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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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  • The Out-of-Body Experience As Dimensional Translocation

    The Out-of-Body Experience As Dimensional Translocation

    From New Dawn 74 (Sept-Oct 2002)

    Pause for a moment and try to imagine four-dimensional space. It is right next to you, but in a direction you can’t point to. No matter how well hidden you may be, a four-dimensional creature can see you perfectly well, inside and outside.
    – Rudy Rucker, The Fourth Dimension

    How might these beings be even dimly aware of our presence, if we normally don’t have an inkling of theirs? Once more, we’re treading on extraordinarily thin ice by even thinking about explanations for this phenomenon. The mere need to attempt an understanding shows us how far afield our thinking has come.
    – Rick Strassman, M.D., DMT, The Spirit Molecule

    If these men are correct, then physics is the study of the structure of consciousness.
    – Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters

    Consensus reality in the “real world” is founded upon corporeal entities beholding three-dimensional space. When out-of-body explorers or UFO abductees claim that they passed through solid walls during their experiences, they are contradicting perhaps the most fundamental perceptions of human observers.

    Scientism condemns such assertions as either fraudulent or hallucinatory because if they were accepted as legitimate, our entire conception of reality would collapse – an appalling prospect, challenging the credibility of all self-appointed official observers. Nevertheless, when faced with such an abundance of anomalous data any fearless spectator might suggest that our concepts of dimensional location need to be re-evaluated and clarified.

    At its simplest, the experience of three-dimensional space is the awareness of three perpendicular axes: North-South, East-West and Up-Down (e.g., a cube). Two-dimensional space (a flat plane) contains only two of these axes, and one-dimensional space consists of only one axis – a single line.

    Time is also a dimension, though not a spatial one; however, it is a necessary extension to our awareness of space, and so we normally describe our reality as three dimensions of space, plus one dimension of time – the so-called “four-dimensional space-time continuum.” Even small children can understand this because we spend all our lives living within its confines: it’s an experience so commonplace and taken-for-granted that we never really think about it. (It is, after all, our consensus reality).

    Four-dimensional space, on the other hand, though mathematically describable, is a concept virtually impossible to visualise. That’s because progression from one spatial dimension to another follows a logical sequence of perpendicular extension: a plane is merely the extension of a line in a direction at right-angles (“perpendicular”) to that line’s axis; a cube is created when a plane is extended at right-angles to that plane’s axis. This is easy enough to portray as long as we’re dealing with three dimensions or lower, but in what perpendicular direction would a cube have to move to create four-dimensional space? Even if you know the secret, the mind boggles and goes into spasms while trying to visualise it.

    The reason for this is because we are multi-dimensional entities “serving time” in a three-dimensional spatial prison and brainwashed into believing it’s a life sentence without parole or any hope of escape.

    To switch metaphors, consider for a moment a Zen Koan – an existential test of your ability to transcend your perceptual situation:

    You are standing on a spot where (judging by the rumbling sounds and trembling beneath your feet), a volcano the size of Krakatoa is just about to erupt. Immediately above your head an enormous fireball, a meteor as big as Manhattan, is only seconds away from crashing exactly where you’re standing. A few metres to your front, a tidal wave (over a kilometre high!) is cresting and about to break. Six metres behind you (at Ground Zero), a hydrogen bomb test is in its final few seconds of countdown; to your immediate right, the entire Nazi army from World War II is bearing down upon you with distinctly murderous intentions. And finally, coming up fast on the left, a charging herd of ten thousand enraged bull elephants is about to stomp you into the dirt.

    Koan: In what direction lies escape? (Hint: it’s the only “perpendicular” direction available to you, and given the above circumstances you are about to take it whether you want to or not!)

