by John A. Keel
1971
from IFile Website
|
Theories about "ultraterrestrials,"
Men In Black,
glass mountains,
ancient maps,
and advanced
civilizations predating the caveman.
Are we being
manipulated for someone's amusement? |
CONTENTS
PART ONE
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Chapter One: 'You Can't Get There From Here'
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Chapter Two: The Continent That Vanished
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Chapter Three: If's a
Nice Place To Visit But…
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Chapter Four: Towers of
Glass and Theories of Putty
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Chapter Five: Strong Men and Stupid Enterprises
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Chapter Six:
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Extinction
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Chapter Seven:
Scientists in Collision
PART TWO
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Chapter Eight; Mimics
of Man
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Chapter Nine: Men-in-Black Lore and the CIA
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Chapter Ten: Rendezvous with the Damned
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Chapter Eleven: Not
One of Them, etc...
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Chapter Twelve: The
Demise of the Gods
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Chapter Thirteen:
Secret of the Ages
PART THREE
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Chapter Fourteen:
'Hello, Central - Give me Ganymede'
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Chapter Fifteen:
Where Is Everybody Going?
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Chapter Sixteen: The
Revolution of The Mind
INTRODUCTION
In September 1953,1 spent right
hours inside the Great Pyramid in Egypt producing a radio
program which was aired throughout Europe over the American
Forces Network (AFN) the following month.
Egypt so impressed me, and
archaeology so fascinated me, that I returned to Cairo the next
year and lived there for several months, wading through the
musty libraries and museums, prowling the desert, and visiting
the ancient tombs. During a trek to Aswan and the Upper Nile I
saw my first flying saucer, a metallic looking disk, with a
rotating outer rim, which hovered for several minutes above the
Aswan Dam in broad daylight.
I had written and produced a radio
documentary, Things in the Sky, in 1952, and my earlier
researches into unidentified flying objects had already
convinced me that such things not only existed, but that they
had been present in our skies since the dawn of man.
Eventually my travels took me to Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and a
thousand places in between. I walked among the ancient ruins and
puzzled over man's illustrious but forgotten past. In India I
wandered alone into the Himalayas and crossed the border of
Tibet (which has since been sealed by the Chinese).
As I travelled, I interviewed
archaeologists, historians, and assorted experts and Spent
endless hours in remote libraries poring over rare old books. I
was puzzled at first to discover that none of the leading
authorities seemed to agree on anything. Indeed, a large part of
the scientific literature is devoted to theorization and
incredibly vicious attacks on the theories of other theorists.
Most perplexing of all was the fact
that some of the literature about the ruins I had visited
smacked of pure fiction, because the authors had not visited the
sites but laboured instead to couple fictitious theories with
dubious facts. This led, of course, to conclusions that bordered
on the imbecilic.
An offshoot of this process is, understandably enough, an
enormous quantity of crank literature created by unqualified
researchers who attempted to interpret the scientific material
in their own ways. In many areas of the less popular sciences
the crank material outweighs the scientific because few if any
scientists have tackled those subjects. So 98 per cent of all
the available literature on Atlantis,
flying saucers, Tibet, and prehistoric ruins falls into the
crank category. The task of setting all this out and developing
a valid synthesis is a formidable one - one which! have
undertaken with great trepidation.
In his book, In the Name of Science, Martin Gardner defines the
characteristics of the common crank or pseudoscientist.
He lists
the four chief attributes as being:
(1) The crank considers himself
a genius… even a towering genius who is years ahead of
hi&time
(2) He considers his colleagues
and fellow researchers 'ignorant blockheads', largely
because they fail to recognize his genius. He assaults his
opponents by impugnation, questioning their honesty,
intelligence, and motives. They respond in kind, naturally,
and so great storms are whipped up in the trivial teacups of
the scientific and pseudoscientific journals. Controversy is
the lifeblood of crankism
(3) The pseudoscientist is
paranoid and feels he is the victim of a vast conspiracy
designed to suppress his brilliant work. In many instances
these imagined conspiracies become a vital part of the
subject itself, as for example, the endless literature
discussing how the U.S. Air Force has been keeping the truth
about flying saucers from the public
(4) The crank delights in
focusing his attacks 'on the greatest scientists and the
best-established theories'. He goes after big game. He is
wiser than Einstein, knows more about astronomy than Fred
Hoyle, and is better informed about the moon than Neil
Armstrong.
The crank also invents his own
terminology: a jabberwocky understood only by him and his
closest allies. So, we find the literature filled with confusing
and complicated terms which are merely displays of
pseudo-erudition, or what psychiatrists call neologisms.
Over the years I have met the leaders of many peculiar cults and
pseudoscientific factions of belief. With very few exceptions,
they have all lived up to the above criteria. Most were friendly
and cooperative with me until they realized that I did not share
their beliefs in Atlantis or visitors from Andromeda.
Then they turned on me with wrathful
vengeance and launched such campaigns of unfounded slander that
I could only be amazed and amused. I have now been accused of
being everything from a Communist con man to a secret agent for
the Central Intelligence Agency; from a religious fanatic (I'm a
lifelong agnostic) to a pawn of the devil. Typographical errors,
over which I have no control, in my many articles and books have
been lovingly dissected by these groups and prompted countless
letters and essays reviewing their sinister implications.
After twenty-five years as a writer
and reporter dedicated
to collecting the facts as objectively and as honestly as
possible, my integrity has been attacked from all angles.
For these reasons this book is written in a style which
discusses known facts with the popular and unpopular beliefs
they have inspired. I am not supporting any of these beliefs, I
am merely discussing them. It may be that the great
civilizations of Atlantis and Lemuria once actually flourished
on this planet In this book I am only weighing the evidence pro
and coo.
It may be that little green men from
Mars really are visiting housewives in Nebraska. I am only
reporting the claims of the housewives, not trying to prove that
Martians are really dropping in. The believers in Atlantis will
undoubtedly hate me. The believers in Martians already despise
me.
Parts of this book are so obviously tongue-in-cheek that it
shouldn't be necessary to mention it. Yet I know from bitter
experience that some of my humorous comments will be taken
seriously and will prompt new venom. I am not attacking any
specific individuals or cults. I am attacking man's abysmal
ignorance and his impassioned effort to hide that ignorance from
himself.
I have seen a large part of this
world and its mysteries. Wonder and curiosity have always been
an integral part of my life. I am only trying to share that
wonder with the reader.
This book is based upon countless interviews, endless
correspondence, many in-depth personal investigations, and
hundreds of books covering everything from alchemy to zoology.
Wherever possible, I have tried to include key source references
for the benefit of those readers who might be interested in
pursuing some of these matters further. It has been impossible,
however, to list all my sources.
Some of the books used in my
research were privately published and are quite rare.
[But even some of these can be
obtained through Gray Barker, Box 2228, Clarksburg, West
Virginia 26301; and Health Research, 70 Lafayette Street,
Mokelumne Hill, CaK-fornia 95245.]
Although unidentified flying objects are mentioned frequently in
these pages, the UFO controversy is not the main theme. Some of
the major UFO cases discussed are drawn from reports which
appeared originally in England's Ftying Saucer Review, the only
truly scientific publication devoted to the subject. [Queries
should be -directed to Flying Saucer Review, 49a Kings Grove,
London SE15, England.]
I do not pretend to know any answers. After a lifetime of travel
and study I am still learning the questions. This is a journey
into man's past and the curious manifestations which have always
surrounded Mm and which have directed the human race upwards
from
the caves to the moon itself. It is a Journey into a jungle of
myth, legend, and belief, and hopefully, it is another small
step towards the larger truth that man has always sought but
never really found.
John A. Keel
PART ONE
Archaeology is not a
science, it's a vendetta.
MORTIMER
WHEELER
CHAPTER ONE
'YOU CANT GET
THERE FROM HERE'
While hairy, beetled-browed cavemen were labouring to invent fire
and the wheel, there already existed on this planet a highly
developed civilization of intelligent beings, they built massive
cities of stone, many of which are still standing.
They methodically constructed giant
mounds of earth all over this planet for some purpose which still
escapes us. They scattered peculiar artifacts of stone and metal
across every continent, and they sailed every ocean, mapping the
entire globe systematically.
Then they vanished.
Cavemen inherited the earth. They regarded the ancient cities as
sacred places. As the centuries ticked off, they became conscious of
other life forms around them. Life forms that seemed to possess die
power of invisibility, of life and death itself. They invented names
for these forms. They worshipped them. They recorded the
manifestations of that invisible world in myths and legends handed
down from generation to generation.
Eventually they perfected sciences
.based upon their observations of those manifestations. In time
those sciences developed new myths. The original owners of the
earth, the builders of those great cities, were forgotten. But as
men spread across the face of the planet, the traces of those lost
Elders were rediscovered Man's newfangled sciences couldn't fit such
traces into their new concepts, however, so the evidence was
ignored.
As a result, the earth has two
histories: the history taught in our colleges and schools, and the
real but ignored history of a very ancient people and of strange
forces which have often supervised human events.
Ten thousand years ago that unknown civilization carefully mapped
the entire surface of the globe. Their maps were copied and recopied
and passed along from one age to the next. Finally, copies of them
were rediscovered by Capt. Arlington H. Mallery in, of all
places, the library of Congress. Known as the Pin Re'is maps, they
were originally found among the relics in the former imperial palace
of the Sultan of Constantinople in 1929. Eventually they ended up in
the archives in Washington DC.
At first glance these maps which are
dated a.d. 1513, appear to be nothing more than a hopelessly garbled
view of the ancient world. No one paid much attention to them until
Captain Mallery came along. Working with the U.S. Hydrographic
Office and the Weston Observatory of Boston, he developed a grid
system which suddenly brought the maps into focus. The modern
Mercator grid system was not invented until 1559, so the ancient
surveyors had to develop a method of their own. Once Mallery had
unscrambled that method, he could hardly believe the results.
These maps were incredibly detailed and as accurate as the latest
charts. Antarctica, for example, was not discovered until Captain
Cook reached it in 1773, and it was not fully explored until the
1950s. But the frozen continent is laid out with almost pinpoint
accuracy on the Pi'ri Re'is maps, including mountain ranges that
were not even known to us until 19521
Even more astonishing, these maps outline glaciers and land areas
which are known to have existed in the Ice Age… before the last
great shift of the earth's crust an estimated ten thousand years
ago. This fact led Mallery to conclude that the, original on which
the
Piri Re'is maps were apparently
based had to have been drawn before the Ice Age.
Professor Charles Hapgood, a science historian, heard of
Mallery's work and turned the maps into a class study project at
Keene State College. His students painstakingly compared each detail
with modern charts and found that the ancient maps were never more
than five degrees off… and those errors were probably due to land
movements that occurred after the originals were drawn.
Many of the details of the early maps
correlated precisely with modern surveys. The results of Hapgood's
studies, together with full-color reproductions of the maps, were
published in a book titled Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings,
Modem scientists can't seem to agree on the age of mankind. Each
year produces a new bit of bone and new controversy. Some claim man
might be half a million years old. Others offer more conservative
estimates ranging between thirty to seventy thousand years. But all
seem to share the notion that our ancestors were embarrassingly
primitive ten thousand years ago. They certainly were not developed
enough to sail and chart the earth.
It would have been impossible for anyone to contrive the maps in
1929, the year they were found in Constantinople, It would have been
even more impossible for someone to hoax them in 1513. And it is
downright ridiculous to think that someone could have surveyed the
earth before the Ice Age. Modern scientists have a very scientific
method for coping with such humiliating discoveries. They put them
in the basements of their museums and forget them.
The museums are filled with such erratic, as they are called. A cube
of metal, carefully machined, notched, and rounded on one side, was
found in the centre of a block of coal in Austria in 1885. It's
still in a museum in Salzburg and no one has ever come up with an
explanation for it. Basing their conclusions on the age of the coal
bed. various experts have estimated it to be three hundred thousand
years old.
That makes it quite a bit younger than
the piece of gold thread that workmen found imbedded in eight feet
of rock at a quarry in Rutherford Mills, England. The London Times
announced the discovery on June 22nd. 1844… and the experts mumbled
that it had to be sixty million years old. Who could have dropped a
gold thread in England sixty million years ago? Or who could have
manufactured that iron and nickel cube three hundred thousand years
back?
Maybe these things were the handiwork of
the same people who ma^e the strange pieces of very ancient pottery
which have been found in rock quarries and coal mines around the
world along with steel nails, perfect glass lenses, and even -
believe it or not -bones of prehistoric animals with bullets in
them. Giant chains have been found imbedded in great rocks in both
North and South America.
Not merely imbedded but actually passing
through the rocks. They seem to predate the arrival of the Europeans
by thousands of years.
Electric batteries have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs. A huge
slab of perfect green glass weighing many tons was found in a cave
in Israel a few years ago. It ranks as the largest piece of glass
ever cast and is very ancient. Who made it, how, and why are still
unsolved mysteries.
Science tells us one thing: these artifacts put the lie to all the
scientific theories. Take man's earliest records - the cave
paintings. Scientists assert that the great saurians were extinct
long before man arrived on the scene. Yet cave paintings have been
found depicting dinosaurs. Other cliff carvings in the south-west
show men hurling weapons at gigantic creatures that look like
elephants or mammoths.
Captain Mallery created a stir when he first revealed his work with
the Piri Re'is maps on a broadcast from Georgetown University in
1956. He dared to suggest that the maps may have been the product of
an aerial survey. Professor Hapgood was more cautious, however, and
merely implied they were the work of some lost seafaring culture.
The aerial survey hypothesis would have necessarily
been dependent upon a highly advanced technological society. Not
only would flying machines have been required, but photography would
also be needed for such a survey. Did the Elders have cameras, too?
A mere forty-seven thousand years ago somebody carved an intriguing
picture on the side of the Hunan Mountains in China. A picture of
cylinders in the sky with strange beings standing on them. Russian
and Chinese archaeologists could date it. but they couldn't explain
it Nor could they explain the drawing they found carved in a cliff
at Fergana in Central Asia in 1961. A Reuters dispatch described it
as resembling a man wearing an 'airtight helmet' with some kind of
mechanical contraption on his back. It has been dated at 7000 b.c.
Other peculiar cave and cliff carvings
have been found in South America, Japan, and the Sahara Desert. Some
of these pictures show giants with round heads towering over
ordinary hunters. Others depict circular objects with, odd creatures
coming out of them. These drawings were apparent; attempts to record
highly unusual and significant events, but today they are open to
all kinds of interpretation and speculation.
Scattered throughout France there are many ancient caverns heavily
decorated with carvings and paintings dating back ten to thirty
thousand years. More than two thousand animals are depicted,
including 610 horses, 510 bison, 205 mammoths, and 176 ibex,
according to a study published by H. Breuil in 1952.
Alongside this impressive menagerie there are scores of other
designs which are far more mysterious. They show oval- and
disk-shaped objects some apparently standing on tripod legs with
ladders extending down from them. Archaeologists can't account for
them, but they look uneasily like the modern descriptions of flying
saucers.
The leading French authority, Aime
Michel, goes so far as to suggest that that is exactly what they
are.
Ancient records in China describe flying saucers and mysterious
lights in the sky. They were usually regarded as dragons, and the
early Chinese noted that these things flew regular routes year after
year, century after century. Other early manuscripts preserved in
India mention
vimanas, 'aerial cars", as if they
were commonplace.
Five thousand years ago a sage named
Mahaüshi Bharadwaj wrote a thorough description of these vimanas.
telling how they could move in all directions silently, cover vast
distances, and even become invisible. They were supposedly propelled
by 'tunes and rhythms'… perhaps a poetic way of describing the
humming and whirring of intricate and little-understood machinery.
In appearance they resembled the flying cones which have been
frequently described in the reports of modem UFO witnesses around
the globe.
Although this sort of evidence is superabundant, it has never been
systematically studied by trained scholars. Instead, this material
has fallen into, the hands of assorted cultists and students of
fringe pseudoscience. It has been used to advance belief in
everything from lost Atlantis to extraterrestrial visitants from
some distant planet.
To subscribe to any one of these
multitudinous beliefs is to exclude all other possibilities. We
should consider every possibility, avoid belief, and accept only the
hard facts.
Two key facts are already clear:
(1) There have always been
strange objects in the skies above this planet. They were
seen by early man and have been seen constantly ever since,
as the Bible and other available records still firmly attest
(2) Somebody mapped the earth
before the Ice Age. We have no way of knowing who they were
or how they did it. If the Piri Re'is maps were the product
of an aerial survey, then perhaps there was an advanced
civilization somewhere in the Americas or the Pacific,
removed from the random clusters of primitive men.
But occasionally the advanced culture
dropped in on the cavemen or at least flew overhead.
Thus, two cultures may have existed
simultaneously. One highly advanced and purposely aloof from the
other - the animal-like cave dwellers. It was inevitable that the
two cultures should occasionally cross and that the higher group
should affect the lower in many ways. At some point in early history
the higher culture was either destroyed by a monumental catastrophe
or withdrew in some fashion, leaving hardly a trace behind.
So, our entire record of that
superculture comes from the observations of primitive man. Our only
evidence is the flimsy overlapping that took place: the residue of
the effect of the superculture upon the subculture.
Primitive man was profoundly influenced by the superculture and
guided by it. There are even indications that members of the
super-culture actually appeared before primitive man and took over
as kings and god-kings to direct his early development Such
appearances helped to generate many of man's first religious
beliefs.
Some 2,500,000 people believe in the Book of Mormon, the Mormon
bible, which is purportedly a record of life in North America
thousands of years ago. As with all such records from all cultures
and all religions, there are frequent descriptions of events in
which some unknown benevolent group supplied man with direct help in
an hour of need.
For example, here is how a compass was
introduced, presumably, to those long forgotten North Americans:
And it came to pass that as my
father arose in the morning and went forth to the tent door, to
his great astonishment he beheld upon the ground a round ball of
curious workmanship; and it was of fine brass. And within the
ball were two spindles; and the one pointed the way whither we
should go into the wilderness.
(1 Nephi 16:10)
One of the most popular theories bandied
about in cultist circles is that man was seeded on this planet by
some inter-planetary group and that that group has kindly, but
remotely, observed and guided our progress ever since.
If this were true, they have been doing
a lousy Job in recent centuries. We need a lot more help than they
have been giving us.
In H. G. Wells' prophetic Things to Come there is a vision of a
world ravaged by war and divided into fierce tribes ruled by
warlords. A handful of surviving scientists and thinkers band
together and begin the task of restoring civilization by flying over
the planet. They call their organization Wings over the World (WOW).
Much of the UFO evidence suggests that a real WOW has always
existed. Maybe one of their members handed a caveman the first
flaming brand and the first wheel, just as some unknown party
allegedly deposited the first compass outside that Mormon tent.
A friend from WOW could have handed the original Piri Re'is map to
some ancient Egyptian. After him it may have passed from the library
at Alexandria to the palace in Constantinople. The key to the grid
system was lost, so the map became useless.
However, it is known that Christopher
Columbus did have some strange maps when he set out for his
short-cut to India.1
1 See Arlington H. Mallery.
Lost America.
It is easy to speculate and even easier to leap to mind-blowing
conclusions.
We must try instead to assemble the many
fragments of tantalizing evidence and attempt to construct the
whole. To do this, we must first recognize some very unpleasant
facts. We must admit Just how stupid we really are.
In recent months several different scientists attached to the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have issued
humble public statements admitting that our space program has
produced data which invalidates many of the most coveted conclusions
and beliefs of our learned astronomers. Ideas which have been
accepted as fact for many years have suddenly been proved completely
false.
The more we find out about the moon, the
less we know about it.
Space probes to Mars and Venus have
tossed innumerable astronomical theories into a cocked hat Recent
radar probes to the planet Mercury discovered that that planet is
actually rotating slowly on its axis, even though millions of school
children have been taught for generations that Mercury does not
rotate. Leading astronomers are now arguing over the status of
Jupiter. Some now suspect that it isn't a planet at all but is
really a cold star.
For the past two centuries astronomers have been peering through
telescopes, counting stars, and making mathematical calculations to
account for the motions and puckering they have observed. They hare
published and taught their learned conclusions as the gospel. Now we
know that they have been wrong in many key areas. Before the end of
this century all the textbooks will have to be scrapped.
All of the old ideas will be discarded.
"We used to think of the universe as
nothing more than abundant fields of stars arranged in
galaxies," Dr Frank Drake, Chairman of Cornell University's
astronomy department, said recently.
"But we underestimated the variety
and quantity of matter in space by a factor of about one
trillion. Which means that we were about as wrong as we could
be."
In the early 1960s deep-dished radio
telescopes discovered a maze of radio signals pouring in from outer
space.
At first there were wild speculations
that we had made contact with some superdeification in some other
galaxy. But further study discounted this fascinating notion.
Instead, it was found that interstellar space is filled with
invisible objects which don't emit light rays but which do give off
powerful radio waves. These things have been dubbed quasars and
pulsars. They constitute one rather trivial aspect of a broad and
complex phenomenon.
Our haunted planet has always been
bathed in mysterious electromagnetic propagation and radio waves,
some of them intelligent signals of unknown origin. We have been
aware of these signals ever since the invention of the radio
receiver, but we still can't account for them. All of this will be
discussed in depth in another chapter.
Just as those funny flying saucers seem to be an environmental
mystery which has always existed on this planet, it also seems that
the earth's atmosphere has always been charged with unidentified
radio signals - some of which seem to radiate from the planet
itself… as if the earth were beaming signals into space in response
to the signals being received. Of course, the cultists contend that
WOW has established secret transmitters in underground caverns.
Even gravity is a mystery. Newton discovered the hard way that if
you sit under an apple tree, you are apt to get hit on the head by a
falling apple. But we still don't know why. Recent experiments
indicate that gravity is really a slowly pulsing wave pouring across
space, beating about once per hour. The source of this wave and its
true nature are a puzzle. We thought we knew something about it
until our astronauts went into space and fumbled around in
weightlessness.
They found that even friction disappears
in space.
R. Buckminster Fuller, the great thinker and designer, has
said,
"Everything you've learned in school
as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study
the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe.
There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute
continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines."
Everything is up for grabs.
We don't know anything about the
universe or outer space. We have in all likelihood constructed a
totally false history of our own race. And most humiliating of all,
although we have lived on this planet for at least forty thousand
years, we really don't know much about it. Worse still, we haven't
even explored it!
Vast sections of this planet encompassing hundreds of thousands of
square miles have never been surveyed. There are enormous regions
that still have not been visited by a single scientifically trained
man.
Seasoned travellers are wearily familiar
with the problem of locating accurate maps. In many countries in
Africa, Asia, and South America detailed maps are simply
unobtainable because no surveys have ever been made. Those maps
which are available often have the rivers and mountains in the wrong
places. Here in the United States precisely detailed maps of many
areas just don't exist. There are blank spots in Maine and even in
New Jersey.
The average road map doled out by
service stations includes only the major highways and the larger
towns. Unincorporated villages - and they number in the thousands -
can't be found on any map anywhere. The regional maps distributed by
the Geological Survey in Washington are often based upon surveys
made in 1880 or 1920, so many of them are virtually useless.
New highways are being built so rapidly
that the average road map is two to five years behind.
Travelers to inland Brazil find themselves trying to cope with maps
based on sketches drawn by missionaries a hundred years ago.
Visitors to the Himalaya Mountains have to deal with maps drawn by
amateur cartographers and guesswork. Vast sections of the earth's
oceans have not been adequately charted. There are count
less islands everywhere that have never been visited, named, or
mapped. If WOW actually exists, they could occupy a large island in
the Pacific or Antarctica and nobody would ever he the wiser.
We have, of course, flown over a great part of the earth. Back in
the 1930s Charles Lindbergh flew over Brazil and reported
seeing an enormous stone wall deep in the jungle. A wall that
stretched for miles. No explorer has ever penetrated to that wall
overland. We still don't know anything about it. Other flies in
other parts of the world have reported similar oddities and most of
them remain unexplored mysteries.
In 1970 the United Nations issued a report which stated that
four-fifths of the earth's surface was inadequately surveyed and
charted and that tremendous areas remain unexplored altogether. The
cartographers who drew up the original Piri Re'is maps probably knew
more about our planet than we do.
Despite all these facts, most of us like to pretend that our planet
is fully explored and that all of its many mysteries have been
adequately solved. We believe our history books. In fact, many
millions of people still cling to the thoroughly discredited
religious belief that mankind is only four thousand years old.
Science labours to ignore the mounting evidence that we may not be
the only intelligent life form on this planet.
Yet historians have always carefully
recorded the events which indicate that a para-human race does exist
alongside us. Millions of people have encountered them and thousands
of books have been written about those encounters.
Now that we are zooming headlong into the Age of Aquarius, it is
time for us to take a new look at the world around us; time for us
to study those despicable erratic of archaeology and history; time
for us to think about the unthinkable. Our much-touted technology
has led us down the road to ruin, poisoned our environment, and
given us the implements for destroying the earth itself. If there
was a great superculture thousands of years ago, perhaps it followed
the same tragic course.
Perhaps even the Abominable Snowmen of
the Himalayas and their North American counterparts, the Sasquatch
of Canada, will inherit the earth, and ten thousand years from now
their descendants will be studying a frayed copy of an old road map
and speculating about us.
Naturally, there will be scientists
among them who will sneer at the whole thing… and they will get back
to the business of trying to split the atom.
CHAPTER TWO
THE CONTINENT
THAT VANISHED
Every two or three years some adventurous scientist or peripatetic
deep-sea diver discovers lost Atlantis.
He usually announces Ms find during the
summer silly season when news is slow, and the papers are filled
with yarns about the Loch Ness monster and bathing beauty contests.
Atlantis has now been located in the Mediterranean (many times),
west of the Azores, south of the Azores, in the -Caribbean, off the
west coast of South America, off the east coast of South America, in
the North Pacific, in the South Pacific, of the coast of Florida,
and even in the Indian Ocean.
Recently the ruins of an ancient temple of unknown origin were
discovered in the blue waters off the Bahamas. The newspapers
soberly revealed that Atlantis had been found at last. A year of so
later a mysterious stone pillar was spotted by divers deep in the
ocean off the coast of Peru. Atlantis rose again.
This game has been going on for a very long time.
Researchers wading through
fifty-year-old newspapers have found them sprinkled with wondrous
tales of Atlantean finds. Professors and PhD's nave frequently
joined the clamor, bidding for publicity (and the often sizable
foundation grants that follow such publicity), keeping alive one of
the great fantasies of human history.
It isn't even a myth or legend; there
isn't enough evidence of any kind to give Atlantis such stature.
Nevertheless, Atlantis has become an important part of our folklore.
