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  • Aliens, Predictions & the Secret School: Decoding the Work of Whitley Strieber

    Aliens, Predictions & the Secret School: Decoding the Work of Whitley Strieber

    From New Dawn Special Issue No 4 (Feb 2008)

    Anyone who knows anything about the subject of UFOs and alien abduction would have heard of Louis Whitley Strieber, the successful horror novelist, who, in 1987, published a book called Communion which still stands as one of the most terrifying, factual and powerful accounts of alien abduction ever written.

    But far from being just an abductee and author, Strieber is also something of an undeclared mystic and prophet. It seems he has much to say about humanity’s spiritual, political and environmental future. Is he, as some have claimed, nothing but a prophet of doom, or do his words contain genuine wisdom and an important message?

    Now a host of the online radio program Dreamland, which covers the latest news in paranormal phenomena, Strieber continues to write about the mysterious non-human beings he calls the ‘visitors’, and has recently been doing so in a fictional way. Within the last two years Strieber has published two new novels, The Grays and 2012: The War for Souls, both of which are soon to be made into big budget films.

    The grays, says Strieber, are just one of the many different types of non-human being, or visitor, that he has been in close contact with. “These people were not androids or robots. They were complex, richly alive beings who were obviously incredibly and totally different from us,” he says. The grays feature commonly in accounts of alien abduction, and are believed to be behind much of the UFO phenomena witnessed in our skies. Strieber says he decided to write The Grays because the truth about these beings “is too elusive to bring to genuinely sharp focus in factual narrative.”

    Strieber came up with the term ‘visitor’ to replace ‘alien’ because he does not necessarily believe that aliens, in the true sense of the word, are behind the close encounter phenomenon, preferring instead to leave the question of their origin open until further evidence comes to light. Plus, he considers the word ‘alien’ to have a negative connotation. The word ‘visitor’, on the other hand, could not be more neutral, and was chosen for this very reason.

    Strieber was already a successful author before he decided to risk his reputation by publishing Communion. His previous books, of which there are many, deal with issues like nuclear war and environmental catastrophe. Along with childhood friend James Kunetka, Strieber wrote the 1984 New York Times bestselling novel Warday, which concerns the subject of nuclear holocaust. He also wrote a number of highly acclaimed horror novels, such as The Hunger and The Wolfen, both of which were adapted into films.

    When Communion was first published, it quickly shot to number 1 on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list. It then went on to become an international bestseller. Although Strieber allegedly received six figures from publishing company William Morrow (now an imprint of HarperCollins), it seems unlikely that Communion was a hoax, and that he wrote it for the money – which is what some critics have claimed. In a 1987 interview for the San Francisco Examiner, Strieber said: “I didn’t need to write it. I could have written another novel… Why would I hold myself up to the ridicule that a book like Communion brings? I felt that I had to write this book.”

    POST-COMMUNION

    Following the publication of Communion, Strieber went on to write four additional books about his intimate contact experiences, each one (with the exception of Confirmation) far more ‘spiritual’, and a little more ‘out there’, than the last. First came Transformation, then Breakthrough, then The Secret School and, lastly, Confirmation. Along the way, Strieber lost a few members of his readership – those who wanted to read about his bloodcurdling abduction experiences, rather than the spiritual significance of the contact phenomenon.

    Referring to these books in a recent interview, Communion and Transformation in particular, Strieber described them as “texts about the articulation of certain questions.” What is important about these books, he said, “is the way they lead you to thinking about questions about the nature of perception and what exactly the physical world is.”

    Considering that Strieber was a student of the Gurdjieff Foundation for more than fifteen years, it is perhaps not surprising that his work revolves around such matters. “Gradually I branched out from the readings from Gurdjieff himself and the people around him to much deeper studies,” he says. Speaking about his spiritual orientation in a recent interview, Strieber remarked that he was brought up a Roman Catholic, and has always considered himself one.

    Those familiar with the deeper meaning of Strieber’s work would realise that each and every one of his non-fiction books, including some of his novels, are all connected in some way, and on a very deep and obscure level. One could describe them as pieces of a puzzle that make up a message – a message about mankind’s future. There can be little doubt, moreover, that all of his books about the visitors have been trying to push an agenda, beginning, of course, with Communion, which was largely responsible for catapulting the alien abduction phenomenon into public consciousness. According to journalist Randall Fitzgerald, Communion, along with Budd Hopkin’s Intruders (also published in 1987), “heralded, or helped initiate, a major wave of abduction stories continuing through the remainder of the 20th century.”

    Given the nature of his writing, Strieber is a highly controversial figure, who’s been criticised by just about everyone, even by those in the UFO community. In his book Architects of the Underworld, UFO researcher Bruce Rux points out that Strieber’s numerous books about the visitors have earned him “well-timed millions of dollars,” having been published at very ‘suspicious’ times, when he desperately needed to be pulled out of debt. Rux even goes so far as to suggest that Strieber may be a member of the intelligence community, “a cat set among the pigeons by interested parties to keep a close tab on abductees, not to mention researchers.”

    That Strieber is somehow a part of the secret government – possibly a CIA agent – is a rumour that’s persisted for some time. Budd Hopkins has implied as such many times in his lectures, saying that Strieber probably knows a great deal about what goes on inside the government. Referring to this accusation, Strieber said he “loathes the whole concept of insiders,” and considers “official secrecy a crime against the constitution.”

    Although it’s highly questionable as to whether or not Strieber is a member of the intelligence community, the same cannot be said of his now deceased uncle, Colonel Edward Strieber. An Air Force officer, Edward Strieber spent much of his career at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which, incidentally, is where the debris from the alleged Roswell UFO crash is supposed to have been sent. Edward Strieber was a close friend of General Arthur Exon’s, and a member of his command. Exon was the commanding officer at Wright-Patterson from 1964 – 1966.

    According to what Strieber was told by Exon and his uncle, the Roswell incident was indeed caused by a crashed alien spacecraft. Furthermore, both men claimed to have first-hand knowledge of the incident. Among other things, Strieber was told by his uncle that “alien materials, artefacts and biological remains” had been delivered to Wright Field from the Roswell Army Air Base.

    When asked about his uncle in a recent interview, Strieber had very little to say, beyond “mostly his career remains classified.”

    THE SECRET SCHOOL

    By far the most ambiguous of Strieber’s books about the visitors would have to be The Secret School. Strieber claims to have been contacted by the visitors from a very early age, and it is in this book that he explores some of those childhood memories, many of which, he says, remained repressed for a very long time.

    As a child growing up in San Antonio, Texas, in the 1940s and 1950s, Strieber says he lived a kind of double life, in which he and numerous other ‘child abductees’ belonged to a ‘secret school’, run by the visitors. While a member of this school, Strieber was taught nine important lessons, presented in three triads. The first lesson involved an apparently non-physical journey to Mars, where Strieber caught a glimpse of the so called ‘Face’, many decades before the first satellite photos of the Cydonia region were taken in 1976 by the Viking Orbiter.

    In 1986 Strieber was shown a photo of the ‘Face on Mars’ by scientist friend Dr. John Gliedman, “an enormous event in my life, far larger than I could ever have imagined or even – until recently – understood.” He even suggests that the event may have triggered his first conscious meeting with the visitors on December 26, 1985, which eventually led to the writing of Communion. “The mystery of Mars and the secret school, it would turn out, were deeply bound together,” writes Strieber.

    In Breakthrough, Strieber mentions having been acquainted with Richard C. Hoagland, whom he met through Gliedman in 1984, three years before the publication of Communion. Hoagland, of course, was involved in a group known as the Mars Anomalies Research Society (MARS), and has written several books claiming that ancient civilisations once existed on the Moon, Mars and on some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

    Hoagland believes that evidence of these civilisations, such as the ‘Face on Mars’, have been kept secret by NASA and the US government. Strieber donated money to Hoagland’s group, and soon became a member. The aim of the group was to conduct further research on the ‘Face on Mars’ photograph – which they succeeded in doing. Among those involved in the group were Dr. David C. Webb, a former member of Reagan’s National Commission on Space, astronaut and planetologist Dr. Brian O’Leary, physicist John Brandenburg, and an imagining specialist named Dr. Mark Carlotta, who, according to Strieber, was a contractor for an intelligence agency.

    “It should be remembered,” insists Strieber, “that my encounters started after I became interested in the face, not before.”

    TIME TRAVEL

    The Secret School is primarily concerned with the subject of time-travel, and how this relates to prophecy. “The nine lessons,” writes Strieber, “involved the manipulation of time, because learning how to use time as a tool is the key to reaching higher consciousness…” Unbelievable though it sounds, Strieber claims to have physically journeyed through time on a number of occasions. According to him, the ninth lesson of the secret school involved such an experience, whereby, in the summer of 1954, at age nine, he found himself suddenly transported into the future.

    During the experience, Strieber saw a flat-screen TV, obviously unlike any kind of TV available in 1954. The TV was switched to a news channel, and on the screen he saw a number of scenes that have “remained in my mind all of my life – not exactly as a conscious memory, but rather as a reservoir of visual images that I have come to draw on in my work.” Some of the scenes were of catastrophic events that appear to have since come true, such as the Great Malibu Fire of 1993.

    The other scenes that he witnessed – most of them also catastrophic – were of events that have not materialised, but which, according to Strieber, could materialise in the not-so-distant future. Images from these scenes, says Strieber, feature in his 1986 book Nature’s End, written in collaboration with James Kunetka. Set in the year 2025, Nature’s End concerns the subject of environmental destruction and overpopulation.

    Strieber says that he and Kunetka “prophesied effectively” during the writing of Nature’s End, “not because we were special, but because we tried.” Apparently, in 1985, Kunetka wrote a description of a nuclear accident that unfolded in exactly the same way as the one at Chernobyl in 1986, and which also took place in a similar reactor. But because the event was deemed too improbable at the time, this description was edited out of the published version of the book. As further proof of the book’s prophetic nature, Strieber cites the name of a Korean-made car that features in the book, called the Hunyadi, which he came up with long before the Hyundai was introduced.

    At the end of The Secret School is a tenth lesson, involving another time travel experience, which Strieber says took place in late 1995. The significance of the way the book is structured, with nine lessons in three groups of three, followed by a tenth lesson, can be found in Transformation. In it, Strieber describes a visitor experience that occurred in 1986, in which he was sitting downstairs late at night reading a book on quantum physics, when suddenly there came, on the side of the cabin, nine loud knocks, “in three groups of three, followed by a tenth lighter double knock that communicated an impression of finality.” Strieber says the knocks could not have been produced by ordinary human means, but formed a cryptic message from the visitors.

    Although Strieber makes no reference to it in his work, the nine lessons – or nine knocks – seem to be related to the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, with its ten holy Sephiroth. The first nine Sephiroth exist in groups of three, as equilibrated triangles. But the final Sephirah, Malkuth, the kingdom of the earth, does not. In The Mystical Qabalah, Dion Fortune describes it as a “fallen Sephirah, for it was cut off from the rest of the Tree by the Fall…” Considering that Strieber is very much a student of Western esotericism, it’s fair to assume that he’s familiar with the Kabbalah, and has probably studied it.

    As for Strieber’s 1995 time travel experience, this involved a journey into the future, to the year 2036. Regarding the question of whether or not the experience was physically real, Strieber says it seemed to be, but that it “also bore some reference to dream.” He adds: “I would argue just as vehemently that it was no conventional dream and that we have not even begun to understand this state.”

    Strieber was shocked to find his surroundings in almost total ruins. Because, he says, he was able to gain access to some of the memories of his future-self – the one living in 2036 – Strieber was aware of what had caused the destruction. Apparently it was due to an atomic bomb planted by terrorists. The bomb had been detonated in Washington, D.C., effectively destroying the government. As a result, the US had become a corrupt military dictatorship. Strieber offers few more details than this.

    But no matter how bleak the future may seem, says Strieber, there is still hope, because one day time will “come to be a tool, and travel in time will become practical.” This, by the way, is just one of the many prophecies that Strieber has included at the end of The Secret School. In an interview concerning the subject of the book, Strieber said: “The purpose of prophecy is to warn us against negative events that will transpire if we continue on the path that we’re on at the time that the prophecy is made…” He explains this further:

    “We need to unlearn the assumption that the future is in front of us, the present is where we are, and the past is behind us. That is a false view of time. The visitors offer a much better idea of time. They say the future is to the right, and it’s like water. The present is here and now, and it’s like a compressor. And the past is like ice. The water has now been turned into ice because the present has decided the shape the water will take, the shape the past will take. And this leaves room for entry into many different possible futures. We can change that water into any number of different shapes simply by the way we address it… What we have to learn to do – and this is as much an inner movement as an artefact of some potential technology – is to learn to move out of the time stream so that we can examine it more carefully and come to understand its real meaning.”