    There are other ways of visualising this: consider the “black hole” or “singularity.” A black hole is created when a largeish star (about 50 times bigger than our sun) consumes all its nuclear fuel and implodes into its own intense gravity. Anything, including light, approaching within a given critical distance of a black hole is sucked into its whirlpool, never to be seen again. Physicists postulate that such imploding singularities depart from our own space-time to create new parallel-universe/space-time dimensions. (The connections between them constitute the familiar “worm holes” so necessary for Captain Kirk’s navigation of the Starship Enterprise.) What appears to us as a black hole implosion in this universe becomes a “white hole” explosion somewhere else – creating a whole new universe, a whole new dimensional reality:

    “Relativists realized that there is nothing to stop the material that falls into a singularity in our three dimensions of space and one of time from being shunted through a kind of space-time warp and emerging as an expanding singularity in another set of dimensions – another space-time. Mathematically, this ‘new’ space-time is represented by a set of four dimensions, just like our own, but with all the dimensions at right angles to all the familiar dimensions of our own space-time. Every singularity, on this picture, has its own set of space-time dimensions, forming a bubble universe within the framework of some ‘super’ space-time, which we can refer to simply as ‘superspace’.”1

    Notice that the rule of perpendicular extension is maintained in the creation of these new universes and that any observers within them would perceive an analogy of our own familiar four-dimensional space-time continuum. (Should they be practitioners of Scientism, let us forgive them for believing that theirs is the only reality that exists!)

    Now imagine that you are standing outside on a clear summer’s night – all the stars above the horizon are visible to your sight. Assume (for the purpose of illustration) that the hypothetical XYZ-123 galaxy (one-hundred million light years from Earth) is shining brightly. The photons (waves or particles, take your pick) which were emitted from the XYZ-123 galaxy during earth’s dinosaur days, are just now arriving on our planet; they implode through the pupils of your eyes to explode within your brain: “Ah-ha – yes, there it is! Just above Orion, the familiar old XYZ-123 galaxy,” says your mind-observer.

    Koan: Where do these photons (after their exhausting one-hundred million year journey through interstellar space) go upon entering your own personal black holes (eye-pupils)? The radiation from an entire galaxy registers on your brain, is interpreted by your mind, and then what? And then where? Surely those photons can’t just “wink out” after going to all that trouble to get here! Can they?

    “The matter [falling into a black hole] cannot escape back into the universe we know, yet if it does not disappear at a singularity it must pass into a region of spacetime that we do not know. Sometimes such unknown regions are called other universes, the effect of gravitational collapse being to establish a bridge or tunnel into these enigmatic ‘parallel’ worlds. The collapsing star, or whatever matter falls in after it, falls on through the tunnel and out into, presumably, a cosmos much like our own.”2

    Look at it another way: Imagine a point existing in some kind of pre-spatial “void” – the Tao, perhaps (whatever that is). Mathematically, a point has zero dimensions, but it exists anyway because consciousness defines it that way. A zero-dimensional point existing in “non-space” probably comes as close to “nothing” as we can imagine, but quantum cosmologists say that our universe was created out of just such a “singularity.” They also tell us that nothing can take place without an observer:

    “The universe is supposed to be everything that there is, and if all is quantized, including spacetime, what can collapse the cosmos into reality without invoking consciousness?”3

    The implications of this concept are astounding! If the zero-dimensional point is all that exists, and if it “decides” to “extend itself” and become the universe, by the rules of quantum physics it can’t be anything but Consciousness itself! Some might be tempted to define this Primordial Awareness as “God,” but let’s not, since Scientism insists (regardless of the implications of quantum theory), that the concept of “God” is unnecessary to explain the Cosmos. (Whether you regard this as a non sequitur or not depends on which belief system you use to define your illusions.)

    Anyway, the rules of dimensional extension tell us that movement in any direction from a point is perpendicular, so one dimension (a line) is created if the point moves at all. Should it turn from there, two dimensional space is defined; and of course all it has to do next is make one more right- angle turn and we have three spatial dimensions. Should all of these movements happen simultaneously, we have a passable description of an explosion:

    “The evidence suggests that the Universe was born out of a singularity – a point of infinite density occupying zero volume – and that in the first split second the tiny seed containing all the mass and energy in the observable Universe went through a period of exponential expansion, known as inflation.”4

    This “inflation” is the Big Bang that became our universe – a point of infinite density occupying zero volume (a mind-numbing concept!) “explodes,” creating space, time, matter, energy, and anything else we haven’t discovered yet. Unfortunately, when most people imagine the Big Bang they visualise it as a three-dimensional event, forgetting that all other possible dimensions must also be factored into the equation. Which is to say: the primordial point explodes (the Big Bang), but because this is a multi-dimensional affair, it is also imploding (the Big Whimper, perhaps), creating all of multidimensional space in one event. If our point is indeed conscious, as quantum theory demands, it follows that consciousness is a priori to any and all phenomena, and anything created by it is by definition part of it: hence everything that exists is in some way conscious, just as the Theosophists tell us. (More about them later.)