Even the famous prophet Edgar Cayce discussed the lost continent
with the spirit world and passed along the prediction that it would
rise again in the stormy Atlantic in 196S-9.
While the reality of Atlantis can be viewed with considerable
skepticism, the persistence of the belief in it provides some
interesting farts about the weird mechanisms employed by the earth's
phantom inhabitants to generate myths and camouflage their real
existence. Atlantis is no more real than visitors from Mars. Yet
there are millions of people who have believed wholeheartedly in
both. The members of WOW have carefully sowed the seeds of such
myths in their wake and have worked across the generations to
nurture them.
First, how did the story of
Atlantis begin?
It was launched by a single man named
Plato (427-347 B.C.). In his two dialogues Timaeus and Critias, he
offers a description of Atlantis and its demise nine thousand years
earlier. His source, he states, is a man named Critias, who had
heard the story from his great-grandfather Dropides, who had heard
it from a sage named Solon, who had heard it from an Egyptian
priest.
So the whole foundation of the Atlantis
fantasy is based upon what a ninety-year-old man told a ten-year-old
boy (those are the ages given by Plato) about a tale spun by Solon
years before. Rather like having your great-grandfather tell you the
plot of a novel that someone else described to him after having
heard it from someone else in a far-off land.
And that someone else hadn't read the
novel but had only heard about it, since the novel was nine-thousand
years old.
Incidentally, the final pages of Plato's discourse are missing, so
even his record of this hearsay is incomplete.
Scholars have devoted their lives to pondering Plato and searching
for archaeological evidence to support the existence of Atlantis.
Visit any library and you will find shelves of books on the subject.
New pro-Atlantis volumes appear each year. A small, indefatigable
cult of Atlantean believers has existed for a century or more,
pouncing upon each new archaeological discovery as proof of
Atlantis.
Ruins throughout Central and South
America have been credited to the Atlantis culture. Everything from
Stonehenge in England to the Great Pyramid in Egypt to the
monasteries in the Himalayas has been accepted by the believers as
further evidence of Atlantis.
In Chapter One the premise was stated that mankind could be an
offshoot of some earlier superculture. The Atlantophiles have
recognized this partially and think of Atlantis as that superculture.
The psychic world has supported this contention for years by passing
along endless messages about the past glories of Atlantis through
mediums, Ouija boards, and the like.
Many of these messages have served as
the basis for some of the peculiar books that have appeared.
Surprisingly, some of the data in this torrent of gibberish can be
authenticated historically, but a pattern is hard to establish.
There are people around the world who claim to have actually met the
Atlanteans themselves. These percipients (witnesses) describe
stately men and women dressed in colorful robes and headdresses, who
appear suddenly like ghosts or apparitions. People who have never
given Atlantis any thought at all are suddenly confronted
by these entities. Such visits can last for hours according to the
percipients. The Atlantean takes great pains to describe the history
of Atlantis in detail and when the witness scurries to a library, he
or she finds some of the things mentioned in the literature.
Eventually the percipient may write a book or pamphlet himself,
combining what he has read with what he has been told by the entity.
His work is entered into the literature
and quoted again and again in new books by others.
This same phenomenon occurs constantly in religion, spiritualism,
and ufodom, In the latter the entities claim to represent some other
planet and they pass along convincing (to the percipient)
descriptions of life on other worlds. like the Atlantean entities,
the UFO pilots share the disturbing ability to appear and disappear
in thin air.
The tall, bearded Atlanteans with their
high cheekbones and Oriental eyes are undoubtedly close brethren of
the picturesque spacemen who, incidentally, are most often described
the same way.
In occult lore these entities have been described for centuries and
are called elemental. The phenomenon take many forms and undoubtedly
inspired the massive folklore on fairies and leprechauns, vampires,
and demons, and the multitude of ghouls, goblins, and banshees who'
have always occupied our haunted planet. They appear to have the
ability to assume any shape or disguise.
Some, if not all, seem to be the product
of some complicated hallucinatory process which is able to feed
false images into the minds of the percipients. Thus, a group of
people in a room can sometimes come up with contradictory
descriptions of an apparition. Some of the people might not see it
at all
There are, of course, all kinds of psychological factors which could
explain some of these hallucinations and apparitions, too. But it is
quite remarkable that some of the messages passed along by our
elusive Atlanteans are identical to messages passed along to
unrelated witnesses who have chatted with spacemen from Ganymede (a
satellite of Jupiter). The same mechanism, be it psychic or
psychological, is clearly at work in all these cases.
The phenomenon utilizes many other frames of reference. An
apparition might pose as an ancient Greek philosopher or as Abraham
Lincoln or a deceased pope. There are cases of all these. The
folklore of all cultures also takes into account apparitions which
pose as exact duplicates of living persons. In Germany such entities
have long been known as doppelgangers.
The manifestations have also led to the creation of many minor
cults, such as the believers in
Lemuria (which is supposed to be another lost continent)
and Mu, Here again, we find that a large part of the literature is
based upon the alleged experiences of those who have encountered
Lemurians.
In the Middle Ages many people insisted
they had visited the underground palaces of the fairies, and volumes
were written about the secret commonwealth of the little People. In
modern times the Dero (detrimental robots) myth has blown up around
the stories of people who claim they have been taken to the secret
caverns occupied by the ancient secret Dero culture.
In 1944, Amazing Stories, a science fiction magazine, published
Richard Shaver's 'I Remember Lemuria'. Editor Ray Palmer was amazed
when he was swamped by thousands of letters from people who swore
they had experiences with Deros and Lemurians. They often described
things identical to the flying saucer phenomenon (which did not
explode on the American scene until 1947).
The myth-making machinery of WOW has always been in operation and
the earliest thinkers and scientists recognized it. Strange
illusions and purposeful distortions of reality have always haunted
the human race. Some cults have defined the culprits as Masters of
Illusion, the Black Mentalists, and the X Group. For centuries it
was popular to accuse the devil, witches, and warlocks for these
bewildering manifestations. Whole religions sprang up around the
evidence supplied by the phenomenon.
In Sweden the great mathematician Emanuel Swedenborg
(1688-1772) wrote huge tomes about his experiences with the
elementals and offered solemn warnings such as:
When spirits begin to speak with a man, he must be aware that he
believe nothing that they say. For nearly everything they say is
fabricated by them, and they lie: for if they are permitted to
narrate anything, as what heaven is and how things in the heavens
are to be understood, they would tell so many lies that a man would
be astonished. This they would do with solemn affirmation j,,
Wherefore men must beware and not believe thems.«
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), the famous novelist, made a
serious study of these matters, and in 1830 he published a series of
essays summarizing his conclusions. He noted that when trained
psychics encountered fairies and visited their splendid palaces 'the
illusion vanished1.
He explained:
The young knights and beautiful
ladies showed themselves as wrinkled carless and odious hags…
The stately halls were turned into
miserable damp caverns - all the delights of the Elfin Elysium
vanished at once. In a word, their pleasures were showy but
totally unsubstantial - their activity unceasing, but fruitless
and unavailing - and their condemnation appears to have
consisted in the necessity of maintaining the appearance of
industry or enjoyment, though their toil was fruitless and their
pleasures shadowy and unsubstantial.
Hence poets have designed them as
'the crew that never rest'. Besides the unceasing and useless
bustle in which these spirits seemed to live, they had
propensities unfavorable and distressing to mortals.
Educated theologians and scholars
attached to the Vatican made a sober investigation into the
burgeoning fad of spiritualism in the 1850s. This examination led to
the issuance of a Papal Bull which warned Catholics that
spiritualism was dangerous and the 'work of the devil'.
Despite all these warnings, millions of people were gripped in the
hopeful effort to communicate with the spirit world, and the
elementals played the game with relish, implanting a whole new lore
about life on other worlds or planets. New cults were spawned and
dozens of frames of references were established, all based entirely
on the seemingly sincere messages of these characters.
We were guided from beliefs in fairies and their secret commonwealth
to new, more scientific beliefs in interplanetary visitors and their
great Intergalactic Councils. The flying saucer phenomenon generated
a whole new set of theories and beliefs as more and more people had
encounters with Venusians and Martians in the back hills of Kentucky
and the deserts of Arizona. The crew that never rest were up to
their old tricks in a new guise.
Once the skilled investigator recognizes just how intangible the
manifestations really are, he is catapulted into the more esoteric
world of philosophy. He struggles with the task of interpreting
these unreal events, trying to understand their hidden purposes.
This is unfortunately the route to madness. The phenomenon is fond
of creating allegorical situations which can not be interpreted
without excessive scholarship.
The problem is to sort out the
meaningful from the rubbish and to search for the hidden
consistencies buried in the mountains of communications from the
past and present.
The scriptures of all the great religions do contain a number of
subtle correlations. Much of this literature deals vaguely with
rumors of some great past civilization. Isolated Indian tribes in
North and South America have legends and myths very similar to the
stories found in the Bible, including tales of a great deluge which
destroyed most of mankind thousands of years ago.
The Toltec Indians, for example, even
had a tradition about a zacuaü, a very high tower they erected, and
according to Ixtikochit,
"Presently their languages were
confused, and, not being able to understand each other, they
went to different parts of the earth."
Atlantean scholars have labored to
assemble all this lore as further proof that Atlantis did indeed
exist as a real continent, which was destroyed by some great natural
catastrophe.
However, much of the information passed
along by the Atlantean elementals states that Atlantis was an evil
place, dominated by a warlike technology very similar to our own,
and that the Atlanteans eventually destroyed themselves - or were
deliberately destroyed by some greater force which took a dim view
of their militarism.
In flying saucer lore we have tales passed on by the spacemen of a
great planet located between Mars and Jupiter and identified
variously as Maldek, Clarion, and a dozen other names. The
inhabitants of this planet learned to smash the atom and soon
succeeded in smashing their entire planet. It was broken into
thousands of bits and pieces and those fragments now constitute the
asteroid belt.
So, one important thread runs through all this literature: a great
civilization once existed prior to the appearance of modern man, and
it was either destroyed or destroyed itself. The surviving physical
evidence, which will be discussed further on, indicates that such a
civilization did exist on this planet and that its inhabitants
vanished before, or soon after, man crawled out of his caves.
It may be that the elementals are actually a part of the human
psyche and that they have been presenting us with some scrambled
racial memory of the distant past. like the Garden of Eden, Atlantis
may be nothing more than an allegory designed to give us a clue
about our own history. In flying saucer lore there is elaborately
detailed literature asserting that Venus was actually the Garden of
Eden and that Adam and Eve were Venusians planted here to colonize
Earth. Another variation on the Noah's Ark theme.
Even more interesting are the contiguous activities of the para-human
group which has remained in constant touch with us throughout
history and has greatly influenced our theological and philosophical
ideas. They are proven liars and mischief makers, but it is also
possible that they have been slyly trying to tell us something about
ourselves. In recent years the flying saucer occupants
have passed along innumerable warnings about how we have been
upsetting the balance of the universe with our atom bombs. They have
laced these warnings with bloodcurdling tales about Maldek.
A controversial UFO report from Mendoza, Argentina, is rather
typical of these warnings.
On September 1st, 1968, Carlos
Peccinetti, twenty-six, and Fernando Jose Villegas, twenty-nine,
were driving home from their job at the Mendoza casino at 3:30 a.
m., when their car suddenly stalled. They got out to look under the
hood and discovered a huge circular machine hovering nearby. Three
beings in coveralls appeared, they said, and they found they were
paralyzed, unable to move.
A foreign-sounding voice rang in their
heads.
'It was as though they had put into
our ears the tiny earplug speakers used with transistors,'
Peccinetd said.
'We have just made three journeys
around the sun,' the voice told them, 'studying customs and
languages of the inhabitants of the system… Mathematics is the
universal language.'
Then a circular screen, similar to a
television screen, appeared next to the object, and the two men were
treated to a series of images. The first was a waterfall in lush
country; the second, a mushroom-shaped cloud; the third, the
waterfall scene again but without water.
After the entities clambered into the machine and flew off. the two
witnesses were able to move again. Their story contains all the
familiar ingredients of thousands of other UFO contact tales. First,
their automobile stalled, then they were paralyzed, next they heard
a telepathic voice, and finally they were given a simplified
message… and the meaning of that message is quite obvious.
Police officers, doctors, lawyers, college professors, government
officials, and just plain folks by the thousands have shared similar
experiences in recent years. The members of WOW have really been
engaged in an all-out effort to convince us of some impending
disaster. It is not unusual that they should relate their warnings
with tales about past civilizations that followed the same woeful
path.
The Atlantis story seems to acquire another meaning in view of all
this. Atlantis could be a part of our future instead of our past.
Perhaps we are the Atlanteans.
CHAPTER THREE
IT'S A NICE PLACE TO
VISIT BUT…
Soon after be became president of the United Arab Republic, the late
Gamal Abdel Nasser ordered a giant eighty-foot statue moved from the
desert to a park in Cairo.
The statue had been standing for
uncounted centuries near the famous Steppe Pyramid. A battery of
engineers and workmen descended on it, equipped with builders,
tractors, and monstrous cranes. They struggled with the project for
weeks, first perplexed, then annoyed, and finally humiliated by the
discovery that modern technology simply could not budge the mammoth
piece of stone.
This raised the even more troublesome
question: how had the ancient Egyptians moved the statue into place
to begin with?
Archaeologists have been arguing for years about the methods
employed by the ancient stone masons. Some quite moronic theories
have not only been suggested but have been widely accepted as the
answer. These theories are, as usual, taught to schoolchildren. The
mystery is regarded as solved. Nobody asks questions.
There are over ninety pyramids in Egypt alone. (There are dozens of
others all over the world, the largest of all is located deep in
China.) Most of the Egyptian pyramids were once used as the burial
places for pharaohs, but the Great Pyramid at Giza was never
employed for this purpose, and no one has an inkling why it was
built.
Some of the gigantic stones in these
structures and in the great temples spotted, around Egypt were
apparently taken from quarries hundreds of miles away. The popular
archaeological theory is that these stones were floated up the Nile
on rafts and then moved into place on wooden rollers. Since some of
these blocks weigh as much as five tons, this means that in order to
float them, the Egyptians would have had to build huge rafts capable
of displacing over five tons of water.
Otherwise, they would just sink to the
bottom with their load. The Egyptians didn't amount to much when it
came to building ships. No evidence of these super-rafts has ever
turned up.
There are other flaws in these theories. We are told that hundreds
of thousands of slaves were pressed into pyramid building during
certain seasons of each year. This leads us to the problem of
logistics. It would take a complex organization to feed these
hundreds of thousands daily and administer to their needs.
Various modern engineers and experts
have applied their slide rules to the problem, and the most liberal
estimate of the time required to construct the Great Pyramid is six
hundred years.
Strangely, although the ancient Egyptians left profusive records of
everything else, no one has ever turned up even a single piece of
papyrus describing the planning or building of these massive
monuments. The stones were cut and dressed with such perfection that
a piece of paper cannot be inserted between them. Obviously those
early stonemasons were superb craftsmen.
And obviously there were a lot of them
in order to undertake and complete such enormous tasks.
When there is a mystery which can't be logically explained by
science, cults develop which create explanations of their own. Our
Atlantophiles naturally agree that the Egyptians didn't build the
pyramids at all. Our UFO buffs claim they were built by the
wonderful space people.
Morris K. Jessup, an astrophysicist and an early student of
urology, reviewed the question and suggested:
Levitation is the only feasible
answer. I believe that this lifting machine was a spaceship,
probably of vast proportions; that it brought colonists to
various parts of the Earth, probably from other terrestrial
areas; that it supplied the heavy lift power for erecting great
stone works; and that it was suddenly destroyed or taken away.
Such a hypothesis would underwrite all of the movements of stone
over which archaeologists and engineers have pondered.
This presents us with a splendid
contradiction.
If some super-society in the sky had the
technology to build a spaceship 'of vast proportions' and fly it all
the way to our humble planet, why would they have the need to play
around with stone blocks? If they wanted to leave behind evidence of
their visit, they did a poor job of it, for we never have figured
out the real meaning of these monoliths.
Couldn't they have engraved a nice
little message for us inside the Great Pyramid, explaining the whole
thing in seventy-five languages? The only carvings found inside the
Great Pyramid are a few little scratchings in the roof of the upper
chamber which archaeologists regard as stonemason marks. Similar
marks have been found in other structures.
Maybe they are just the ancient
equivalent of "Kilroy was here".
For centuries the spirit mediums and the percipients who have
chatted with ghostly Atlanteans have told us that the Great Pyramid
really contains a hidden chamber which is crammed with goodies that
will explain everything to us when the proper time comes, for
wishing to be left out, many flying saucer contactees have repeated
the same promise.
An anthropologist named George Hunt
Williamson wrote in the early 1950s:
The builders of the Great Pyramid
buried one of their great spaceships near the structure. It will
be revealed - no doubt within a comparatively short time - that
there are many secret chambers within the Great Pyramid and that
its true entrance lies under the silent object that is like a
lion and yet like a man… the Sphinx It will not remain silent
much longer...*
* Neville Spearman Limited,
London.
On February 9th, 1960, a
fertilizer salesman named Reinhold Schmidt was picked up by a
flying saucer and flown to Egypt, according to his pamphlet,
Edge of Tomorrow.
The friendly space people conducted
him on a tour of those hidden chambers where he saw, among other
things, the true cross on which Christ had died. He was also
shown 'thirty-two tablets of a heavy-quality paper, rather dark
in color… imagine my surprise when I found the events of the
past, present, and future there described in modern day English,
in black ink, and written in beautiful longhand.'
These records indicated, Schmidt
claimed,
'The end of this present Earth cycle
will be 1998.'
So after the endless discussions of the
hidden chambers in the pyramid, we finally had a genuine eye-witness
who had been there and seen them. Unless, of course, Schmidt's
adventure was just another variation of the classical visits to the
underground fairy palaces of yesteryear.
Science took over.
In 1969 a group of American scientists
beaded by Dr Luis W. Alvarez travelled to Egypt and set up expensive
cosmic ray detectors around the Great Pyramid. Their theory was that
any cosmic rays penetrating the pyramid and passing through hidden
chambers would be recorded as moving slightly faster than ray
particles travelling through solid stone. They fiddled with their
gadgets for months and did get some very eccentric readings at
first.
But finally, in the February 6th, 1970
issue of Science, Dr Alvarez glumly announced that no hidden
chambers had been detected with his sophisticated apparatus. The
cultists all nudged each other and winked knowingly. Obviously it
was all a cover-up… part of the great conspiracy to keep the truth
from the public.
Men have been scratching their heads over the Great Pyramid for at
least four thousand years. It has never really been dated, and it
could be considerably older. Whoever built it was so clever that
countless efforts to find an entrance met with failure for thousands
of years. Finally, in a.d. 820 the Caliph Al Mamaun launched
a full-scale attack on the structure, expecting to find it filled
with treasure.
His men chipped away at it, heating the
stones with fires and then cooling them suddenly by pouring vinegar
over them. Slowly the stones cracked and they worked their way into
the pyramid until they came upon a passageway. It was completely
empty.
They found a larger passageway, now known as the great gallery,
which leads upwards to two small chambers. The lower chamber's
entrance is so small a man must enter on his hands and knees. The
upper chamber contains nothing but a crude stone tub which really
doesn't resemble the elaborately designed sarcophagi used by the
ancient Egyptians to entomb deceased royalty. The total absence of
artifacts and hieroglyphics has given archaeologists plenty to
speculate over. Some have suggested that the pyramid was used as a
kind of grain elevator and that wheat was measured out in that tub.
Others have tried to find astronomical significance to it.
In the mid-nineteenth century the pseudoscience of pyramidology was
bom.
A writer named John Taylor published a
book in which he concluded that the whole purpose of the structure
was to preserve ardent Egyptian measurements. He was followed by an
astronomer, Charles Piazzi Smyth, who extended this notion to
include prophecies of the past and future. He measured every inch of
the pyramid, inside and out, and every angle.
In 1864 Smyth published a
six-hundred-page book expounding his theories, and it caused an
uproar in archaeological circles for years afterwards. A small but
devoted cult still exists, still trying to validate his now
thoroughly discredited concepts. Most of the literature on lost
Atlantis also discusses Smyth and pyramidology. The UFO cults also
have their pyramidologists. Just as the pyramids are a cornerstone
in human history, they also serve as key evidence to many cults with
widely diversified causes.
Aside from the few major population centers, ancient Egypt was a mud
hut culture. Then as now the masses lived under-nourished lives in
grinding poverty. Technical skills were rare. Yet somehow they
managed to quarry those gigantic stones, transport them, and put
them into place with geometric precision. We know that the Egyptians
did build the ninety odd pyramids (the village of Meroe on the Upper
Nile contains dozens of pyramids alone), plus numerous great temples
and tombs which are still standing.
But why did they build the Great
Pyramid?
The Plain of Jars in Laos has been frequently mentioned in the war
dispatches from Indochina. Did you ever wonder how it got its name?
The answer is obvious: it is strewn with jars… huge stone jars. Some
of them are over six feet high. Some are so large they can hold six
men. There are over a thousand of these peculiar artifacts scattered
around a high plateau surrounded by mountains. They were apparently
carved out of limestone and granite boulders, and they've been there
forever. No one seems to know who carved them, when and why.
Why would anyone bother to spend weeks
carving a giant stone jar in such a remote place?
Mysterious stone masons have left the fruits of their labours all
over our haunted planet. Many of these fruits make no sense at all.
In Costa Rica giant stone balls have been found deep in the jungles.
Some of these are as big as eight feet in diameter and weigh more
than sixteen tons. They are amazingly round and smooth. Scores of
smaller ones, some only a few inches in diameter, have also been
found. Scientists have been unable to come up with an explanation
for their purpose, although they are obviously man-made. Similar
stones have been found in Mexico and Guatemala.
"One thing the scientists agree on
is that the spheres must have been very important to the
communities of people that made them like the jars of Laos,
these balls are made of granite and limestone."
Science Digest observed in June 1967.
"Using the tools they had, it must
have taken many years to make just one ball, even with many men
working on it."
The United States is covered with
strange artifacts and stone ruins of unknown origin.
Every state boasts of several mysterious
sites. In West Virginia there are the remains of huge circular stone
structures apparently predating the Indians. In many states there
are rums which archaeologists have muttered about being of Roman
origin. Some of these sites have become minor local tourist
attractions. Others are marked only by brief highway signs. A random
few, such as Mystery Hill in North Salem, New Hampshire, have
attained some celebrity.
Mystery Hill features several chambers - or tombs - topped by a
gigantic Sacrificial Table weighing over four tons.
It is supported on stone legs and is
carefully grooved. In 1969 the New England Antiquities Research
Association conducted carbon 14 tests 2 around the site
and concluded that it was probably built around 1000 b.c.
2 Organic material contains
radioactivity which deteriorates at a known rate. The carbon 14 test
is a universally accepted method for measuring such deterioration
and determining the age of the material. The test does not work on
inorganic substances such as stone, of course.
Recent investigations have demonstrated
that some of the huge stones on Mystery Hill are carefully aligned
with certain stars. Each year the sun sets directly over the Winter
Solstice Monolith on the first day of winter, December 21, when
viewed from the centre of the site, the Sacrificial Table.
The Delaware Indians have a tradition that a race of giants once
inhabited the region east of the Mississippi, living in enormous
cities and fortifications. There are innumerable references to
giants in other Indian lore and in ancient literature all over the
world, including, of course, the famous There were giants in the
earth in those days' biblical statement {Genesis 6:4).
South American Indians also have many
legends about giants and their special civilization. Most of the
tales, no matter what the source, assert that the giants were
unfriendly and even hostile to normal men. Bones of giants (who must
have been eight to twelve feet tall) have been found in the mounds
of Minnesota and several other places. So it is entirely possible
that a race of giants did exist in earlier times, and some of these
huge stone constructions may have been their handiwork.
Unfortunately, science doesn't believe
in giants, so all this evidence has been ignored.
There is also considerable evidence that Christopher Columbus was a
rather late arrival to the New World. He was probably preceded by
the Vikings and maybe even the ancient Phoenicians. Chinese
artifacts have been found in Mexico and California, so perhaps even
the Chinese beat Chris by several centuries.
A knight from the Orkney Islands left a carving in Massachusetts in
the fourteenth century. Near Heavener, Oklahoma, there is a stone
twelve feet high, ten feet wide, and sixteen inches thick, covered
with ancient Scandinavian runic symbols. It was discovered by
Choctaw Indians in 1830, and archaeologists have been arguing about
it ever since.
Several other nine-stones have been
found, the most famous being the Kensington Scone, found by a farmer
sear Kensington, Minnesota, at the turn of the century.
Two more rune stones have been found in Oklahoma in recent years.
The last one was discovered by two school boys neat Poteau,
Oklahoma, in September of 1967. As usual, the archaeologists are
sharply divided over the validity of these discoveries. One group
cries hoax, even though it would requite an expert archaeologist and
linguist to perpetrate such a hoax.
Others, such as Frederick Pohl, a noted
Norse scholar, seem to think these stones may be authentic.8
Fifty years before Columbus conned Queen Isabella into financing his
expedition, someone drew up a rough map of North America. A copy of
this map was discovered by Laurence Whitten, a rare book dealer from
New Haven, Connecticut, in 1957, It is now part of the rare document
collection in the Beinecke library of Yale University and is known
as the Yale Vinland Map.
Scientific investigators have dated it
at a.d. 1440, and as usual, the leading experts have been arguing
about it ever since. Some have branded it an out-and-out hoax, while
others regarded it as further evidence that the Vikings were
frequent visitors to the New World.
More substantial evidence has been found in the form of ruins of a
Viking longhouse on the Ungava Peninsula in northern Canada. A team
from Laval University has dated it between the eleventh and twelfth
centuries. Numerous other ruins and artifacts have been found all
over North America. For example, two remarkably similar axes, both
apparently of medieval European origin, have been discovered in
Beardmore, Ontario, and Rocky Nook Point, Massachusetts.
Archaeologists from the Smithsonian Institution uncovered a small
slab of stone covered with ciphers in 1885 near Bat Creek,
Tennessee. They decided it was probably the work of Cherokee
Indians, but modern specialists such as Dr Joseph B. Mahan of
the Museum of Arts and Crafts at Columbus, Georgia, have taken a
second look at it and disputed the old Indian theory.
Dr Mahan knows Cherokee and he persuaded
the Smithsonian to re-examine the Bat Creek stone.
"You simply can't ignore evidence,"
Dr Mahan stated, "just because it doesn't fit current theory."
A similar stone was found by Manfred
Metcalf at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1968.
