Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (55 page)

Goethe’s friend Eckermann once pointed out to him that he had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and asked how he would have felt if he had been less lucky.
Goethe replied contemptuously, ‘Do you suppose I would have been such a fool as to be born unlucky?’
He obviously felt that there is a sense in which our mental attitudes govern what happens to us.

Jung was implying the same thing when he coined the word ‘synchronicity’.
And Vallee’s Melchizedek story (p.
133) underlines the point.
It is almost impossible to dismiss the encounter with the only Melchizedek in the Los Angeles phone directory as mere coincidence.
Vallee suggests that the universe may be constructed more like a computer with its random database (i.e., where information is conjured up by the correct word) than a library with its alphabetical order.
But that still does not explain how he found a taxi driver whose surname was that of the cult he was researching.
Here we are dealing with the same kind of puzzle as in the case of Lethbridge and dowsing.
And the answer to that puzzle seemed to be that we are living in an ‘information universe’, where information is somehow encoded into energy, and is accessible to the mind.
In which case, Vallee may have ‘retrieved’ his taxi driver as I can retrieve a computer file by typing in the right word, or as Lethbridge could retrieve information about underground artefacts with his pendulum, or as a psychometrist can ‘retrieve’ the history of an object by holding it.
Or, for that matter, as a ‘remote viewer’ can find his way to some distant site by using an arbitrarily assigned code.
But a solid female taxi driver is obviously quite a different thing from a computer file or a piece of information, and we need to formulate some very strange theories to explain how it could happen.

Whatever the explanation, the implications remain the same: that the mind—without knowing it consciously—has some sort of control over the material universe.

But how could human beings begin to achieve a conscious grasp of this control?

We must try to grasp what is wrong with us at present: that human consciousness habitually operates on half-pressure, and consequently loses half its energy in ‘leakage’.
When we operate on full pressure—as, for example, when some emergency galvanises us to determined effort—we begin to glimpse the real possibilities of consciousness.

William James approached the problem in a little book called
The Energies of Men
(1899), in which he remarks:

Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days.
Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater.
Most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us .
.
.
Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake.
Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked.
We are making use of only a small part of our mental and physical resources .
.
.
There seems no doubt that
we are each and all of us to some extent victims of habit-neurosis .
.
.
We live subject to degrees of fatigue that we have come only from habit to obey.
Most of us may learn to push the barrier farther off, and to live in perfect comfort on much higher levels of power.

And he goes on to note that, when people have achieved this higher degree of will-drive, ‘the transformation .
.
.
is a chronic one: the new level of energy becomes permanent’.

This is clearly getting altogether closer to the transformation we are talking about.

Another oddity about the human mind was noted by the philosopher Fichte: ‘To be free is nothing; to
become
free is heaven’.
Everyone must have noticed what it is to lie in bed on a freezing winter morning, when you have to get up in ten minutes, and the bed has never seemed so warm and comfortable.
Yet when you can lie in bed as long as you like on a Saturday morning, you cannot recapture that delicious warmth and comfort.
You have
too much
freedom.

What happens should be clear.
When you have to get up in ten minutes, you
pay attention,
and close all your leaks.
So you feel more alive and aware.
When you can stay in bed as long as you like, you do
not
pay attention, and your ‘robot’ takes over.

This is connected with another main problem of human beings: our ‘defeat proneness’.
Difficulties not only cause the heart to sink: they often make us feel totally vulnerable.
And, once life has got us on the run, difficulties seem to proliferate.
This is a consequence of our tendency to ‘leakage’.

On the other hand, once some powerful interest has made us close the leaks, we experience an increasing sense of inner pressure, and begin to feel curiously invulnerable.
And suddenly it is as if we are standing at the beginning of the yellow brick road, with all kinds of fascinating prospects in front of us.
This is quite clearly a glimpse of a different way of living, a way that no longer involves taking two steps forward and sliding two steps backward.
For the past two centuries, from Goethe’s
Werther
to Beckett’s
Endgame,
the basic message of our culture has seemed to be ‘You can’t win’.
But these states of non-leakage bring a breathtaking glimpse of the possibility that we
can
win.

I would suggest not only that many of the aliens we have encountered in this book are beings who have moved far beyond the stage in which humanity finds itself marking time, but that they originally moved beyond it by discovering the secret of closing the leaks and living on a level of higher inner pressure.
But then, the same seems to apply to some of the unusual human beings—for example, the Tibetan lama Nyang-Pas, encountered by John Keel, who was able to hold a conversation while sitting in midair, and was able to read Keel’s mind.
He also explained to Keel how to practise ‘travelling clairvoyance’, which elsewhere in this book has been called remote viewing.

In fact, ‘miraculous’ powers are so commonplace among Hindu holy men that Ramakrishna warned his disciples against attaching any importance to them, since they are too easy to achieve, and can impede further progress.