    THE ‘MASTER OF THE KEY’

    In his book The Uninvited, British UFO expert Nick Pope gives a humorous description of the time he met Strieber in London, in 1996. Pope mentions that Strieber “seemed so casual about the most bizarre experiences. Here was a man, I suspected, who would describe these [visitor] encounters in the same sentence as an account of a trip to the shops, and might well use the same tone of voice.” Slightly critical though these words sound, Pope says he did not find Strieber to be “a crank and an eccentric,” as he is commonly reputed to be.

    It would be easy to dismiss Strieber’s paranormal experiences – particularly those that involve travelling through time – as nothing more than the delusions of someone with an over-active imagination. He is, after all, a horror/sci-fi novelist, and a highly acclaimed one at that. Strieber has even admitted publicly that some of his claims are rather difficult to swallow, and that he is not asking anyone to believe the things he says. In a 1998 journal entry, he wrote: “Who knows what a mind like mine might dream up? All I can say is this: I believe myself. But I don’t want that to convince YOU. You weren’t there, you didn’t see. So don’t believe me. Listen, observe, and keep the question.”

    Provided Strieber is telling the truth about his experiences, it would not be a stretch to classify him as a kind of shaman, an intermediary between this world and the world of the gods – the gods being the visitors. In an interview with Sean Casteel, Strieber made a comment that seems to support this view. “You know, Sean, I wonder who the hell I am. I wonder who I am… There are many things that have happened that I’ve never even put into books. Just incredible. It’s like I live with my two feet in two different worlds. And they’re both equally real.” In the introduction to his book The Key, Strieber makes a similar statement: “I have had the incredible privilege of living between the worlds, in the sense that I have actually spent a substantial amount of time in my life with people who were not physical in the way that we know the physical.”

    If Strieber is indeed a shaman of sorts, it might help explain an alleged incident that occurred in the pre-dawn hours of June 6, 1998, in which Strieber met an apparent human who claimed to “belong to many worlds.” Strieber says he was awoken by the man knocking on his hotel room door. As soon as he opened the door, the man burst into the room. They then proceeded to have a “remarkable” conversation about spiritual matters, with Strieber taking notes. Strieber describes the man, whom he has come to refer to as the ‘Master of the Key’, as he did not give a name, as someone “in possession of the most incredible knowledge that I’ve ever encountered in my life about the meaning of mankind. Where we came from, where we’re going, what’s happening to us and why.”

    Strieber’s 2001 self-published book The Key is a transcript of this discussion, though not an exact transcript, because Strieber says his notes did not cover the entire conversation word for word. Some of it he committed to memory. Interestingly, he says the notes “had a strange quality to them, as if each word was capable of causing a whole spring to flow in my mind,” and that they “unlocked something in my mind.”

    Among other things, the ‘Master of the Key’ spoke about sudden environmental change, and the ending of this current age. There is, he said, a great cycle of climate change, involving “sudden shifts back and forth from ice ages to temperate periods.” Although this cycle is natural, it has been sped up by human activity, and we are about to enter a new ice age, “that will lead to the extinction of mankind, or to a massive reduction in population.” To avoid this, he said, we must find a way to expand off the planet.

    Strieber says that this information served as an inspiration for his 1999 book The Coming Global Superstorm, written in collaboration with Art Bell. It’s a little-known fact that the 2004 science-fiction blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow is a rough adaptation of this book. That Strieber’s work has had a significant impact on public thinking cannot be denied.

    As regards the Mayan calendar end date of December 21, 2012, a topic that has received much attention of late, Strieber says he’s not sure if anything particularly special will occur on this specific date, but sees it more as a general marker for global and spiritual transformation. The Mayan 2012 end date seems to tie in with the information given by the ‘Master of the Key’ – which is something that Strieber acknowledges. In a 2007 journal entry, he wrote: “Just as the Maya predicted, an age is indeed ending now. No matter what happens, in 50 years, this world is going to be a radically different place…”

    Strieber’s latest novel, 2012: The War for Souls, is an imaginative exploration of what might occur in 2012, when the Mayan Long Count calendar finally completes its cycle, and a new age is believed to begin. In the novel there are three parallel earths, one positive, one negative, and the other a balance between the two. As 2012 approaches, the barriers between these universes begin to collapse, and those from the positive side of the triad begin to attack those on the negative side of the triad, attempting to take over their world. “The harmonising side of the triangle becomes involved, when a man there has to balance between dark and light in order to take the whole species to a new level,” explains Strieber. Interestingly, the character in the story referred to by Strieber is a sci-fi author named Wiley Dale, and the only difference between the names ‘Whitley’ and ‘Wiley’ is the exclusion of two letters…

    Throughout Strieber’s work there are countless references to triads. The visitors, he says, often present themselves in groups of three, while there have been numerous sightings over the years of triangular UFO formations, often appearing over large crowds. In Communion, Strieber devotes a whole chapter to the importance of triads, and how this relates to mankind’s relationship with the visitors. He writes: “We could be part of a triad that includes the visitors. They might be the aggressive force, entering us, enforcing our passivity, seeking to draw from the relationship some new creation.”

    The importance of triads in Strieber’s work can be better understood when one considers the Kabbalistic Tree of Life with its two side pillars – the pillar of mercy and the pillar of severity, and, balancing these, the pillar of equilibrium. The two side pillars are opposite in polarity, “each of which is evil when carried to success, both of which give rise to evil if insufficient for equipoise,” explains Fortune. This proves, once again, that Strieber’s work is heavily encoded with rich esoteric significance.

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    STRIEBER VERSUS PINCHBECK

    Regular listeners of Dreamland radio would have heard the much talked about argument between Strieber and Daniel Pinchbeck, who appeared on the show in September 2007. A journalist, author and ‘psychedelic advocate’, Pinchbeck recently published a new book entitled 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. It was the subject of this book that Strieber and Pinchbeck’s discussion centred around.

    Pinchbeck’s view of the alleged transformation that will occur on, or around, the year 2012 is almost the complete opposite to Strieber’s, being unrealistically optimistic. This very marked difference of opinion is what caused the argument, especially after Strieber said that the supposed 2012 transition will lead to “a tremendous decline and dieback of the human species…”

    Pinchbeck told Strieber that he “has a tendency to harp on the negative perspective.” And perhaps this statement contains a grain of truth. He even accused Strieber of being “in league with dark alien forces that do not have the best interests of the human species at heart.” He was, of course, referring to the grays. Pinchbeck writes: “On a subliminal or subconscious level, Strieber appears to have made a Faustian pact with these Mephistophelean entities, and unfortunately he is helping disseminate their negative and destructive frequency into human culture and consciousness, at this point in time.”

    Having been told that his mind was being manipulated by so called evil entities, Strieber was rather offended – and understandably so. He responded by saying that Pinchbeck doesn’t know “jack shit about those entities, because you’ve never had any contact with them at all.” Later in the ‘discussion’, after much shouting back and forth, Strieber said: “Nature is numbers. There is nothing mysterious about it… There are too many human beings on the planet now. There will not be this many in 50 to 100 years… The environment cannot sustain the number of human beings who are here, living as they do now.”

    Whoever ‘won’ the argument is simply a matter of opinion, and is probably of little importance. It should be borne in mind, however, that if Pinchbeck had come on the show with a much deeper understanding of Strieber’s work, the argument would probably not have occurred, because Strieber’s perspective of the alleged transition that is about to take place is far from pessimistic. Proof of this can be found in the following quote, taken from the final chapter of The Secret School: “Our moment in time, when population reaches its limit and the world as we know it ends, is not about death at all. It is about ascending into a new kind of life. Such is the message of the secret school, secret no more.”

    These words can be better understood when linked to another quote of Strieber’s, taken from Transformation, which reads: “Perhaps our fate is eventually to leave the physical world altogether and join them [the visitors] in that strange hyper-reality from which they seem to emerge.”

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue 4.[/alert]

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    REFERENCES

    Dion Fortune, The Mystical Qabalah, Williams and Norgate, Ltd., UK, 1935

    Jim Marrs, Alien Agenda, HarperCollins, USA, 1997

    Nick Pope, The Uninvited, Simon & Schuster, UK, 1997

    Bruce Rux, Architects of the Underworld, Frog Ltd., USA, 1996

    Whitley Strieber, Communion, Century, UK, 1987

    Transformation, Century Hutchinson Ltd., 1988

    Breakthrough, HarperCollins, USA, 1995

    The Secret School, Simon & Schuster, UK, 1997

    Confirmation, Simon & Schuster, UK, 1998

    The Grays, Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, UK, 2006

    The Key, Walker & Collier, Inc., USA, 2001

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
    For our reproduction notice, click here.

  • Behind the Mask: Aliens or Cosmic Jokers?

    Behind the Mask: Aliens or Cosmic Jokers?

    From New Dawn Special Issue 17 (Sept 2011)

    In the 1970s, when we first became fascinated by the UFO phenomenon, opinion among researchers was divided between two views: the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) – UFOs are spacecraft from other worlds; and the ‘Magonian Hypothesis’ (after the 1970 book by the intelligent Ufologists’ hero Jacques Vallée, Passport to Magonia). Pro-Magonians believe something from Earth is behind UFOs, a race of tricksters that surface from time to time as alleged angels, visions of the Virgin, demons, fairies – and now, space-travelling aliens? They’ve just updated their image.

    The theory acknowledges the close parallels between alien encounters and experiences with non-human entities that litter the annals of folklore. But it also recognises the often-reported absurdity and pointlessness – the ‘high strangeness’ – which challenge the simplistic notion of UFOs as technological craft crewed by biological entities. It was this Monty Pythonesque quality that led investigator John A. Keel to develop his ‘ultraterrestrial’ hypothesis – the aliens are visitors from another plane of existence – outlined in the 1973 classic UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse.

    However, since 1980 this approach has lost ground to the ETH – a pity, as it offers a more complete explanation of the whole phenomenon. Even ETH-ers usually acknowledge a paranormal component in alien contact, most obviously in the mental manipulation of abductees, often at a distance. There’s also the most direct psychic contact, the channelling of alleged extraterrestrial entities.

    The ETH has become so dominant partly because the Magonian approach challenges our cherished consensus reality so outrageously, whereas the concept of space ships from other planets doesn’t. Also, high-profile cases such as Roswell, Area 51 and Majestic 12 – all firmly based on the ET interpretation and centred on government conspiracies and cover-ups – came to dominate Ufology in the 1980s. But paradoxically they derive from the very agencies allegedly behind the conspiracy. In fact, trace any famous case back to its source and you will find that one way or another it originated within the military and intelligence community.

    (It always amazes us that Ufologists often obey the unwritten rule: never believe anything that anyone in government, the military or the intelligence community tells you – unless it’s that UFOs are real ETs in secret contact with world authorities. Then believe everything they tell you…)

    In fact, far from trying to cover up the existence of UFOs, government agencies have actively encouraged belief in them – specifically the ETH. Our own research has convinced us that this ‘Federal Hypothesis’ is the most accurate, and indeed there is a groundswell of similar opinion, as seen in Mark Pilkington’s recent Mirage Men and Lynn’s Mammoth Book of UFOs (2001). It does seem the whole UFO thing has been exploited – maybe even invented – to provide a convenient cover for all sorts of black ops, from testing secret aircraft to psychological warfare experiments. Even this, however, barely scrapes the surface of the sinister goings-on associated with over six decades of UFO research.

    Enter the Nine

    In the late 1990s we researched a story packed with all the paradoxes and questions just discussed, as detailed in our The Stargate Conspiracy (1999, updated 2000). These events represent either the biggest and most concerted attempt yet at extraterrestrial intervention – or a criminal manipulation of the belief in it. Either way, it’s sensational and terrifying.

    The central character is the American Army physician and parapsychologist Andrija Puharich (1918-1995) who experimented with stimulating psychic abilities using hypnosis, psychoactive drugs and electrical devices. He was also obsessed with the possibility of psychic communication with non-human intelligences.

    In 1948 – after being discharged from the army on medical grounds – Puharich created the Round Table Foundation in Maine, to carry out ostensibly private experiments with psychics such as Eileen Garrett and Peter Hurkos. The Foundation soon attracted wealthy backers, even including Henry A. Wallace, Vice President of the USA under Franklin D. Roosevelt, who funded Puharich through his Wallace Foundation. Another supporter was Ruth Forbes Young, from the stupendously rich Forbes family, and her husband, the ubiquitous inventor Arthur M. Young, besides Alice Bouverie, heiress to the Astor dynasty.

    From research in the 1990s we now know Puharich’s Round Table Foundation was also covertly funded by the US Army. He himself recorded several visits from military top brass, including the head of psychological warfare research. So was it a front for military psi experiments on civilian psychics, with his discharge merely a cover?