Metcalf was looking for stones to build
a barbecue grill in his backyard when he unearthed the stone. It is
nine inches square and covered with triangles, circles, and straight
and wavy lines. He passed it on to Dr Mahan, who thought the
markings appeared to be characteristically Mediterranean.
* See Frederick Pohl,
The VMng Explorers.
Another scientist, Dr Cyrus H. Gordon, chairman of
Mediterranean studies at Brandeis University, agreed.
There were strong similarities between
the Met-calf stone and sampled of Minoan writing dating back three
thousand years to the Bronze Age civilization which flourished on
the Mediterranean island of Crete from 3000 to 1100 b.c. Dr Gordon
became the centre of another controversy a few years ago when he
announced that a sample of Phoenician writing found on a stone in
Brazil was authentic… after other archaeologists had denounced it as
a fraud.
After all, it was hardly possible that
the ancient Phoenicians could have visited Brazil. Or was it?
As for the Bat Creek stone, Dr Gordon thinks it might have been the
handiwork of Hebrews from Palestine during the Bronze Age. Both
scientists speculate that ancient Semitic tribes from the Middle
East may have visited North America thousands of years ago. This, of
course, revives memories of the lost tribes of Israel. Could they
have somehow found their way to this continent: and become that-lost
American culture described in the Mormon Bible? Dr Mali an believes
that some Indian tribes can be traced back to seafaring
Mediterranean peoples.
The Yuchi, he points out, are racially
and linguistically different from other North American tribes. Their
legends state, 'We came as the sun came, and we went as the sun
went.* Dr Mahan interprets this to mean that the YucM came from the
east, across the Atlantic Ocean, and then moved northwards from
Florida to Georgia.
Some archaeologists tend to lump rune stones together with the
stones bearing Indian petroglyphs. Petroglyphs are designs carved
into rocks as path-markers, and thousands have been found all over
the Americas.
Although innumerable isolated Indian
tribes were obviously responsible for them, there are many
interesting similarities in the symbols used. Some of these same
symbols have been found carved on other ancient rocks in other parts
of the world, suggesting that this form of writing was universal at
one time… even though the races and tribes responsible could not
understand each other's languages and in most cases had little or no
contact.
Archaeologists studiously try to
overlook the fact that some of these pictographs can be traced to
ancient Mediterranean cultures. But the runic writing is quite
distinct from the Indian petroglyphs. The runestones carry
alphabetic symbols, while petroglyphs bear picture writing loosely
related to the Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The Kensington stone, as translated by Frederick Pohl, describes how
'eight Goths and twenty-two Norwegians' established a camp.
One group went fishing, and when they returned, they found the ten
who had remained behind 'red with blood and dead'. The year is given
as 1362. Indian petroglyphs. on the other hand, were customarily
devoted to traU information, where to find water, and the like.
One Indian pictograph of particular interest is a complex design
which has been found throughout North, Central, and South America.
It depicts a series of squares inside one another. The Hop! Indians
call this the Mother Earth Symbol. To the Pimas it is the House of
Teuhu:
to the Cunas in Panama it is the
Tree of life. Anthropologist Harold Sterling Gladwin saw
something else in it when he studied this symbol carved on the
wall of Casa Grande, Arizona.
In his book, Men Out of Asia, he noted
that the Mother Earth symbol is identical with the Minoan labyrinth
depicted on coins from Knossos, Crete, circa 200 b.c.
The famous labyrinth was said to have
been built by Daedalus to hide the half-man, half-bull Minotaur. Dr
Gladwin and Dr Clyde Keeler of Milledgeville, Georgia, both seem to
think that the Indians' use of the ancient labyrinth symbol is
evidence of the influence of the early Minoan culture.
In the eariy 1960s Angelos Galanopoulos, a Greek scientist, proposed
still another theory for Atlantis. He suggested that sunken Minoan
cities of Crete might have supplied the basis for the Atlantis
legends. According to his theory, Plato got his dates wrong.
Atlantis may have disappeared only a thousand or so years before the
historian heard the tale, not nine thousand years before.
It may have been one of the Greek
islands, possibly Thera, Divers and archaeologists working in the
waters there in recent years have uncovered all kinds of evidence
indicating that the Minoan culture came to a very abrupt end. So
abrupt that craftsmen left their tools next to unfinished works and
fled. The explanation currently in vogue is that a sudden volcanic
eruption destroyed the islands. Dr Galanopoulos has been partially
successful in matching Plato's description of Atlantis with what is
now known about Thera.
Dr Bruce C. Heezen, an oceanographer,
believes that the eruption occurred around 1400 b.c. Needless to
say, other scientists and schools loudly dispute this date.
We do know that early Crete was the centre of an impressive culture,
that great cities and temples were built there, and that it was a
major naval power. It is not likely, however, that Crete and Thera
could have lived up to Plato's description of the super-civilization
of Atlantis.
Still we have all the perplexing evidence of the rune stones and
other artifacts scattered around this continent, which demonstrate
that men from Europe and possibly from Crete and Thera did visit
America in pre-Columbian times. It is even possible that groups
settled here and built forts and temples, the remnants of which have
served to augment the beliefs of dozens of cults and fringe
societies.
In a learned dissertation on petroglyphs published by the
Smithsonian in 1937.
Julian H. Steward frowned on the
arguments that attempt to prove that,
'Egyptians, Scythians, Chinese, and
a host of other Old World peoples, including the Ten Lost-
Tribes of Israel, invaded America in ancient days'.
He noted that,
'devotees of the subject have
written voluminously, argued bitterly, and even fought duels'.
Now, over,
"thirty years later the Smithsonian
is slowly changing its tune. They have stopped blaming the
Indians for all these carved slabs. The Indians have been
denying credit all along, of course.
"When the white men first arrived here [in British Columbia,
Canada] in I860, the West Coast Indians had already incorporated
the carvings in their legends,1 Phil Thornburg, a petroglyph
expert in Victoria, Canada, said recently. They showed them to
white explorers and explained they were left by an ancient
civilization and were the hub of creation."
Thomburg points to what appears to be a
carving of a Chinese dragon, known in Indian legend as a sisutl.
"There does seem to be an Oriental
background to them," he observes. 'Being carved in sandstone,
it's virtually impossible to say what age they are. I've found
some that were buried under more than a foot of topsoil.
"Now this wasn't the kind of topsoil that would have washed over
them. This was formed there, placing the age of the carving
around five to seven thousand years - which is really ancient
for this country."
Thomburg found one petroglyph on
Vancouver Island that had a hole worn completely through it by
dripping water - proof that it had been there for a very long time.
At another site he found a carving which
had crumbled when a massive tree grew straight up through it.
Petroglyphs which were definitely the work of Indian tribes often
tell interesting stories about hunts and battles, and in several
instances, encounters with the little people and other phantom
inhabitants. Some contain solemn warnings that the valley or
mountain ahead is the abode of these sinister phantoms.
The Cherokee Indians have legends about the strange entities who
resided around Chimney Rock. North Carolina. White people have also
seen them occasionally.
In 1806 the Rev. George Newton
reported to the Raleigh Register,
"a very extraordinary vision of
thousands of beings in the air. They possessed a glittering
appearance resembling the human form and were seen on or about
Chimney Rode on the thirty-first of July last".
Researcher Angelo CappareHo found this
testimony by a Mrs. Reaves, one of the alleged witnesses:
I looked towards the Chimney. I was
absolutely amazed, for south of Chimney Rock and floating along
the side of the mountain was a huge crowd of white, phantomlike
beings. Their clothing (and filmy as it looked, I can only call
it 'clothing') was so brilliant a white it almost hurt my eyes
to look at them… Although I felt weak, somehow, it left a solemn
and pleasing impression on my mind.
Chimney Rock is only one of the
countless haunted places on this haunted planet.
CHAPTER FOUR
TOWERS OF GLASS AND THEORIES OF
PUTTY
Vitrify is a ten-dollar word meaning to change into glass.
Glass is made by heating sand (silica)
and/or various oxides of silicon, boron, phosphorus, and other
materials, then cooling the result rapidly to prevent
crystallization. The process is fairly simple, and men have been
manufacturing glass for thousands of years. When the first atomic
bomb was exploded in New Mexico in 1945, it not only left a big hole
in the ground, but the tremendous heat melted the sand and fused it
together in glasslike fragments.
These scorched particles were identical
to the objects known as tektites. Tektites have been found all over
our haunted planet and have baffled science for years. One recent
expedition found tektites scattered over an area six thousand by
four thousand miles from Tasmania to north of the Philippines and
from the East Indies to the east coast of Africa.
These were analyzed as being
approximately seven hundred thousand years old.1
1 See Tektites and Geomagnetic
Reversals', B. P. Glass and Bruce C. Heezen, Scientific American,
July 1967.
Like nature, science abhors a vacuum. So most books on mineralogy
blandly assert that tektites are of 'meteoric origin'.
It is a nice little theory, and
everybody seems to believe it. However, a majority of all meteorites
are made out of solid iron, and most are vaporized by the intense
heat of friction when they enter our atmosphere. Substances capable
of melting into glass would, of course, burn up before they hit the
surface of the earth.
In 1969 a group of NASA scientists dished up a delicious new version
of the meteorite theory. They announced that tektites were from the
moon.
Aeons ago, they speculated, a huge
meteor plummeted into the moon, striking with such force that its
impact hurled tons of moon dust into space. This lunar material
attained escape velocity and passed into an orbit around the earth,
where it gradually was sucked downwards by gravity, entered the
earth's atmosphere, melted, and fell into the Pacific Ocean.
So another mystery was solved… unless
you happen to have an eighth-grade education, a slide rule, and a
basic knowledge of the mechanics involved.
Then you would find that the impacting
meteor would have to be of enormous size and be travelling at
fantastic velocity in order to accomplish the first step - casting
debris beyond the moon's gravity. Such a meteor would, in all
probability, affect the moon in other discernible ways - such as
changing its orbit. Next, a long series of spectacular coincidences
would be necessary for the debris to enter the proper orbit at the
proper time so that it would lapse into a retrograde orbit around
the earth.
Finally, since tons of tektites are
scattered in paths across the Pacific floor, and since we know that
less than 5 per cent of a mass entering the earth's atmosphere is
likely to survive and hit the surface, the quantity of lunar
material necessary to produce those tektites must have been larger
than the original impacting meteor.
Hunks of glass have fallen from the sky, however. In fact, since
ancient times all kinds of odd junk has been dropping on us, ranging
from stone pillars and metal wheels to huge blocks of ice and vast
quantities of real blood and even raw meat. Science conveniently
ignores everything but the iron lumps which, they presume, are
pieces of old planets drifting around in space.
To astronomy's credit, we do know that
there are groups of this debris in the earth's orbit around the sun,
and we can predict annual meteor showers which occur as we pass
through this mess.
One chunk of glass and metal crashed into a driveway in Cannifton,
Ontario in September 1968. Wesley Reid looked at it and saw that it
was too hot to handle. After it cooled, he found he had a brownish
object weighing about twelve ounces. When it was tested by experts,
they found it was made of glass laced with a small quantity of pure
zinc. Whatever it was, it didn't seem to be a part of a man-made
satellite (which contain very little glass anyway), and it
definitely fell out of the sky.
Earth's phantom inhabitants are always dumping their garbage on us.
Flying saucer enthusiasts have been collecting and analyzing this
junk for years and have found pieces of pure aluminium, magnesium,
tin, copper, slag, and endless varieties of silicon. Unfortunately
for them, none of this aerial debris seems to support their
contention that UFOs are space ships from another planet. Nor has
any known meteorite strewn such materials or tektites in its path.
The discovery of tektites and vitrified stones among the ancient
ruins of Baalbek has inspired another popular ufological myth: that
Baalbek once served as a spaceport for rocket ships from
another world. A Soviet ethnologist.
Professor M. Agrest, proposed the
theory in an article in Moscow's Uteraturnaya Gazeta in 1959.
He also suggested that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by an
atomic bomb. Lot's wife, he asserted, did not turn into a pillar of
salt but was actually reduced to a pile of ashes when she ignored a
warning not to linger behind Lot's fleeing party.
Baalbek is located in Lebanon, east
of Beirut and north of Damascus, Syria. In ancient times it was
a thriving city filled with great temples dedicated to Baal, the
sun god. The pillars and stone slabs (some weighing many tons)
still standing are impressive… but no more impressive than the
scores of other similar ruins scattered throughout the Middle
East.
Enormous ruins of this type can be
found deep in the heart of inhospitable deserts, raising once
again the question of how the ancient peoples managed to quarry,
transport, and erect these monuments with crude tools and a
minimum of mechanical aids. Yet, quite obviously, they did
manage… and managed well.
In 1948 an expedition from the
University of Chicago unearthed the remnants of an ancient village
thirty miles east of KMuk, Iraq.
Dr Robert J. Braidwood estimated
that the village had been settled some eight thousand years ago.
Baalbek is, in comparison, a modern city.
Professor Agrest's theories were a bombshell to the assorted cults,
particularly the flying saucer believers. He regarded the presence
of tektites as evidence that atomic powered rockets had once used
the vast stone platforms at Baalbek as launching areas. Apparently
he did not know that vitrified ruins are a common phenomenon all
over the world.
Forts and towers so old that there are
no legends to account for them can be found throughout northern
Europe and the British Isles and the walls of many of these are
vitrified. At some point in the distant past these structures must
have been subjected to tremendous heat, though not necessarily from
the blast of some nuclear powered rocket.
Lightning is the explanation most frequently offered by science. But
there is no evidence to indicate that lightning bolts vitrify stone
or even sand, although we really know very little about lightning
and its effects. It would take dozens of lightning bolts all
striking the same spot to produce these vitrified monuments. In some
parts of the world, such as an area of eighteen thousand square
yards outside of Cuzco, Peru, whole hillsides have been vitrified.
Theories of volcanic activity and
glacial movements have been offered to account for these, but none
of these theories really work.
There are legends describing how the planet was once bathed in fire.
Maybe more than once. So this vitrification could be the product of
some nearly forgotten natural catastrophe.
On October 8th, 1871, a gigantic fireball or meteor roared over the
Midwest, causing a rash of disastrous fires in several states,
including the famous Chicago fire. Thousands of people were killed
in Illinois and Wisconsin, and vast areas were ravaged by flames
that night. A similar fiery visitor from space could have caused the
vitrifications.2
2 See Mysterious Fires
and lights by Vincent Gaddis foe a fully documented description of
the 1871 catastrophe.
Another strange phenomenon could be to blame. From time to time
overpowering waves of heat from an unknown source are concentrated
in specific areas. Figueira, Portugal, suffered one of these
mysterious blasts of heat for two minutes on July 6th,
1949.
The temperature soared to 158 degrees. Hundreds of people
collapsed in the streets, while thousands of chickens and ducks
keeled over dead, and the Mondego River dried up suddenly in several
places, killing countless fish, We don't understand this phenomenon
at all, and it is possible that even more intense heat waves of this
type have occurred in the past.
The followers of Agrest were not about to accept such mundane
explanations for the vitrification of Baalbek, however. A young
astronomer, Dr Carl Sagan, presented a paper before the American
Rocket Society on November 15th 1962, in which he repeated Professor
Agrest's speculations and urged that ancient myths and legends be
re-examined for possible clues to an early visit by an
extraterrestrial-civilization.
Other researchers scoured the ancient
records of India and found things such as the Mahabharata, a
document dating back more than three thousand years, which describes
a 'blazing missile' that hurtled out of the sky into the midst of an
attacking army, producing 'a radiance of smokeless fire' which
flattened chariots, ignited forests, boiled rivers, and produced
dark clouds of death.
All of this sounded uneasily like an
atomic attack. In the Mausala Parva, another ancient historical
account, there is a vivid description of some kind of death-dealing
ray which began as a small, bright glow, grew into a shaft of
brilliant light, and then consumed its target. This phenomenon was
accompanied by violent winds, peals of thunder in cloudless skies,
and earth tremors.
Terrible rakshasas, shaped like huge
mounds, attacked another Indian army from the sky and fired 'weapons
winged with gold', thunderbolts, and hundreds of fiery wheels.
Even in the Bible we are told how the prophet Elijah was saved by
balls of fire which wiped out a hundred soldiers and their captains
(Kings II:i).
That would have been around $96 b.c.
There are innumerable stories of this
type from all cultures indicating that WOW is armed with
spectacularly advanced weapons and doesn't hesitate to use them
against mortal men. So, one cultist conclusion about the vitrified
forts is that they were attacked by flying saucers which focused
deadly heat rays on them and their occupants. However, the entire
desert between Damascus and Baghdad is littered with blackened
cocks.
Thousands of square miles seem to be
charred, not by the sun but by some long forgotten holocaust.
Did WOW lay waste to all of Mesopotamia?
Or did some horrible natural disaster wipe out the great
civilization that once thrived there?
CHAPTER FIVE
STRONG MEN AND
STUPID ENTERPRISES
Four thousand years ago Great Britain was populated by a small group
of people barely out of the Stone Age.
They had a few primitive tools made of
bones, and they probably eked out a living with only the greatest
difficulty. Anthropologists estimate that there were probably about
three hundred thousand of them. They were undoubtedly divided into
warring clans and factions, since factionalism is a natural state of
man.
Yet somehow, thousands of these people
managed to get together to spend many generations quarrying huge
stones (some weighing thirty tons) in the Prescelly Mountains of
Wales and hauling these enormous blocks 240 miles to Salisbury.
There they systematically arranged these stones in a circle,
following measurements so precise that they were able to construct a
mathematically correct astronomical computer.
It's called Stonehenge.
Like the Great Pyramid, Stonehenge appears to have been a pointless
and impossible exercise. Thousands of workers had to be fed, clothed
and housed for generations as they laboured on the profitless
project. Top-flight administrative talent must have been necessary
to plan and organize the work and supervise its execution.
Architects had to design the monument
with care before the first block of stone was chipped out of the
hillside. Above all, we are asked {by the archaeologists) to believe
that these early primitives had the motivation necessary to dedicate
themselves to such an awesome task. We are also asked to believe
that they pushed and hauled these monstrous stones up and down
hills, across rivers, through forests and soupy bogs on sledges and
wooden rollers.
Then somehow, they managed to stand the
slabs on end, lifted other stones on top of them, and built the
whole thing so securely that it would last for four thousand years.
Plainly, the whole thing is quite absurd.
In his definitive book, Stonehenge Decoded, astronomer
Gerald S. Hawkins catalogues these absurdities and offers the
educated estimate that the construction of Stonehenge required at
least 1.5 million man-days of physical labour. He calculates that it
took three centuries to build. That's ten generations.
Ten generations of primitive people who
were somehow convinced that it was worth while to arrange a pile of
giant stones in a circle on an English plain.
"For generations the work on
Salisbury plain must have absorbed most of the energies
-physical, mental, spiritual - and most of the material
resources of a whole people," Hawkins observed.
There are others, of course, who prefer
to believe that the early Britons didn't build Stonehenge at all.
To them, it is obviously the work of the
Atlanteans or even the wondrous space people.
If Stonehenge were the only existing megalithic monument of this
type in Britain, Hawkins' work would be more acceptable.
Unfortunately, there are several hundred of these stone circles
scattered about the British Isles, many of them just as mysterious
as Stonehenge. We must therefore assume that all the Stone Age
Britons were frantically engaged in monument building for at least a
thousand years.
If the scientists have dated Stonehenge
correctly, then its construction occurred around the same time that
the Minoan culture blossomed on distant Crete. The Great Pyramid had
already been built or was in the final stages. So far as we can
tell, the Indians had not yet appeared in North and South America.
On Lewis, the northernmost island of the Outer Hebrides, many
hundreds of miles north of Stonehenge, there is another group of
giant standing stones arranged in a circle. Called Callanish, this
ring consists of thirteen blocks set around a large central stone.
It is erected in a desolate, hard-to-reach place, again posing the
questions, how and why did the early builders put it there?
Since Callanish is somewhat cruder than
Stonehenge, Hawkins speculates that perhaps it was built first, and
the builders applied what they had learned from that effort to the
later construction on the Salisbury plain. But the two sites are
separated by a vast distance and expanses of water. In order for the
theory to work, we need evidence that the early Britons were also
great travellers and had a society developed enough so that they
could travel in large groups. The small, wandering tribes couldn't
meet these criteria.
Astronomers and scientists have been measuring and studying these
sites for centuries, and the general conclusion is that the stones
were arranged in such a way that they deliberately aligned with
certain stars and phases of the moon to form a crude computer which
acted as a calendar. Hawkins fed his own calculations into a modern
electronic computer and produced numerous charts and tables
demonstrating such correlations. In essence, when a man stands in
the centre of the Stonehenge circle specific stars (or the sun or
moon) appear directly over specific stones at specific times of the
year in a manner which had to be planned by the builders.
Hawkins noted:
Some 240 Stonehenge alignments
translated into celestial-declinations. For whatever reasons
those Stonehenge builders built as they did, their final,
completed creation was a marvel. As intricately as an
interlocking series of astronomical observing instruments (which
Indeed it was) and yet architecturally perfectly simple, in
function subtle and elaborate, in appearance stark, imposing,
awesome, Stonehenge was a thing of surpassing Ingenuity of
design, variety of usefulness, and grandeur - in concept and
construction an eighth wonder of the ancient world.
Considering the enormous amount of
effort that must have gone into its construction, Stonehenge ranks
as the costliest calendar in the world.
Earlier investigators tried to explain Stonehenge as the work of the
Romans, the Danes (similar constructions stand in Denmark), and the
Druids, as esoteric priesthood which entered Britain from France in
500 B.C. Stonehenge had been around for at least one thousand years
when the Druids arrived, but nevertheless, Druidism has become
closely allied with Stonehenge.
Even today, members of the Most Ancient
Order of Druids make an annual pilgrimage to the site to perform
their rites - rites which they claim date back to the days of
Atlantis, incidentally.
Hawkins discovered that a significant cycle occurs every 18.6 years
at Stonehenge. He calls it midwinter moonrise, for the moon rises
over one particular stone every 18.6 years. Then he points out with
some glee a statement by the ancient historian Diodorus (circa 50
b.c): The Moon as viewed from this island appears to be but a little
distance from the Earth and to have on it prominences like those of
the Earth, which are visible to the eye. The account is also given
that the god visits the island every nineteen years, the period in
which the return of the stars to the same place in the heavens is
accomplished.'
What god visited the British Isles every nineteen years? Could
Stonehenge have been constructed to predict the appearances of some
alien being? This would have given those ancient stonemasons a
strong religious motive for constructing it.
Who ever planned Stonehenge had to have a knowledge of mathematics
and astronomy. Did the Stone Age Britons possess such knowledge ? Or
was the information passed along to them somehow? Were they
following orders, just as Moses followed the specifications given to
him by Jehovah for the construction of a gold ark (Exodus 25)?
The gods and demons of all cultures have
always had a penchant for ordering men to build huge seemingly
useless temples, tombs, and artifacts.
Soon after Gerald Hawkins published a summary of his findings in
Nature, October 26th, 1963, he became the centre of controversy.
Mathematicians, astronomers, and archaeologists who had never been
near Stonehenge assaulted his thesis and dissected his semantics. He
did leave many unanswered questions - largely because they were
unanswerable.
Twenty miles from Stonehenge there is another ancient wonder - the
mammoth mound at Silbury.
This is a man-made mound of earth 130
feet high, covering over five acres. Scientists estimate that it was
constructed around 1800 B.C., which means that while thousands of
early Britons were starting work on Stonehenge, other hundreds or
thousands were pointlessly hauling baskets of dirt to Silbury to
build one of the largest mounds on Earth.
In 1S48 a group of investigators
burrowed a tunnel into it, going from the top to the bottom in hope
of finding some clue. All they discovered were some picks made from
red deer antlers. Recently these objects were given the carbon 14
test and were found to be from around 800 B.C. This was most
upsetting to the theorists who believed the mound was at least a
thousand years older than that.
At the present time a team of American
and British archaeologists are busy digging new holes in the Silbury
mound, searching for new clues.
Man-made mounds of unknown origin and purpose number in the
thousands all over this haunted planet. In Ireland they are called
sidhe, or fairy mounds, and are purportedly the homes of the little
people. St Patrick is supposed to have stood on Croagh Patrick, a
mound in County Mayo, when he ordered the snakes out of Ireland.
Hundreds of these mounds are scattered throughout the United States,
where they are popularly called the Indian mounds, even though the
Indians have no legends to account for them.
Some of the mounds in Ohio, Minnesota,
and in the Southwest are skilfully laid out in geometric patterns
which can be seen only from the air. When viewed from above, they
represent elephants, birds, snakes, and other animals. Whoever laid
these things out apparently intended them to be seen from the air.
From the ground they appear to. be nothing more than symmetrical
hills with flat tops.
Aerial surveys of South America have revealed elaborate, ridged
fields and earthwork (some covering fifty thousand acres and some as
long as a thousand miles) in at least five scattered locations. The
ridged field at Lake Titicaca in the Andes covers two hundred
thousand acres and is spread over 160 miles.
These man-made ridges and mounds may
have been part of a complex agricultural and irrigation system.1
1 See "Pre-Columbian Ridged
Fields', J. J. Parson and W. M. Denevao, Scientific American, July
1967.
Other mounds and ridges of this sort are spread throughout Europe
and Asia. Stone chests found in mounds in the Mississippi Valley are
identical to chests dug up in mounds in Yorkshire, England. But most
of the mounds have yielded little or nothing to patient diggers. Yet
the presence of these mounds everywhere is an indication of a
worldwide culture in prehistoric times which regarded mound building
as an important activity.
We do know that mound building persisted as part of the burial rites
of ancient peoples. Early historians such as Homer and Herodotus
describe these rites. Alexander the Great is supposed to have spent
a fortune to erect a huge mound over the grave of his friend
Hephaestion.
The kinds of ancient Scythia on the
Black Sea were buried under mounds. Archaeologists assume that this
mound building practice led eventually to the development of the
Egyptian pyramids. The desert sand was. a poor mound-making
material, so the Egyptians switched to stone blocks.
But how did mound building spread to the
Americas in the pre-Indian epoch?
Flying saucer cults read great significance into the fact that many
modern UFO sightings seem to congregate around the old 'Indian'
mounds. Strange lights, bobbing and weaving and blinking in
intelligent patterns, periodically cavort above the mounds of the
Ohio and Mississippi valleys. Since UFOs have a tendency to appear
in the same geographical locations year after year, century after
century it is possible that ancient peoples saw them too and erected
the mounds for them.
Some flying saucer writers have borrowed
a page from Professor Agrest's Baalbek theory and suggested that the
flat-topped mounds were intended as UFO. airports.