I am, then, arguing that the UFO entities—or some of them—have passed beyond the ‘leakage’ stage of evolution, and have begun to learn what can be accomplished when consciousness is operated at full pressure—what should be ‘normal’ pressure.
And certainly, there are enough examples of people who have encountered UFOs and experienced some kind of transformation.
We may recall Vallee’s engineer who spent three hours aboard a UFO, and found he has been away for eighteen days; he told Vallee that his powers of memory and concentration had been enormously enhanced, and that he was convinced that some immense change was about to take place on Earth.
We may also recall ‘Doctor X’, whose leg injury vanished after he had seen a UFO, and who told Vallee that he and his wife had become telepathic, that strange coincidences kept occurring, and that he had experienced levitation.
There was also the Aveyron case, where the farmer’s son began to have out-of-the-body experiences after seeing a UFO.
Many other cases in this book—like John Spencer’s Kathryn Howard, or the woman who saw a goat-footed man in an Oxford garden—leave no doubt that a UFO encounter can cause a basic change in awareness.

Moreover, it also seems likely that some of the incomprehensible operations performed on abductees are another method of inducing change.
When Beth Collings asked a ‘grey’ why he was driving a needle into her navel, she was told, ‘It is part of the change’.
The same seems to apply to the instrument applied to the forehead of Anders, in the case described by John Spencer, and which left Anders with a deep sense of unity with Earth.

There is also considerable evidence for Budd Hopkins’s suggestion that the entities are involved in some kind of breeding experiment.
Hopkins has been accused of imposing this reading on his material.
But there are too many other cases to take this objection seriously—for example, Hans Holzer’s case of Shane Kurz, the virgin who in 1967 found herself pregnant after an abduction encounter, then ceased to be pregnant.
This was a feature also described by Beth Collings and Anna Jamerson (see chapter 7).
Altering the human race by changing its breeding stock would seem to be another obvious method of bringing about evolutionary change.

Other cases—like that of Linda Cortile—point to a possibility even more startling: the notion that many human beings may be dual personalities, whose everyday selves are simply unaware that they have an alien alter ego.
It would certainly be an interesting way to bring about change in the human species: to abduct thousands of individuals and ‘engineer’ their minds to turn them into part-aliens.

One of the most interesting of H.
G.
Wells’s later novels,
Star Begotten
(1937), presented just such a notion.
Its central character is a writer of popular history books who notices that more and more exceptional children are being born, and wonders if this might be caused by mutations due to cosmic rays.
These children he calls ‘Martians’.
They seem to see the universe in a slightly different way from other people.
They question accepted ideas.

The hero asks, ‘Suppose there are beings, real material beings like ourselves, in another planet, but far wiser, more intelligent, much more highly developed .
.
.
Suppose for the last few thousand years they have been experimenting in human genetics.
Suppose they have been trying to alter mankind in some way, through the human genes’.

He has come to suspect that ‘Martians’ are deliberately bombarding Earth with cosmic rays.
The idea disturbs him deeply.
But when, at the end of the book, his wife asks whether he believes he is one of these ‘fairy changelings’, ‘everything became coherent and plain to him.
Everything fell into place’.
Suddenly it is obvious to him that he is a Martian.
And, as they look down at their sleeping baby, they know he will be a Martian too.
(Significantly, their names are Joseph and Mary.)

But cosmic rays could hardly bring about the kind of change Wells has in mind.
We now know that cosmic rays would not be a viable instrument for genetic engineering, being incapable of ‘fine tuning’.
A far more practical way of bringing about a ‘change of mind’ would be by altering the consciousness of individuals—as discussed above—and then relying on what Rupert Sheldrake has called ‘morphogenetic fields’ to spread the change.
Studying the experiments of the psychologist William McDougal with white rats, Sheldrake noted that not only were the rats able to pass on their laboratory training to their offspring (thus challenging the dogma that ‘acquired characteristics’ cannot be inherited), but that other rats in the laboratory which had played no part in the experiment (the so-called ‘control group’) had also picked up the same learning—apparently by some form of telepathic induction.
But it could not have been simply telepathy, because even crystals behaved in the same way.
Some crystals are extremely difficult to crystallise in the laboratory; but once a single lot has been crystallised, others also crystallise more quickly, even in distant laboratories.
Sheldrake suggested that this form of ‘osmosis’ was due to a kind of electrical induction, and called his theory ‘the hypothesis of formative causation’.

There have been many experiments that have confirmed it.
For example, English speakers memorised two rhymes in a foreign language, one of which was a well-known nursery rhyme, while the other had been newly composed.
As expected, the subjects found it easier to memorise the well-known rhyme—presumably because millions of people already knew it.

So, if the UFO phenomenon is, indeed, a ‘control phenomenon’, then we would expect it to make an increasing impact on the human mind simply by this process of morphogenetic ‘induction’.

During the writing of this book I have been experiencing an odd kind of synchronicity.
Beside my bed there is a digital clock.
And, when I look at it in the night, it often shows numbers in treble figures: 1:11, 2:22, 3:33, 4:44 and so on.
Now the chance of that happening are obviously sixty to one.
Yet it happens again and again—on one occasion, twice in one night.
Once, I fell asleep after doing a particularly satisfying piece of thinking, and when I woke up, the clock showed 11:11.
And this morning, when I knew that it must be sometime after four, I turned over, thinking (only half seriously) ‘I bet it will be 4:44’.
And, sure enough, it was.