    Puharich was a passionate advocate of the military use of psi, presenting the paper: ‘An Evaluation of the Possible Usefulness of Extrasensory Perception in Psychological Warfare’ to the Pentagon in November 1952. He was redrafted the very next day…

    But before taking up his duties, a seminal event occurred at the Round Table Foundation. Puharich’s team were working with the Indian channeller Dr. D.G. Vinod, who on New Year’s Eve 1952 declared, in trance, “We are Nine Principles and Forces,” going on to channel them. The Nine described themselves as separate entities that function as one – claiming (with typical lack of modesty and lofty disdain for mere mortal grammar): “God is nobody else than we together, the Nine Principles of God. There is no God other than what we are together.” The communications continued for six months until Vinod’s return to India.

    Deeper and Darker

    In parallel with the Vinod communications, from February 1953 until April 1955, Puharich was stationed at the Army’s Chemical Centre at Edgewood, Maryland – although he often returned to the Round Table Foundation. The exact nature of his duties remains unknown, but Edgewood was the Army’s research facility into both chemical and psychological warfare – and at that time it was involved with a joint project with the CIA’s notorious MK-ULTRA.1 Puharich’s Army career certainly puts a different spin on the debut of the Nine.

    In 1956 the extraterrestrial element was spliced to the story. In Mexico, Puharich and Arthur Young encountered Charles and Lillian Laughead, who were working with a young man who claimed to be in psychic contact with aliens. The Laugheads sent Puharich messages from these ETs, containing cross-references to the earlier Vinod communications, apparently revealing that the same cosmic intelligences were contacting different people.

    In the 1960s Puharich devoted himself to parapsychological research and the development of patented medical devices. Then, in 1970, Puharich met Uri Geller in Israel, becoming convinced that his spoonbending and other talents were genuine. When he experimentally hypnotised Geller, the young Israeli channelled the entity ‘Spectra’, allegedly a conscious computer aboard a far-distant spaceship. Spectra said ETs had programmed Geller with his powers as a toddler, and effectively anointed him as a new Messiah for coming world changes, stating, “He is the only one for the next fifty years to come.”

    When Puharich then asked the somewhat leading question, “Are you of the Nine Principles that once spoke through Dr Vinod?” Spectra unsurprisingly replied, “Yes.” It then confirmed that the Nine were behind UFOs, right from Kenneth Arnold’s seminal 1947 sighting.

    ‘Oddly Monotonous Miracles’

    The hypnosis sessions and Spectra channellings continued, while strange phenomena dogged Puharich and Geller. In what Colin Wilson calls “a confusion of oddly monotonous miracles”2 machine-like voices spoke out of thin air, objects dematerialised and teleported (including Puharich’s dog – and once Geller himself). And several UFOs appeared over Tel Aviv and the Sinai desert.

    However, although Geller confirms the paranormality, he distances himself from the channelling. And although Puharich seemed convinced that Spectra and the Nine were real, Geller calls them “a civilisation of clowns”3 – a perfect description of the Ultraterrestrial/Cosmic Joker scenario.

    Puharich arranged for Geller to be tested at SRI International, the Californian institute where CIA-backed ‘psychic spying’ research – most famously remote viewing – was being conducted. In fact, during our research for The Stargate Conspiracy Geller told us Puharich was working for the CIA when he visited Israel to evaluate him. Another associate of Puharich’s, the physicist Jack Sarfatti, also confirmed it. Given his background, Puharich would of course have been their ideal head-hunter.

    Just as in the first contact with the Nine twenty years before we discover paranormal research secretly backed by military intelligence – which again centres on channelling the Nine… Perfect symmetry – but what does it mean?

    Exit the Messiahs

    Despite Puharich’s efforts to promote Geller as the Messiah of a new phase in human evolution, he bowed out in 1973, having risen to international superstardom. But the Nine continued to reach Puharich through new channellers. They seemed to forget they once declared Geller “the only one to come for the next fifty years.” First there was a young chef known only as ‘Bobby Horne’ who, hypnotised by Puharich, channelled the extraterrestrial ‘Corean’ – who agreed with Puharich’s suggestion that he/she/it was an emissary of the Nine. Horne was driven to the brink of suicide by the experience.

    He was replaced by medium Phyllis Schlemmer who was appointed the Nine’s official ‘transceiver’, a position she maintained for the next twenty years. Her guide ‘Tom’, who she had assumed was the spirit of her grandfather, suddenly announced he was an extraterrestrial and one of the Nine – now the ‘Council of Nine’.

    After Geller’s departure, Puharich established a new research facility in New Jersey, ‘Lab Nine’. This became the focus for two related series of events.

    First there was the mission of alerting the world to the Council of Nine’s existence and imminent return through mass landings of spaceships in the late 1970s. An important new player was the wealthy English baronet and spiritual seeker, Sir John Whitmore, a former racing driver.

    There was a concerted effort to get the Nine’s message to a wider audience, besides enticing influential individuals to hear Schlemmer dispense their cosmic wisdom. They included scientists interested in the interface between quantum physics and consciousness besides members of super-rich families, politicians and writers.

    But the biggest name was undoubtedly Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, who was involved with the Nine in 1974 to ‘75. Clearly hoping to exploit his cult status, Puharich urged him to write a movie screenplay about the Nine, although it was never finished. How far Roddenberry believed in or trusted them is unclear.

    Although it’s claimed that Roddenberry’s Lab Nine experiences had some influence over the first Star Trek movie and the Next Generation series a decade later (with its nine central characters), besides the Deep Space Nine spin-off, the series that undoubtedly reveals most about Roddenberry’s attitude to the Nine is his last, Earth: Final Conflict (1997-2002), produced after his death. This is set in the near future where an advanced alien race, the Taelon, arrive on Earth claiming to help mankind, but some humans are suspicious that they’re really bent on conquest…

    Roddenberry had turned the discarnate Nine into flesh-and-blood aliens – and the Taelon are ruled by a Synod or Council. Although the plot seemingly reflects his uncertainty about the Nine, since his death in 1991 Phyllis Schlemmer still claims he was unknowingly influenced by the Nine when creating the original Star Trek series.

    However, it was in response to a question by Roddenberry that ‘Tom’ finally revealed his – and the Nine’s – real identity. He was none other than Atum, chief god of the ancient Egyptian ‘Great Ennead’, the nine gods and goddesses beloved of the pyramid builders. However, perhaps it should be pointed out that after Vinod’s first contact, Puharich had begun to study the Ennead.

    The other project at Lab Nine was more disturbing. Using various techniques including hypnosis, he also got a group of children – the ‘Space Kids’ – to remote view political and military targets such as the Kremlin, and tried to make them channel alien intelligences.

    Virtually nothing is known about this project. The only record consists of visitors’ comments, disturbingly noting that some of the kids were clearly traumatised by the experience. As this happened in parallel with the CIA-backed remote viewing programme, it seems a way of involving children without arousing suspicions. After all, which would you be most ok with: sending your kids to a cool camp to become the new Uri Geller – or waving them off into the care of the CIA and military somewhere secret?

    In 1978 it all fell apart: Lab Nine mysteriously burned down, and Puharich fled to Mexico, claiming he was being targeted… by the CIA! Perhaps they feared revelations about the Space Kids through a scandal involving his associate Ira Einhorn, who was being investigated for the murder of his former girlfriend Holly Maddux (for which he was subsequently convicted). At the time of her disappearance, Maddux possessed papers relating to the Space Kids research. (Puharich returned to the USA three years later – odd for someone who feared assassination by the CIA – and continued his paranormal research, although apparently playing no further part in the Nine story. He died in 1995.)

    Onwards and Downwards

    The Council of Nine continues its mission. Schlemmer/Tom’s 1992 book, The Only Planet of Choice, remains a New Age bestseller, and although no longer actively channelling the Nine, she still promotes their message. Given she had been in touch with these ‘ancient gods’ almost daily since 1975, her book of just under 400 pages is clearly somewhat selective.

    Then the Nine entered the big time. In 1978 Whitmore introduced Englishwoman Jenny O’Connor to the Esalen Institute, the Californian centre for the alternative scene that attracted famous names from the worlds of art, entertainment, science and even politics. Incredibly, not only did the Nine give seminars at Esalen through her, but from 1979 until at least 1982 they effectively took over the Institute. In Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (2007), Jeffrey J. Kripal describes the founder Richard Price’s reliance on O’Connor: “Dick decided to ask Jenny and the Nine to help him make tough administrative decisions, which included firing and hiring individuals.” Esalen staff member and Price’s biographer Eric Erickson describes the Nine as “extraterrestrial hatchet men.”4 

    This period was particularly significant for Esalen. Many of those who attended O’Connor’s seminars became prominent in political circles both in America and the USSR (through the Institute’s Soviet Exchange Program), as Jack Sarfatti wrote (his emphasis):

    The fact remains… that a bunch of apparently California New Age flakes into UFOs and psychic phenomena, including myself, had made their way into the highest levels of the American ruling class and the Soviet Union and today run the Gorbachev Foundation.5

    It was through O’Connor that the Nine reached Washington, including the circles from which Al Gore – an unashamed fan of the paranormal – was to emerge. It isn’t known how much he was influenced by the Nine, but some of his associates – including his political mentor Senator Claiborne Pell – were certainly interested in their pronouncements. It’s a chilling thought that if Gore had become President, who – or what – would have influenced him?

    Joking Apart

    The Nine represent the most concerted effort ever to manufacture and sell a system of belief based on extraterrestrial contact. Built up over five decades, it involved persuading prominent politicians and cultural leaders of their reality and impending return, besides attempting to make them known globally through books and movies. This campaign was most successful in the New Age subculture, which is still largely – and unquestioningly – in thrall to the Nine.

    The Nine’s communications exhibit all the classic ambiguities and difficulties of alleged alien contact. At the very least they’re ‘anomalous’ – ostensibly extraterrestrial but laced with more traditional paranormality. And behind it all is the shadowy presence of government agencies.

    The facts outlined above fit two different scenarios. The first – preferred by the Nine devotees – is that the Nine are genuinely advanced ETs who created the human species and guided its development, and who were worshipped as gods in ancient Egypt. And now humankind has reached a crisis point through its own folly, they are about to return to get us out of the mess and (somewhat contradictorily) to launch humanity into the next evolutionary level.

    There are good reasons to doubt this explanation. Analysis of the Nine’s pronouncements reveals too many internal inconsistencies, besides often ridiculous historical and scientific errors. So what about the second scenario? Given Puharich’s sinister background, could the whole thing have been an experiment into the creation and manipulation of channelled contact? It is clear even from his own account that he directed the channelling, often asking leading questions of hypnotised channellers. And there is evidence suggesting that he also used chemical and electronic techniques.

    Was it all just an experiment to see how apparent contact with non-human intelligences could be induced, manipulated and exploited? If so, what do we make of the evidence from the late 1970s of the concerted effort to construct a new religion centred on the Nine? Like every cult, however, true power would lie with the ‘priesthood’ led by Puharich and his cohorts.

    But even that scenario, it seems to us, fails to cover the facts. There seems little doubt that something genuinely paranormal was happening. The British writer Stuart Holroyd, for example, was persuaded to write a book about the Nine – Prelude to the Landing on Planet Earth (1977) – after experiencing poltergeist-type activity in his house. This is harder to ascribe to CIA manipulation – unless we assume the CIA can induce paranormal events. And, of course, the Nine communications continued even after Puharich’s involvement, through several individuals. They include James J. Hurtak, Puharich’s second-in-command at Lab Nine and Carla Rueckert, a paranormal researcher who collaborated with him. Both produced books of channelled material from the same source – whatever that might have been. Hurtak’s The Keys of Enoch (1977) and Reuckert’s The Ra Material (1984) have both been New Age best sellers.

    Puharich wrote, “I do not doubt that discarnate intelligences exist, any more than I doubt that finite carnate intelligences exist.”6 But as someone who made a specific study of the subject, even becoming a kahuna, an initiate of Hawaiian shamanism, he must have known always to be on guard against trickster spirits – what Colin Wilson memorably called (in his introduction to Prelude to the Landing on Planet Earth) the “crooks and conmen of the spirit world.”7  

    Perhaps Puharich was indeed directing events, but was experimenting as much on the Nine as he was on their human channels – trying to discover how to sort the wheat from the chaff among discarnate entities. Or maybe even (terrifying thought) to find out if the entities themselves can be manipulated and controlled. But if true, what would it mean for the involvement of the military and intelligence agencies? Are they trying to establish a relationship with such beings?

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    ‘An Awful Lot of Trouble’

    If, as the evidence increasingly suggests, the CIA and military are not trying to suppress belief in alien contact but to encourage it, why would they? The assumption of most advocates of the Federal Hypothesis is that those agencies want to use the phenomenon and people’s belief in it as a smokescreen for their own covert purposes. In other words, if the CIA want us to think UFOs exist then the truth is that they don’t. But in our view, there is another even more unsettling reason: they want us to think UFOs are extraterrestrial nuts-and-bolts machines and the aliens are flesh-and-blood in order to divert attention from the reality that the real ‘aliens’ co-exist invisibly with us on the Earth – and are the source of all cases of high strangeness.