If the great mounds were merely monuments to the dead, they were
costly ones. Even with modern bulldozers and steam-shovels, it would
take much time and money to construct, a mound 130 feet - high and
five acres square, like the Silbury mound. It is difficult to
visualize tribes of prehistoric people engaging in this activity for
months or years. It is even more difficult to think of them planning
the mounds so they would present specific symbols when seen from the
air.
Now. it has been established that while the early Britons were
simultaneously erecting Stonehenge and piling dirt for the Silbury
mound, they were also carving giant figures in nearby hillsides. The
figure of a great white horse is cut into the summit of a hill in
the Berkshire Downs.
At Ceine Abbas a giant caveman is traced
upon a hillside. He carries a club, and his male genitalia are
prominently displayed. A similar figure, the Long man at Wilmington,
was emasculated by early Christians. There are many others spotted
from Australia to Africa to the United States, all obviously meant
to serve as landmarks for unknown pilots cruising the virgin skies.
The tradition for making these landmarks
survived until at least fifteen hundred years ago, for that is the
apparent age of the famous
Nazca Lines found in the Peruvian
desert.
Nobody paid much attention to these
lines until the early 1940s. Since then they have become an
important facet of Atlantean and, flying saucer lore.
From ground level the Nazca Lines are merely a jumble of paths made
by brushing aside the stones and pebbles of the desert. There is
little rain or natural erosion in the area, so the lines have
remained intact for at least seven hundred years and possibly even
for fifteen hundred (estimates vary}. Seen from the air, the
clearances form the outlines of spiders, birds, fish, assorted
monsters or unknown animals, and numerous squares and rectangles…
some longer than two football fields.
Dr. Maria Reiche, a German
astronomer, has lived at Nazca for twenty years, carefully charting
all the lines by viewing them atop a high ladder.
Daniel Cohen remarked in Science
Digest, May 1970:
In spite of such devotion to her
work, she is regarded by some scientists as a woman obsessed
with a theory, rather than a careful scientist. Dr Reiche had
produced all sorts of correlations between the lines and the
positions of the sun, moon, and stars. She postulates a gigantic
"desert calendar' with which the ancient Peruvians could mark
the passing of the years.
Her opponents argue that with so
many lines and so many astronomical bodies with which to make
alignments, it,is possible to work up many correlations, but
that they are meaningless.
The Inca-Nazca people who created
these lines were massacred in the wars which followed Francisco
Pizarro's invasion of Peru in the 1500s. The Inca civilization
destroyed by Pizarro apparently came along centuries after the
lines were laid out An ancient Inca road slices across the
desert, ruthlessly severing the lines. It would seem that the
Incas regarded the lines as insignificant.
Nevertheless, hundreds of people
must have worked for years, if not for generations, in planning
these lines and scratching away the topsoil to render them. The
Nazca lines remain as another of early man's energetic but
seemingly pointless enterprises.
On Easter Sunday, 1722, Dutch admiral
Jaakob Rogeveen landed on an island in the Pacific some
twenty-two hundred miles from the coast of South America. The first
things he saw were hundreds of giant statues squatting near the
water line, staring out to sea.
They were huge, eyeless heads mounted on
small stone bodies. Some were as high as thirty-six feet.
Admiral Rogeveen had discovered not Atlantis but
Easter Island - a pitifully barren
volcanic island with an area of forty-five square miles, with almost
no trees, and with no wild-life except for hordes of bothersome
insects. It was populated by cannibalistic tribes of Polynesian
origin who had apparently migrated there centuries before.
The current population is 270, but at
one time it was considerably larger. Intertribal wars and raids by
early slave traders whittled the population down.
The aku statues were quarried from volcanic rock. Some weigh as much
as thirty tons. Since wood is practically non-existent on the
island, the statues must have been hauled out of the quarries with
ropes and sheer muscle power, dragged down to the beaches and raised
"upright with more muscle power. Many of the monuments were topped
with a hat, or pukao, made out of red Tock.
Some of these pukaos weighed five tons.
How the natives raised these five ton carvings to the tops of the
erected statues is another puzzle.
Like the builders of Stonehenge, the Easter Islanders had to
accomplish their task with the crudest kind of tools. Each statue
must represent months or years of labour. There are over six hundred
on the island. The statue building came to an abrupt end for some
reason. So abrupt that the workers dropped their stone chisels on
the spot. Their tools have been found in the quarry, next to two
hundred unfinished statues, some of which measure sixty-six feet
long.
Various expeditions have visited Easter Island and tried to piece
together the story of the ahu builders, but the surviving natives
have only the vaguest legends. During the tribal conflicts of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many of the statues were
overturned
and destroyed rather contemptuously. Remnants of the island's
culture were erased by the wars, slavers, a smallpox epidemic, and
missionaries who ordered the destruction of pagan artifacts. The
latter included ancient wooden tablets covered with an unknown form
of writing. Only a few samples of these tablets remain in scattered
museums.
Scientists who have concluded that the Easter Islanders are
Polynesians blithely overlook the fact that megalithic structures
are virtually unknown in Polynesia and that the Polynesians never
developed a form of writing. One Easter Island legend stresses that
wars were waged between a tribe of long-eared people and a tribe of
short ears. The short ears won and presumably ate all the long ears.
Perhaps the long ears were the ahu
builders.
Easter Island is so isolated that the early settlers must have been
marooned there, and lacking wood for boat-building, remained out of
touch with the rest of the world for centuries, while they developed
their own peculiar culture. They did have a complicated religion,
and it is possible that the statues were some part of it.
The red hats could have some meaning,
for even the American Indians have legends and prophecies about gods
in red hats. But there are also intriguing legends of red-haired
beings in such distant and isolated places as Borneo, and the
ancient gods of Europe and Asia were often described as having red
or blond hair. Modern UFO contactees claim that the space people who
ride around in flying saucers have long red or blond hair, too.
So it is not surprising that some
cultists speculate that members from WOW may have visited Easter
Island and that the ahu statues are tributes to them, each statue
symbolizing one appearance of a god.
Scores of giant red-haired mummies have been found in a cave
twenty-two miles from Lovelock, Nevada, in the last sixty years.
The first ones, discovered in 1912, were
between 6.5 and 7 feet tall. Artifacts found in the same cave have
been dated by carbon 14 tests. Apparently, the cave had been
occupied as far back as five thousand years. The local Piute Indians
have legends about these giants, describing them as being
cannibalistic.
In her book, Life Among the Piutes
(1882), Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins wrote that the last of the
red-haired giants were exterminated by the Piutes in the nineteenth
century.
'They would dig large holes in our
trails at night,' Mrs Hopkins reported.
'Our people would fall into these
holes… That tribe would even eat their own dead. Yes, they would
even come and dig up our dead after they were buried and would
carry them off and eat them.'
Atlantis lore also describes giant
red-haired cannibals who behaved almost like traditional vampires.
Some authors have speculated that the
red-haired giants invaded Easter Island from South America, and the
cannibalistic rites of the Easter Islanders were inherited from
them.
There is now an American military base on Easter Island, and
recently the workmen and heavy equipment constructing an airfield
were diverted to raise one of the flattened statues. It took a heavy
crane to do the job that was once done by hundreds of dedicated
natives engaged in another of early man's impressive but pointless
enterprises.
Easter Island has been a favorite of National Geographic for years,
and the cultists have had a field day inventing explanations for the
mystery. But there are many other Pacific islands even more remote
and very rarely visited which pose far more baffling questions.
The city of Metalanim on the
south-eastern shore of Ponape Island in Micronesia is now in ruins,
but it once could have housed two million people. No one knows who
built it or when. Some of the stone blocks in those ruins weigh
fifteen tons, and the stone used in the city is not from the island.
Gigantic waterways or canals intersect the city, some of them large
enough to float a battleship.
Who built this enormous place, and how
did they move those huge stone blocks across the Pacific to the
island? Whatever happened to the two million residents?
Three thousand miles to the south-east of Fonape Island, on tiny
Maiden Island in the line Island chain there are the ruins of forty
Stone temples whose architecture is identical to that of Metalanim,
Basalt roads lead from these ruins straight into the Pacific Ocean.
The island is uninhabited and covered
with guano (bird droppings). But if we draw an imaginary line
southwards from Maiden for twelve hundred miles, we arrive at
Rarotonga in the Cook Islands. Here another ancient road of basalt
blocks rises out of the ocean.
Innumerable other hard-to-reach islands scattered throughout toe
Pacific are dotted with enigmatic ruins, canals, and roadways from
some long lost culture. They all seem to be interrelated, as if they
were all once part of some great civilization. It would be
prohibitively expensive to organize a proper scientific expedition
to visit and study all of these far-flung ruins systematically.
Besides, their existence doesn't fit in
with any of the current anthropological theories. Suppose some
scientist should find that they date back ten thousand years or more
and are the remnants of some super-civilization of the past? No
matter how substantial his evidence might be, he would be
immediately crucified by his colleagues and drummed out of all the
scientific societies.
Obviously. Metalanim was built by cannibals with stone chisels, and
those canals served their religious rites to the water gods.
Believers in the lost continents of Mu, Pan, and Lemuria (which may
have been one place) noisily embrace these tidbits as evidence that
a great land mass did exist in the Pacific at one time and that it
was populated with a highly advanced race while the Egyptians,
Britons, and Cretans were all fashioning stone axes.
One cultist tradition, passed along by
talkative elementals and members of WOW, is that Lemuria preceded
Atlantis. After Lemuria sank into the Pacific, the Atlantis culture
got underway and flourished for 14,000 years before it, too, sank
10,500 years ago.*
* See Eklal Kueshana, The
Ultimate Frontier.
A mystical archaeologist named
James Churchward is largely
responsible for the modern revival of interest in Mu. In the early
part of this century he travelled through Central and South America
probing into ancient ruins and trying to decipher stone carvings and
petroglyphs.
Then he published a series of books
which combined scientism and socialism (that is, he applied the
scientific method to dubious fragments of evidence) to support his
contention that a supercontinent once existed in the Pacific. In his
view, Easter Island served as a kind of factory, and the great stone
heads manufactured there were shipped off to other parts of Mu.
The poorly investigated ruins of the
Pacific islands and the great island mounds (yes, huge man-made
mounds are found on many of these islands) were all a part of that
ancient civilization, he said. He leaned on scrambled translations
of stone carvings and vague legends of undefined origin. These were
mixed in with the flat statements of elementals and strange Vise
men.
Churchward also saw evidence or traces of Mu in the ruins of the
Mayan civilization in Central America and the Aztec and Incan
cultures further south. He compiled charts which compared the
writing of Maya with the hieroglyphs of Egypt, and he constructed
the ancient alphabet of Mu. Ultimately, he produced precise maps of
Mu and tried to demonstrate how the mysterious ruins found in the
United States were linked to that remote continent.
Socialists everywhere leaped on to his
bandwagon, and an enormous body of Mu literature has developed, but
science remains unconvinced.*
*
See The Lost Continent of Mu. The
Sacred Symbols of Mu, Cosmic Forces of Mu, The Children of Mu,
Cosmic Forces of Mu - Book 2, all published by Neville Spearman.
Actually, there is considerable merit in Churchward evidence, even
though his conclusions and his bold statements about Mu history can
be questioned.
A fantastic culture of stone builders
and mound builders, predating modern man by centuries or even
thousands of years, obviously did exist all over this planet The
only possible explanation for the many Pacific ruins, such as the
huge stone arch found on the coral atoll of Tonga-Tabu (two upright
columns weighing seventy tons each, topped by a crosspiece weighing
twenty-five tons), is that these islands must have somehow been
linked together by a land mass in the distant past.
The culture of this mysterious land
spread throughout the world. Then an unthinkable catastrophe
occurred. A catastrophe which altered the face of the whole earth
and wiped out everything but the most durable constructions of that
doomed race. In effect the slate was wiped dean. The ancient world
was destroyed and a new race slowly emerged.
But we are still haunted by racial
memories of our planet's past.
Every race and every culture has
preserved - and even guarded - memories of that earlier epoch.
Unfortunately, modern science has boxed itself in and dedicated
itself to proving Darwin's theory of evolution and other theories
which supply a rational, but not necessarily valid, explanation of
man's origin and past.
Back to Contents
CHAPTER SIX
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY
TO EXTINCTION
Want to discover a lost city and be entered in the annals of
archaeology?
It's easy, according to James Randi, the
famous magician and escape artist who has spent considerable time
probing into the ruins of Asia and South America. Just visit an
out-of the-way place and ask the natives for directions to the
nearest lost city, Randi explains. There are thousands of these
structures an every continent, and only a comparative handful have
been recognized by archaeology.
Those prehistoric stonemasons were
ubiquitous, and they left their works everywhere.
A young geologist named Karl Mauch found the lost city of
Zimbabwe in southern Rhodesia in 1871 simply by asking an ivory
trader for directions. Mauch's story is filled with high adventure.
The trader, a German-American named Adam Renders, rescued him from a
tribe of hostile natives and led him to the site of the ancient
ruins.
Mauch decided Zimbabwe was actually the biblical gold centre
of Ophir, where the fruits of King Solomon's mines were collected.
But all he and Renders found were a series of granite structures on
top of a steep bill, filled with winding passageways and tunnels.
The largest was the Elliptical Building roughly 830 feet in
circumference and thirty-three feet high. Nearby were two towers. A
cave on a cliff some distance away has proven to have unusual
acoustics.
When someone speaks in the cave, his voice can be heard
in the Elliptical Building but nowhere else.
'Doubtless, the native
priests put this phenomenon to nefarious use,' L Sprague de Camp, a
reformed science fiction writer, notes.
Archaeologists have been arguing about Zimbabwe for one hundred
years.
The ruins have been dated variously from a.d. 700 to 1500.
They have been credited to everyone from the Phoenicians and the
Egyptians to the naked Bantu tribesmen. Their workmanship is rather
crude when compared with the far more impressive structures of Asia,
the Pacific, and South America. Nevertheless, someone - we'll
probably never know who - went to the trouble of dragging thousands
of granite bricks to the top of a hill deep in the African
jungle twelve hundred years age and building an elaborate
fortress-temple filled with labyrinths and passageways whose only
apparent purpose is to drive archaeologists mad,
The city of Timbuktu was little more than a legend until the closing
years of the nineteenth century, when French adventurers crossed two
thousand miles of the Sahara wasteland and found it on the banks of
the Niger River in what is now the country of Mali. It was settled
in ajo. 1087 and was once a large, thriving trade centre.
Today it
has a population of about eighty-five hundred.1
1 Population figures for most parts of tie world are debatable. The
figures used in this book ate up-to-date estimates from theofficial
statistics of the United Nations and sources such as the Hammond
World Attas.
The architecture of Timbuktu is not
particularly Impressive, and the city is most noted for the hundreds
of storks who reside there.
Since a prominent city Uke Timbuktu could become lost, in modem
times it is not surprising that even larger and more impressive
cities,' such as Angkor Wat could get lost altogether. Angkor was
only a myth until explorers stumbled on to it in Cambodia in 1857.
It contains enormous temples and pyramid-like structures apparently
related to the mysterious structures of the Pacific islands. The
walls are covered with statues and bas-reliefs, and the origins of
the city are lost in a welter of half-remembered legends. Local
natives still speak of the great godlike beings who built the place.
Hard facts are rare, One story popular soon after Angkor's discovery
is that the city was abandoned suddenly (probably around a.d. 1300)
in the same way that the Easter Islanders threw down their tools in
their quarries and fled.
At least it is obvious that Angkor was
the product of an advanced culture of engineers and stonemasons and
that their culture vanished rather suddenly.
History demonstrates that men have often built imposing, elaborate
cities, flourished in them for hundreds or even thousands of years,
then deserted them to live in simple grass huts on their perimeters.
Wars and natural calamities often played a part in this pattern, of
course. Great cultures have risen and then died out. Men returned to
simpler ways of life. It is a natural order of things.
A thousand
years from now people may be living in thatched shacks in New Jersey
and on Long Island within full view of the decaying towers of
Manhattan. They may tell the children about the peculiar ancients
who built the towers as part of the strange region which worshipped
the great god Money.
In the Middle East the little country of Jordan is filled with Roman
ruins predating the Christian era. A large Roman theatre with a
seating capacity of four thousand can be found near Amman. There are
great temples and triumphal arches and countless stone columns
lining dead streets paved with large stone blocks.
Far to the south of Amman, in the midst of the unfriendly desert,
the traveller enters a narrow, gorge which leads through the cliffs
to an ancient city right out of the Arabian nights. This is Petra,
carved out of the red sandstone cliffs and filled with stately
columns and temples. This Arab Shangri-la was constructed around 700
b.c. and must have housed thousands of people. Food, water, and
supplies had to be brought in through the gorge - the only approach
- from miles away.
Thousands of men must have laboured for
generations, hacking these monuments out of the walls of this hidden
valley. Some of the ruins are pre-Roman. There are ancient tombs,
and a narrow stone staircase leads to an area on top of a cliff
where two twenty-foot obelisks are located on 'the high place' - a
platform measuring forty-five by twenty feet.
Perhaps Professor Agrest would regard it as another launching platform for nuclear
rockets.
The culture that built Petra is lost in legend and archaeological
confusion, but in the city's final days it was used as a hideout by
desert bandits.
For the most part, believers in Mu, Atlantis, and flying saucers
have ignored the ruins of the Middle East and Africa, concentrating
instead on the lost cities of Central and South America. The fairly
recent Mayan, Inca, and Aztec civilizations cannot account for all
these ruins. There is evidence that another, possibly far more
advanced, culture thrived in the Americas in earlier times. Remnants
of that civilization may have been handed down to the Indians who
followed.
Tiahuanaco, a fabulous stone ruin high in the Andes Mountains, has
inspired more curiosity, speculation, and nonsense than any other.
It has been the subject of countless books and articles and has been
used to support the beliefs of nearly every outlandish cult going.
In recent years there have been innumerable flying saucer sightings
and appearances of little glowing green men around Lake Titicaca,
which is 12,644 feet above sea level, Tiahuanaco is at the
south-east end of the lake. Although the ruins cover only about one
sixth of a mile, they feature impressive tumuli (man-made mounds), a
fifty-foot high pyramid, and a number of stone platforms and
underground chambers.
The famous Gateway of the Sun is an arch
weighing nearly ten tons. Archaeologists believe that the Tiahuanacans
were part of an empire that preceded the Incas by two thousand years, but they left no -written record, and there are no local
legends about them.
When the Incas latest conquered the Lake
Titicaca region, they found Tiahuanaco abandoned.2
2 See Road in ike Sky by George Hunt Williamson, Neville Spearman.
While many of tie structures in Petra were carved from the sandstone
cliffs in place, same of the walls in Tiahuanaco were whittled out
of huge blocks weighing as much as sixty tons and then somehow moved
into place. Giant statues also stand around the site.
One weighing
twenty tons has been moved to a museum in La Paz. In their book, The
Great Idol of Tiahuanaco, Hans Bellamy and P. Aljan offer an
interpretation of the symbols found in a huge statue discovered in a
Tiahuanacan temple. They claimed the symbols recorded astronomical
knowledge of a very advanced order.
Erich Von Daniken, author of
Chariots of The Gods,
visited the Andes is his search for evidence that spaceships had
visited the Earth in prehistoric times. He describes seeing a
twenty-thousand stone
block near the ruins of the Incan fort of Sacsahuaman.
Daniken
explains:
It is a single stone block the size of a four-storey house. It has
been impeccably dressed in the most craftsman like way; it has steps
and ramps and is adorned with spirals and holes… the whole monstrous
block stands on its head. So the steps run down-ward from the roof;
the holes point in different directions like the indentations of a
grenade; strange depressions, shaped rather like chairs, seem to
hang floating in space.
Who can imagine that human hands and human
endeavor excavated, transported, and dressed this block? What power
overturned it? What titanic forces were at work here? And to what
end?
The fortress of Sacsahuaman is surrounded by a wall sixty-feet high,
containing stones weighing as much as two hundred tons. Two hundred
tons!
Morris K. Jessup, a qualified investigator, viewed the
fortress and described these stones.
All of them crudely rough quarried and were then ground into their
designated niches in the structure by pushing them back and forth in
situ, until they fitted so closely, completely, and accurately that
a knife blade can not be inserted between them. This is a logical
and practical shortcut to effective stone fitting, which we have not
qualified in modern engineering.
Science writer Joseph Goodavage questioned Jessup's theory in Flying
Saucers-UFO Reports, No. 4.
The stones, he pointed out,
… had to be lifted into the air. placed roughly into their proper
positions, and then by some force inconceivable to us, shoved back
and forth, grinding down the roughly hewn surfaces until they fitted
smoothly and perfectly into their proper niches.
To lift, swing into
position, then rub the massive weight back and forth (against
enormous friction) without loosening its snugly fitting neighbors
was no job for simple aborigines or even for an advanced Inca
culture; the fact is that Sacsahuaman was ancient long before the
Incas appeared on the scene.
To add to the mystery, some of the larger stones found in the Andes
ruins were quarried in a valley two hundred toiles away.
Somehow
these enormous blocks of stone had to be transported up and down
mountains to their final resting place. Those fond archaeological
inventions, wooden rollers and rafts, couldn't have been used. So
how did the ancient builders accomplish this task?
A possible explanation taken seriously by some scientists - and
loudly berated by others - is that these monuments were built in a
time when the surface of the earth was actually different from what
it is now. A time when the Andes were level with the rest of the
land. Hans Schindler Bellamy prowled around Lake Titicaca and
claimed that he found traces of marine sediment indicating that the
Great Deluge had once engulfed the area.
This of course was evidence
that the ruins had been built before the deluge and were many
thousands of years old.
Two Frenchmen, Louis Pauwels, editor of the magazine Planite, and
Jacques Bergier, a nuclear physicist, seem to go along with Bellamy
in their book,
The Morning of the Magicians. They propose that the
Earth was once inhabited by a giant race which built the mounds and
monoliths and maintained a worldwide civilization with key centers
in the Andes, New Guinea, Mexico, Abyssinia, and Tibet.
They were
the true Atlanteans and were destroyed by some great cosmic
disaster.
The evidence reviewed thus far does indicate that this planet was
once occupied by a single great culture or a series of intertwining
cultures which possessed secrets of engineering and stone building
beyond anything known by the ancient Minoans, Romans, had Britons.
They constructed their monuments in isolated places, such as the
islands of northern Scotland, the Pacific, and the Andes Mountains, demonstrating an incredible sense of purpose as well as
awesome perseverance.
Our anthropologists and archaeologists have been struggling to
uncover and understand the history of the past four thousand years.
They have steadfastly refused to consider the possibility that
mankind may be only the latest race to infest the Earth, that other
races and other civilizations may have thrived here and died here.
One of the increasingly popular themes in science fiction is the
notion that an earlier super-race built space ships and sent their
members off to visit the stars.
Now those space travelers are
returning to home base in their flying saucers, and they're looking
around in unhappy confusion, asking,
'Where did everybody go? Who
are all these pitiful little ants shooting at each other?'
Alfred Wegener, an obscure German meteorologist, died in 1930 after
suffering fifteen years of ridicule, slander, and contempt at the
hands of his peers and colleagues.
He was branded a fool because he
believed that the earth once contained two large land masses which
had gradually split up and drifted apart to form the six continents.
Every schoolboy who has ever studied a map of the globe has reached
the same tentative conclusion, for the great land masses do seem to
conform like the pieces of a massive jigsaw puzzle.
Wegener's
evidence was a bit more complicated than that, however. He
considered fossils from different continents, climatic changes, and
specific geological formations, such as mountains which seem to
display marked similarities on the different continents. But science
was not ready to consider the theory of continental drift in 1915.
It was easier to denounce Wegener, dissect his ideas with more
popular theories, and consign the books to the scrap heap.
When
Wegener died in 1930, his theory seemed to die with him.
In the late 1950s, the Wegener controversy long forgotten, a new
crop of scientists began to explore the oceans, and new data were
fed into computers. Mountain ranges were discovered under the
oceans, laid out in ways which confirmed Wegener's earlier
speculations. Almost overnight the continental drift theory became a
new scientific fact. The National Science Foundation has now
committed $5.4 million for new tests and studies.
Alfred Wegener may
soon have the last laugh.3
3 The Confirmation of Continental Drift, Patrick M. Hurley,
Scientific American, April 196S. Also, 'Jigsaw of the Primeval World",
Life, January 30th, 1970.
Rock layers at specific levels in South America have been found to
match identical layers in Africa, indicating that both land masses
were once a single unit.
The current guess is that 150 to 200
million years ago there were two supercontinents. They broke apart
and drifted away from each other slowly. They are still moving
slowly, almost imperceptibly, and their movements have been measured
by satellite photos and other means. North America is moving away
from Europe at the rate of an inch per year.
New instruments are able to measure the magnetic fields of rocks on
the ocean's bottom. These measurements indicate that the Earth's
magnetic field has frequently shifted, the North Pole becoming the
South Pole and vice versa. Such magnetic shifts have occurred at
least 171 times in the past seventy-sfac mil Bon years -further
proof that the Earth's crust is wriggling about.4
4 See "Reversals of the Earth's Magnetic Field'. Allan ^px.
Scientific American, February 1967.
What all this means is that, about two hundred million years ago
during the age of the great reptiles - the Paleozoic age - this was
an entirely different planet. Perhaps it harboured life forms now
unimaginable to us.
Then it broke up, and new continents were
formed, new climatic changes occurred, the physical environment
itself may have changed. These changes could have brought about the
sudden or gradual change of the life forms as they altered to adapt
to the new conditions. Some of the puzzling erratics discussed in
Chapter One could have been produced by a form of intelligent life
now lost and forgotten.
But a lot of other changes can occur in two
hundred million years. It is doubtful if even the most advanced
civilization could produce any quantity of monuments and artifacts
which could withstand millions of years of erosion and geological
change.
The Atlantophiles are not too happy with the continental drift
theory because it virtually excludes the possibility that any large
land mass could have existed between North America and Europe. It
might not rule out Mu or Lemuria, however. Other stubborn cultists
are already leaping on to the continental drift bandwagon and
claiming one of those two land masses as their favored lost
continent.
Our flimsy knowledge of the very ancient past is based entirely upon
the discovery and interpretation of fossils found in the various
lock layers of the Earth's crust. This inexact science called
paleontology is only two hundred years old. We haven't dug deeply
enough or studied things thoroughly enough to reach reliable
conclusions about the distant past.
So many of the facts commonly
accepted today are only educated guesses.