    Our point’s simultaneous explosion/implosion would create a bare minimum of six spatial dimensions: three of space and three of hyperspace, and certainly many more than that. What would they look like “objectively?” Wouldn’t dimensions created out of Consciousness have to be “Mind Stuff” – perhaps a Super Collective Unconscious at least as infinite as the physical universe? Out-of-body shamans do indeed describe Locale-II (hyperspace; see previous parts of this article) as a kind of Supermind, a realm where thought (consciousness) creates mass and energy out of itself:

    “Superseding all appears to be one prime law. Locale-II is a state of being where that which we label thought is the wellspring of existence. It is the vital creative force that produces energy, assembles ‘matter’ into form, and provides channels of perception and communication. I suspect that the very self or soul in Locale-II is no more than an organized vortex or warp in this fundamental. As you think, so you are.”5

    This empirical out-of-body observation is echoed in quantum theory, which of course is based upon solid, self-consistent, repeatable, scientific experimentation:

    “To the naive realist the universe is a collection of objects. To the quantum physicist it is an inseparable web of vibrating energy patterns in which no one component has reality independently of the entirety; and included in the entirety is the observer… In the absence of an observation a quantum system will evolve in a certain way. When an observation is made, an entirely different type of change occurs. Just what produces this different behavior is not clear, but at least some physicists insist that it is explicitly caused by the mind itself.”6

    Physicists describe matter at the subatomic level as a “wave function,” and tell us that it is more “idea-like” (i.e. related to awareness) than it is “matter-like.” In fact, at the subatomic level, there is no substantive physical world at all – it’s just a vibrating dance of energy, or Consciousness, which must in some sense be the same thing! We can deduce this as follows:

    Einstein’s famous E = MC squared equation demonstrates that matter and energy are two versions of a single phenomenon. Unfortunately, Einstein left himself (as observer) out of his equation. It might more accurately be written as: E = MC squared, divided by X – “X” symbolising consciousness (i.e., an observer) which is demanded by quantum theory for anything to exist. If this is at all accurate (and the implications of quantum physics seem to require it), then the lowest common denominator to which reality can be reduced is Consciousness itself.

    If Consciousness (what else?) created an infinity of four-dimensional space-time “bubble” universes, each of which is perpendicular to (i.e. “perceived by”) that Consciousness, then Consciousness has to be the “Super-Space” surrounding and permeating them all. Since time and consciousness can’t be separated from each other without logical absurdity, time could be thought of as a one-dimensional function of Consciousness projected into three-dimensional space. (Thus, the four-dimensional space-time continuum, since without duration, space would be, if not unperceivable, at least very boring.)

    This time-consciousness interface is what sets space “in motion” and is the only way a differentiated point-of-view can experience dimensional reality. Outside of the dimensional bubble-universes (i.e. in the superspatial realm of Consciousness-without-an-object), time does not exist, a fact attested to by psychonauts and mystics since “time out of mind.” (Pun intended.)

    Each differentiated point is a potential “free agent” which may be arbitrarily assigned to any position in any dimension. Being conscious, they become attitudes or points-of-view within multidimensional space (“God’s observers,” if you will). Your individual human consciousness is essentially the interface of a point-singularity (“you”), linking our particular spacetime bubble with Super-Space, or perhaps more accurately, the Objective Psyche: which is Jung’s revised, much better, label for the “Collective Unconscious.”

    “What Jung calls the objective psyche may then be likened to an encompassing energy stratum from which arise varying field activities discernable to the experienced observer through the patterning of image, emotion and drive configurations. These psychic field expressions Jung has called complexes and archetypes of the objective psyche… The objective psyche exists independently of the ego, but can be experienced and comprehended to a limited extent by the ego.”7

    These complexes and archetypes within the Objective Psyche have traditionally been regarded as “gods,” but not as “God” (i.e., as the Objective Psyche per se). The difference between you (or any other differentiated point-of-view) and the Objective Psyche, as such, is the difference between man and “God.” The purpose of our incarnations as “points-of-view” is to return to the pool from which we emerged with full gnosis of where we’ve been and what we’ve done. (We’ll examine the traditions informing this concept in our next article.)

