O’Leary picked up these facts by telepathy with his partner—but, if so, that is just as remarkable as ‘remote viewing’.
The experience made O’Leary aware that he had been living for thirty years in a false paradigm—the scientific paradigm that said that telepathy, remote viewing and psychic powers were delusions of feeble-minded New Agers.
O’Leary now knew, beyond all possible doubt, that they were not.

When he began to tell Princeton friends about the experience, he received some odd looks.
From their point of view, O’Leary had gone over to the enemy, the forces of irrationalism.
But from O’Leary’s point of view, he
knew
beyond all doubt that the paradigms of science were inadequate.
They failed to explain how he could know about a man he had never met.

It would be another three years before another remarkable experience led Brian O’Leary to make the break with his past.
In March 1982, when he was driving from New York to Boston, his car skidded on ice at sixty miles an hour, and overturned several times before it went through a crash barrier.
The car looked like an accordion—yet O’Leary emerged unhurt and was able to walk away.
As the car had been turning over, he had experienced a sense of floating above it.
There was no panic—only of a kind of euphoria.
He recognised what had happened later as a typical near-death experience (NDE for short).
A month later, he bought an old van and drove to California with all his possessions.
One of the first results of his altered way of life was a book called
Exploring Inner and Outer Space.

But he remained a scientist, attempting to explore the new paradigm with experimental methods.
For example, he spent some time in the San Diego laboratory of Cleve Backster, the man who had discovered that plants can read our minds—Backster had attached a lie detector to a rubber plant, and found that it reacted when he thought of giving it water, or burning it with a cigarette.
O’Leary was present at an even more extraordinary experiment.
This time the machine recorded the electrical fluctuations in white blood cells donated by a young woman.
As she and her boyfriend made love in a motel five miles away from the laboratory, the strip chart recorder registered wild fluctuations, then abruptly ceased.
The next morning the recorder again registered fluctuations when the young couple woke and began lovemaking again, and then once again stopped as the session ended.
Although separated from her body, the blood cells in her saliva were still responding to her sexual excitement.

Like Leon Rivail, Brian O’Leary had recognised that we are living in a wider reality than that recognised by science, and that the paradigms of science can be an active hindrance to our personal development.

Inevitably, O’Leary became interested in UFOs.
And a curious, if unsettling, experience left him in no doubt that there was some truth to the stories of abduction.
In May 1987, O’Leary and a girlfriend went to stay with Whitley and Anne Strieber in their cottage in upstate New York; Strieber was just about to publish his bestselling
Communion
, describing his own abduction experiences.
Before retiring for the night, O’Leary and his girlfriend did some meditations.
Then he began to experience a strange lethargy and paralysis, accompanied by a sense of euphoria.
‘We were being drugged without the help of an inducing substance’.
Although he tried hard to stay awake, he fell deeply asleep, and woke up in the same position.
His girlfriend had awakened four times in the night, still paralysed, and saw lights in the room.
In the morning, all lights were off.

In the two years following this experience, O’Leary studied UFO reports and interviewed witnesses.
He found himself agreeing with Jacques Vallee, who wrote that UFO phenomena ‘have had an impact on a part of the human mind we have not discovered.
I believe that the UFO phenomenon is one of the ways through which an alien form of intelligence of incredible complexity is communicating with us
symbolically .
.
.
It has access to psychic processes we have not yet mastered, or even researched’.
O’Leary’s own conclusion was that ‘through their experiences, an ever increasing number of people are telling us we are on a collision course with a destiny far beyond our conscious minds.
My conclusion is that we cannot ignore the phenomenon any more than we can ignore the physical reality of an impending auto accident.
Through the UFO phenomenon, the greater reality is being gradually but inexorably forced upon us’.

Carl Sagan had been one of the first to break with him after his ‘travelling clairvoyance’ experience, and O’Leary finally had some critical words to say about his old friend.
In
Miracle in the Void
(1996), he comments:

In his zeal to debunk the evidence, astronomer Carl Sagan seemed to go to extremes in distorting existing data on the ‘face’ on Mars and about the abduction phenomenon in popular articles for
Parade Magazine
.
Sagan sees abductions as hallucinations, says there is no evidence of UFO phenomena, and seemed to contrive a second photograph of the Mars face which appeared to be doctored from the original version to look not like a face.
Either Sagan is totally unaware of the available data, or has become a disinformation specialist for the existing world view.

In fact, Sagan had long been acting as a disinformation specialist.
The year 1973 had seen one of those peaks of UFO activity—one sheriff’s office in Mississippi was receiving two thousand calls a day.
On 11 October, two shipyard workers, Charlie Hickson (forty-two) and Calvin Parker (nineteen) were fishing off the end of a pier in Pascagoula, Mississippi, when an oval-shaped UFO landed close to them, and three bizarre entities floated out
.
They had pointed projections instead of ears and noses, and very long arms with clawlike hands.
Hickson and Parker were ‘floated’ on board, and Parker fainted.
(He later had two nervous breakdowns.) After being ‘scanned’ in some way, both were returned to the pier.
They finally decided to call the sheriff’s office.
At one point, the sheriff left them alone in a room with a secret tape recorder, and their conversation made it quite clear that they were not shamming.
They also passed a lie-detector test.
Expert after expert later concluded that they were honest—a conclusion John Spencer also came to when he met Hickson.