If the Earth has suffered truly cataclysmic changes in the past two
hundred million years, we must first know of and understand those
changes completely before we can accurately assess the meanings of
rock formations. It seems unlikely that we will ever be able to
develop methods for collecting evidence that will give us conclusive
truths about the Earth's past. Astronomers and mineralogists were
astounded and upset by the rocks our astronauts scooped up off the
surface of the moon, because they indicated that the moon was four
billion years old or even older, and it may be even older than the
Earth itself.
Some astronomers had been pushing the theory that the
moon was really just a chunk of the Earth that had been scooped out
of the Pacific Ocean area and tossed into space somehow.
That theory
and many others went down the drain when our first space module
dropped on to the Sea of Tranquillity.
Geologists and paleontologists have developed reasonable evidence
that the Earth has passed through several glacial periods, or ice
ages. These seem to be cyclic, with minor ice ages occurring every
twelve thousand years or so and with major glacial periods taking
place over longer periods. These ice ages suggest a really major
catastrophe - a sudden shift of the Earth's entire axis.
If you lived on the planet Uranus, the seventh planet from the sun,
you would be exposed to a pseudo-ice age every 21.5 (Earth) years.
Our knowledge of Uranus is admittedly flimsy, and when and if we
ever manage to visit it we may find that many of the currently
accepted facts about the planet are erroneous, just as our moon
landings disproved many of the previously accepted facts about our
own satellite. In any case, the best astronomical information
indicates that Uranus has a very wobbly axis and that it flips over
about four times for each of its circuits around the sun. (A Uranus
year is 84 Earth years.)
A resident living on a fixed point on
Uranus would find himself shifting drastically away from or towards
the sun every 21.5 years. If the planet were closer to the sun,
these shifts could produce dramatic changes of climate.
It is possible that the Earth's orbital mechanics include similar
fluctuations of the axis over longer periods. Scientists have
figured out that there are minor climatic changes on Earth every 170
years due to minor axis shifts. The magnetic polarity of our planet
is quite unstable. The magnetic South ^ole is not a fixed point but
moves steadily in a two-hundred-mile circle. As already noted, the
poles reverse themselves every few million years. Studies of the
rock levels of the last Ice Age have produced evidence that major
shifts of the Earth's crust or the planet's entire axis occur every
12,000 years or
so. Such shifts would change the climate completely; frigid areas
would suddenly be in the tropic zones, water would inundate land
areas, and of course, all life would be affected. Sea shells and
fossils have been found in the heart of the Sahara desert,
indicating that it was once covered with water.
In a stimulating article in the Saturday Evening Post of January
16th, I960, zoologist Ivan T. Sanderson documented the
amazing results of one of these planetary inversions. Prehistoric
mammoths found preserved in the frozen muck of Siberia had mouthfuls
of unswallowed
plants, as though they had been quick frozen while munching happily
on their feeding grounds.
Sanderson pointed out that the only way
these animals would have been so splendidly preserved was to have
been exposed to an incredible drop in temperature. TMs could have
occurred in several ways, he pointed out cautiously. The earth's
crust could have shifted very suddenly, carrying the animals farther
north very rapidly, the entire axis could have tucked over, or some
cloud of frigid gases from space could have suddenly engulfed the
entire planet.
Whatever the case, the discovery of these animal
carcasses is solid evidence that some unexplained calamity took
place with fierce suddenness thousands of years ago.
Decades earlier an Austrian mining engineer named Hass Horbiger had
developed a fanciful theory to explain the Earth's early history. He
envisioned huge spheres of ice crashing into the planet and talked
of captive moons, which predate our present moon, entering
retrograde orbits, their gravity tearing up our seas and reshaping
the Earth's surface.
His eight-hundred page Glazial Rosmogonie,
published in 1913, enraged the astronomers and scientists of Germany
and Austria.
The late Willy Ley, the German rocket authority and
science writer summed it up when he said. To pick flaws in this
theory is about as easy - and as pleasant - as gathering Japanese
beetles from an infested flower bed.'
But Horbiger found a powerful ally, another Austrian named Adolf
Hitler. In 1925 Horbiger delivered this ultimatum to the scientific
world:
The time has come for you to choose - whether to be with us or
against us. While Hitler is cleaning up politics, Hans Horbiger will
sweep out of the way the bogus sciences. The doctrine of eternal ice
will be a sign of the regeneration of the German people. Bewarel
Come over to our side before it is too late!
Powerful backers materialized, and Horbiger set up offices and
recruiting campaigns for his doctrine of eternal ice. His scientific critics were soon subjected to
horrifying harassment and cringed in terror as Wei took on all the
dimensions and power of a poetical party.
Every good Nazi had to
declare,
'I swear that I believe in the doctrine of the eternal ice.'
With the disintegration of Nazi Germany Wei also seemed to melt
away.
But recently Horbiger's concepts were resurrected by
Pauwels
and Bergier in The Dawn of Magic.
"There have been four geological
epochs," they state flatly, "because there have been four moons."
The earlier epochs were influenced by gravitational changes and
factors which produced giant animals and plants,
'… and in a world
peopled by monsters there appeared this first man of immense size
bearing also no resemblance to us and possessed of a different kind
of intelligence.'
Cosmic rays became stronger in those days, they
tell us, and produced a vulgar mutation. Survivors of this race of
giants overlapped into the modern epoch and are mentioned in the
folklore of many races, usually being described as evil and violent
characters.
One of Horbiger's disciples was Hans Bellamy, who sifted myth and
legend to find farther proof for the doctrine of eternal ice. It is
not unusual that the Wei believers turned to the Atlantis literature
and found in it some of the evidence they sought.
The Atlantophiles
had also scoured folklore and uncovered innumerable references to
earlier global disasters.
Although scientists sneer at the use of myths as evidence, it is
obvious that all the isolated races of mankind managed to preserve
the same kind of stories. Of all the bits and pieces assembled from
these ancient tales, the most common is the universal account of a
great flood which occurred simultaneously over the entire planet (if
the assorted legends have been dated correctly).
Many Indian tribes
in the Americas have myths about arks and Noah-like personalities
who survived the flood. If we take these things at their face value,
we can assume that the Earth did experience a phenomenal rising of
the waters in fairly recent times, that a large part of the land
surfaces were inundated, and that some human beings escaped because
they had been warned in advance and had fled to high places or had
constructed ships which were sufficiently seaworthy to withstand the
torrents.
The flood legends form the cornerstone of the Atlantis myth. A
colorful politician named Ignatius Donnelly was responsible for the
revival of interest in
Atlantis in the late nineteenth century. He
collected hundreds of fragments of archaeological erratics and wrote
a number of best selling books.
He also managed to find time to
serve as a U.S. congressman and state senator and even ran for
vice-president on the Populist ticket in 1901.
Donnelly's
Atlantis - The Antediluvian World
is still in print and makes some sense, even
though it fails to prove the existence of Atlantis. It does prove
that other civilizations existed before the present epoch. Donnelly
also advocated a theory claiming that a visiting comet had upset the
balance of the Earth in earlier times and produced catastrophic
effects. Horbiger carried the theory several steps further.
Comets have always served as a kind of scientific catchall. Although
we actually know very little about these celestial objects (since
we've never managed to catch one), astronomers like to believe that
these fireballs are made of ice and that the huge chunks of ice that
have crashed out of the sky for centuries were really from the tails
of comets.
In recent years many prominent scientists have seriously
explained flying saucers as being the debris from comets' tails.
During the UFO flap of 1966 the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy sent
out form letters stating that,
'One explanation of this phenomenon
connects the lights that are seen with the gaseous tails of comets.'
If a comet ever did strike the Earth, it might make life here rather
uncomfortable.
Scientists have estimated that if a solid meteorite
only a mile in diameter should strike the planet intact, the impact
and concussion could destroy a large part - or all - of life here.
There are a number of large meteor craters, all very ancient, which
prove that such collisions have taken place.
Ancient civilizations could have been destroyed by any one of these
potential catastrophes as well as such things as enormous
earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Our planet is really unstable.
Mountains are always blowing up. The crust is constantly shifting,
generating earthquakes which take a frightening toll in lives and
property every year. Rivers overflow and floods occur with appalling
regularity. Enigmatic fireballs can sweep down oat of the sky
suddenly and unexpectedly and burn up whole cities like Chicago.
On top of all these hazards, we have the most dangerous factor -man
himself. He has made war an economic and political necessity. The
ruins of the Middle Hast and Europe stand as testimony to his
ability to destroy whole civilizations by himself without any
outside help.
Among the traditions of the Hopi Indians is the story of Kuskurza,
the third world or epoch, which lay 'in the east' (Atlantis again!).
They developed flying machines called patuwvotas according to
Frank Waters in his Book of the Hopi:
'Some of them made a patu-wvota, and with their creative power made it fly though the
air. On this many of the people flew to a big day, attacked it, and
returned so fast no one knew where they came from. Soon the people
of many cities and countries were making patuwvotas and flying on
them to attack one another. So corruption and war came to the
Third World as it had to the other.'
With present day inflation, theories are the cheapest commodity
around, costing less than a penny a gross. It is better to stick
with the available facts.
Those facts are that one or more
civilizations preceded early man and left behind magnificent
megaliths as proof of their artistic and engineering abilities.
Something destroyed those civilizations, or perhaps they destroyed
themselves. Great civilizations have risen and died within the past
two thousand years alone.
Our own civilization may be following the
same unhappy route, and two thousand years from now the Earth may
again flip over on its axis. Great sheets of ice may bury the rubble
of our cities. Silt and stones will wash over our towers and
fortresses. And somewhere a handful of beings, reduced to savagery
by necessity, will tell tales around their camp fires about us and
how we even dared to reach for the moon.
Thousands of years after
that, a new breed of anthropologist will collect those tales and
scoff, even though all the tribes from all parts of the planet will
have the same tales to tell. It is plainly impossible, those
scientists will say, that any super civilization could have existed
in prehistoric times. And primitive man could hardly have flown to
the moon.
It is folly to even listen to such nonsense. It's far more
fruitful to measure and study those giant faces carved into Mount
Rushmore… faces that are obviously replicas of ancient gods.
Probably they were carved by the same primitives who erected that
great ring of stones in the British Isles, they will observe sagely.
Mankind is like a broken record repeating the same refrain over and
over again.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SCIENTISTS IN COLLISION
In 1950 a new meteor raced across the horizon, spewing a long trail
of crisp ideas that left the scientific establishment sputtering in
rage.
The meteor was a book dealing with history, astronomy, and archaeology. It was written by a psychiatrist and published by a
major Madison Avenue house. Science editors and book reviewers
across the country greeted it with awe, comparing its author with
Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein.
The public responded by
making the book a best seller. It was titled Worlds in Collision and
written by Dr
Immanuel Velikovsky.
Dr Velikovsky tore at the delicate underpinnings of modern science,
applying excessive scholarship to the problems of how the planets
were formed and what forces may have wrought changes in the Earth.
Along the way he was obliged to invent new theories based upon the
flimsy (by scientific standards) evidence of mythology. He dared to
throw out some of science's most coveted concepts, substituting Ms
own cosmology.
The explosion followed almost immediately. The biggest names in
astronomy and physics organized and fulminated. They set out to
destroy this upstart by flooding his, publisher's office with
vicious letters threatening to boycott the firm unless Velikovsky's
book was withdrawn. Since the publisher also had a profitable
sideline of textbooks and was heavily dependent upon the academic
community for support, this ugly campaign had some effect.
An
assistant editor who had first suggested publishing the book was
fired, and publication rights were turned over to another publisher
who did not have a textbook business.
'Leading scientists gave public lectures denouncing Velikovsky. The
scientific journals were filled with critical anti-Velikovsky
letters and articles. It was modern science's darkest hour. There
was a response which for intensity and hostility was unequalled in
twentieth century scientific history,' the Los Angeles Times later
noted.
What triggered this emotional outburst?
Velikovsky's main theme was
that the planet Venus was really a comet hurled out of the planet
Jupiter. It had brushed part the Earth, he said, on its way into
orbit around the sun and had been observed by all the existing races
and recorded in the mythology.
Immanuel Velikovsky was born June 10th, 1895, in Vitebsk, Russia. He
studied medicine and law at same of Europe's best universities (he
couldn't go to a Russian college because he was a Jew), received his
medical degree in 1921, and settled in Palestine in 1924. He
knew Freud personally and corresponded with the great man in the
last years of his life.
In 1939 Velikovsky and his family moved to
New York, intending to stay only eight months. But he was already
toying with his theories, and he spent the next nine years in
libraries conducting the exhaustive research which finally resulted
in Worlds in Collision. Today he lives quietly in Princeton, New
Jersey, rarely appearing in public. He has been more fortunate than
Wegener and his continental drift theory in that Velikovsky has Eved
to see his critics silenced and many of his seemingly far-out
concepts confirmed.
Ever since the invention of the printing press, publishers have been
flourishing on best selling books covering the whole spectrum of
pseudoscience. Volumes of profound nonsense, such as the works on
pyramidology and Atlantis, have sold in amazing numbers generation
after generation. Nearly every major publisher has books of
astrology and flying saucers on his lists.
A large part of the
endless stream of theses, papers, and learned studies by
establishment scientists has in time proven invalid and more
crackpot than even the cultist literature. It was incredible that Velikovsky's contemporaries singled out his work - a book that had
taken nine years of careful study and research - for their venom. In
retrospect many of the anti-Velikovsky critiques read like the work
of deranged lunatics who had not even bothered to read the book they
were attempting to criticize.
They were against the book simply
because it propounded ideas that were contrary to the accepted
theories of the day. They resented the fact that a psychiatrist
dared to speculate on astronomy and archaeology. He was an intruder.
Above all they resented the fact that his book was very well written
(most scientists are miserable writers).
'If I had not been psychoanalytically trained, I would have had some
harsh words to say to my critics,' Dr Velikovsky said loftily in the
early 1950s.
Orthodox scientists have always sneered at the works of Charles
Fort, an American humorist who published four books of oddities and
scientific anomalies, primarily because Fort delighted in attacking
the scientific establishment.
Now they tried to lump Velikovsky
together with Fort.
Scientists and the untutored followers of sdentism spent years denigrating Velikovsky and generating the
legend that be was just another crackpot. The ageing psychiatrist
just ignored them and went on writing books expanding Ms central
thesis.1
In a rare attempt at self-defence 2 he stated that he hoped
that future generations of scientists would understand his work more
dearly.
1 Among these are: Earth in Upheaval, Ages in Chaos, and Oedipus and
Akhnatnn.
2 Harper's. June 1951.
He wrote off his contemporary critics, and this prompted
Martin Gardner to observe in 1952 that:
Dr Velikovsky is an almost perfect textbook example of the
pseudoscientist - self-taught in the subjects about which he does
most of his speculation, working in total isolation from fellow
scientists, motivated by a strong compulsion to defend dogmas held
for other than scientific reasons, and with an unshakable conviction
in the revolutionary value of his work and the blindness of his
critics.
One of the favorite points of the anti-Velikovsky critics was that
he relied upon ancient myths and traditions for his evidence.
Actually, in Worlds in Collision, he devoted many pages to this
problem. Since he was trying to reassemble events which transpired
in prehistoric times (before the advent of written records), he was
obliged to perform a comparative study of early legends.
He
recognized that the problem of interpreting such material correctly
was monumental.
'Traditions about upheavals and catastrophes, found among all
peoples,' he wrote, 'are generally discredited because of the
shortsighted belief that no forces could have shaped the world in
the' past that are not at work also at the present time, a belief
that is the very foundation of modern geology and of the theory of
evolution.'
Those were fighting words to the scientific establishment.
Velikovsky compounded his felony by suggesting that numerous events
and catastrophes long accepted in religious lore as miracles and
acts of God were in reality observations of astronomical phenomena
which could be explained. This was totally unpalatable to the
scientific community and to many others as well.
In 1950 the staid American Journal of Science ranted that
Velikovsky's book was 'best described as burlesque of both science
and history'. Seventeen years later Yale Scientific Magazine devoted
an entire issue to vindicating the good doctor.
What had happened in those seventeen years? For one thing, the Old
Guard had changed to a degree, and many bright young men had
emerged, clutching their slide rules as they rode the tails of
man-made comets to Venus and Mars. For another, the stupefying and
stultifying atmosphere of the McCarthy Era of the early 1950s had
ended.
Professor Lloyd Motz of Columbia University scented the tide
of change, and in a letter in Harper's in October 1963. he
cautiously admitted,
'I do not support Velikovsky's theory, but I do
support his right to present his ideas and to have those ideas
considered by responsible scholars and scientists as the creation of
a serious and dedicated investigator and not the concoctions of a
charlatan seeking notoriety…'
Scientists and professors live in the uncomfortable atmosphere of
the academic rule, Publish or Perish.
They grind out interminable
research papers and studies, not because they have something to say,
but because their livelihood often depends upon their ability to put
their names into print. This unfortunate system has spawned an army
of men whose academic credentials are sound enough but who indulge
in quasi research.
Some even manage to acquire a considerable
reputation by publishing a steady stream of unread books. Professor
Mote's remark about 'the concoctions of a charlatan seeking
notoriety1 is revealing, because scientists are painfully aware of
the many charlatans in their own midst who thrive on such notoriety.
Over and over again in the past, leaders of the scientific community
have proven mere charlatans or, at best, competent organizers and
administrators, while their less notorious contemporaries made the
real contributions to their field.
This spills over of course into
other fields such as literary criticism, where a man will write a
critical essay of a famous author, and then others will write
critical essays of the original critique.
Soon the little literary
magazines are actually feeding upon themselves, and the professors
are quarrelling about their interpretations of said famous author.
Velikovsky became the most prominent victim of this system. If he
had written a book about psychiatry {his own field) or sex and sold
a million copies, no one would have cared. But when he invaded the
turf of others, presented unpopular ideas in a logical and
successful manner, and got the book published… well, he had gone too
far.
To the scientists of the 1950s he had to be a 'charlatan
seeking notoriety', like Herr Horbiger of another era, they chanted,
'Ether you believe in us, or you
must be treated as an enemy.'
A decade later the main dish served at many a scientist's table was
crow.
Astronomers were dead certain in 1950 that both Jupiter and Venus
were elderly planets, and after much peering through their
telescopes, they had constructed some fanciful facts about both
bodies. These facts were taught, as usual, to generations of school
students as. the gospel.
Assorted studies had "proven" that the
surface temperature of Venus was somewhere between 25° C, and 30° C
making it a relatively cool planet and possibly an inhabitable one.
Dr Velikovsky's theory was that Venus was actually an ex-comet and
had been in solar orbit for only thirty-four centuries. If he was
right, the surface of Venus would have to be considerably hotter.
In 1961 Dr Frank Drake and other radio astronomers turned their
equipment on Venus and discovered that its temperature based upon
its radio emissions was at least 600° F, or 315° C. later the United
States and the Soviet Union sent unmanned space probes to Venus and
confirmed that it was a mighty hot place and that there might be
some source of surface heat other than solar radiation.
Venus is the
second planet from the sun after Mercury. Even the side turned away
from the sun radiates considerable heat.
Another interesting
discovery was that Venus rotates slowly in a retrograde - that is,
clockwise - direction and has movements, which are in sharp contrast
to the other planets in the solar system.*
'Maybe Venus was created
apart from the other planets,' scientists at the Goldstone Tracking
Station muttered in 1962, 'perhaps as a secondary solar explosion or
perhaps in a collision of planets.'
* See 'Radat Observations of the Planets', Invin I. Shapiro,
Scientific American. July 1968.
There were other factors, such as the heavy hydrocarbon atmosphere
of the planet, which seemed to confirm Dr Velikovsky's 1950
speculations. Venus is definitely an oddball among the planets, but
the astronomers of 1950 didn't know any of this.
Turning to the ancient records for his evidence, Dr Velikovsky
pointed out that early peoples had recorded Venus as an
exceptionally bright object trailing smoke. The Chinese, Mayas,
Toltecs, and Aztecs also recorded its motion… and the early Venus
apparently followed a much different orbit, or trajectory, than the
diminished orb now visible in our skies.
The people of Mesopotamia did not even record Venus in their
astronomical records. Later the Chaldeans described it as a 'bright
torch of heaven' that 'illuminates like the sun' and 'fills the
entire heaven'. Other far-flung cultures preserved similar comments,
all of which suggest that Venus began as a comet which roared very
close
to the earth at one point - close enough perhaps to cause tidal
waves and spew burring fragments on to the earth's surface.
Another part of Dr Velikovsky's evidence consisted of the stories of
the 'rain of fire' which encompassed the earth, and he quoted from
Mexican texts as well as the records of the Assyrians. If he was
right then some of the oil deposits on earth were a result of that
celestial shower.
But geologists have always assumed that oil is
created by a process which takes millions of years. Since Worlds in
Collision was written, deposits of liquid hydrocarbons have been
found and dated in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere, giving every
indication they are only a few thousand years old! The ancient texts
described the comet Venus as coming from the fifth planet, Jupiter.
Was this possible? This was the flimsiest part of the Velikovsky
theory, and the most widely attacked.
Ironically, the very men who
advocate the theory that tektites are the result of meteor impacts
on the moon (Chapter Four) are the same ones who deny that a Jovian
comet could come into being, perhaps by the same process. Velikovsky
proposed a collision of planets as a possible source. The asteroid
belt between Mars and Jupiter could be made up of surviving
fragments from that awesome event.
Our ideas about Jupiter itself
have been revised considerably since 1950. We used to think of it as
a gigantic planetary body composed of gases and liquids, but in
recent years powerful radio waves have been detected coming from it.
Apparently, there are great electrical storms on the surface, and
some of these storms affect earthly radio waves as much, or more so,
than sunspots.
Studies of all this have led to a new theory, now
quite popular among astronomers, that Jupiter may not be a planet at
all. It may be a cold star! Maybe one planet could not give birth to
another, but a star, even a cold star, could.
Jupiter's diameter is approximately eleven times the diameter of the
earth - about eighty-six thousand miles. As nearly as we can
determine, it revolves very rapidly on its axis; a Jovian day is
less than ten Earth hours long. Through the telescope it appears to
be ringed with cloud-like bands, the most interesting feature of
which is the famous red spot.
This is an elliptical spot some forty
thousand kilometers long and thirteen thousand kilometers wide -
roughly equal in area to the entire surface of the Earth. This spot
was first observed by Robert Hooke in 1664. Astronomers have been
watching it ever since. It also rotates with the planet but at
different speeds. And it always remains in approximately the same
latitude, wandering only slightly.
Morris K Jessup and other ufologists have advanced the notion
that the ted spot is actually a great spaceship, a monumental Ark
from outer space, which transported the survivors of some dying
world into our solar system. Some modern flying saucer
contactees
even claim that the spacemen have taken them to Jupiter and shown
them this Ark.
Other contactees have been told stories about the ark
by the spacemen. It is waiting for the day when the Earth will be
evacuated by the kindly space people.
Then we will all fly to the
stars aboard it. Well, not all of us. Just those lucky humans who
have been chosen by the space people. Several dry runs have already
been held in recent years with the chosen contactees closing down
their homes and businesses to sit on a hill or mountaintop and wait
for the evacuation to begin.
A number of these dry runs are
documented in the author's book, UFOs - Operation Trojan Horse.
Jupiter's Ark is an integral part of modern flying saucer lore.
Stanley Kubrick's epic motion picture, 2001, added to this lore by
having astronauts head for Jupiter after a mysterious monolith was
discovered on the moon. The monolith, a faceless grey slab, is used
throughout the film as the symbol of some extraterrestrial force
guiding man's destiny. In the dosing scenes of 2001, scenes which
have thoroughly baffled many moviegoers, an astronaut arrives on,
Jupiter only to enter into a new phase of evolution: a kind af
rebirth. Shorn of its cinematic mysticism, the film is a restatement
of what many cultists have been saying all along.
The flying saucer buffs have been misled by astronomical
terminology.
Although the red spot is usually termed an 'object', it
could be almost anything. Bernard M. Peek, an amateur astronomer,
called it a raft and suggested it could be some form of water
floating like an iceberg in the Jovian atmosphere. Professor Raymond
Hide, of the British Meteorological Office, proposed in Scientific
American in February, 1968 that it could be the visible part of a
phenomenon known as a Taylor column - a stagnant cylinder of liquid
centered above some depression or topographical feature on the planet
below.
The late Frank Edwards, a radio news commentator and author
of UFO books, poetically equated it with a giant eye always turned
towards (he earth. Some followers of Velikovsky have asserted that
the red spot is really the hole left behind when Venus was
catapulted out into space.
In order for a body the size of Venus, which is only slightly
smaller than the earth, to be successfully hurtled out of Jupiter,
it would have to attain an incredible escape velocity to overcome
the great mass and gravity of the planet.
Achieving this velocity
would require a tremendous amount of energy, or as Professor Motz
put it,
'… to
eject a planet like Venus, Jupiter would have had to release in a
manner of seconds or minutes as much energy as the Sun emits in more
than a year. Jupiter would therefore have appeared as bright as a
nova [an exploding star], which is about a million times as luminous
as the sun…'
Dr Velikovsky attempted to explain this by theorizing that a large
mass on a near collision course with Saturn and Jupiter may have set
the cosmic machinery in motion.
Whatever may have happened, Velikovsky's main premise is that Venus
is a young planet. He predicted in 1950 that Venus would prove to be
hot and that it would display orbital eccentricities.
The claims
have now been verified. He claimed that the ancient records stand as
proof that Venus was not even present in the skies until fairly
recent times, that it first appeared as a comet hauling a tail and
followed a course somewhat different from its present one. Its
passage through our solar system caused massive disturbances on
earth and probably wholesale destruction. There are written records
of those disturbances and archaeological and geological evidence of
that destruction.
In relatively recent times Venus posed a new mystery. Today's
astronomers agree that our sister planet has no moons. But a
satellite was observed orbiting Venus in 1672 by a prominent
astronomer named Casden. He saw it again in 1686. Other well known
astronomers, using primitive but adequate instruments, sighted it in
1740, 1759, 1764, and 1791.
They all noted that it seemed to be
about one fourth the size of Venus itself (giving it a diameter of
two thousand miles) and that it was very bright, almost luminous.
It's very hard to lose something two thousand miles across… even in
space. But no astronomer has seen this object since 1791. Flying
saucer cultists have taken Venus' vanishing satellite to their
bosom, claiming naturally that it was really a gigantic spacecraft.
But the object's extreme luminosity could mean that it was a
fragment of the Venus comet itself, following a retrograde orbit
which eventually sent it into the planet's surface.
We have followed a long and bizarre trail from the ancient rumors
of massive catastrophes to the Atlantis-bound theories of Donnelly
to the Ice Age notions of Horbiger's Wei and finally to the
carefully researched and thought-out conclusions of Dr Immanuel
Velikovsky and his still controversial concept of colliding worlds,
These men and their many followers were probably mostly wrong… but
there is always a chance that they might also be partially right.