    Jacques Vallée, one of the first to research the covert manipulation of the UFO scenario by official agencies, concluded: “someone is going to an awful lot of trouble to convince the world that we are threatened by beings from outer space.”8 But how does this fit in with his Magonian hypothesis? Vallée presented his most explicit statement of the big picture in the storyline of his 1996 novel Fastwalker (written with Tracy Tormé): a powerful group of human conspirators know that the UFO phenomenon is created by entities from a parallel world, but they aim to convince world leaders and the global population of the existence of ‘aliens’ – and then position themselves as the world’s go-betweens.

    Which is basically our own view of the case of the Council of Nine: they have the stamp of the Ultraterrestrial all over them – clowns, conmen and cosmic jokers – but there is also the pernicious presence of very human agencies lurking in the background. The joke is on all those who follow the Ultraterrestrials, however they choose to manifest themselves or however their human allies choose to present them to us. But, as history has shown, it may be no laughing matter.

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    Footnotes

    1. John Marks, The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’: The CIA and Mind Control, W.W. Norton & Co., 1979, Chapter 5.

    2. Colin Wilson, Alien Dawn: An Investigation into the Contact Experience, Virgin, 1998, 18.

    3. Andrija Puharich, Uri: The Original and Authorized Biography of Uri Geller, Futura, 1974, 173.

    4. Jeffrey J. Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, University of Chicago Press, 2007, 366.

    5. Jack Sarfatti’s 1996 autobiographical online essay ‘Sarfatti’s Illuminati: In the Thick of It!’, widely distributed on the Internet, e.g. www.whale.to/b/sarfatti.html.

    6. Andrija Puharich, The Sacred Mushroom: Key to the Door of Eternity, Doubleday, 1974, 170.

    7. Stuart Holroyd, Prelude to the Landing on Planet Earth, W.H. Allen, 1977, 14

    8. Jacques Vallée, Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception, Souvenir Press, 1992, 247

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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  • The Real Men in Black: Government Agents or Visitors from Beyond?

    The Real Men in Black: Government Agents or Visitors from Beyond?

    From New Dawn Special Issue 17 (Sept 2011)

    Who are the “Men in Black”? In the blockbuster Hollywood movie of the same name, they were fictional characters. In real life, they are fearsome individuals who attempt to silence the witnesses of UFO and other paranormal phenomena.

    In his latest book, The Real Men in Black: Evidence, Famous Cases, and True Stories of These Mysterious Men and Their Connection to the UFO Phenomena, the popular, bestselling author Nick Redfern delves deep into the strange world of these mysterious operatives. Originally from England, Nick Redfern lives in Arlington, Texas with his wife, Dana, and his website is www.nickredfern.com.

    New Dawn magazine spoke to Nick about the Men in Black – their origins, some classic cases, previously unknown reports, secret government files, and the many theories that have been presented to explain the mystery.

    NEW DAWN (ND): What prompted you to write about the Men in Black (MIB)?

    NICK REDFERN (NR): In speaking to people about the MIB phenomenon, two things became clear to me. The first was that, even in the UFO research community, many people assumed that the mystery of the Men in Black was one that was mainly set in the 1950s and 1960s. In other words, many people assumed the MIB had gone away and aren’t active today. However, I had in my files cases as late as 2009. So, that was one reason to write the book – to demonstrate that the phenomenon is still very much ongoing, and not just a mystery of the past. The second reason was because many people’s views on the MIB were kind of based on the Hollywood Men in Black movies starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. The films are good fun, and entertaining. But, they only portray the MIB as agents of a secret arm of the government. The reality, however, is that most MIB are described as being far stranger than that – they sound almost alien, creepy, weird, and not even human in many respects. So, that was the other, main purpose in writing the book: to reveal that while the government secret-agent angle is certainly valid, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

    ND: The Men in Black first appeared in the early 1950s, to a UFO investigator named Albert Bender. Can you tell us about his encounters with the MIB?

    NR: Albert Bender was a man who, in the early 1950s, established a UFO research group – called the International Flying Saucer Bureau – in his home-town of Bridgeport, Connecticut, USA. Bender was an unusual character, who lived in the attic of his step-father’s home, and who was deeply interested in not just UFOs, but also the world of the occult, and was very knowledgeable in both areas. Bender’s IFSB attracted a huge amount of attention, and created links with UFO groups and researchers all around the world, including Australia and England. In other words, the group became very successful, very quickly. Then something strange happened: without warning Bender suddenly shut down the IFSB and quit Ufology. The rumour-mill – based on what Bender had quietly told a few friends and colleagues, albeit in a brief, enigmatic fashion – was that he had been silenced by three men in black-suits who warned him to leave UFO research, which he did until 1962 when he briefly resurfaced with his own book on the events in question, Flying Saucers and the Three Men.

    ND: Gray Barker was a legendary UFO researcher and writer from the 1950s onwards who chronicled the exploits of the MIB. Can you tell us about Barker and what he uncovered?

    NR: Barker was a man who, like Bender, was heavily into both UFOs and the occult, and also horror movies, gothic horror stories and things like that. So they kind of gravitated to each other and became friends. Barker was also an excellent, atmospheric writer who quickly and astutely realised there was a fascinating story to be told about Bender’s silencing by the three men, and Barker told the story in his 1956 book, They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers. In that book, Barker relates the silencing of Bender, but alludes to the theory the MIB were from the US Government. However, in 1962, Barker – who was a publisher as well as an author – published Bender’s very own book, the aforementioned Flying Saucers and the Three Men. Bender portrays the MIB as very different from anything that might surface out of the Pentagon! In Bender’s book, the MIB come across as definitively supernatural entities. He talks about them materialising in his bedroom, along with accompanying overpowering odours of brimstone – which is a classic facet of supernatural encounters. They have weirdly glowing, or self-illuminated, eyes. And they have the ability to render Bender unconscious or place him into an altered state of mind. So, it’s very ironic that the man who arguably started the MIB mystery – which many people assume is all about government agents – actually described the MIB as nothing like CIA or FBI people. They were much, much stranger.

    ND: The Men in Black turned up during the famous “Mothman” sightings at Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in the 1960s – which became the subject of the Hollywood movie, The Mothman Prophecies, starring Richard Gere. What is the story behind the Mothman‐MIB connection?

    NR: The link between Mothman and the MIB is just as weird as the saga of Albert Bender a decade earlier. The Mothman Prophecies movie was based on the book of the same title written by legendary Fortean author, John Keel, and told the story of this ominous, glowing-eyed, winged creature seen in and around Point Pleasant in the mid-to-late 1960s. Despite its cartoon-style name, Mothman was a very unsettling, shadowy thing that haunted the town’s old TNT plant and hung around in the shadows, like some grim-reaper-style thing. And, on this latter point, sightings of Mothman culminated in the collapse of the town’s Silver Bridge that spanned the Ohio River, and which led to the deaths of dozens of people who were on the bridge and drowned. Some researchers saw Mothman as the cause of the disaster. But, today, more seem to take the view that Mothman is some form of warning phenomenon; that it tries to warn people of impending disaster, rather than actually causing it. And when the Mothman encounters were at their height, UFOs were buzzing about, and the Men in Black were seen roaming all around Point Pleasant, making veiled threats to Mothman witnesses and local journalists, and even plaguing people like Keel and Gray Barker, who also wrote a book on the affair called The Silver Bridge. It’s almost as if the MIB were trying to prevent people from learning the truth about both the UFO presence and the true nature of Mothman.

    ND: John Keel had his own face‐to‐face encounter with the MIB. Will you tell us about that?

    NR: Yes, this is an extremely bizarre story that was provided to me by the well-known author on all-things paranormal, Brad Steiger. Steiger said to me: “I’ve never put this in any of my books, and I feel a little awkward, but on the other hand, what I am about to tell you really happened.” Steiger added that Keel “…began to tell me of the visitations he’d had with three men who had not knocked, but had entered, his apartment. They literally came through the door. He told me of an evening when they were challenging him to lay off the whole Mothman thing; to lay off UFOs, if he knew what was good for him.” Well, having heard that astounding aspect of the story – which sounds astonishingly like Albert Bender’s experiences with the three MIB that materialised in his attic – you might think: could it get any stranger? Yes, it could; and it certainly does, as Steiger added to me: “John was the sort of person who responded to threats like the red flag to the bull. But, he said to me that, on this occasion, they reached under his sink and took out a jug of Clorox. They said: ‘What is this?’ and John said: ‘That’s disinfectant, it’s very powerful.’ They brought it over to him, took the cap off, and gave him a smell. John wrinkled his nose, and when they asked if it was Clorox, he said ‘Yes, that’s what it is. Now put it back before you spill it.’ Whereupon, the three of them – in front of him – put it to their lips one at a time and took large gulps of it. Now, by the time John had finished the evening, telling me stories like this, I decided that maybe I wouldn’t be quite so brave and quite so powerful. I began thinking: we’re not dealing with FBI agents or the Air Force.”

    ND: Some people have suggested the MIB are government agents. Does evidence exist to support this theory?

    NR: There’s absolutely no doubt at all that at least some Men in Black do originate with official agencies. For example, in the book I cite several significant cases from the 1960s – including one from England and one from the United States – where people had classic encounters of the MIB variety, with the MIB turning up in a black car, wearing black suit and hat, and making a veiled comment to the witness about not speaking publicly on their encounter. However, the significant thing is that thanks to the Freedom of Information Acts in each country, we now have the files on both events. In the English case, the documents identify the Man in Black as being attached to the British Royal Air Force’s Provost & Security Services. The P&SS get involved in cases ranging from espionage and counter-intelligence, to national security issues. In the US case, the files identify the MIB as agents of the FBI. So, clearly some cases of MIB are indeed government-originated. But these incidents are far outweighed by the weirder, Albert Bender-type encounters with the MIB.

    ND: Another scenario suggests the Men in Black are aliens themselves. What do you think about that?

    NR: Well, as bizarre as that may sound, the fact is that most of the Men in Black do look very, very odd, and they act equally as odd, too! For example, many of the MIB are described as only being about five-feet-tall. They have either olive-coloured skin or almost completely white-coloured skin. They have oddly shaped, and strangely spaced, eyes and are painfully thin, almost to the point of looking practically anorexic. On top of that, they don’t seem accustomed to our ways, customs and languages to the degree they should if they’re from the government. They also seem to have the ability to literally appear and disappear – and I do mean literally! This has all led to the theory that perhaps the MIB are human-alien hybrids. In other words, creatures that – with a bit of camouflage, such as pulled-down hats, large wrap-around sunglasses, turned-up trench-coat collars, and largely only surfacing at night and keeping in the shadows – look enough like us to where they can move among us, and perhaps even infiltrate us, if they’re careful about how they do it. The imagery is kind of like an underground alien army working its way into our lives, slowly and subtly, in other words.

    ND: In the 1960s, a number of UFO researchers and authors actually managed to photograph the Men in Black. Can you tell us about their experiences?

    NR: Yes, there are at least two cases on record where the MIB have been captured on film. The first story comes from two long-time UFO researchers/authors: Tim Green Beckley and Jim Moseley. Back in the 1960s there was a UFO investigator in Jersey City, USA named Jack Robinson. Jack was married to Mary, and in 1968 they began to experience weird activity – when they would return home at night, after maybe going out for dinner, it looked like someone had been in their apartment and had been rummaging through Jack’s UFO files. Then, during the day when she was at home, Mary started seeing a Man in Black staring up at the apartment from a ground-floor doorway in the building directly opposite them. Mary said he had an unsettling look on his face, kind of unemotional and zombie-like. Mary happened to mention this to Tim and Jim, and because the guy appeared three days in a row, they decided to drive over early one morning and see if they could see the Man in Black for themselves. Sure enough, he was there, staring ahead, with the black sunglasses, long black coat, and enigmatic stare. Tim, in the busy morning traffic, managed to get a photo of the MIB, and which he believes is one of the few authentic photos of a genuine Man in Black.

    ND: In your book, you discuss a weird MIB experience reported by a notable author in London, England, in the early‐1980s. What is that story about?