    Because our unconscious mind is a two-way wormhole connecting subjective perception with the infinite realms of the Objective Psyche, it is not uncommon for profound insights to emerge from those dimensions into human awareness – often before their time. Figure 1 is taken from Rene Descartes’ posthumous 1667 work, Traite de l’Homme, which illustrates his theory of perception. He regarded the pineal gland as the “gateway to the soul,” and in this drawing he hypothesises how visual perception is concentrated therein. Most of Descartes’ theories have been disproved by modern research, but his fundamental intuition in this case is still valid. All that is missing is the concept of the DMT-synthesising pineal gland (discussed in our last article) as a singularity linking spacetime awareness with the Objective Psyche to complete the hypothesis being proposed here.

    And I hope my hypothesis is beginning to make sense: Since we experience ourselves as a conscious centre (a “point”) inhabiting a physical body, which perceives itself as part of a three-dimensional “outside” reality, it is obvious that all external sensory input is perpendicular to our subjective awareness. Which, if you follow the right-angle rule, is to say that consciousness itself must be in some sense dimensional! The only direction of escape in Koan-1, then is within. The only place that the radiation from the XYZ-123 galaxy can go after entering the black-holes of your eyes is inside. This mandates that both Locale-I and Locale-II are inner dimensions which to varying degrees mirror our familiar, externalised space-time. We have the empirical testimony of out-of-body explorer William Buhlman that this is so:

    “For two years I had believed that I was moving laterally from one area to another within the same dimension, but now the startling truth was apparent. I was not moving laterally but inwardly within the universe from one energy environment to another.”8

    Buhlman goes on to describe what can only be a kind of singularity of consciousness imploding into itself, into a dimension of many dimensions. Here he is, out-of-body, in the Locale-I version of his bedroom, about to enter a typical Locale-II environment, perhaps one of Robert Monroe’s “upper rings”:

    “Feeling centered, I stand at the foot of my bed and say aloud, ‘I move inward.’ I feel an immediate sensation of rapid inner motion – I’m being drawn into a vacuum deep within myself. The sensation of motion is so intense that I shout ‘Stop!’ Instantly I stop moving and realize that I’m in a new environment. I am outdoors in a beautiful parklike setting.”9

    Although admittedly rare, this perception is neither new nor unique. The Tibetan Book of the Dead tells us explicitly that all of the bardo realms are “inside of us”:

    “O nobly-born, these realms are not come from somewhere outside [thyself]. They come from within the four divisions of thy heart, which, including its center, make the five directions. They issue from within there, and shine upon thee. The deities, too, are not come from somewhere else: they exist from eternity within the faculties of thine own intellect.”10

    Although the idea that “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you” is a cliche familiar to everybody, when entertained at all, it is usually understood metaphorically. Seldom do we perceive “inside” literally: as a real, honest-to-god dimension of reality. Here’s another version of this ancient idea from the Vedic tradition of India:

    “The seat for the Gods is indeed within, in the inner being which is wider and far greater and subtler and supple and enlightened and distinguished from the physical being.”11

    Come on! Gimmie a break! (The logical mind wants to know how a vessel can be smaller than its contents.) Although an impossibility in any three-dimensional context, four-dimensional space is obviously not bound by such provincial illusions. Actually, instead of an absurdity to be dismissed out of hand, initiated awareness recognises immediately that it is dealing with a legitimate dimensional interface when such “impossibilities” are depicted. For example, it is not at all uncommon for UFO abductees to describe the inside of the spacecraft as much larger than the outside:

    “As strange as it sounds, this bigger-on-the-inside-than-out impression is exactly what a three dimensional creature like… any one of us might expect to experience when confronted with a four dimensional space. An analysis of the geometry by Stan Kulikowski in the MUFON UFO Journal concluded: ‘Whether this inside-too-big phenomenon is actual alien technology or deliberate fraud or a subconscious psychological trick of perception, it is nevertheless based on good mathematics and related to the fundamental physics of our universe’.”12

    All of the confusion surrounding OOBEs (Out-Of-Body Experiences), NDEs (Near-Death Experiences), alien abductions (and life itself, for that matter), is directly attributable to the difficulty that a consciousness hypnotised by three dimensions has in perceiving “beyond” that illusion. Thus, we project these spaces “outside” of ourselves, and regard our bodies as “vessels” which must be “gotten out of” in order to “ascend” to “higher” realms. (Notice that we can’t even discuss the subject without using three-dimensional, “external” concepts.)