While their peers and colleagues have fumed, fussed^ fought.
ridiculed, and attacked their body syntheses, a new generation of
scientists has steadily uncovered substantial scientific evidence
which seems to support them. New theorists will undoubtedly seize
upon this new evidence and construct concepts which will make them
seem pikers.
We are beginning to realize that the Earth's crust is in constant
motion, that the continents are adrift. The whole planet may
flip-flop on its axis every few thousand years, causing water to
bury land areas, bringing new land areas to the surface, and
thrusting temperate zones into the Arctic cold to be smothered by
ice.
And if we can accept Velikovsky, our little mudball is running
the constant hazard of encountering objects and forces in space
which can wreak unbelievable havoc in hours or days. The moon could
even fall on us one day, or the sun could suddenly explode. Our
whole technological civilization could be wiped out in a flash.
It would not be too surprising, therefore, if other great
civilizations might have flourished on this planet many thousands of
years ago. Other great races, not necessarily linked to us
biologically, could have existed here.
The supergiants of Pauwels
and Bergier could have been real. All that has survived of that
ancient race are the puzzling stone monoliths and the great mounds
and ridges. It was a logical step for a super-civilization to move
from the construction of mounds and earth-works to the building of
the more permanent pyramids of Egypt, China, and South America.
Their culture, or remnants of it, survived and were imitated by
early man.
For thousands of years superb stonemasons laboured all
over this planet, erecting pyramids, then temples, then great
cities. Our sciences have timidly attempted to reconstruct the
history of the past three or four thousand years, never daring to
look beyond.
And woe to anyone - such as Velikovsky - who does dare.
PART TWO
If the religious projections
of man correspond to a reality that is superhuman and
supernatural, then it seems logical to look for traces
of this reality in the projector himself.
Peter L. Berger
A Rumour of Angels
CHAPTER EIGHT
MIMICS OF MAN
The animal world is filled with incongruous redundancies.
There are
insects that resemble twigs and sticks, fish that look like harmless
underwater plants, animals that appear to be rocks and ferns. Some
non-poisonous snakes imitate the coloring and appearance of their
deadlier cousins. Numerous tasty insects discourage their enemies by
imitating poisonous centipedes and scorpions. The animal and insect
world is thronging with fakers and imitators and cunning masters of
camouflage.
One insect is so cleverly disguised that it can march
along with formations of fierce army ants unnoticed. It even
imitates the scent of the any ants.
Man, the most vicious and wanton killer of the animal world and the
natural enemy of all wild things, has his imitators, too. Overt
contacts between man and paraman have numbered in the millions
throughout history. Legend and lore are rich with such incidents of
contact. Our great religions are founded upon encounters with angels
and demons.
The annals of psychic phenomena are filled with accounts
of seemingly chance meetings with these ultraterrestrials. Some of
them seem dull and inconsequential and even easily explainable;
others are witnessed by groups of reliable people and produce
testimony that would have been written by a drunken science fiction
author.
'Living among us undetected may be creatures (not necessarily alien)
with all the outward appearances of human beings,' urologist Alex
Saunders wrote in Quest magazine. October 1969. The mimic would of
necessity be a "lone wolf", likely living in a large, bustling city
where the eccentric and the odd may flourish unhindered. For it is a
curious fart of nature that that which is in plain view is often
best hidden.*
Another famous ufologist, Ainte Michel, has also commented on these
mysterious mimics.
"Certain cases have been checked and found to be
perfectly authentic. But they are so absurd (because they are
mimetic) that folk do not dare to talk about them. No useful
research can ever be done so long as absurdity produces
complexes in us." 1
1 The Humatwüs. Neville Spearman.
Early man was very aware of the existence of these mimics and tended
to separate them into two groups - gods and demons.
All religions
have always warned their followers to be cautious of false angels
and demigods. The Bible repeatedly discusses these entities and
their influence upon man, always describing them as humanlike beings
usually travelling in threes and possessing remarkable superhuman
powers.
"Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have
entertained angels unawares,' we are warned in Hebrews 13:2.
Three men, usually of Oriental countenance and dressed in
somber
black clothing, play important roles in both flying saucer and
religious lore.
For years the (lying saucer researchers who
encountered these Men In Black (MIB) believed they were secret
agents of the CIA seat to harass them. These MIB have been seen most
often riding about in large black automobiles, usually Cadillacs,
and they have engaged in frightening tactics, harassing amateur UFO
sleuths.
There are hundreds of reports from all over the world in
which these mysterious gentlemen have approached UFO witnesses and
investigators, warning, even threatening, them to be silent about
what they had seen. Since these entities and their big black
automobiles have an uncanny talent for disappearing into thin air,
investigators examining the stories of their victims have tended to
dismiss such accounts as lies and hallucinations.
Then, as has
happened in so many cases, when these skeptical investigators had
MIB encounters of their own, they have panicked in confusion. There
has been an appalling number of sudden deaths, suicides, and nervous
breakdowns among UFO investigators in the past twenty years.
On the religious level these same MIB, answering the same
descriptions of the UFO harassers, have always been regarded as
agents of the devil - or the devil himself. The antics of these
characters have kept the devil myth have into modern times, and
there are still numerous religious cults hopelessly engaged in
battling and trying to outwit them… but they always manage to stay one
jump ahead of their pursuers. Most of their deeds and manipulations
appear to be nothing more than mischievous games.
The activities of these parahumans are largely confined to specific
areas of this planet, where they appear and reappear century after
century.
"The angels keep their ancient places," poet Francis
Thompson wrote.
Thus there are many 'haunted' places all over the
world, shunned by ancient man or made sacred by him. These are
precise geographical locations, and anyone digging into the history
and lore of such locations will find thousands of accounts of
ghosts.
demons, monsters, and flying saucers pinpointed within a few square
miles and covering a thousand years or more of time. To UFO cultists
such places are Windows: entry points for spaceships front some
distant planet. Occultists teach that these are Gateways: weak spots
in the Earth's etheric envelope through which beings from other
space-time continuums seep through into our reality.
Sussex County
in England is one Gateway, as are the Mississippi Valley, the Ohio
Valley, and parts of our western states, such as the area around Frescott, Arizona. There are literally thousands of these weak spots
all over our planet. Paranormal and supernatural activities in these
areas seem to be controlled by complicated cyclic factors.
Periodically, all hell breaks loose in all these places
simultaneously, and then we have a flap, or wave, of UFO sightings,
apparitions, poltergeists, sudden inexplicable disappearances of
animals and human beings, mysterious fires, and even a form of mass
madness.
Researchers are only now beginning to untangle the cycles involved.
For some unknown reason a high proportion of all these activities
seems to occur on Wednesday and on the twenty-fourth of the month.
This has been a stable factor throughout history. The biblical
prophet Zachariah reported (Zachariah 1:7) an angelic visitation
Upon the four and twentieth day of the eleventh month', circa 520
b.c.
The most famous flying saucer sighting of modern times, that of
private pilot Kenneth Arnold near Mount Ranier in Washington,
occurred on June 24, 1947. Note that many of the events discussed
throughout this book took place on the twenty-fourth of the month.
Paranormal events also seem to duster around the tenth of the month-
Early peoples were aware of these factors and linked them with the
phases of the moon. They thought the full moon influenced human
behavior and produced lunacy. Appearances of DFOs and assorted
apparitions do seem to increase during specific periods of the lunar
cycle, and as noted in Chapter Two, the human mind does seem to be
involved.
Many of these things have been carelessly dismissed as
hallucinations because only certain people can see these things at
certain times. However, a great many factors are involved. Recent
studies indicate that persons of high psychic potential, who
experience prophetic dreams and flashes of extrasensory perception
(ESP), are more prone to see these things than people with little or
no psychic ability.
Polls and tests conducted over the past century
by assorted scientists indicate that about one third of the
population possesses active or latent psychic abilities, They
constitute our main
body of TOO witnesses.
The other two thirds have never had any
personal experiences of tins sort and so. naturally enough, dismiss all of this as utter rubbish.
Two independent statistical studies of available UFO reports were
conducted in 1970 and confirmed that the highest number of UFO
sightings took place on Wednesdays. An amateur group, the American
Flying Saucer Investigating Committee of Columbus, Ohio, ran a study
of 929 UFO reports from the year 1968 and found that Wednesdays
produced the greatest number -
152.
A more elaborate professional computer study of 7,025 sightings
from tie years 1921 to 1969 was carried out by Dr. David Saunders of
Colorado University. He too found that the greatest number of
sightings (1,077) occurred on Wednesdays.
The lowest number in the
Ohio study was 117 for Sundays; the lowest number in the Saunder's
study was 903 for Saturdays. Although these are only pilot studies
and much more work along this line will be necessary before any
definite conclusions can be reached, it is obvious that these things
are not random and sporadic but are governed by a definite time
cycle of some sort.
Factors of coincidence, innocent errors,
misinterpretations of ordinary aircraft and mundane natural
phenomenon, weather balloons, and so on must be filtered out.
Another computer study of twelve hundred anomalies and unusual
occurrences, sifted from the works of Charles Fort, was recently
carried out by C. L Mallows of the Bell Telephone Laboratories.
Here
it was found that a broader cycle of 9.6 years was seemingly
involved. The conclusion is inescapable that these cycles of
activity, which pass through our world like radio waves of enormous
length, must have a common cause,
'Damon Knight explained in his
book, Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained. The cause of the
cycles, the controlling force that keeps them in synchrony, must lie
outside the earth.'
The Bell study includes such diversified phenomena as sky falls (odd
objects dropping out of the sky) unusual storms (rains of frogs,
etc.), things observed in space, and things seen in the sky.
All of
these phenomena tended to duster - to occur simultaneously in
specific months and specific years. The waves or cycles of these
events were repeated approximately every 9.6 years. The study dealt
largely with data from the nineteenth century.
Ancient magicians and seers were quite familiar with these cyclic
factors. The earnest religious and occult lore discusses rays which
periodically sweep our planet from some extraterrestrial source and
cause everything from miracles to sadness and catastrophes.
Strangely, the Australian Aborigines, the South American Indians,
and the tribes of Africa, as well as the ancient Babylonians and
other early cultures, all pinpointed the Pleiades (a cluster of
seven stars), and the constellation of Orion as that source of these
rays. Rays from outer space are an integral part: of all human
folklore.
In time all of these intangibles will be puttied down by courageous
scientific investigators (studies of this kind are still very
unpopular among scientists). Already we know (or have relearned)
that all paranormal manifestations have a tendency to occur in the
same places year after year; that they follow specific patterns
within our own time scale; that only specific people can witness or
become involved in these events.
The logical jumping off place for
any future investigation is to study the witnesses in depth and to
explore these Gateways carefully and methodically. Small groups of
psychiatrists, para-psychologist, geologists, and physicists are now
engaged in studies of this type.
One significant factor, which is hardly a secret to the occultists,
is that the Window areas tend to be places where peculiar magnetic
faults exist. Our haunted planet is covered with magnetic faults,
and interestingly enough, many of them are grouped around the
ancient mounds, temple sites, and spots where flying saucers are
seen most frequently.
Psychically oriented people living in these
regions tend to have extraordinary experiences with elementals,
angels, MIB, and spacemen (numerous examples will be given further
on).
A leading authority on mythology and mysticism, poet Robert Graves,
recently stated:
"There are some sacred places made
so by the radiation created by magnetic ores. My village, for
example, is a kind of natural amphitheatre enclosed by mountains
containing iron ore, which makes a magnetic field. Most holy
places in the world - holy not by some accident, like a hero
dying or being born there - are of this sort. Delphi was a
heavily charged holy place."
Back in the Middle Ages
the Vatican pointedly ordered that new
churches should be constructed on the sites of old temples whenever
possible.
The tradition of sacred places runs deep
and seems to be largely based upon the continuous observations of
paranormal manifestations. The entities who allegedly approached
human beings in miraculous events frequently ordered a church or
temple to be built on the spot. But we didn't need an order to erect tie great
churches at Lourdes and Fatima after the entities appeared there.
Remember the legendary nineteen-year cycle of Stonehenge, when the
god was supposed to appear? Multiply the Fortean cycle of 9.6 years
by 2.
A magnetic survey of the United States was carried out by the
government in the 1950s. Maps detailing magnetic variations in
nearly every state can be obtained from the Office of Geological
Survey in Washington. Comparisons of the concentrations of
paranormal manifestations with these maps show unique clusters
around the magnetic aberrations.
Could it be that periodic sweeps of
those rays from outer space set up some kind of physical or psychic
reactions in these fault areas? This is a question that could be
answered scientifically, if only someone would put up the money,
equipment, and personnel to make a study.
We are only re-observing the things which awed early man and inspired
his superstitions and beliefs. Electro-magnetic energy plays a key
role in these manifestations. We are still learning about it. Our
planet may be constantly interchanging energy with some outside
force. This exchange of energy is an important part of occult
belief. It occurs we are told, on every level.
Chinese philosophers
of long ago contended that man was moon food (i.e., the energy of
individual souls was drained off and absorbed by some
extraterrestrial force which needed such energy to replenish
itself).
Later, theologians extended this to form the classic
explanation that we were the subjects of a war between God and the
Devil… a war to win the souls of man and thereby control the planet.
Thus, the demons and MIB who appeared in earlier times were supposed
to have been after souls. They made lavish promises, according to
the records, and offered fanciful philosophies and cosmologies, but
as Swedenborg figured out, they always proved to be nothing but
splendid liars.
Early investigators and thinkers soon realized they were dealing
with magical beings who could imitate man and his works.
Instead of
being solid physically stable assemblages of cells and matter, these
entities were apparently temporary manipulations of energy. So the
word 'transmogrification' was used to describe them. These
transmogrifications, according to the lore, could assume any form…
from a wolf or a cat to a house, ship or iridescent god of awesome
proportions. They could appear clothed in rags or in gold crowns and
expensive velvet robes.
Worst of all, they had a penchant for
playing all kinds of games with us, manipulating our fears and
beliefs and even conning us into going to war against each other.
One alarming facet of their countless messages to percipients and
contactees is their preoccupation with spreading racist propaganda.
The messages recorded throughout history are filled with such
propaganda. If the percipient was an Indian, the propaganda was
aimed at a nearby tribe. If he was Hindu, it was directed at the
Moslems.
The elementals are purveyors of bate, and perhaps much of
the racial prejudice blighting the human race was originally the
product of their teachings.
Even those wonderful space people and Brothers from other planets
manage to play this game. Long John Nebel, a New York radio
personality, has spent thousands of hours interviewing contactees
and UFO burls on the air over WNBC and in his book. Way Out World,
he offers this comment:
A bit that has always bugged me is the racist propaganda which keeps
cropping up from one group to another. In this area, regrettably,
I'm unable to name names and cite occasions, since the allusions are
always so carefully phrased so that the offenders could easily deny
the intentions of their remarks. But the meaning is there, never
doubt it.
As is usually the case, the unflavored parties racially
speaking are the Jews and Negroes, and the themes of both Fascism
and Communism seem to echo from behind the scenes on more than a few
occasions. But it's all part of the action.
Some contactees who claimed to have visited Mars blandly point out
that the planet is divided into zones with the Negro and Jewish
Martians carefully segregated from the others.
Even contactees of liberal persuasions repeat with some dismay the
nastily racist remarks of the Venusians. The Jews are a favorite
target of this outer space propaganda, as if they haven't got enough
trouble already.
Until the past five or six years racial prejudice was actually a
basic part of all the Western religions. After digging down to the
source of these racist beliefs, there are always the ancient
teachings of dubious messengers. They have kept the human race
stirred up and at each other's throats for thousands of years. Now
finally the Catholics are beginning to soften their traditional
anti-Semitism, and the Mormons are beginning to face the fact that
Negroes ate also human beings.
Aside from their inveterate racism, the mimics are also fond of
exploiting tense political situations. A band of phantom Indians
plagued the settlers of Gloucester. Massachusetts, back in 1692.
They appeared night after night, skirmishing with the English and
firing bullet-less guns.
'Although the Indians never killed or scalped
anyone, the colonists were understandably upset and heavily
fortified their positions, the English became convinced that they
were not real Indians,' Sir Walter Scott reported, 'but that the
devil and his agents had assumed such an appearance.'
The North American Indians have innumerable legends about an entity
they called the Trickster because he would turn up occasionally and
play wild and vicious pranks.
Earth's phantom inhabitants play many other roles, especially in the
widely accepted sphere of psychic phenomena.
Telly Savalas, the
famous character actor, told Hollywood reporter Dick Kleiner a weird
story involving a black Cadillac. It happened when Savalas was young
and flat broke. His car ran out of gas on Long Island, and after he
started walking, a black Cadillac 'seemed to appear from nowhere',
and the driver offered him a lift.
The driver was dressed entirely
in white - a refreshing switch - and said very little. But at one
point he offered Savalas a dollar to buy some gas. The actor
insisted that the nun write down his name and address on a slip of
paper so he could be repaid. They found a gas station, and the
driver waited while Savalas bought a can of gasoline.
Then they
drove back to his own car in silence.
'I know Harry Agannis,' the driver said suddenly. Savalas asked who
Harry Agannis was. 'He's a utility infielder on the Boston Red Sox,'
the man answered.
That was the end of the conversation.
The man waited while Savalas poured the gasoline into the car, gave
him a push to get him started, and then drove off with a wave. The
next day Savalas was shaken by newspaper headlines announcing the
sudden death of Harry Agannis. He decided to call the phone number
on the slip of paper given to him by the man in the white suit. It
was in Massachusetts, and a woman answered. Savalas told her he
wanted to speak to Bill, the name on the paper.
There was a pause,
and another woman came on the lire.
'I met Bill last night,' Savalas began, "and something happened,
and I wanted - '
"You met him last night?' she interrupted, choking on sudden tears.
Then she told him that her husband Bill had been dead for three
years.
Later she met with Savalas in New York and told him that her
husband had been buried in a white suit. She showed him the last
letter her husband had written, and ha was startled to see that the
handwriting exactly matched the handwriting on the slip of paper
given him by the Cadillac driver.
The whole fabric of psychic belief is woven from such stories, which
number in the many thousands and are accepted by millions as proof
of survival after death. But investigators informed in the antics of
the ultraterrestrial mimics are obliged to look deeper.
These entities labour to cultivate belief in various frames of
reference, and then they deliberately create new manifestations
which support those beliefs. Savalas rode in a physically real
Cadillac and spoke with a seemingly real man. If the incident was
only a joke of some land, it was a very complicated and pointless
one.
Phantom campers, vehicles with built-on trailers, have been widely
reported in the western states in recent years. And we have reports
of phantom airplanes and helicopters by the hundreds. In the 1930s
thousands of people in northern Europe saw formations of mysterious
aeroplanes over Norway, Sweden and Finland. Despite extensive
searches by the military forces of several countries, the source of
these ghost fliers, as they were called, was never determined.
During World War n military intelligence groups collected a number
of phantom aeroplane sightings from pilots returning from missions.
Crews of several bombers from the Ninety-Second Group reported the
following over Germany:
Four P-47s, thought to be friendly American aircraft flown by the
enemy, were observed on the approach to the initial Point at 22,000
feet, heading 120° magnetic. These aircraft flew out to the side and
parallel with the combat wing formation in the manner of fighter
escort. They suddenly executed a 90° turn in towards the head of the
combat wing formation. These aircraft were originally at 800 yards
on port beam.
They approached to 300 yards, when they nosed up and
away, showing a full-plan view of themselves. Positive
identification is claimed. The aircraft had brown fuselages, and the
wings were a very dark colour, almost black. No white cowling and no
white tail markings were observed. No insignia was observed, and the
aircraft did not open fire.
Several B-17s fired on them. The last
P-47 escort had long since departed, and the enemy aircraft had been
attacking for some time at this point.
The opening theory expressed in this intelligence report -
'Four
P-47s, thought to be friendly American aircraft flown by the enemy'
- was proven invalid. The mystery planes did not fire at the American
bombers, but were fired on instead. If the Germans had attempted
such a ploy with captured aircraft, they certainly would have
painted appropriate insignia on the planes.
And after having
succeeded in getting within 300 yards of the bombers (which is very
dose), the pilots, if they were German, would certainly have opened
fire. Instead, they scooted away, never to be seen again.
2 For a full account of this interesting sequence of events see John
A. Keel, VFOs-Operatitm Trojan Horse.
Low-flying mystery aeroplanes reported in 1969-70 were most often
described as resembling P-38s, the twin-engined, dual-fuselage
fighters used in the Pacific in World War II.
They were fast, noisy
aircraft, but our mystery planes move very slowly and in complete
silence. They execute impossible maneuvers, such as sudden right
angle turns, and disappear as mysteriously as they had come. Only 3
handful of P-38s are still operational, and they were not the
culprits in these cases. like the ghost fliers of 1934, they are a
dull grey and violate all regulations by failing to show any license
numbers or insignia.
Could these phantom aircraft be part and parcel of the same
phenomena which produce phantom automobiles and campers? Could they
also be apparitions and transmogrifications of energy that can be
properly categorized with the disappearing Indians of Gloucester?
The evidence suggests that this could very well be the case.
In other ages flying ships were sometimes reported. Flying Saucer
Review, May-June 1970, reprinted a fascinating story from 1743. A
farmer near Peibio, Wales, claimed he had seen a flying sailboat
that year. He estimated that it was about 1,500 feet in the air and
could have been about ninety tons. The keel of the ship was plainly
seen (thus ruling out mirages of ships far out to sea). Similar
phenomena had been reported in the same area about ten years
previous.
Fairy lore is also filled with alleged sightings of fairy ships
complete with billowing sails.
Our problem is compounded by these amazing, confusing, and alas,
scientifically inadmissible subjective observations. The UFO cults
have solved this dilemma by simply throwing out this material and concentrating only on those reports which describe
circular of cigar-shaped objects. We must, however, consider all the
forms reported with equal care if we are to arrive at any valid
conclusions.
There is no way to investigate a flying saucer after it has flown.
But it is possible to study the people who saw it and the terrain
over which it appeared. If we are dealing with clever mimics and
transmogrifications of energy and if man has been observing these
things throughout his history, then the real clues may be found in
the thousands of volumes in all languages describing those
observation.; and encounters.
One basic fact should be obvious from the foregoing: these entities and things are not necessarily from some other planet. They are
actually closely tied to the human race, are a part of out Immediate
environment in some unfathomable fashion, and to a very large extent
are primarily concerned with misleading us, misinforming us, and
playing games with us.
These mysterious members of the Well' sian
Wings Over the World are oat benefactors and our enemies. They
educate us and they torment us. They have given us hope, guided our
religions and philosophies, and watched us crawl out of the cares
and build rockets to the moon.
They may have watched other civilizations come and go. They may have
sincerely helped us to preserve the memories of those lost ages and
those past mistakes.
Or it all may be rubbish, and we may be nothing
more than the pawns with which they play their mischievous games.
Theologians and philosophers have always been troubled by the nearly
impossible task of sorting the real from the unreal, the truth from
the false.
Perhaps the only workable criterion is the ancient one of
judging them by their works.
CHAPTER NINE
MEN-IN-BLACK
LORE AND THE CIA
There is no truth to the rumors that the flying saucers are from
Spain, or that they are piloted by Spaniards,' Gen. Carl Spaatz, Air
Force Chief of Staff, told a press conference in 1948.
This was an
astonishing statement since a review of all the UFO literature and
the fan magazines of the period has failed to uncover such a rumor.
It suggests that .people must have been reporting slight,
dark-complexioned pilots to the Air Force back in 1948, long before
the UFO buffs started taking flying saucer occupant sightings
seriously.
In his detailed report on the Maury Island UFO 'hoax' of 1947,
Kenneth Arnold also describes meeting a small, dark foreign-looking
man who was tinkering with the motor on a beat-up boat in Tacoma
harbor. Ray Palmer, editor of Amazing Stories in Chicago, had
commissioned Arnold to investigate the puzzling Maury Island affair,
which began when a 'doughnut-shaped object' had rained 'slag' on to
a boat near Maury Island.
Pieces of that slag had killed a dog
aboard the boat and slightly injured a boy, the son of Harold Dahl,
who was piloting it. Early the next morning, according to Dahl's
story, a 1947 Bulck drove up to his home and a black-suited man of
medium height visited him. This man, Dahl said, recited in detail
everything that had happened the day before as if he had been there.
Then he warned Dahl not to discuss his sighting with anyone, hinting
that if he did there might be unpleasant repercussions which would
affect him and his family. Since Dahl and the others had not yet
told anyone of their sighting, and since UFOs were still publicly
unknown (Arnold's sighting over Mount Rainer and the attendant
publicity did not occur until three days later), Dahl was naturally non-plussed by his strange visitor. This was the
first modern MIB report.
Dahl's boss, Fred L. Crisman (he also owned the boat), became a
central figure in the mystery. Dahl himself vanished soon after his
interview with Arnold, and efforts by later investigators {such as
Harold Wilkins, a British author) have failed to locate him.
Crisman
had been a flier in World War II, and he was suddenly recalled into
the service in 1947, flown to Alaska, and later stationed in
Greenland, In recent years the amateur sleuths engaged in
investigating
the alleged conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy have
tried to implicate Crisman. District Attorney James Garrison of New
Orleans subpoenaed one Fred Lee Crisman of Tracoma, Washington, to
testify before the Grand Jury listening to Garrison's evidence
against Clay Shaw, according to wire service stories in November,
1963.
Crisman was identified as a radio announcer, but Garrison's
investigators implied that he was either a member of the CIA or had
been 'engaged in undercover activity for a part of the industrial
warfare complex'. He allegedly operated under a cover as a preacher
and was 'engaged in work to help Gypsies'. These stories caused a
chain reaction in UFO circles, since UFO believers have long accused
the CIA of being somehow connected with the flying saucer mystery.
Of course, the CIA was in its infancy in 1947 at the time of the
Maury Island case and was then largely staffed by naval personnel
from World War in intelligence units.
Clay Shaw was tried early in 1969, accused by Garrison of having
conspired to murder President Kennedy. He was found innocent and
freed. The exact nature of Crisman's testimony before the Grand Jury
is not known. He did not testify at the actual trial.
When Ray Palmer, one of the best-informed urologists extant,
summarized his own theories about the Maury Island mystery in the
book he coauthored with Arnold, The Coming of the Saucers, he
asked pointedly,
"Was the Tacoma affair a hoax?
Whose?"
In recent years many seemingly solid flying saucer cases have
dissolved in confusion under close investigation.