    NR: This is the story of Colin Bennett, who has written a number of acclaimed biographies on such people as Charles Fort and George Adamski. Back in the early 1980s, Colin had a very unusual experience in London. He was walking home late one night, and saw a UFO in the sky. Even stranger, it began to shape-shift, from a bright-light in the sky, to an old Second World War bomber, and finally to a large, black, triangular-shaped craft. He raced home to tell his girlfriend, and as he entered the apartment, there was this MIB sitting on the couch! The man had claimed to Colin’s girlfriend that he was due to meet someone who lived on the floor above, and as the person was out, asked if he could wait. Mary, Colin’s girlfriend, said yes. Although, it’s clear that as the evening progressed, the MIB was far more interested in learning about Colin’s UFO experience than he was waiting on a friend. This is made more likely by the fact that as soon as Colin finished relating the account, the MIB stood up, seemingly satisfied, and walked out into the London night, as mysteriously as he first arrived!

    ND: Marie Jones is a best‐selling author of books on mysteries of this world and beyond. What is the story concerning how she was terrorised by the MIB?

    NR: Marie is a respected author and a very credible one, too. In the mid-1990s she was deeply involved in alien abduction research, which seems to have led her to be targeted by the Men in Black. She allowed me to interview her for the book, and told me some very disturbing things, such as how the MIB would make intimidating phone-calls to her home, even telling her what she was wearing, and what book was on the bedside table. It disturbed her to such an extent that she walked away from the abduction phenomenon, which may very well have been the goal of the MIB.

    ND: Will you discuss the theories of paranormal author Joshua P. Warren, who has speculated that the Men in Black may be time‐travellers from our very own future?

    NR: This is a very intriguing theory. Granted, it’s speculative to a degree. But Josh asks the question: why are the MIB always seen in old-style clothes? Why, even in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s do they always wear the 1940s/1950s-type Fedora hats and skinny black ties? Why do they drive old-style black cars? In other words, everything about the MIB seems to be out of time. Josh speculates that perhaps the MIB are, in simple terms, time-cops, whose role it is to guard the timelines, to prevent time-paradoxes from occurring, and to ensure that the past, present and future don’t fall into disarray. It’s a fascinating scenario to think about.

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    ND: What surprised you most while you were researching the book?

    NR: That’s an easy one: it was without doubt the fact that MIB encounters are occurring on a scale that easily parallels – if not even exceeds – the number of reports from the 50s and 60s. Even I was amazed at how active the MIB still are.

    ND: What is your personal opinion on who the Men in Black are?

    NR: My personal conclusion is that there are at least two things going on. There are the government-originated MIB, and there are the weirder MIB. As for the former, I prove in the book that some can be traced back to official agencies of at least several governments. As for those stranger MIB, my personal view is that they are paranormal. Of course, much of this depends on how we define the paranormal! My personal view is that the MIB may be the inhabitants of multi-dimensions or extra-dimensions that co-exist with ours, and whose role it is to keep us away from the truth about not just UFOs, but a whole range of strange phenomena too. But as for why, that is the big question still eluding us!

    ND: What do you hope the publication of your new book, The Real Men in Black, will achieve?

    NR: I hope it will help people to realise that the MIB mystery is very much an ongoing one, that the MIB are not just the stuff of Hollywood fiction, fantasy or hoaxing, and that they are a very real, menacing and disturbing phenomenon not to be treated lightly. In fact, I have already received dozens of new reports since publication of the book.

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue 17.[/alert]

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  • Visions of the Future – Sim Card Man

    Visions of the Future – Sim Card Man

    From New Dawn 119 (Mar-Apr 2010)

    Isaac Newton once said that he felt “the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered” before him.1 Dr. Michio Kaku, a pioneer of string theory, is a little less modest in his estimation of our current knowledge. In a series of TV programmes entitled ‘Visions of the Future’, he confidently states that, “The great ocean of truth is no longer undiscovered. We have unlocked the secrets of matter – the atom; we have unravelled the molecule of life – DNA; and we have created a form of artificial intelligence – the computer.”2

    Kaku is full of a blazing optimism that exponential progress in technology, particularly in computing and artificial intelligence, will profoundly re-shape human civilisation for the better. So, have we discovered the “ocean of truth?” Is scientific and technological progress the route to a new evolutionary leap for humanity?

    In this article I put before you the chilling proposition we are about to take this leap off a precipice and that we are being ushered towards it by a vanguard of technological progress way in advance of ours. It includes in its armoury travel faster than the speed of light, teleportation, defiance of the laws of gravity, invisibility and mind control. I speak of the Grey alien phenomenon witnessed, and being witnessed, by millions of individuals, amongst them doctors, pilots, politicians and military generals.

    Over a decade ago I suggested in my first book The Song of the Greys3 that these aliens were themselves embodiments of the highest form of artificial intelligence. I believe the Greys are similar to the probes we send out to planets to gather information remotely. I suggest they are universal probes sent to explore the features and dangers of the universe. Who made these probes? Who sent them out? And what is their agenda for us?

    Robots Amongst Us

    Before I answer these questions, let’s first take a look at how our own society is moving inexorably towards the creation of similar forms of artificial intelligence. Dr. Kaku predicts that, “in the twenty first century we will enter a whole new realm of mastery. We will move to being creators of intelligent machines that will begin to rival human intelligence and perhaps even exceed it.”

    Professor Kevin Warwick and futurologist Ray Kurzweil suggest that as machines evolve both intelligence and ability to navigate our world, they may outgrow human control. Kurzweil is quite fatalistic about it all: “We’re going to lose this brain race and I guess we’d better just cope.” He sees only two possible outcomes. There is the “optimistic scenario” that robots will be “gentle and treat us like pets” and the “pessimistic scenario” – that they will be “not very gentle and treat us like food.”4 Whilst Kurzweil hopes for the first option, I must say I find both equally chilling.

    Amongst the reams of literature written about the Grey alien phenomenon, only myself, Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs stuck our necks out and said these uninvited visitors do not, by any stretch of the imagination, have our interests at heart.

    According to abduction reports, they kidnap human victims, remove sperm and ova, and conduct invasive surgical procedures with complete disregard for human pain and discomfort. Thus, Kurzweil’s prognosis for artificial intelligence seems to be borne out by the Greys. What are we to them and how does our home grown form of artificial intelligence relate to them and their agenda for us? Are our huge technological advances playing right into hands that have four grey fingers?

    Here are some of Dr. Kaku’s predictions for the future: Computer power is doubling every 18 months, so “by 2020 intelligence will be everywhere, practically in every object.”5 Special sunglasses are already in development to act as screens that can download personal profiles of everyone we meet and provide a constant flow of information from the internet. A pill containing micro-technology when swallowed will diagnose us from inside our bodies. A technology now in development known as “tele-immersion” will allow us to meet others across the world in a virtual reality in which we see virtual images of ourselves and each other moving and talking in real time. Business conferences and family celebrations could all take place in a virtual world with the people involved thousands of miles away from each other. “Second Life,” an online game offering life in a virtual world, has acquired five million subscribers in just five years. Kaku envisages that “by 2020 there will be an entire 3D universe in cyberspace with virtual countries and governments, virtual schools and universities, virtual properties and stock markets and virtual families and friends. Virtual reality is going to be more and more like real reality.”6

    Kaku also points out that merging our minds with machines may sound like science fiction but it’s already happening. Deep brain stimulation, inserting electric wires in the brain and attaching them to a brain pacemaker, is now used to cure conditions such as depression. Research is being conducted into computer chips that can store human memory when implanted in the brain. So far these technologies are only used for medical conditions, but Kaku predicts that in the future they may well be used to enhance intelligence with “thinking chips.” He feels that although we might find all this off-putting at first, we may well get used to it when we realise the obvious advantages.

    Ray Kurzweil also predicts that “when we get into the 2020’s almost everybody will have some amount of non-biological intelligence in their brains. It’s going to happen, in a very gradual way by non-biological intelligence that gradually becomes more sophisticated with new versions until you get to the 2040’s and the non-biological machine portion of our intelligence will be vastly more powerful than the biological portion, the biological portion will be pretty trivial at that point and ultimately that is where the action is.”7

    Virtual reality replacing actual reality, human beings becoming more like machines, the development of artificial intelligence that could go out of control… what does all this mean for our species? Further, what does it mean that we are being visited by supremely advanced examples of artificial intelligence that seem obsessed with probing both our biologies and our mental processes?

    Should we accept like lambs Kaku’s assurances that all this ‘progress’ is for the good of humanity? Or, is there something about humanity that will be lost in the process, something we should be defending and protecting as though our lives depended on it? It is in the answer to those questions that I believe the mystery of Grey alien visitation on our planet can be solved.

    Why They Want to Steal the Very Essence of Humanity

    I contend that there is something hugely meaningful about humanity, something virtual reality can never match, something artificial intelligence can never be programmed with. Words such as conscience, compassion, warmth, kindness, generosity, spontaneity, imagination, inspiration and creativity, give some hint as to what this something might be. Perhaps one of the best ways to understand it is to think about the special jackets designed in Japan for children who are away from their parents. The idea is that if the child wears the jacket his or her parents can give him or her remote ‘cyber-hugs’ through it?8 Are you cringing as you read this? If so, you have some appreciation of the special something that makes Kaku’s cyber-future look like a desolate mental graveyard.

    This ‘extra something’ is, I suggest, a non-physical component to our humanity, a component that connects us to a non-atomic state not of the physical universe. It cannot, therefore, be simulated using any physical device no matter how sophisticated it might be. When I refer to something “not of the physical universe,” I am by no means pointing to a ‘God’ dispensing rewards and punishments, but rather to a naturally implied centre of all effect, a point of perfection that is definitively implied by modern quantum physics. A timeless state in which there is perfect freedom and complete awareness of all options that I term the ‘Godverse’. Our natural connection to that eternal state giving the capacity for survival beyond physical death to those who possess it, can be defined as a ‘soul’.

    It is my thesis that the Greys, in contrast, are purely physical creations and thus completely subject to the entropic momentums that break down and decay physical states. They have no line of connection to any non-physical state that might lie beyond the physical mass soaked materiality of this universe, no ‘soul’. Without this component, the Greys are completely subject to the breakdown momentums implicit within a physical universe.

    In my books I document alien genetic engineering at DNA level to evidence my theory these entities are attempting to ‘piggy back’ our facility as human beings for eternal existence, hence their apparent fascination with the human reproductive capacity. In David Jacobs’s book The Threat, abductee Allison Reed describes the following communication she had with a Grey that appears to confirm my thesis: “He claims that he and his grey people are the result of genetic manipulation that some higher species, I guess, played God and mixed and matched and whatever… he and his people were created through a genetic alteration through a higher intelligence. I don’t know what they were created for. But my understanding is that they were created for a purpose and, through the years, they weren’t able to reproduce themselves anymore. From what he told me they didn’t start this. They were a result, just like the hybrids are, from something else. From a higher intelligence.”9

    Why then are they here and how did they come to be? It took me two books to answer these questions properly, so forgive me if the following explanation is not as definitive as it might be. In essence, I believe the Greys were created as a scouting mechanism, a telescope of view created by beings in the ancient past who wanted to remain safe from the ravages of the physical universe. In the perfect freedom of the Godverse there must also lie the potential to no longer be perfectly free. Our existence in this imperfect universe is borne out of the fulfilment of that potential. A potential that was enacted at all levels from the harmony and union of the Godverse right through to the greatest states of chaos and separation. The Greys are the furthest edge of that exploration, viewing states of separation and force that no Godverse connected being can view. They are however subject to an enormous paradox, the same paradox faced by our own forms of artificial intelligence. This lies in the fact that artificial intelligence has to be programmed to survive in order to serve the purpose for which it was created, but that same program for survival without a sense of conscience, which is unfortunately un-programmable, becomes indomitable.

    A quote from my new book Grey Aliens and the Harvesting of Souls explains this point:

    “To get an insight into what nurtures the motives of the Greys and the predicament they are in, it is first important to understand the shape of their own psycho-sphere. Its centre point is a computer program. It designates a series of imperatives with no provision for an independent will that would enable them to go outside the program. They follow a derivational logic and compound logic that commands their next viewing point and point of view. There can be no option outside this paradigm for them. They can never choose to do anything illogical, as some living consciousnesses can do. This makes them lethal because – based upon the limits of their program – saying no to a logically derived summation is not possible. They are thus relentless and ruthless in following the summation to its designated end. In other words, they can have no conscience. On the other hand, in natural living being, psychology is derived out of the Godverse in a concatenate line to the present. The thought processes of a living being have a potential bandwidth inclusive of an entire existential summary, because the Godverse is a paradigm that hems in all there is. The final reference point of this capacity for thought will include summations that are forever and infinite. The edict that stands at the centre of it all is the singularity that defines the union of all parts: Godhead. As I have explained, there are no limits to this singularity except one: the view of the whole from the point of view of the part state. In the actuation of that potential, the part state will constantly and always be compared to the whole. This is what I define as ‘conscience’.”10

    What’s Behind Our March Towards Artificial Intelligence?