    Because the imploded dimensions are generally believed to be difficult to visualise, authentic mystical (i.e. hyperdimensional) awareness is greatly handicapped in its attempt to translate what it experiences into terms that three-dimensional chauvinists can understand. Here’s another description of this interior reality from the Chandogya Upanishad. Note that it describes the “heart” as the centre of awareness. That could be poetic license – the pineal gland might make a better candidate:

    “As large as the universe outside, even so large is the universe within the lotus of the heart. Within it are heaven and earth, the sun, the moon, the lightning, and all the stars. What is in the macrocosm is in this microcosm.”13

    This is an unambiguous description of consciousness as four-dimensional space! If we superimpose our observation of the hypothetical XYZ-123 galaxy onto this picture, we have photons imploding from spacetime into mindspace: inner and outer galaxies connecting, interacting and evolving within the matrix of Consciousness itself. Since we know that the pineal gland (a singularity within the human brain) is associated with out-of-body perception, it’s a fair hypothesis that some kind of eye-pineal connection constitutes the focal “point” linking these two realms. “External” images implode into our “eye-pupil-wormholes” to instantly explode via the pineal singularity into interior dimensions of infinite Mind Stuff.

    “The eye is [the Self’s] dwelling place while we wake, the mind [pineal gland?] is his dwelling place while we dream, the lotus of the heart is his dwelling place while we sleep the dreamless sleep.”14

    I won’t quarrel about where the pineal gland fits into the above scheme, because if Descartes is correct in his intuition, the pineal is the dimensional aperture that processes sensory input from everywhere in the body. In connection with this, it is highly significant that theorists studying our spacetime universe postulate the existence of tunnels, tubes, or wormholes, yoking the dimensions together (see Figure 2).

    “Cosmologists have even proposed the startling possibility that our universe is just one among an infinite number of parallel universes. These universes might be compared to a vast collection of soap bubbles suspended in air. Normally, contact between these bubble universes is impossible, but, by analyzing Einstein’s equations, cosmologists have shown that there might exist a web of wormholes, or tubes, that connect these parallel universes… The Einstein-Rosen bridge acts like a tunnel connecting two regions of space-time; it is a wormhole.”15

    By now it shouldn’t surprise us that the experience of passing through a “tunnel” is one of the most universally reported characteristics of out-of-body travel. Later in his career, Robert Monroe founded The Monroe Institute, a non-profit corporation, to scientifically study and induce the out-of-body experience in a wide-range of subjects. Here’s one of the first things he found:

    “As the induction of the OOBE state was examined further, one key element did repeat consistently… In slow motion it ‘felt as if one were going through a tunnel to get to the light,’ a classic description that has been brought forth by many who performed the OOBE inadvertently or in a near-death situation.”16

    “Classical description,” indeed! Can there be any doubt that the following accounts are portrayals of interior-dimensional “wormhole-analogs” which mirror their spacetime counterparts? Here is Oliver Fox, describing a visit to some indeterminate realm in Locale-II:

    “And now it seemed to me there was a sort of hole or break formed in the continuity of the astral matter; and through this, in the distance – as though viewed through a very long tunnel – I could see something indistinct which might have been the entrance to a temple, with a statue still further away showing through it… I was falling, with seemingly tremendous velocity, down a dark, narrow tunnel or shaft.”17

    Subjects undergoing a DMT-induced out-of-body experience commonly describe an identical phenomenon. (DMT: N,N-dimethyltriptamine, a product of pineal synthesis, was discussed in the previous article of this series):

    “First I saw a tunnel or channel of light off to the right. I had to turn to go into it. Then the whole process repeated on the left. It was intentional that way. It was as if it had a source, further away. It got bigger farther away, like a funnel. It was bright and pulsating… I had a sense of great speed. Everything was unimportant relative to this. Things were flashing, flashing by, as if from a different perspective. It was so much more real than life. The left and right tunnels joined in front of me.”18

    Dr. John Mack, in his study of the UFO Abduction Syndrome, also describes the tunnel as a common experience among his abductee-informants. These are apparently inter-dimensional doorways through which the Aliens both enter our space and convey their victims into hyperspace.