Often they appear
to be outrageous hoaxes perpetrated by some mysterious third party,
although the general tendency is to blame the innocent witnesses.
These bizarre hoaxes are often identical to the mischievous fairy
hoaxes and games of an earlier epoch.
The Maury Island case fell apart in Arnold's hands. The slag samples
given to him by Dahl and Crisman were switched by someone; two
investigating Air Force officers, Brown and Davidson, were killed
when their plane crashed shortly after leaving Tacoma; Dahl
vanished; Crisman was literally exiled to Greenland for two years;
Tacoma newsman Paul Lance, who helped Arnold in his investigation,
died suddenly a short time later. Palmer claims that a cigar box
filled with original slag samples was stolen from his Chicago office
soon afterwards.
At one point Ted Morello of the United Press took Arnold aside and
told him:
You're involved in something that is beyond our power here to
find out anything about. We tried to find out information at McChord Field [the Tacoma Air Force base] and drew a Wade, and we
have informants there who practically smell the runways for news…
We've exhausted every avenue attempting to piece what has happened
together so it makes some sense… I'm just going to give you some
sound advice. Get out of this town until whatever it is blows
over.
Arnold got into his private plane and headed for home.
He stopped
in Pendleton, Oregon, to refuel, and shortly after he took off
again, Tüs engine stopped cold. Only quick thinking and expert
flying saved him from a serious crash.
Despite the statements of General Spaatz and Kenneth Arnold in
1947-8, slight, dark-skinned men did not really begin to appear in
published UFO reports until around 1954. (There were, however,
descriptions of dark - or heavily suntanned - UFO occupants as far
back as 1897.)
The Men in Black phenomenon did not really grip the
UFO field until the early 1950s.
A pioneer ufologist, Albert K. Bender of Bridgeport, Connecticut,
gave the MIB mystery new impetus when he suddenly closed down his
International Flying Saucer Bureau in 1953, vaguely hinting that
three men in black suits had terrorized him into abandoning his
research. Other UFO researchers studied his guarded remarks and
concluded that he had been pressured out of business by sinister
agents of the government.
Three years later Gray Barker, a UFO
investigator in West Virginia, published They Knew Too Much about
Flying Saucers, a book which dealt with numerous MIB stories from as
far away as Mew Zealand. The Bender case was the cornerstone of
Barker's theory that the MIB either represented some governmental
authority employing 'questionable methods' to 'silence' UFO
researchers, or that a more 'fantastic sponsorship is responsible
far their deeds'.
Many of these dark-skinned. Oriental-featured
gentlemen visited UFO witnesses wearing Air Force uniforms. This
fact and the vast quantity of reported visits quickly led the UFO
buffs to believe that their enemy was indeed the U.S. Air Force.
Soon the UFO believers and their organizations were devoting most of
their time, energy, and money to investigating the Air Force and, as
the paranoia mounted, to investigating each other. The popular books
of Donald E. Keyhoe, a retired Marine Corps pilot, were largely
concerned with the alleged Air Force and governmental conspiracy to
hide the truth about flying saucers from the public.
Other UFO
writers of the late 1950s followed Keyhoe's example, and this monumental conspiracy became one of the main 'facts' of
ufology.
Ten years after he suddenly withdrew from UFO research, Albeit K.
Bender released his full story. Flying Saucers and the Three Men,
which was privately published by Gray Barker. It proved to be far
more unbelievable than any of the speculations. He claimed that he
had been visited by dark-skinned gentlemen with glowing eyes, who
materialized and dematerialized in his apartment.
On one occasion, he
said, he had been transported to a secret UFO base in Antarctica,
where he had been told the secret. The UFOs were here to collect a
rare and valuable element from the Earth's oceans. The project would
be completed in the early 1960s, he was told, and then the flying
saucers would leave our planet, and he would be tree to write about
his experiences.
Bender's revelations made no sense to the UFO coterie, since few; of
them were acquainted with demonology and the fairy myths of the
Middle Ages. They did not realize that his purported experiences
followed classic patterns. In addition to Ms interest in flying
saucers. Bender had also been involved in a study of black magic,
and black magic, as we shall soon see. has always been a major
method for conjuring up elementals. He had been plagued by odors of
sulphur and strange poltergeistic manifestations during the period
of the visitations.
He also suffered certain medical effects, such
as chronic headaches and lapses of memory, which are common symptoms
of the contactee syndrome. The UFO buffs quickly branded Bender a
nut who was trying get rich from flying saucers (actually, his book
sold only a few thousand copies to the UFO hardcore and made him the
subject of considerable criticism and ridicule).
Countless MIB-type stories have now been collected and published by
UFO investigators all over the world. Even the stuffy anti-UFO
report of Colorado University, a study which had been commissioned
by the Air Force in 1967, discussed a few cases. Case Number 52 of
the report occupies eighteen pages and discusses in detail the
strange experiences of a Santa Ana, California highway inspector
named Rex Heflin who took a series of Polaroid photographs of a
circular object near a Marine Corps air field on August 3rd, 1965.
He had copies made of these pictures, fortunately, and turned over
the originals to two men who claimed to represent the North American
Air Defence Command (NORAD). Later NORAD officials emphatically
denied that any of their personnel had visited Heflin, and the
original photos have never been located.
Two years later, soon after scientists front Colorado University
began their investigation of the Heflin case, he received another
group of strange visitors. They appeared at his home at dusk on
Wednesday, October 11th, 1967, dressed in Air Force uniforms.
Because of his earlier experience, Heflin inspected their
credentials carefully and wrote down their names and other
information.
They questioned him about the photos and asked him if
he knew anything about
the Bermuda Triangle (an area where many
planes and ships have vanished).
'During the questioning, the witness
says he noted a car parked in the street with indistinct
lettering on the front door,' the Colorado report states. 'In
the back seat could be seen a figure and violet (not blue) glow,
which the witness attributed to instrument dials.
He believed he was being
photographed or recorded In the meantime his FM multiples radio
was playing in the living room and during the questioning it
made several loud audible pops.'
Dr James E. McDonald, a meterologist from the University of Arizona,
and other investigators later tried to check out the identity of
these visitors.
Again, they drew a complete blank. Despite their
credentials and uniforms, these men were apparently imposters.
Numerous other witness have also reported visits from men in big
black cars, usually Cadillacs, with peculiar purplish glows lighting
their interiors. There are even a number of witnesses who claim to
have been temporarily kidnapped in such automobiles. They have
described strange psychedelic lights on the dashboards which caused
them to fall into hypnotic trances.
Some of these phantom vehicles have a special insignia printed on
their doors - a triangle with a bolt of lightning passing through
it. In other cases witnesses said the symbol was the classic
triangle with an eye - the ancient symbol for the deity -
and the MIB identified themselves as 'agents for the Nation of the
Third Eye." Such stories are rarely given wide circulation and are
almost never published. So it is quite interesting that so many
far-flung witnesses manage to come up with the same identical
details.
One of the first clues that a UFO flap was about to break on Long
Island in the spring of 1967 was a series of random reports
describing strange Oriental or Gipsy-like entities parading across
people's lawns in the middle of the night. One man living on an
isolated farm near Melville, New York, said he saw a metallic disk
hovering a few feet above one of his fields in broad daylight.
A
ladder was hanging down from it, he said, and as he watched, it was
retraced into the object, and the whole thing flew off soundlessly.
A few days later he answered a knock on his door and was surprised
to see a Gipsy lady standing there. She was dressed in a long grey
gown and wore sandals. Her skin was a deep olive and
her eyes had an Oriental cast.
She was about 5 feet 4 Inches tall,
and her hair was long and 'so black that it looked dyed'.
'I have travelled a long way,' she said in a low, accented voice.
'May I have a glass of water? I must take a pill.'
He gave her the water, and she took a round green pill, thanked him,
and left. He was puzzled that there was no car in sight. He lived on
an isolated back road, and visitors, especially visitors travelling
by foot, are very rare.
'I have travelled a long way' is an old Masonic pass phrase and is
frequently used in these contacts. Sometimes the simple phrase,
"What time is it?" or "What is your time?" is substituted.
The
pill-taking ploy is also a common procedure. When a most peculiar
being visited a family on Cape May, New Jersey, early in 1967, be
also took a pill. He too had 'travelled a long way', and after
conducting an inane interview with the family, he stepped into the
night, got into a black Cadillac, and drove off with the lights out.
A full summary of this case was published in Flying Saucer Review's
second special issue.
A woman living in an old house on the summit of a high hill in the
Melville, New York area had a visit from a strange quartet around
the same time that the Gipsy lady dropped in on the farmer. Four
Indians appeared on her doorstep after a heavy seasonal rainfall.
Three of them were stately, dark-skinned, with pointed faces and
Oriental features. They were dressed in expensively cut grey suits.
The fourth man looked different, more normal, she said, and was
poorly dressed in a frayed black jacket. They told her that their
tribe had originally owned her property, and they were going to try
to get it back.
What frightened the woman most - and she was frightened she admitted
later - was that there was no mud on their neatly shined shoes, and
they had no car in sight. The road and her lawn were soupy with mud
at the time. After they left, she realized they had left no
footprints on her lawn.
In case after case amateur UFO investigators have rejected the
testimony of sincere witnesses who claimed to have seen UFOs land
and entities dismount, because no footprints could be found on the
site afterwards.
At 1.30 a.m. on Wednesday. March 1st, 1967, a man named Dewitt
Baldwin was hunting near Eden, New York when, according to his
story, he heard a funny noise and saw a circular gold-colored
object land.
"I was scared. I didn't know what to do,' Baldwin said. "While I was
watching it, a door opened - like a sliding elevator door - and a
man walked out and down the incline of the machine. He was dressed
in a sort of black tight-fitting suit like a flier and had on some
sort of helmet and goggles.
'He asked me what I was doing. He wasn't white, and he wasn't a
Negro. He talked very plainly with no accent. I told him I was
hunting. He asked me if I was born here, and I said no, that I was
born in Georgia. He took my gun, looked at it, and handed it back to
me. He told me he would be back, walked up the saucer, got in, and
seconds later zipped out of sight."
Mr Baldwin found a crack in the muzzle of Ms shotgun after the man
had examined it. Neither the object nor the pilot left any marks in
the fresh snow. Local UFO investigators regarded this as proof that
Mr Baldwin bad fabricated his story and was merely seeking notoriety...
An Iowa college professor who writes popular books under the
pseudonym of Brad Steiger has been investigating Men in Black cases
in the Midwest for several years.
In his book, Flying Saucer
Invasion, he disclosed another common MIB tactic which is being
widely employed these days to discredit investigators.
Steiger
wrote:
'In the summer of 1968 Brad Steiger received a long distance
telephone call from a journalist friend who was covering a UFO flap
for his local newspaper' [Steiger wrote in the third person.] "Blast
Brad Steiger and Joan Whritenour [a Florida researcher who
collaborated with Steiger] and down with John Keell" he thundered.
'Steiger, recognizing his friend's voice, asked him what the trouble
was.
' "I'm trying to cover this flap over here - my lordl Everyone has
seen these UFOsl - but every time I try to dig deep, the eyewitness
clams up and says. 'I won't say more. Brad Steiger says awful things
will happen to me if I tell too much!' One lady said that John Keel
had told her that she would be carried off by the saucer people if
she talked to anyone about her sighting."
'Steiger knew that neither he nor Keel were in that particular area
at that time and that neither he nor Keel would say such things in
even a jesting manner if they had been in the locale, so he pressed
his friend for details.
' "Well, damn near everywhere I go the witness has been given a copy
of one of the Steiger-Whritenour books or a magazine with an article
in it by you or Keell"
"And the books and articles are
supposed to frighten them?" Steiger
questioned. "Whoever is delivering these things must be
adding their own interpretation. * > Who are the deEvery boys? Have
you seen them?"
"Not until this afternoon," the newsman answered, "I guess I
arrived at this farmhouse just a few minutes after they did. Damn
unfriendly little monkeys . *. I was trying to talk to the farmer's
wife, while they were chattering at the fanner and waving a copy of
this magazine in their hands and telling the man how Brad Steiger
was warning all UFO sighters not to talk."
"Could you describe them? "
' "They were short men in dark suits. All three of them had deep
suntans… I can't recall even seeing their eyes. Come to think of it,
they all wore dark glasses."'
Small wonder there's so much paranoia in the UFO field.
These
mystery men have posed as Air Force officers, well-known
investigators, and members of the amateur UFO organizations,
deliberately sowing confusion and fear in their wake. There are even
reliable reports describing entities who resembled exactly the men
they were imitating (doppelgangers). On several occasions these
doppelgangers have visited witnesses who had been previously
interviewed by the author, creating considerable confusion.
The
Colorado University study tried to shrug off the Heflin photos
because of the 'internal inconsistencies' in his story: his visits
from nonexistent military officers. Similar episodes have led to
extended feuds between amateur investigators and groups, each
believing that the other has been warning witnesses not to talk to
them.
In many of these episodes the MIB appear on the scene immediately
after the sightings, before the witness has had a chance to report
it to anyone. They often flourish an identification card and
announce they are from Washington or the CIA (any real CIA agent who
went around openly identifying himself as such would soon be
standing in an unemployment line).
When they use the Air Force ploy,
they have the uncanny ability to use the name of an existing
officer, but they change their rank. Thus a Colonel Higgins may turn
up in a flap area where an actual sergeant named Higgins is
stationed nearby.
Adding to the nonsense and confusion, we have the dreary face that
ufology has always attracted eccentric personalities, and a few (very
few) of these situations have proven to be their doing. One
quasi-scientific UFO group maintains an office in Washington, D. C.,
and some of their members are fond of waving their membership cards
about authoritatively, giving the false impression that they
represent a government agency.
The whole mess began in Tacoma in 1947. Since then the MIB
manifestations have created a body of myth and lore fingering the
federal government as the sinister silencer of UFO witnesses and
censor of UFO news in the press. (There is no UFO censorship, as the
publication of this hook attests.) The hardcore UFO buffs maintain
these myths, however. They ignore the massive evidence found in the
other frames of reference which points to the puzzling existence of
the parahuman mimics of man who have always been engaged in
mischievous - and sometimes malicious - shenanigans.
Mrs. Coral Lorenzen, who has been running the Aerial Phenomena
Research Organization (APRO) since 1952, devoted a chapter of her
book VFOs over the Americas to the CIA's purportedly sinister
interest in the subject. Her evidence was a combination of hearsay,
speculation, coincidences, classic MIB manipulations, and the uneasy
feeling that APRO was being watched.
It is cot surprising, of
course, that some of the UFO organizations have occasionally been
monitored by the FBI and other agencies, since the leading
proponents of UFO beliefs have made a habit of publicly attacking
the government and the military establishment on radio and
television. Some UFO publications do border on the subversive. In
the 1950s a strong Communist influence was visible, and some major
groups collapsed when they turned more political than ufological. In
the 1960s ufology swung in the other direction as members of the
extreme right wing embraced the flying saucer cause.
In 1969 the
long-suffering Air Force got out of the UFO business by closing down
Project Blue Book, its halfhearted flying saucer agency, thus
eliminating the favorite target of the UFO cultists' wrath.
Another group of CIA-baiting researchers is now overlapping into
ufology. They are the comparatively small teams of amateur sleuths
dedicated to investigating the assassination of President Kennedy.
Here the black Cadillacs and the slight, dark men in black suits are
viewed as Cubans and CIA agents. Paranoia runs high because now over
fifty witnesses, reporters, and assassination investigators have met
with sudden death, some under the most suspicious circumstances.
The
full story of Kennedy's murder in Dallas in 1963 is filled with
incredible details, many of them similar to things found in the most
mysterious of the UFO incidents. Photos and physical evidence have
vanished or been tampered with just as in so many UFO cases.
A wide
assortment of mystery men have been involved; including
doppelgangers of the late Lee Harvey Oswald.1
1 See Richard PopMn, The Second Oswald
This other Oswald even
turned up at a public rifle range before the assassination,
making a nuisance of himself (so the witnesses would be sure to
remember him?) as he fired an unusual gun which spat out balls of
fire at the target. He also visited an automobile showroom and went
for a demonstration ride in a new car. The real Oswald could not
drive.
His whereabouts at the time of these incidents are known, and he was nowhere near the rifle range and auto agency.
The huge Warren Report contains numerous pieces of sworn testimony
describing MIB-type men in the vicinity of Dealer Plaza and the
School Book Depository building immediately before and after the
assassination. Long-haired men were seen. This may not sound
extraordinary, but remember that long hair was most unusual in 1963.
The Beatles did not begin to make an impression until 1964, and the
long-hair fad did not get underway until 1965-6.
Elemental hair styles have always been on the longish side, as we
have already noted. The UFO lore is filled with accounts of pilots
with angular faces and long, shoulder-length hair, usually blond,
just as the gods, demons, and angels of earlier times sported long
hair, Another interesting consistency is the unnatural colour of
their hair, „. so unnatural that witnesses often comment on it.
The
late Mrs Mary Hyre, a newspaper reporter in Point Pleasant, West
Virginia, received visits from strange personages soon after she
began to write about local UFO sightings.
'Two of these strangers had
long, silver hair', she said. 'They were young men, and I couldn't
understand why they had dyed their hair such a funny color.'
Mrs Hyre also claimed encounters with darkly tanned, soberly dressed
gentlemen who rode up to her office in black Cadillacs.
One of them asked her what she would do if someone ordered her to stop
publishing UFO reports,
"I'd tell them to go to hell," was her reply-
Jerome Clark, one of America's leading ufologists, has his own
theory about the present trend towards long hair.
'For a long time contactees and their followers talked freely of the New Age, while
the rest of us, merely sneered,' Clark wrote in Flying Saucer
Review, September-October, 1970.
'Now there is considerable talk,
even a popular song, about the coming of the Aquarian Age. One of
the features of the New Age, as contactees predicted years ago, is
the revival of interest in the occult: astrology, the Tarot,
palmistry, telepathy, spiritualism, magic, witchcraft, the ouija
board, and so'.
Also involved, of course, are such obvious
features as changes in clothing and hair styles… On, basic strategic
grounds it is easier now for "them" to walk in our midst unnoticed
(a long-haired blond male for example, would now attract little if
any attention in the
streets of most good-sized Western cities, nor would "strange"
behavior patterns be any particular cause for alarm in a culture
born of nonconformity).
There are millions of people today who do believe that Venusians,
Martians, angels, and demons are walking among us unnoticed, their
long hair and peculiar dress and manners no longer attracting
attention. Strange men in black turtleneck sweaters and wraparound
sun glasses (a favorite garb of our MIB) are being reported
everywhere The black Cadillacs are on the prowl.
Have we been invaded by beings from outer space or from some other
space-time continuum as so many now believe, or is it that we are
just beginning to notice the funny folk who have been in our midst
all along?
In any case it is understandable that so many researchers and
investigators double bolt their doors at night and spend their days
peering fearfully over their shoulders.
CHAPTER TEN
RENDEZVOUS WITH THE DAMNED
Sometime around the year a.d. 421 a group of artisans from a now
lost civilization painstakingly engraved a series of gold leaves or
plates with cryptic symbols and buried them in a stone box on the
west side of a hill near what is now the village of Manchester, New
York.
They remained there, unknown and untouched for fourteen
hundred years.
Then on Friday, September 21st, 1821, an
eighteen-year-old farm boy named Joseph Smith awoke to a vision in
his bedroom near Palmyra, New York, A personage appeared, he said
later,
'… standing in the air, for his feet did not touch the
floor'. This being was dressed in a long robe 'of most exquisite
whiteness', was surrounded by light, and 'his countenance was truly
like light ring'.
He identified himself as Moroni, a 'messenger sent
from the presence of God", called the youth by name, and announced
that he had been chosen for a special task. In subsequent
appearances Moroni gave Joseph Smith the exact location of the box
and told him that he was to dig it up when instructed to do so.
Six years passed before Smith received word to unearth the tablets
The date was September 22nd, 1827. That night the skies were aflame
with a spectacular display of meteors, falling stars, and luminous
spheres. One of the many witnesses was another young man who lived
in northern New York but was unacquainted with Joseph Smith.
His
name was Brigham Young.
Smith dug into the hillside, found the box exactly as Moroni had
said, and discovered the gold plates along with
crystalline devices which became known as the Urim and Tkammim.
He
spent the next three years translating the strange writing -although
he had little formal education - purportedly with the aid of the
lens-like objects. Eleven of his friends and neighbors signed
formal affidavits swearing they had viewed the plates. But once they
had been translated, the gold plates vanished.
'The messenger called
for them,' Smith explained.
In March 1830 the translation was published by a local printer. It
was the Book of Mormon, a history of ancient North America. The
following month the Mormon Church was officially organized with
six members in Fayette, New York. Today it has over 2.5 million
followers.
Joseph Smith was murdered by a hostile mob in Carthage, Illinois, in
June 1844. Brigham Young became the leader of the harassed' band of
Mormons who worked their way across the country until they arrived
at the rather inhospitable wasteland around the 'Great Salt Lake in
Utah. In 1848, many of the Mormons were dismayed by Young's choice
for the site of their future city.
But a year later the California
Gold Rush began and the gold-mad hordes charging westward all paused
at Salt Lake Oty for supplies. Within a short time the city was
prospering, and many of
the Mormons became rich overnight.
This is essentially the history - and the legend - of the Mormons.
The controversy which raged around the authenticity of the Book of
Mormon and its teachings is too complicated to discuss here. The
point is this: there is enough evidence to believe that a spectre, a
vision, or an angel visited Joseph Smith, or else he ascertained the
location of those plates by some psychic ability - or by pure
accident.
And wouldn't it be interesting if the story were entirely
true? If the elementals, ultraterrestrials, or some other force did
select Joseph Smith, passed along the information about the platesj
and engineered the formation of the Mormon religion?
All of our great religions were founded in almost the same way.
Muhammad (a.d. 570-632) was just an Arab tradesman until at the age
of forty he began to have visions and conversations with messengers, which led him to organize the Muslim religion and write the
Koran.
More recent religions, such as the Seventh Day Adventists and
Jehovah's Witnesses, were established by men who claimed
communication with supernatural beings and often issued amazing
prophecies which came true. Throughout history common men have had
uncommon experiences which have changed them instantly and in many
cases even changed the whole fabric of the period in which they
lived.
A Jewish tentmaker named Saul was once on the road to
Damascus to help suppress the rise of Christianity when, according
to tradition, a blinding light appeared in the sky, and a voice
converted him on the spot. He became St Paul.
Two groups or forces have always been involved in this cosmic
charade. Early man quickly learned to separate them into the good (prehuman)
and evil (antihuman) and gave each new god and demon a name. In the
interests of clarity, we shall label the good guys the Alpha Group
and the bad guys the Omega Group. The Alpha Group gave man a set of
ethics and moral principles, while the
Omega Group fostered racism, greed, and violence. As time passed,
the two groups began imitating each other's tactics, and the task of
discriminating between them became impossibly difficult. In his
confusion man soon began to associate everything that happened
around him to one of the groups. Natural catastrophes and accidents
were automatically blamed on the Omega Group.
This led to the
development of pure superstition and the awesome, irrational fear of
all ultraterresrrials. Things reached a peak in the Middle Ages.
Then every new and radical invention was regarded as an invention of
the Devil, and men such as Galileo, who came up with new scientific
discoveries running contrary to the accepted cosmological view,
were jailed or burned at the stake.
The Omega Group delighted in spreading false interpretations of the
universe and false religious teachings. For every Buddha and
Muhammad there were ten thousand Cyrus Teeds.
Who was Cyrus Teed? He believed that the universe was a sphere and
that the earth was hollow and that we live on the inside of it.
Born
in 1839, Teed took up the study of alchemy in IMca, New York, and at
the age of thirty he received his first visit from a beautiful
female entity who materialized in his laboratory. Following the
pattern of such contacts, she first informed him of his past
incarnations, He had been mighty kings and great men in past lives,
naturally. (No one ever approached by these entities has ever been
identified as of lesser station.)
Then she proceeded to give him a
detailed history of the cosmos, complete with her own special
terminology which, of course, he adopted. He began to write
pamphlets and books on this new Cellular Cosmogony, became a
powerful public speaker, and gradually built a following for his
profitable Koreshan cult (he used the pseudonym Koresh). He settled
finally in Fort Myers, Florida, where he established his New
Jerusalem with about two hundred followers. He died in 1908 of
injuries resulting from an altercation with the local sheriff.
Teed had promised that he would rise again after death. He was
buried in a concrete tomb on the island of Estero, and a violent
hurricane carried his tomb off in 1921. His body was never
recovered. This event gave the Koreshan cult new impetus, and it
survived into the 1940s.
Teed-Iike ideas permeate the thousands of books written in every
language by percipients and contactees. He proposed, for example,
the existence of a supersun which served as the ultimate source of
the universe. Albert K. Bender claimed that the space people
-.described this central body to him also. Many variations of this
concept exist in the literature.
Long before Albert Einstein
published his famous theory of relatively in 1905.
Einsteinian ideas
were being expounded by the ultraterrestrials and published by
enthused per-dpients. The Big Bang Theory currently in favour with
leading astronomers is that the universe began when all matter
condensed into a single enormous body, which then exploded. The
fragments of that explosion, including our own solar system, are now
hurtling outwards from the centre at tremendous velocity, but
eventually they will follow the curvature of space as envisioned by
Einstein and return to reform a new central body. Then the whole
cycle will start over again.
Teed and his ilk have been talking
about this same thing in their own peculiar way for centuries.
Scientists and doctors who have examined people claiming visions and
visits with ultraterrestrials have been puzzled by their apparent
normality. In many cases the percipients have seemed too
unintelligent, unimaginative, uneducated, and too sincere to have
simply invented the complicated, profusely detailed stories they
relate.
The contactee syndrome is not a form of insanity, but
insanity - particularly paranoid schizophrenia - frequently develops
after the contacts begin. Investigators, however, are still debating
which came first in some cases - insanity or contact.
The first complete psychological study of a percipient took place in
the 1890s, when Theodore Flournoy, a professor of psychology at the
University of Geneva, investigated the strange phenomena surrounding
a girl known as Helene Smith. Beginning in March 1892, Miss Smith
started to receive messages through automatic writing {a process in
which the percipient merely holds the pen, and some other force
moves it).
Soon she was going into trances and speaking in a man's
voice with an Italian accent. He identified himself as Leopold and
proved to be something of a rascal, prefacing his communications
with phrases such as, 'I am here. I wish to be master of this
sitting.* Then all kinds of poltergeistic activity would begin.
Later, however, Victor Hugo, the deceased author, came through the
medium and offered advice on how to handle the evil Leopold.