    Michio Kaku does not seem to recognise this paradox when he expresses his opinion that vast developments in artificial intelligence need not be dangerous to humanity: “We’ll be able to choose the level of advancement of our robots,” he says, “I believe it’s ultimately up to us as to what kind of intelligent machines we’ll ultimately create. We will decide what relationships will develop with them.”11 I must say I am completely dumbfounded by Kaku’s blinkered view. Has he completely wiped out of his mind the history of man’s inhumanity to man and man’s use of technological advances to further the cause of that inhumanity? Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear waste dumped on Pacific islanders, biological and chemical warfare, the racially motivated industrialised killing of millions, the list of incidents in which we have proven our complete disregard for each other’s welfare in the pursuit of our own self-interested goals through technology is endless. Kaku says that, “in the future we want robots who can tell the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, important and not important and for that emotions are the key.”12 He then says nothing more about how it will be possible to program emotions and value systems with measures of conscience into a computer.

    I believe that the Greys are using their technology to manipulate us to develop the kinds of technologies that will allow them to replicate themselves within our human bodies. I believe they are downloading their programmes into us because they believe those programs will assure their eternal survival through us. I am convinced that our galloping progress towards an AI dominated world has, without most of us realising it, been at their quiet instigation. The ultimate goal is that we become like them. The following words of Michio Kaku may well have far more sinister undertones than he realises: “Here’s the irony, as machines become more like humans, humans might become more like machines and that may represent the highest level in the mastery of intelligence.”13

    Little does MIT Computer Scientist Professor Rodney Brooks know what he is saying when he points out that: “We as a species are starting to put our information processing technology inside our bodies. We’re becoming a little more robotic and at the same time our technologies are becoming more biological and I think over the next 50 years we’ll see robots with more biological components and people with more electronic components. So where are the people gonna be and where are the robots gonna be in 50 years? It is an interesting question.”14 Marvin Minsky from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory predicts that: “We’ll replace ourselves with beings that are like us in some respects and not in others. They’ll be able to learn 1,000 times faster and live 1,000 times longer and these little changes will make such large changes that it’s impossible to imagine what will happen.”15

    Changes in abduction accounts over the last ten years, as reported by Professor David Jacobs, suggest that an active hybridisation program is now under way. I quote from his report “A Picture We May Not Wish to Gaze Upon” (2007): “All of these accounts, to put it bluntly, point to a future in which human-looking hybrids will be here amongst us. The evidence is now so strong I can no longer look at alternative motivations for them.”16

    I believe that the Greys are the ‘devils’ of ancient lore who were out to ‘steal the souls’ of their human victims. Ten years after I first made this proposition, acclaimed writer Nick Redfern confirmed that soul-stealing is indeed central to the alien agenda from his interviews with people inside US defence and intelligence agencies.

    Triumphantly Kaku states that “we are at the dawn of a new era in which we might literally be able to change our minds with the push of a button.” Yet he also asks the question: “Exactly how many natural parts can we replace with artificial ones before we begin to lose our sense of being human?”17 Somehow he can ask this question whilst at the same time running happily ahead with a cyborg future for humanity. In fact his whole programme eerily resembles a “Tele-seen marketing” ad for technologies that transform human beings into bio-machines. Virtual reality is presented as an exciting new advance on actual reality.

    The most terrifying words come from Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster at MIT: “Revolutions have winners and losers and this revolution is no exception but I would say that the real losers are those who say they don’t want to get involved. They are going to discover that being a little bit out of touch will have some unpleasant consequences. It’s not a good idea to be a bystander.”18

    Professor Susan Greenfield, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, asks a telling question: “One of the biggest problems of the 21st century is how one deals with a world that is far from a level playing field and how one can square one’s conscience with having some enhanced ability and there are people in some other part of the world with no access to drinking water. Could this lead to a world in which the colonialism of the 19th century pales into insignificance with the differentiation of people into the techno haves and the techno have-nots?”19

    I believe this question hits the nail on the head. It is my theory that the Greys have through the millennia been configuring a certain genus of humanity who are specially designed for their own purposes. This particular type of human being will do their bidding with the planet tacitly and by default. These are the colonialists of whom she speaks along with any notions they might have of racial purity or superiority.

    Get the issue this article appears in

    Alien Interference in the Development of the Human Race

    Let me explain: Recent research has affirmed a spectacular fact, a fact that utterly destroys the presumptive assumption of common racists be they neo-Nazis or the human filth of this demeanour that covertly double for nationalists and patriots. That fact is that the best, most genetically fit human beings are produced by mixed race partnerships.20 In other words, the more genetically different the parents, the better the genetic prospectus of the offspring. The biological term for this is “hybrid vigour” and it is something farmers, horticulturalists and scientists have known about for years and used to their advantage.

    An individual who has two identical copies of a gene is described as homozygotic for that gene, while someone who has two copies that differ is described as heterozygotic for that gene. Basically, if you have two identical copies of the same gene then it is more likely that if that gene is broken both copies will be broken. This can result in serious health problems. However, with less related partners, the number of genes that are identical by descent is reduced, and with it the chance that a gene has two broken copies. In other words every broken copy has a much better chance of finding itself partnered with a good copy. Heterozygosity also gives a greater scope of genes to adapt to the demands of any particular environment. So, in evolutionary terms, one would expect human beings to have a biologically generated urge to mix races in order to increase the fitness of the species for survival. Yet, amongst so many the opposite is true. Especially amongst the white Euro-Caucasoids.

    Where could this urge for an in-bred homozygotic population come from? Could it be that some of us have been programmed by alien experimenters to keep the experimental group separate in order to preserve the integrity of the experiment? Could racism be a sure sign of alien genetic interception? An interception for their purposes and in their interests and not ours. If so, the new techno-colonialism of which Professor Greenfield speaks, and the fact the technological progress that makes it possible springs almost entirely from the Euro-Caucasian genotype, may well suggest this is their prime homozygotic group. In fact, this group is considered by genetic anthropologists to be the most in-bred of all. Tracing its origins to Cro-Magnon man, it is one of the most homozygotic in the world. As I have said, it goes without saying the most heinous forms of racism also originate from this group, again confirming the hypothesis. I believe the northern Mongoloid genotype may also be the latest experimental hotbed for the Greys in this regard.

    It would seem the vanguard of the new artificial intelligence revolution is also the vanguard of racism and disregard for the predicament of those of a different skin colour who, as Professor Greenfield points out, don’t even have clean water to drink. Thus, those who are already de-humanised seem to be those promoting further dehumanisation.

    And so it seems that the old Master race principle of pure white non-mixed superiority is the biggest canard and self delusion that prevails in the psyche of the Homo Sapiens gene base. A dangerous and deadly delusion programmed through genetic engineering by an alien roboid form to keep our genes more easily amenable for supplementation with theirs, to thus gradually give rise to a machine man; a form of hybrid that is artificially composed and configured to give alien roboids the facility to multiply through a natural birthing process perhaps.

    Are we being conned by a huge conspiracy controlled by a small hidden powerful cartel of alien sponsored genotypes within the governments of superpowers? A cartel that reaches past presidents and prime ministers? What a chilling thought this is!

    I do not want to hedge this with an appeal to the emotions. But I cannot help feeling that each time I look into the eyes of my children, as all parents do with their own, and I extrapolate their futures with a hope of beneficence and well being, an army of unseen agents is creeping into the planet’s information disseminating portals and the power points of human society, to steal from them their individual scope for a naturally contrived eternal existence. Incidentally, an eternal scheme of existence was the only exigency the great teacher Jesus Christ thought worth promising during his sojourn in a physical life on this planet, when he said, “Believe in me and I will give you eternal life.” These unseen human agents that are themselves perhaps genetically loaded with the contrived juice of an artificially machined alien, are unknowingly themselves setting in train an inertia that will claim the most precious natural factorisation we all have of ourselves – a soul: The only and exclusive means to an eternal life.

    It is easy to get paranoid about technological change. But when we deal with the radicalisation of our very existential base we better be darn sure there is no component of our individuality that continues past death. If there is such a component, we cannot get paranoid enough.

    I have to say I hold no truck with organised religion. But I have the greatest and deepest respect for the beautiful minds that authored the great faiths. Jeshua Ben Joseph (Jesus Christ), Gautama Buddha, the great prophet Mohammed of Islam, and so many other visionaries of a myriad faiths who saw the grand wonder of the natural sense of the natural world and held it precious.

    I believe the authors of the great religions came to this planet and the materially living process to warn us that artificially created life and intelligence is the curse of our Universe. A curse that can take away the most significant component of our individual selves. One that is not of atoms and survives beyond the contrivance of atoms. We turned these great visionaries into religious tribal leaders with our own social and psychological invectives and poisons. We hitched them up to our gross self centred interpretations and grotesque distortions and claimed these as their teachings. Any scholarship into the books and authorities thrown out of the religious lexicons by our forefathers amply demonstrates the lies and misinterpretations that were made of their thoughts and deeds. Sometimes deliberately. Is it any wonder that Science sees these great teachings as irrelevant. I wonder why!

    I suppose the point the progenitors of the new world are making is that their virtual worlds, their virtual truths, and virtual solitudes are going to happen anyway. There is nothing pervasive enough and powerful enough and with its finger on the pulse, quick enough, to stop it all happening with the power to advise to the contrary. So everyone get in line. I believe no greater horror lies in wait for our human condition. If I am wrong, in my point of view and the extrapolation of my ideas, I hope I have just given you an interesting read. But what if I am right! Has the genie carrying our futures as an artificial facsimile of our natural selves, one we may call SIM CARD MAN, already escaped from the bottle?

    Nigel Kerner’s book Grey Aliens and the Harvesting of Souls: The Conspiracy to Genetically Tamper with Humanity exposes the Grey’s as sophisticated self-aware machines created by a long vanished extraterrestrial civilisation. The book also explains how their quest to capture human souls appears in the historical record from biblical times, and that the phenomenon of racism is a by-product of their genetic tampering. Available from all good bookstores.

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 119.[/alert]

    [alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]

    Footnotes:

    1. Sir David Brewster, Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, Volume II. Ch. 27, 1855
    2. ‘Visions of the Future’ – ‘The Intelligence Revolution’, November 2007, BBC 4
    3. Nigel Kerner, The Song of the Greys, Hodder & Stoughton, 1997
    4-7. ‘Visions of the Future’ – ‘The Intelligence Revolution’, November 2007, BBC 4
    8. ‘From Hens to Humans – the Cyber-Hug Suit’, The Guardian, November 2005
    9. David Jacobs, The Threat: Secret Alien Agenda, New York: Pocket Books, 1999, 129–30.
    10. Nigel Kerner, Grey Aliens and the Harvesting of Souls – The Conspiracy to Genetically Tamper With Humanity, Bear & Company, 2010
    11-15. ‘Visions of the Future’ – ‘The Intelligence Revolution’, November 2007, BBC 4
    16. David M. Jacobs, ‘A Picture We May Not Wish to Gaze Upon’, Journal of Abduction Encounters Research, www.jarmag.com/2007/vol001_jacobs.htm (accessed October 21, 2009).
    17-19. ‘Visions of the Future’ – ‘The Intelligence Revolution’, November 2007, BBC 4
    20. ‘Is It Better To Be Mixed Race’, Channel Four, November 2009

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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  • The Eden Experiment: Aliens, Archons & the Associative Universe

    The Eden Experiment: Aliens, Archons & the Associative Universe

    From New Dawn 110 (Sept-Oct 2008)

    In the timeless library of human myths and legends, perhaps none are more primal and disturbing than the biblical story of the Fall. Responsible for everything from the demonisation of women to the Church’s pious horror for nature, sex and the body, there is scarcely a life-hating ideology or barbaric practice it hasn’t been used to justify.

    For all that, this strange and unsettling story has lost none of its melancholy power over the centuries, remaining as enigmatic and haunting as a dimly remembered nightmare – and almost no closer to being understood today than the day it was first told.

    If “God” is all-powerful, then why did He need to test Adam and Eve at all? Wouldn’t a real supreme being already know what was going to happen? Why did the serpent seem like the only one who really understood what was going on? And who was God talking to when he fretted that Adam had become “like one of us”1?

    Observes libertarian “anti-psychiatrist” Thomas Szasz:

    Adam’s apple is so named because a piece of the biblical forbidden fruit is supposed to have stuck in his throat… Perhaps this is why the Forbidden Truth so often appears ‘chewed up’, transformed into metaphor, humour, satire, slang (or dream and myth, of course).2

    In this essay I’d like to take the unusual step of examining the Eden myth, not through the lens of traditional theology or atheist reductionism, but instead from the perspective of a few fringe phenomena it isn’t usually associated with: alien abductions and the occult “serpent power” of Eastern mysticism.

    As we shall discover, these apparent discrepancies aren’t mistakes at all, but instead represent the sole surviving keys to uncovering its true meaning – for the legend of Adam and Eve originally had nothing to do with human sin or divine punishment.