    “A forty-one year old health care executive spoke to me of large tubes through which he passed during one of his abductions ‘into the next plane where there was this light’… Catherine [another abductee]… also spoke of a tube or tunnel through which she and others passed from a spirit plane outside space/time back to the embodied physical state on earth.”19

    Then of course, there is the Near-Death Experience (NDE) as described by Dr. Raymond Moody, the pioneer investigator of this unique form of out-of-body projection. In fact, the “tunnel phenomenon” is so ubiquitous that he lists it as one of fifteen symptoms considered definitive of an NDE.

    “Often concurrently with the occurrence of the noise, people have the sensation of being pulled very rapidly through a dark space of some kind. Many different words are used to describe this space. I have heard the space described as a cave, a well, a trough, an enclosure, a tunnel, a funnel, a vacuum, a void, a sewer, a valley, and a cylinder. Although people use different terminology here, it is clear that they are all trying to express some one idea.”20

    In a later article we will examine the phenomenon of “Remote Viewing,” a tactic used by both United States and Soviet intelligence agencies to spy on each other during the Cold War. We will then determine if these specially-trained psychics were actually “out-of-body” travellers in the classical sense of the term as we’ve defined it so far, but for now it is instructive to examine some representative descriptions of Remote Viewing in light of the tunnel phenomenon under discussion. Here are some excerpts from the remote viewings of Captain David Morehouse:

    “My phantom body fell through the tunnel of light again… I began plummeting down the tunnel of light… I made the long fall down the tube of light and passed through the membrane into the target area… The fall through the tunnel seemed longer this time and I never hit the membrane at all… I found myself falling into a tunnel of light and passing into another world.”21

    Here is a description by Captain F. Holmes Atwater, the Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) officer who founded the US Army’s Remote Viewing unit at Fort Meade, Maryland. (As described in his book, this particular event was almost certainly a classic “astral projection” OOBE):

    “My kinesthetic sense of motion (like the feeling you get when flying in an airplane) was accompanied by a strange visual perception. I seemed to be moving through a white tube or tunnel, its walls lined with crystalline forms.”22

    And finally, here is another observance by William Buhlman, the out-of-body explorer who (even more than Robert Monroe), defined his experiences within the context of modern quantum theory:

    “The tunnel experience is much more significant than most people recognize. Not only does it provide substantial evidence of a logical transitional method for consciousness after physical death, but it directly relates to the modern physics theories concerning parallel universes and energy wormholes, as well as to my observations concerning the multidimensional universe.”23

    Yeah, but what about Locale-I (the Sidpa Bardo), which Monroe describes as our own familiar world, though perceived while out-of-body? How could that be regarded as an “inside” dimension?

    Imagine consciousness as a dimensional “double mirror” with back-to-back reflective surfaces: one facing outward to space-time, the other facing inward to hyperspace. The evidence suggests that when someone goes “out-of-body” into Locale-I, they are not actually interfacing with the physical world that we touch when “in-body,” but with the “etheric double” of the physical world on the other side of the mirror. (Technically, of course, we’re not going “out-of-body” at all, but “in-our-body,” but for now at least, let’s not complicate the nomenclature.) Here’s Buhlman again:

    “Slowly I came to understand that the environment I was observing was not the physical world, as I had assumed. I realized that the structures I normally observed when out-of-body were nonphysical structures… Now I finally understood why there were slight variations between the nonphysical and physical furniture and other objects. For example, the nonphysical walls were often a different color, and the shapes and styles of some of the furniture and rugs were different. Much of this was minor but nevertheless noticeable… It appears that we are not observing the physical world from a different perspective, as many believe, but are interacting in a separate but parallel dimension of energy.”24