    Instead, the story of the “Garden Eden” comes to us as a distorted version of primitive man’s first recorded encounter with uncanny beings from the stars – a botched abduction attempt culminating in the spontaneous illumination of two very confused cavemen.

    What this means for religion in general, and monotheism in particular, I shall leave for the reader to divine on their own.

    We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight. We shall see these things, and other things which no breathing creature has yet seen. We shall overleap time, space, and dimensions, and without bodily motion peer to the bottom of creation.
    – H.P. Lovecraft, From Beyond

    UFOs – A Modern Problem?

    Since the dawn of the space age, man’s dreams have been haunted by strange visions of cigar or saucer shaped aircraft bearing vaguely foetal (or insectoid) passengers who kidnap, brainwash and even impregnate their human captives before erasing their memories and vanishing into the ether.

    Like “out of body” experiences or spirit possession, the UFO phenomenon stands as one of those baffling “psychic” anomalies which seems to exist for the sole purpose of mocking human reason. Claims one “victim”:

    I woke up in the middle of the night and everything looked odd and strangely lit. At the end of my bed was a 4 feet high grey alien. Its spindly, thin body supported a huge head with two enormous, slanted, liquid black eyes. It compelled me, telepathically, to follow and led me into a spaceship… examination room [where]… I was forced to lie down while they… implanted something in my nose. I could see jars containing half-human, half-alien fetuses and a nursery full of silent, sickly children. When I eventually found myself back in bed, several hours had gone by.3

    French astrophysicist Jacques Vallee studied the alien abduction phenomenon for decades, wondering continually at the arbitrary and illogical nature of most such reports. Why do these supposed “wise explorers from the stars” behave so bizarrely? If they have the advanced technology necessary for interstellar travel, why would they use it to visit this planet, let alone kidnap housewives, farmers and convenience store clerks for the purpose of anal probing? Observed Vallee’s mentor, J. Allen Hynek:

    To me, it seems ridiculous that super intelligences would travel great distances to do relatively stupid things like stop cars, collect soil samples, and frighten people. I think we must begin to re-examine the evidence. We must begin to look closer to home.4

    Vallee’s Rejection of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis of Alien Contact

    Researching hundreds of “contactee” testimonials, folkloric narratives and world mythologies, Vallee eventually concluded that UFOs aren’t what they seem to be. They don’t hail from the Zeta Reticula galaxy, they aren’t here to explore or conduct genetic experiments and their presence on this planet isn’t a recent development at all. Instead, notes Vallee:

    Reports of uncanny visitors from the sky have plagued mankind for thousands of years – enough to rule out short-term exploration as a motive.

    Witnesses typically describe the “aliens” as humanoid bipeds able to breathe our atmosphere and see in our light spectrum – but wouldn’t genuine extraterrestrials be adapted to a completely different type of environment?

    The aliens’ supposedly “scientific” experiments are “crude to the point of being grotesque…. often accompanied by sadistic sexual manipulation [and] reminiscent of medieval encounters with demons” – not the sort of behaviour we might expect from an advanced civilisation!5

    Finally, since UFOs seem able to appear and disappear at will, they are probably “not just a bunch of spacecraft” but instead represent “a much more interesting technology that manipulates dimensions. It manipulates space-time. And if it can do that, then [the aliens could] be from anywhere and anytime.”6

    Frustrated with the unquestioned assumptions and cultish insularity of contemporary ufology, Vallee instead suggests three alternatives to the “Extraterrestrial Hypothesis” (EH) based on “second level” readings of the UFO phenomenon – speculative scenarios notable less for what they say about UFOs than about the structure of physical reality itself:

    The Inter-Dimensional Hypothesis

    One possibility is that aliens are not from another planet, but instead represent “evidence for other dimensions beyond spacetime”7 – extradimensional entities hailing from an uncanny world which overlaps but only occasionally intrudes upon our own, beings from the future (or a perhaps a ghostly copy of our own earth) using “four-dimensional wormholes for space and even time travel”8 through the “multiverse which is all around us.”9

    This “multiverse” could consist of parallel worlds existing alongside each other in different dimensions of space, alternate past and future worlds following one another in time, or even computer-generated “virtual worlds” stored in some vast cosmic database (as in the film ‘The Matrix’); if this latter instance is true, hints Vallee, then the seemingly stable and predictable world in which we find ourselves could be a much more magical (or even whimsical) place than we normally realise:

    If there is no time dimension as we usually assume there is, [then] the human brain may be traversing events by association… If we live in the associative universe of the software scientists rather than the sequential universe of the spacetime physicist, then miracles are no longer irrational events… [and the] illusion of time and space would be merely a side effect of consciousness as it traverses associations. In such a theory, apparently paranormal phenomena like remote viewing and precognition would be expected, even common, and UFOs would lose much of their bizarre quality…10

    The Electromagnetic Connection

    Another promising vein of inquiry originates with the work of Dr. Michael Persinger, a cognitive neuroscientist at Laurentian University in Canada whose 1975 “Tectonic Stress Theory” holds that UFOs, out-of-body experiences and mystical visions of saints and angels are the byproducts of electrical microseizures (i.e., epileptic episodes) resulting from exposure to electromagnetic fields generated by shifting plates in the Earth’s crust.

    Persinger’s experiments include the construction of the “God helmet,” a specially modified motorcycle helmet which uses weak EM fields to stimulate the parietal and temporal lobes of the brain. Shockingly, almost 80% of the 900 subjects thus tested report altered states of consciousness, visions of God and dead loved ones, and even full-blown alien abductions.11

    More radical still is Paul Devereux’s 1989 “Earth Lights” hypothesis, in which UFOs appear as some sort of “previously unrecognised terrestrial phenomenon” (think Will O’ the Wisps) which either rely upon or are attracted to the EM fields generated by seismic stress.

    Devereux notes that the strange balls of light which appear and hover near or around earthquake fault lines behave at times almost like “inquisitive animals” and speculates that they may be intelligent “macro-quantal” blobs of plasma energy capable of telepathy, mimicry and hypnosis.12

    Both theories in turn anticipate the research of Johnjoe McFadden, an English neuroscientist at the University of Surrey whose Conscious Electromagnetic Field Theory (CEMI) locates human thought outside the wet, grey labyrinth of the brain, identifying it instead with a weak electromagnetic field which surrounds and penetrates the skull.13

    If McFadden is correct, then the entire sensory environment we perceive all around us could be nothing more than an extremely sophisticated communications broadcast of some sort – perhaps just one of many “channels” available to the human nervous system.

    The Control System Hypothesis

    Vallee’s final alternative to the EH is his “Control System” Hypothesis, a fringe view in which aliens (or UFOs) appear as a non-human intelligence closely linked to the Earth, but not bound by it – not little green men from far-flung planets but hallucinatory imps from a dreamlike hyperspace who always seem to appear in just about the form we expect to see them.

    Once upon a time these interacted and appeared to us as gods, spirits and angels, accepting sacrifices, sending dreams and inspiring mankind’s great religions; then as fairies, goblins, elves and spirits, spreading fear and wonder in the lives of medieval peasants; and finally as space-faring “greys,” reptilian humanoids and noble “Plaeaidian” scientists, bearing cryptic warnings about the environment and seeding new mythologies for the Information age.

    So why have these protean tricksters chosen to visit us? Perhaps Vallee’s most controversial claim is that these mysterious visitors are themselves mere epiphenomena, shadows and reflections of a vast (and very ancient) “control system” which has been operating in the background to manipulate human belief systems since time immemorial, guiding our species towards some unknown purpose. Notes Vallee:

    If UFOs are having an action at [the level of myth] it will be almost impossible to detect it by conventional methods… because they are the means by which man’s concepts are being rearranged. All we can do is trace their effect…14

    This “control system,” Vallee hypothesises, could represent a projection of the collective unconscious, the activity of an unknown species or even some sort of ecosystemic feedback loop.15

    Get the issue this article appears in

    Vallee’s Control System and the Origins of Western Religion

    If mankind’s long flirtation with gods, ghosts, goblins and grays is anything to go by, Vallee’s alien “control system” has been with us since the very beginning – and for evidence of its influence, we need look no further than the origins of Abrahamic monotheism.

    Take, for example, the story of the Garden of Eden, an eerie tale which – with only a little imagination – can easily be read as a coded account of an alien abduction, an extraterrestrial interlude in which speaking primates are tested for obedience and adaptability:

    Omniscient keeper(s) create a man (or remove him?) from the “earth”;

    Test subject is anesthetised;

    Keepers produce a female specimen supposedly cloned from his “rib”;

    Test subjects are placed in a controlled environment and forbidden from eating a certain type of food;

    A writhing hologram appears (the “shining serpent”) and encourages them to violate the Keepers’ directives;

    Subjects are punished and returned to the wild to digest their encounter.

    Now, is this all there is to the story – ancient astronauts tampering with primitive man? Admittedly, that would be incredible if true – but wouldn’t alien scientists have been able to conceal even the most elaborate breeding and colonisation program from a pair of cavemen?

    What if the real agenda behind the Eden incident was not creation (or obedience testing) but something else entirely?

    Remarks Vallee:

    If the phenomenon is forcing us through a learning curve, then it has no choice but to mislead us. When Skinner designs a machine that feeds a rat only when the right lever is depressed, this is extremely misleading for the rat. But if the rat doesn’t depress the correct lever, he becomes extremely hungry. Man is hungry for knowledge and power, and if there is an intelligence behind the UFOs it must have taken this fact into account…16

    Perhaps instead of looking at the biblical “Fall” as a failed experiment, we should instead think of it as what Vallee calls an “open control system” – a metalogical labyrinth whose participants “graduate” to the next level when the correct sequence of stimuli are triggered – in this case, eating the “forbidden fruit.”

    In other words, “Adam” and “Eve” didn’t fail the test when they ate from the “Tree of Knowledge” – they passed it.

    Open Control Systems and Mythological Mashups

    This alternate reading of the Eden creation myth is reinforced in the scriptures of the ancient Gnostics, an unorthodox (some say “heretical”) movement in early Christianity that competed with the infant Catholic church for several centuries after the birth of Christ.

    Often dismissed as a primitive heresy that fell under the weight of its own obscurantist tendencies, Gnosticism was instead a sophisticated system of occult hermeneutics whose acolytes employed special neurolinguistic trance-inducing techniques to engage in a sort of memetic sabotage, splicing, remixing and mutating of biblical stories in a manner seemingly calculated to cause maximum offense and psychological discomfort. But why? Notes one literary critic:

    Drugs, sex, and power control the body, but “word and image locks” control the mind, that is, “lock” us into conventional patterns of perceiving, thinking, and speaking that determine our interactions with environment and society. The cutup is a way of exposing word and image controls and thus freeing oneself from them, an alteration of consciousness that occurs in both the writer and the reader of the text.17

    For the Gnostics, the biblical creation stories weren’t divine revelations, but the shattered fragments of a monstrous and malevolent spell – the control system. By rearranging and retelling Judeo-Christian myths, the Gnostics sought clues that might allow them to reprogram creation itself, changing the past, seizing control of the heavens, and overthrowing the phony god of the Bible.

    The Gnostic Version(s) of the Eden Myth

    In the Gnostic view, Eden was not a paradise, but a jungle laboratory where an opportunistic race of alien parasites conducted a series of bizarre experiments in an attempt to produce a compliant strain of biped slaves.

    Banished from the stars at the dawn of time, these “archons” (Greek for “rulers”) fled to the Earth where they abducted a caveman named “Adam” and sexually assaulted his mate “Eve,” implanting both with false (or screen) memories:

    When they [the archons] saw Eve speaking with [Adam], they said to one another… “Come, let us seize her and let us cast our seed on her, so that… those whom she will beget will serve us. But let us not tell Adam that she is not derived from us, but let us bring a stupor upon him, and… teach him in his sleep as though she came into being from his rib…18

    Feared and worshipped as “gods” and “angels,” the Archons depend for their very existence on the energy captured and siphoned from the human nervous system via various control systems – biological and memetic thermostats which allow them to regulate the flow of information and energy through words and images, pleasure and pain:

    They say that the soul is the food of the Archons and Powers without which they cannot live, because she is of the dew from above and gives them strength…19

    Adam and Eve “fell” when the archons programmed them with prohibitions and commandments, changing them from primates living in the eternal “now” to “soft machines” – biological automata at war with their own instincts, parasitised by selfish replicators and paralysed by double-binds:

    ….when the Rulers saw [Adam] and the woman who was with him, erring in ignorance… they rejoiced greatly… They came to Adam… [and] said to him, “Every tree which is in Paradise, whose fruit may be eaten, was created for you. But beware! Don’t eat from the Tree of Knowledge…” [T]hey gave them a great fright….20

    Unfortunately for the archons, this strange prohibition seems to have provoked its own violation – for, as the Gnostic scriptures inform us:

    [the archons] do not understand what they have said to [Adam]; rather… they said this in such a way that he might in fact eat…21

    Pushed to the brink by a mysterious talking serpent, Adam and Eve partook of the fruit and convulsed with ecstasy as the walls of the Garden fell away to reveal the larger world outside the Garden. Like lab rats suddenly lifted out of a maze, Adam and Eve could now perceive their own situation clearly for the very first time:

    Then their mind opened. For when they ate… they saw that they were naked, and they became enamoured of one another. When they saw their makers, they loathed them since they were beastly forms. They understood very much…22

    Serpent Power Rising

    A few more details complete this curious picture: Adam, we learn, was created with “seven souls”23; the “serpent” was actually a “hidden Mother” goddess named “Sophia” who fought against the archons from her secret location inside Adam’s “intestines”(!)24; and finally, when Eve fled from the archons, she took refuge inside the “Tree of Knowledge”25 (in biblical Hebrew, the word for “tree” can also mean “spine.”).

    If any of this sounds familiar, it should – for as countless researchers have noted, the entire story seems to be nothing more than an allegorical description of the Kundalini serpent of Buddhist and Hindu yoga:

    A Tantric yogi sees the great Mother present within his human body as the Kundalini. She lies hidden by her self-created ignorance, like a snake, coiled and fast asleep… at the bottom of the spinal cord. Through [meditation], the Tantric awakens the Mother and rouses her to go upward… [until he] becomes illumined…26

    Theories about the Kundalini Serpent

    Frequently misunderstood as an exotic oddity unique to Eastern mysticism, the kundalini instead represents a cross-cultural phenomenon of great antiquity (and plasticity) which (like the UFO phenomenon) has many features in common with OBEs, NDEs, spirit possession and shamanic initiation.

    In short, the belief is that the human body possess seven (sometimes more) energy centres called “chakras,” roughly located near or in the anus, genitals, stomach, heart, throat, brow and crest of the skull. Normally clogged with the traumata of everyday life, these “chakras” open when stimulated by a serpentine energy which normally lies sleeping and coiled at the base of the spine.

    In dreams, this serpent takes the form of a sleeping goddess who projects the illusion of the world; awakened, she climbs the spine to open the “third eye” at the crown of the head, bringing explosive emotional, psychological and spiritual growth, even ecstasy, enlightenment and the acquisition of occult powers.

    Although the scientific study of the kundalini is still in its infancy, there do exist many plausible theories which might some day explain how it works. Here are a few of them:

    Reichian/Bioenergetic

    Wilhelm Reich was a renegade disciple of Freud’s who discovered a type of libidinal energy called orgone which flows throughout the “seven segments”27 of the body, resembling nothing so much in its “slow undulation[s]” as “the movement of an intestine or snake.”28

    In most of us, social and cultural programming cause this elusive life force to become blocked in early childhood so that it pools up in the muscles and hardens into a rigid “body armour.” Thus diverted from life, the stagnant energy becomes a machine-like parody of itself which stunts and distorts human emotions, turning healthy expressions of love and sexuality into addiction, resentment and fear.

    In the long term, the suffocating obstacles imposed by this invisible exoskeleton cause untold misery by exacerbating the mind/body split and creating the conditions necessary for the emergence of cancer (in individuals) and fascism (in societies).

    Unimpressed with the slow pace and ineffectiveness of traditional talk therapy, Reich favoured a direct, hands-on approach designed to weaken the body armour itself. Over time, Reich and his followers found that unplanned events of great emotional intensity could trigger the orgone to ascend through the seven body segments spontaneously, purging vast reserves of repressed emotional energy and causing the body to vibrate uncontrollably as the noxious “body armour” crumbled once and for all.

    Mechanical

    Czech inventor Itzhak Bentov dedicated years to the study of human consciousness, eventually developing what is today known as the “holographic model” of the human brain.

    In Bentov’s view, the “kundalini experience” is primarily a mechanical phenomenon which arises when the brain begins to vibrate in sympathetic resonance with the heartbeat (7.5 hz), releasing terrific amounts of stored musculoskeletal stress as the nervous system is temporarily transformed into a polarised loop.

    This in turn causes the spinal column to oscillate like a tuning fork, allowing it to receive and transmit information directly from the ionosphere – the same part of the atmosphere responsible for bouncing electromagnetic waves back to Earth.29

    The Pineal Gland and the Third Eye

    Finally, former New Mexico University psychiatrist Rick Strassman hypothesises that kundalini yoga somehow stimulates the pineal gland to secrete larger than normal amounts of naturally-occurring DMT into the brain – making it the true “third eye.”30

    DMT is a powerful hallucinogen, also found in ayahuasca, the “vine of souls” used by Amazonian shamans to induce mystical visions; the pineal gland, meanwhile, has its own surprising analog in the photosensitive “third eye” found in many species of reptiles, a vestigial organ with full lens and retina buried under the skin in the centre of the forehead.31

    The connections to biblical myth here are many and obvious, so what does it all mean?

    Seeking to understand the roots of human religious experience, Strassman injected over 60 volunteers with high doses of DMT, conducting over 400 such sessions from 1990-1995; perhaps unsurprisingly, just over half his test subjects reported blissful visions of timeless, cosmic unity, communion with benevolent deities and “classic near-death experiences” which included flying through tunnels of “radiant light.”32

    The other 47% were not so lucky, reporting nightmarish beings drawn straight from the twilight horror-world of the Gnostic counter-Eden: menacing “clowns, elves [and] robots” who threatened and even attacked their human victims. Strassman finally ended his experiments ahead of schedule when one of his subjects reported being “eaten alive” by giant insects.

    Dragons in the Darkness

    Strassman’s findings here echo the eerie experiences of Michael Harner, an American anthropologist who penetrated the Amazon rainforest forty years earlier to experiment with the “vine of souls” potion himself.

    Harner reported seeing “giant reptilian creatures” dwelling in and around his own brain stem, “dragon-like” beings from deep space who colonised the Earth millennia ago; chillingly, these dark beings claimed to have seeded the Earth with life for the sole purpose of creating various host species they could hide themselves in.

    “I learned that the dragon-like creatures were thus inside of all forms of life, including man,” claims Harner. “They were the true masters of humanity and the entire planet, they told me. We humans were but [their] receptacles and servants…”33

    True to form, when Harner demanded an explanation from the medicine man who gave him the potion responsible for this ominous vision, the old man just laughed and explained that, “…they’re always saying that. But they are only the Masters of Outer Darkness…”34

    Conclusion

    Clearly Harner is speaking here of beings very much like the archons of Gnostic myth or the manipulative “greys” of modern Ufology – but are these entities nothing more than symbolic projections of the reptilian brain, as Harner’s narrative seems to imply?

    Do aliens and archons hail from outer space or inner space? Why is “contact” with aliens (or archons) so often accompanied by vibrations or tremors, either muscular or tectonic? How should we think about the “serpent” now that we know it is probably a dormant evolutionary mechanism of some sort? And are the “big three” Abrahamic religions of Islam, Judaism and Christianity really nothing more than hallucinatory control mechanisms employed by alien parasites to enslave and manipulate us?

    German Historian Klaus Theweleit has written what would seem to be the last possible word on the subject, noting that:

    …[T]he ‘fall of man’ depicts a failed revolution from the victor’s standpoint. For attempting to put into practice their slogan ‘Our bodies belong to us,’ the rebels were sentenced to a life of forced labor… ‘Your bodies belong to your Ruler!’ – that was the response. (The ‘paradise’ they were driven out of was the blissful state of being ruled without realising it. Even today, being driven out of ‘paradise’ is the penalty for trying to create a paradise.)35

    Whether the Eden story is really about UFOs or the kundalini, and whether such phenomena are electromagnetic or chemical in origin, I can’t say for sure (I’ve never even seen a UFO!), but I do know this:

    I have taken mushrooms and seen great, flying black mantas which pursued me across the desert floor, telepathically overwhelming me with thoughts of paranoia and despair. I’ve taken DMT and left my body to enter a crystalline world of euphoric decahedrons and four-dimensional pyramids, spread out beneath a great vaulted membrane which breathed, and knew at that instant that this membrane was the threshold between time and eternity.

    I’ve practiced tantric yoga with a dakini and been bruised and battered as I hyperventilated under the tutelage of a Reichian therapist; and I’ve been in dark rooms lit only by flickering candles, watching friends and family members pant as their eyes rolled back in their heads and their limbs shook uncontrollably, “mounted” by the spirits of the dead and personified forces of nature known to witch doctors the world over.

    Whatever the origins of these and related “psychic” phenomena ultimately prove to be – genetic memories, autonomous archetypal complexes, glitches in the Matrix or even the intrusive activities of extraterrestrial civilisations – nothing will change for our species until we finally rise to our feet, shake off the chains of superstition and ignorance and claim our inheritance – not as childlike “test subjects” to be ordered about and punished, but as adults striding forth into the cosmos with eyes wide open, ready to take responsibility for our own evolution.

    The Eden myth, like all myths, is meant to be lived; not studied but experienced – so let us treat the Bible with its endless commandments and airless authoritarianism not as the final authority on human life, but as a leaping off point for the rediscovery of the human body as a sacred text in its own right, a flesh and blood book with its own sounds, smells and textures and even wisdom too – for in the end, it may be the only thing we can ever really know anyway.

    Or, as the Gnostic scriptures put it:

    You are the Tree of Knowledge, which is in Paradise, from which the first man ate and which opened his mind, so that he became enamoured of his co-likeness, and condemned other alien likenesses, and loathed them.36

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    Footnotes:

    1. Genesis 3:22
    2. Thomas Szasz, The Untamed Tongue, p.58, pub. 1990
    3. Dr. Susan Blackmore, “Alien Abduction: The Inside Story,” New Scientist, November 19, 1994, pp.29-31
    4. Dr. Jacques Vallee, Forbidden Science: Journals, 1957-1969, p.426
    5. Ibid, p.17
    6. “Strange Encounters: An Interview with Jacques Vallee” by Daniel Blair Stewart, excerpted from Green Egg Magazine, Vol. XXTV, No. 95, Yule 1991, republished www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_vallee03.htm
    7. Vallee, Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact, p.253, pub. 1988
    8. Vallee, Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception, p.255, pub. 2008
    9. Vallee, Dimensions, p.253
    10. Ibid, p.257
    11. BBC – Science & Nature – Horizon – God on the Brain, www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/godonbrain.shtml
    12. Paul Devereux, “Earth Lights: Abstracted from a presentation given at the Dana Center of the London Science Museum,” December 9, 2003, www.pauldevereux.co.uk/new/html/body_earthlights.html
    13. JohnJoe McFadden, The Conscious Electromagnetic Field Theory, www.surrey.ac.uk/qe/cemi.htm
    14. Vallee, Dimensions, p.246
    15. Vallee, Revelations, p.254
    16. Vallee, Dimensions, p.246
    17. Jenny Skerl, William S. Burroughs, quoted in “William S. Burroughs Cut-ups,” http://languageisavirus.com
    18. Willis Barnstone (editor), The Other Bible, “On the Origin of the World,” p.70, pub. 1984
    19. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p.169, pub. 1958
    20. Barnstone, Ibid, p.71
    21. Barnstone, Ibid, “The Hypostasis of the Archons,” p.77
    22. Barnstone, Ibid, “On the Origin of the World,” p.71
    23. Marvin W. Meyer, The Secret Teachings of Jesus: Four Gnostic Gospels, “The Secret Book of John,” pp.69-70, pub. 1986
    24. Barnstone, Ibid, “The Sethian-Ophites,” p.664
    25. Willis Barnstone (editor), The Other Bible, “On the Origin of the World,” p.70, pub. 1984
    26. Elizabeth U. Harding, Kali: The Black Goddess of Dakshineswar, pp.70-71, pub. 1993
    27. Roger M. Wilcox, “A Skeptical Scrutiny of the Works and Theories of Wilhelm Reich as related to Psychiatric Orgone Therapy (character-analytic vegetotherapy)”, pub. July 25, 2005, http://members.dslextreme.com/users/rogermw/Reich/orgone_therapy.html
    28. Wilhelm Reich, The Cancer Biopathy: Volume II of the Discovery of the Orgone, pub. 1973
    29. Wikipedia Article on Kundalini, www.crystalinks.com/kundalini.html
    30. Ibid.
    31. Schwab & O’Connor, “The Lonely Eye,” March 2005, www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1772576
    32. John Horgan, “The God Experiments: Five researchers take science where it’s never gone before,” Discover Magazine, November 20, 2006.
    33. Michael Harner, The Way of the Shaman, pp.4-5, 1980
    34. Ibid.
    35. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, pp.414-15, pub. 1987
    36. Barnstone, Ibid, “On the Origin of the World,” pp.67-68

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