    In the spring of 1902, Oliver Fox had his first out-of-body experience when his consciousness “woke up” within what he called a “dream of knowledge,” but what would today be labelled a lucid dream. It was an anomaly such as Buhlman describes above that shifted his awareness from semi-conscious dreaming to conscious perception of Locale-I:

    “I dreamed that I was standing on the pavement outside my home… Now the pavement was not of the ordinary type, but consisted of small, bluish-grey rectangular stones, with their long sides at right-angles to the white kerb. I was about to enter the house when, on glancing casually at these stones, my attention became riveted by a passing strange phenomenon, so extraordinary that I could not believe my eyes – they had seemingly all changed their position in the night, and the long sides were now parallel to the kerb! Then the solution flashed upon me: though this glorious summer morning seemed as real as real could be, I was dreaming!”25

    If Locale-I is the other side of our spacetime looking glass, then further extension of consciousness into Locale-II with its hierarchies of astral and mental matter is even more difficult to visualise except perhaps as a funhouse hallway of imploding-exploding, wormhole mirrors. For the sake of comprehension it is not improper to retain familiar three-dimensional terminology (e.g., “rings,” “planes,” etc.) as long as we remember that it is probably only accurate in a metaphorical sense. Since OOBE explorers perceive these other realms in “external” three-dimensional terms we can assume that any inner differentiated realm appears to awareness as a three-dimensional construct.

    What seems clear is that the out-of-body experience is the projection of a subjective observer into the Objective Psyche: mind imploding into Mind. The perpendicular rule of dimensional progression mandates that realms numerically “higher” than the observer are always perceived as “inside” – which is to say, related to “Consciousness” rather than to “matter” (whatever that is). This explains why entities existing in numerically higher dimensions can always observe those in numerically lower realms, though normally not the other way around – unless the observer is “out-of-body.”

    For example, we could easily contemplate two-dimensional beings dwelling in a plane. (Imagine flat creatures moving back and forth within a sheet of cellophane.) To them, however (if they became aware of us at all), we would seem to be “supernatural” entities appearing magically within their midst. (Touch the sheet with your finger: they’d regard it as the sudden apparition of a mystery out of “nowhere.” Remember, our concept of “above” can only be comprehended by them as “within.”)

    If this rule holds, we can hypothesise with reasonable certainty that dwellers in numerically higher dimensions are normally experienced by dimensionally lower entities as inner ephemera: as voices in the head, spirit guides, channelled entities, and so-forth. (The possible exceptions would be temporary fourth-dimensional “holographic inserts” or “shamanic projections” into three-dimensional space – such as UFOs, apparitions, ghosts, etc.)

    Although seemingly ghost-like or discarnate to us, there is no reason to believe that these ephemeral beings don’t experience themselves as anything but “physical” within their own space. Since quantum physics tells us that our own seemingly solid reality is actually energetic or “idea-like,” it should come as no surprise that the higher dimensions must also be experienced by their inhabitants as “physical.” That means that what we regard as “thought” is perceived as “matter” in the higher dimensions.

    As Robert Monroe and other out-of-body explorers have attested, the “non-material” realms have an ascending order of abstraction which can be divided into an indeterminate number of levels, planes, rings, spheres, or bubbles. Those closest to our physical Earth are most like Earth: those further removed fade off into zones so ethereal that they become almost impossible to portray. Denizens of the nearest realms are described as experiencing their environments pretty much the same way that we experience our physical space-time dimension – some are even said to believe that theirs is the only reality: for them, Earth cannot exist.

    When we read the monotonously repetitive data on UFO abductions – how abductees are routinely transported through solid walls, beamed into spaceships, communicate telepathically with aliens, etc., we have to ponder what kinds of dimensional interfaces must be involved. Almost all serious researchers are now in substantial agreement that the UFO phenomenon is transdimensional in nature, though how higher-dimensional entities can “physically” introject themselves into three dimensional space remains maddeningly unresolved.

    “I believe that the UFO phenomenon represents evidence for other dimensions beyond spacetime; the UFOs may not come from ordinary space, but from a multiverse which is all around us, and of which we have stubbornly refused to consider the disturbing reality in spite of the evidence available to us for centuries… The UFOs are physical manifestations that simply cannot be understood apart from their psychic and symbolic reality. What we see here is not an alien invasion. It is a spiritual system that acts on humans and uses humans… They are part of the environment, part of the control system for human evolution. But their effects, instead of being just physical, are also felt in our beliefs. They influence what we call our spiritual life. They affect our politics, our history, our culture.”26

    Everything we have examined so far suggests that these intruders from a fourth-spatial-dimension constitute the “angels, devils, fairies and elves” who’ve been interfacing with humankind since the dawn of time. The fact that they accommodate themselves to prevailing cultural illusions tells us immediately that (just like us), they are Ideas (spirits, points-of-view) evolving on some frequency within the Objective Psyche. They and we may even be co-creations – when fairies fade from credence in spacetime, the ideas they represent morph into space aliens to keep pace with current belief systems. Who creates whom?

    By now it should be clear that the out-of-body experience (including its near-death variant) and the UFO Abduction Syndrome are but two linked components of a larger underlying reality, the structure of which is quite “alien” to anything granted by general cultural consensus. We are now ready to examine these concepts as they are described by the “traditional counter-culture” – that ancient body of wisdom comprising what is known as the Perennial Philosophy. This will be covered in the next instalment of this series.
    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 74.[/alert]

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    Recommended Reading:

    Ultimate Journey by Robert Monroe, Perils of the Soul by John Haule.

    Footnotes:

    1. Gribben, John, “Is The Universe Alive?,” Whole Earth Review, No. 84, Winter 1994, Pg 31-33
    2. Davies, Paul (1982). The Edge of Infinity, Touchstone (Simon and Schuster), NY, Pg 87
    3. Davies, Paul (1980). Other Worlds, Simon & Schuster, NY, Pg 135
    4. Gribben, op. cit.
    5. Monroe, Robert A. (1977). Journeys Out Of The Body, Anchor Press/Doubleday, Garden City, NY, Pg 74
    6. Davies, Paul (1984). Superforce, Simon & Schuster, NY, Pg 49
    7. Whitmont, Edward C. (1969, 1978). The Symbolic Quest, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, Pg 42
    8. Buhlman, William (1996), Adventures Beyond the Body, Harper SanFrancisco, Pg 30
    9. Ibid, Pg 31
    10. Evans-Wentz, W.Y. (1960). The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Oxford University Press, NY, Pg 121
    11. Pandit, M.P. (1970). Aditi and Other Deities in the Veda, Dipti Publications, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry- 2, India, Pg 23
    12. Stacy, D. and Huyghe, P. (2000). The Field Guide to UFOS, Harper-Collins, NY, Pg 145
    13. Prabhavananda/Manchester translation (1948, 1957). The Upanishads, Breath of the Eternal, Mentor Books, NY, Pg 74
    14. Ibid, Aitareya Upanishad, Pg 62
    15. Kaku, Michio (1994). Hyperspace, Oxford University Press, Oxford, Pg x., 226
    16. Monroe, Robert A. (1985). Far Journeys. Doubleday, NY, Pg 19
    17. Fox, Oliver (1962). Astral Projection: A Record of Out- of-the-Body Experiences, University Books, New Hyde Park, NY, Pg 98, 106
    18. Subject, “Willow,” in: Strassman, Rick, M.D., (2001). DMT, The Spirit Molecule, Park Street Press, Rochester, VT, Pg 224-5
    19. Mack, John E., M.D. (1994), Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, Chas. Scribner’s Sons, NY, Pg 419
    20. Moody, R. A. (1976), Life After Life, Bantam, NY, Pg 29
    21. Moorehouse, David (1996), Psychic Warrior, St. Martin’s Press, NY, Pgs 139, 142, 150, 162, 201
    22. Atwater, F. Holmes (2001). Captain of my Ship, Master of my Soul, Hampton Roads Publishing Co., Charlottesville, VA, Pg 8
    23. Buhlman, op. cit., Pg 87
    24. Ibid, Pg 16, 18
    25. Fox, op. cit., Pg 33
    26. Jacques Vallee – “Excerpts from Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact,” ReVison, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Spring 1989), Pg 39, passim.

    Bibliography:

    Rucker, Rudy (1984). The Fourth Dimension, Houghton Mifflin
    Zukav, Gary (1979). The Dancing Wu Li Masters, Morrow, NY

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