The clash between Leopold and Victor Hugo escalated into a classic
ultraterrestrial game, just as the modern UFO contactees are caught
up in the games waged between the spacemen and the evil Men in
Black. Then at 3.15 a.m. on the morning of September 5th, 1896,
Helene woke up and had a strange vision. She viewed, she said, a
foreign landscape with a 'beautiful blue-pink lake' whose shores
were, joined by a transparent bridge.
A crowd of 'peculiar people'
approached the bridge. A man 'of dark complexion, carrying an instrument somewhat resembling a carriage lantern in appearance,
which, being pressed, emitted flames and which seemed to be a flying
machine* stood on the centre of the bridge. Using this instrument,
he flew off the bridge, touched the water, and flew bade again.
By the end of that September the dark compassioned man had become a
part of Helene's life. He appeared and disappeared suddenly when she
was alone and fully conscious. Often he spoke to her in a strange
unknown tongue.
His name was Astane, and he was from Mars, he told
her soberly. He looked more Wee an Oriental or last Indian. On a
number of occasions he guided her to Ms home on Mars (at least in
her visions and hallucinations). Usually he was dressed in
beautifully embroidered robes. Miss Smith described at length the
vehicles on Mars, stating they had neither wheels nor horses, and
people seemed to fly about in them.
Helene quickly learned to speak the strange Martian language. Her
automatic writing also developed a new twist. She began writing in
unknown symbols but was able to decipher them and translate Martian
into French. These symbols had the Oriental characteristics which
have been so often described by modem flying saucer con-tactees who
claim to have been aboard the craft.
In later periods Helene would
sometimes lapse into this language in the course of normal
conversation without realizing she was doing so. It was not, Hournoy
noted, the kind of gibberish that children make up when they are
playing at being Chinese ot Indian. It was an actual - language
which could be broken down and studied.
Other Martians turned up answering to the names of Ramie and Esenale.
Soon Helene's world was peopled with strange beings with long hair
and long fingers (both common characteristics of the UFO entities
described by contactees) who led her off on spiritual trips to other
planets.
On November 2nd, 1898, Helene reported rising at 6.15 am and feeling
an invisible arm clasp itself about her waist.
'I then saw myself
surrounded by a rose-colored light which generally shows itself when
a Martian vision is coming,' she said.
She found herself suddenly in,
'a section of country people by men
altogether different from those who inhabit our globe. The
tallest of all were three feet high, and the majority were an
inch or two shorter. Their hands were immense, about ten inches
long by eight inches broad; they were ornamented with very long
black nails, Their feet were also of great size.
These little men of 1898 resided in simple houses 'all low, long,
without windows or doors; and each house had a little tunnel about
ten feet long running from it into the earth. The roofs were
flat, supplied with chimneys or tubes.'
All of the things described in Flouraoy's 447-page study,
From India
to the Planet Mars, published in 1900, have been repeated endlessly
in the occult and UFO literature in other cases.
The little men have
since earned a special place in flying saucer lore. Flournoy
speculated that Leopold and Astane could have been the same entity
in different guises. Perhaps he was aware of Swedenborg's warning
centuries earlier that the ultra-terrestrials could assume any
identity, and more interestingly, if the percipient accepted their
identity, they would eventually believe themselves that they were
Moses, Napoleon, or Astane.
Joseph Smith and his friends were
treated with visits not only from Moroni but also from entities
claiming to be John the Baptist and the apostles Peter, James, and
John.
Our ultraterrestrials are ham actors who delight in assuming roles
and adopting names from ancient mythology. Early theologians were
kept busy recording the endless names of angels and demons. Numbers
are also flourished indiscriminately in both religious and contactee
literature. The Bible contains long chapters giving elaborate but
seemingly meaningless measurements.
In Oahspe, a book produced by
automatic writing in 1880, we learn that Egypt had a population of
thirteen million at the tune of Moses birth; four million of these
were enslaved Hebrews. (Today Egypt's population is about forty
million - not much of an increase in two thousand years.) Page after
page in Oahspe lists the total number of spirits and angels and
druks (the Oahspe word for the Oraega Group).
This numbers game has been extended to
the modern UFO phenomena. 'On August 7,1965, three prominent men in
Venezuela were present at a UFO landing and had a conversation with
two tall (seven to eight feet) beings with long yellow hair, large
penetrating eyes, and one piece metallic coverall-type garments.
The witnesses, who included a well-known
Venezuelan doctor, claimed they communicated through telepathy, and
among the questions they asked was.
'Are there any beings like you
living among us?'
'Yes,' came the reply. Two million, four hundred and seventeen
thousand, eight hundred and five.'
That's a very precise answer.
But many other contactees have thought
to ask the same question, and the answers are wildly variable… from
seventy-five to ten thousand (in the city of Los Angeles alone) to
up in the millions. Our long-haired friends also indulge in
nonsensical prophecy on a grand scale. Asked when the world is going
to end, they are apt to give a precise date in the near future,
Some people have actually started building arks on their say-so. One
group in Denmark erected a hasty atom bomb shelter in 1967 and
settled down to await Armageddon that December. Who is going to be
elected President in the next election? The elemental announce with
grave authority that Frank Sinatra or Mae West is in line for the
job.
The study of glossolalia has had a small group of scholarly
followers for years. This is the attempted translation of the
mysterious language(s) spoken by the ultraterrestrials, mediums, and
church groups who indulge in speaking in tongues.
It seems to be a conglomerate of many
languages, both ancient and modern, and Flournoy
wasn't the first to try to unravel it. There are books filled with
symbols and translations similar to, but never exactly like, Helene
Smith's Martian language. Dozens of these phony alphabets have been
published in dead seriousness* A retired teacher named John W. Dean
collected the testimony of flying saucer contactees and the
elaborate information passed along by the space people for his book,
Flying Saucers Close Up.
The project must have taken years. He
devotes many pages to listing unknown planets far out in the cosmos
(as described by the ultra terrestrials), and giving encyclopedic
data about each one.
Here's a sample from one of his tables:
Planet Colonized, Name Indigenous, Population Day Length Diameter Year Uninhabited in Billions in Hours in Miles Length Wamovaldam Un. - "36.6 9,810 0.95 Tarmandre Col. 1.2 23.7 10,480 1.88 Ophianche lad. 3.62 28.0 7,188 3,21 Salumandran Lid. ' 4.23 24.1 9,170 5.66
Dean lists hundreds of unknown planets in this fashion.
The group in
this particular table happen to be from the star system of Alpha Tauri, 53.6 light years away. But anyone with) a basic knowledge of
orbital mechanics and a slide rule can check the mass of figures and
discover that many of these alleged planetary systems are quite
impossible. The cosmos of the ultraterrestrials must be filled with
colliding planets weaving and spinning in defiance of all the known
laws of motion.
In Flying Saucers Close Up Mr Dean also presents a complete
vocabulary and the written language of the folks from the planet
called Korendor. Some of the symbols bear a striking resemblance to
runic ciphers. His book is only a minor example of the privately
published material circulated to about two thousand hardcore flying
saucer believers.
Over the past twenty years the ultraterrestrials
have constructed a whole fantasy world through the contactees - a
cosmos which includes great Intergalactic Councils (as soon as we
grow up, we may be permitted to join).
On other levels, in different frames of reference believers speak in
terms of other planes. The most common belief shared by every
culture on this planet is that there are seven distinct worlds or
realities. We have on the lowest rung of the ladder. If there is a
hell, we must be living in it
Numerous religious sects are concerned with Holy Ghost apparitions
and the speaking in tongues phenomenon, which they accept as
verification of their beliefs. The United Pentecostal Church, for
example, finds great meaning in such manifestations… and they occur
constantly within the church. Church bulletins and publications are
filled with accounts of these events.
The newsletter, Global
Witness, June-July 1970, described the following, as reported by a
group in Peru:
On April 28th as they were praying, the ten-year-old daughter
suddenly went into what they thought was a 'fit of convulsions'.
She
began to jerk and shake all over. Her terrified mother rushed to her
side to attempt to help her daughter, but an unseen hand restrained
her, and a voice urged her to leave the girl alone. In just a few
moments this little girl, who did not know what the Holy Ghost was,
began to speak in a strange but lovely new language.
The following
Tuesday night the oldest boy was marvelously filled with the Holy
Ghost. He rejoiced in the Spirit and spoke with tongues for over
an hour.
Convulsive seizures are common to all the frames of reference. Many
UFO contactees suffer chronic headaches, muscular soreness, and
other symptoms of such seizures after their experiences. These fits
could be caused by some disorder of the frontal lobe. Primitive
peoples usually regarded such fits as demonic possessions.
One of the world's foremost psychologists, the late Dr Carl G. Jung,
examined the pseudo religious aspects of the UFO rumors and
published a shrewd analysis, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in
the Sky in 1959.
He correlated the UFO reports with psychic
manifestations and suggested that the phenomena were products of the
collective consciousness of mankind. The psychic aspect plays so
great a role that it cannot be left out of account,' Dr Jung
stated.
The discussion of it leads to psychological problems which
involve just as fantastic possibilities or impossibilities as the
approach from the physical side.'
Another scientist, Dr
Jacques Vallee, an astronomer and computer
specialist, spent several years sifting UFO accounts and comparing
them with the earlier fairy lore of Europe.
He felt that the two phenomena shared a
single cause. In
Passport to Magonia, Vallee
offered a catalogue of 923 flying saucer landings from 1868 to 1968,
many of which included the classic characteristics of the more
universal psychic manifestations.
"Is it reasonable to draw a
parallel between religious apparitions, the fairy faith, the reports
of dwarf-like beings with supernatural powers, the airship tales in
the United States in the last century, and the present stories of
UFO landings?" he asks. 'I would strongly argue that it is - for one
simple reason: the mechanisms that have generated these various
beliefs are identical.'
The crux of the problem is to reach beyond the endless reports of
varied manifestations and seek out the source: the physical,
psychic, of psychological mechanism which has inspired these
beliefs.
All of these incidents are subjective; that is, we have
only the testimony of the witnesses that these peculiar events
occurred. Although millions of people have claimed encounters with
the ultraterrestrials in the past two thousand years, many millions
of others have not had such experiences. Astronomers and physicists
are neither trained nor equipped to deal with a purely subjective
phenomenon.
Only a few examples have been given, but it is apparent that,
-
Joseph
Smith
-
Cyrus Teed
-
Helene Smith
-
even John Dean,
...were all
confronted by the same basic phenomenon.
Each approached it in a
different, individualized way, and each received information
structured to support Ms own beliefs. Albert K. Bender and Teed both
explored black magic and alchemy.
Both claimed they received complex
cosmic theories from parahuman entities. Dean asked for and received
elaborate facts and figures about extraterrestrial beings and the
planets they supposedly inhabited. like Swedenborg and the biblical
prophet Enoch, Helene Smith was shown other worlds and led to
believe that she was visiting other planets.
Reinhold Schmidt was
transported to the centre of the pyramid; Bender was taken to
underground bases in Antarctica; others have visited the underground
palaces of the fairies and the subterranean cities of the Deros. It
is not likely that any of these places exist in reality. It is more
likely that these people made hallucinogenic excursions, or
mind trips, guided by some force which is capable of manipulating
the electrical circuits of the brain.
The only, alternative explanation is that all these people were
liars, hoaxsters or lunatics. None of the scientists, psychiatrists,
and theologians who have investigated these matters have been able
to accept such a simple explanation.
A remarkable man named
Aleister Crowley, born in 1875, became known
as the wickedest man in the world through his work in black 'magick'.
He too claimed to receive visits from an angel, and he was the
centre of a large cult around the turn of the century. He was noted
for sexually liberating Ms female followers, and he published a
number of books expounding on his personal cosmology.
Those books
are currently enjoying a revival of popularity among the youth
subculture.
In 1939 a young rocket fuel scientist, John Whiteside Parsons,
joined the Crowley cult and burrowed into the dark world of 'magick'
and the occult. Another practitioner of the mysteries crossed
Parsons' path in 1946, and the two became close friends, combining
their efforts to conjure up demons and elementals. The newcomer,
Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, claimed he had a personal angel, a
beautiful red-haired entity whom he called the Empress.
The two men
donned robes and engaged in secret mystical rites. According to
Parsons, they had some success.
On the night of January 14th, 1946,
the electric power failed as they were mumbling incantations, and
Hubbard was struck by something on the right shoulder, knocking a
candle from his hand,
'He called me,' Parsons wrote, 'and we
observed a brownish-yellow light about seven-feet high. I brandished
a magical sword, and it disappeared. Ron's right arm was paralyzed
for the rest of the night.'
During one of their rites, Parsons was given this prophecy:
'Babalon
[the whore of Babylon] is incarnate upon the earth today, awaiting
the proper hour of her manifestation. And in that day my work will
be accomplished, and I shall be blown away upon the breath of the
father…'
A rocket fuel explosion at a laboratory in Pasadena in 1952 did blow
away the ill-fated Parsons.
Lafayette Ronald Hubbard went on to bigger and better things. Born
in Tilden, Nebraska in 1911, he served in the Marines, studied
engineering, and became a prolific science fiction writer. Sometime
around 1948 he began to develop a form of pseudopsychiatry which he
labeled Dianetics. John Campbell, Jr., editor of Astounding Science
Fiction, served as one of his first patients and was so impressed by Hubbard's concept that he persuaded him to write an
article about it for Ms magazine.
The article caused such a stir
among the science fiction fans that Hubbard quickly churned out a
full-length book, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Healing.
It became an instant bestseller, and a new movement was born.
Teed's neologisms (such as 'planets are spheres of substance
aggregated through the impact of afferent and efferent fluxions of
essence*) were nothing compared to Hubbard's new vision oi the human
mind and soul. All our troubles, he decided, were caused by 'engrams':
traumas stored in the unconscious or reactive mind. Patients were
guided by auditors - people who have already undergone the process,
unearthed their own engrains, and reached the exalted state of
'clear'.
The American Medical Association, the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration and other authorities took a dim view of Dianetics,
and Hubbard's career had many ups and downs throughout the 1950s. At
one point he publicly claimed that he had even visited Venus,
Apparently the friendly Venusians were 100 per cent behind Dianetics.
But even with their support, Mr Hubbard suffered many setbacks and
his movement went into limbo for a, few years, reappearing in the
late 1950s as the Church of Scientology.
Inside newsletters and publications distributed to the operators of
the Scientology offices or "org" (short for organization) are
written in Hubbaid's own unique jargon with emphasis on the magic
word sell. In 1962, the Food and Drug Administration raided the
Founding Church of Scientology in Washington, D.C., and seized
literature and a number of E-meters.
The E-meters are a simple
electrical device similar to a lie detector and are used by auditors
in counseling sessions. On August 30th, 1971, Federal District
Court Judge Gerhard A. Gesell in Washington ruled in favour of
Scientology and ordered the return of the confiscated materials
because the FDA failed to prove that the E-meters were being sold as
healing devices.
In the 1960s Hubbard's movement spread throughout the world despite
the opposition of medical societies and legal authorities from Great
Britain to Greece. Hubbard now spends most of his time cruising
outside the twelve-mile limit aboard his magnificently appointed
yacht. The Church of Scientology is now a franchise operation with
Hubbard receiving a small percentage of the take.
He has come a long
way since those days when he and Parsons were drawing circles on the
floor and praying to unseen demons.
The games of the ultraterrestrials never end.
The latest entry is an outfit called Koscot Interplanetary, Inc. of
Orlando. Florida, who have 'had difficulties with law enforcement
agencies in several states', according to the Better Business
Bureau.
Koscot has been pushing 'Dare To Be Great', a motivational
course consisting of a series of four tapes which will tell you how
to get rich. The four tapes cost only seventy-seven hundred dollars,
but the investment can be quickly recouped by selling the course to
others. The whole scheme is based upon a pyramid plan with each
student peddling the course to new seekers of truth.
Unfortunately,
the population of a state can not support an indefinite selling plan
that depends upon recruiting other sellers and students, and the
Better Business Bureau has labeled the whole enterprise 'doubtful
and unrealistic'.
The tapes deal largely with the same philosophy
and cosmology found in all the occult lore.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Not One of
Them, etc...
Not one of them who took up in his youth with this
opinion that there are no gods ever continued until old
age faithful to his conviction.
Plato
A New Jersey sign painter named Howard Menger experienced a most revealing flying saucer vision in August
1956, when he came face-to-face with a godlike being. But according
to his book From Outer Space to You. Menger's story began years
earlier.
As a boy he had encountered a beautiful female entity in a
wood and was told that he would one day serve the illustrious space
people. As a young man in,' the Army he was again contacted, this
time in Juarez. Mexico, by a man with long blond hair and suntanned
skin, riding in a taxicab. Then in the mid-1950s, Menger's real
adventures began.
Strange aerial objects haunted the area around his
home near High Bridge, New Jersey, there were innumerable
witnesses, including lawyers, physicists, and reporters.
The space
people began to drop in on him for coffee and friendly chats about
the state of the universe. They asked him to buy dark sunglasses
with red lenses, and on several occasions they even pressed him into
service as a barber, inviting him to chop off their long blond
tresses so they would look even more human. He was rewarded with a
flight to the moon (he brought back some strange rocks which were,
he said, moon potatoes).
Finally, in August 1956, he met the boss
spaceman.
A saucer landed in a field near Menger's home, and two men stepped
out of it.
"Then a magnificent sight appeared in the doorway,' Menger
wrote. 'A tali, handsome man with long blond hair over his shoulders
stood towering at the entrance… Then he came toward me. But he
seemed to float or glide rather than walk."
This being was dressed
in,
'a radiant white ski-type uniform… the sleeves were full and
loose; the neckline was high, similar to that of a turtleneck
sweater.'
He wore a light blue, fluorescentlike cape fastened to his
shoulder with a gold pin in the shape of a wheel. His skin was
white, and his eyes 'were the color of goldenrod when it is ripe.'
His fingers were long and tapering.
This superbeing gave Menger a message of love and truth in the
grand tradition of the elemental's, then returned to his flying
saucer, and Sew oil to the stars.
When Howard Menger courageously published his story (it was
privately printed in 1959), he was roundly cheered by one group of
cultists for having solved the UFO mystery and roundly condemned by
the equally fanatical scientific ufologists who believed in the
existence of extraterrestrial spaceships but could not believe that
anyone had ever been close to one. His business collapsed as he
gained a reputation for being a crack-pot, and his family fell
apart.
If Howard Menger had lived in another age, he might have been looked
upon as great prophet and visionary - one of those privileged
individuals who consorted with the gods. Sculptors would have been
commissioned to carve mighty replicas of the superbeing. Poems and
songs would have been written about his experience and handed down
from one generation to the next.
Unfortunately, Menger lived in 1956. He was laughed out of business.
His book earned a few hundred dollars from sales to the hardcore
cultists and was then forgotten. But it is a revealing record of the
mechanism of belief which is at work in these cases. If such things
could happen in 1956, then they may also have happened in 1056 and
556 B.C. There are in fact extensive legends suggesting that this
sort of thing has been happening to men since the beginning of
history. The long-haired, long-fingered ultraterrestrials have been
walking among us forever.
Before we can understand this tangled maze, we must attempt to
understand something of the origins and complexities of human
history. We must try to ascertain how it all began, how the
ultra-terrestrials have influenced our course, and where it is all
leading us.
Our scientists can only guess at how the universe itself came into
being. The two most popular theories are the Big Bang concept,
already discussed, and the Steady State theory that matter is
constantly replenishing itself and that the cosmos really has no
beginning or end. The beginning of the solar system and the birth of
the planets are a little easier to deal with. The commonly accepted
theory is that the planets are cooling masses of material ejaculated
from the sun.
Two independent scientists, Dr C. J. Hyman and C. William Kinsman,
have developed a new Geocosmic theory based upon the new discoveries
outlined in earlier chapters, coupled with Velikovsky-like evidence
and speculations. They suggest that Earth once pursued the orbit now
occupied by Venus and that Mars was in the present
Earth orbit.
This would explain the legends of early man, which
claimed that Earth days and years were once shorter than they are
now and that the human life-span was once considerably longer.
Ancient calendars carved in stone also indicate important
differences in the early Earth years. If the Earth began as a lump
of matter cast off by the sun, it may have first passed along the
orbit of Mercury before spiraling outward and settling into the
orbit of Venus. This could have happened five billion years ago.
The cooling planet Earth could have reached the life support stage
hundreds of millions of years ago. and it could have been inhabited
while it was in the Venus orbit. If Mars was then in the Earth
orbit, it too could have supported life. But as it was pushed
further into space by the approach of Earth, the Martians either
died out or were forced to make radical biological adjustments to
their new environment.
In a recent letter Kinsman also proposes that there was some efforts
to crossbreed Martians with earthlings.
He states:
If Mars was 'pushed' out there in our Permian times to make way for
Earth in our present orbits, its environmental change in climate in
this some three hundred million years would surely modify its
humanoids, because of the scarcity of air, water, and warmth, into
presumably a more scrawny physique no longer adapted to normal life
on Earth…
Presumably for millions of years they have been trying to
hybridize their fauna and flora with ours and to develop some sort
of humanoid to whom they could bequeath the advances which their
dying civilization had long since acquired. Success in this seems to
have finally come with the sudden hybrid appearance of Cro-Magnon
man some fifty thousand years ago.
They may have visited us
frequently and openly for such time as they could stand it, until a
few millennia ago (when men were still few and fearful).
If the Earth did begin in another orbit and did undergo the changes
postulated by these scientists, it may have been even more unstable
than it is now and cataclysmic occurrences would have been logical.
Velikovsky pointed out that human folklore has recorded many such
cataclysms, including a period when the entire earth was bathed in
total darkness for three or more days. The Earth may have followed
an elliptical orbit which carried it so far away from the sun that
it was plunged into darkness. Then it looped back and fell into the
present orbit.
Elementals have constantly told occultists and UFO contactees that
mankind began on Venus and that orbital changes have taken place in
the past and will recur in the future. On April 24th, 1964, a farmer
named Gary Wilcox allegedly had a two-hour conversation with a pair
of faceless little men from a flying saucer in a field near Newark
Valley. New York.
Among other things, he said, they told him that
the Earth would soon be where Mars is now.1
Many flying saucer books have followed the premise that the Earth
was originally seeded by beings from outer space. Man has always
assumed that the frequently observed parahumaus had to originate
from beyond our planet or even from beyond our solar system or
space-time continuum.
Science writer Otto Binder's Flying Saucers Are Watching Us dealt at
length with the theories of an engineer named Max H. Flindt.
Flindt
proposed,
'that man is a hybrid from the union of ancient spacemen
and some earthly species of man-ape who existed, according to recent
anthropological finds, as long as two million years ago.'
More orthodox scientists have struggled for the past hundred years
to find a provable system of evolution to account for man's
appearance.
The commonly accepted view is that man was a mere animal
for thousands of years, and he somehow suddenly developed
intelligence and consciousness and quickly evolved from a low hairy
animal to his present exalted status of low hairless animal. The
mythical missing link of the Sunday supplements is supposed to be
the animal that bridged the two orders of life.
Is
the movie, 2001,
Arthur C. Clarke solved the problem by having a sudden outside
influence - the slab-like monolith - appear in the midst of a group
of apes. It led them to discover tools, namely clubs, and they began
bashing in each other's heads.
There are really only three primary theories for the origin of man:
-
The religious theory: man was created by some greater intelligence
through the manipulation of physical matter and energy.
-
The cultist theory: man migrated to Earth from some other planet, or
he was seeded here by some other race, or he was produced when some
other race crossbred with earthly animals and produced the present
strain of Homo sapiens.
-
The theory of evolution: a
series of random chemical and biological accidents took place over a period of millions of years, and
man slowly evolved from lower life forms.
1 See Dr. Berthold SchwarzTs psychiatric study of Mr. Wilcwt in UFO
Percipients.
Billions of people have believed and still believe in supernatural
creation.
A few million accept Darwin's theory of evolution, and
only a few thousand are even willing to consider the seeded idea.
The real truth may be a combination of all three, Of the three,
evolution is actually the weakest and the most difficult to support.
Evolution adequately explains the development of living species, the
process of natural selection, and the other things, but it fails to
provide a rational and provable explanation for the process of
creation itself.
Scientists shrug this off with limp statements
about how bolts of lightning struck puddles of chemicals and induced
life. But if such a lightning process were true, it should be still
continuing, and it should be easy to duplicate in our laboratories.
The fact that it is not a discernible continuing process (new
species are not constantly appearing) and that we have not managed
to duplicate it weakens the concept…
The Japanese have myths and legends which claim that their islands
were first settled by beings who descended from the sky. These
stories are a part of the Japanese culture. The Eskimos believe they
were somehow flown to die Arctic circle in ancient times.
The natives
of the Sahara desert have folklore about blue-skinned people from
the sky who had such impact that certain tribes still dye their
skins blue in emulation of these ancient cosmic beings; Deep in the
Bayan-Kara-Ula Mountains of China there is a tribe of diminutive
people about four feet high. Hieroglyphs have been found in that
region (on the border of China and Tibet) by Russian archaeologists.
When translated, these records describe how members of
the Dropa
tribe came to Earth in some kind of flying machine.
The stone disks
bearing these inscriptions have been dated at about twelve thousand
years. Ancient graves have also been found there containing small
human bodies with huge craniums and underdeveloped skeletons.
There is, in fact, a staggering amount of historical and
archaeological evidence to support the seeded notion, while the
evolutionists are obliged to fall back on a few fragments of fossils
and a mountain of conjecture.
The concept of supernatural creation is wholly dependent upon the
religious texts and the testimony of the ultra terrestrials. The
story of Adam and Eve can be found in the ancient writings of the
Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians, Abyssinians, Hebrews, and many other
ancient peoples. like the tales of the deluge and the Ark, the
Garden oE Eden is a universal myth. Unlike the deluge stories, it
seems to be largely allegorical.
Archaeologists digging in the
Middle East have found artifacts which indicate that Neanderthal,
Cro-Magnon, and modern men all existed during the same period. This
not only shoots down the theory of evolution, but it suggests that
modern man - a creature with a conscience and a consciousness - was
separate and distinct from primitive man.
If we ever manage to assemble a more accurate history of Earth, we
may find that modern man is the descendant of the survivors of some
earlier civilization which existed thousands, even millions, of
years ago, and that he has no direct biological linkage with the
lower animals at all. We must not ignore the possibility that the
Earth was originally colonized by beings from some other point in
space.
Historians and archaeologists are troubled by the fact that
mankind seems to have appeared quite suddenly on this planet Ether
we were placed here, even stranded here, at some point between
thirty and seventy thousand years ago. or we were created in some
fashion millions of years after the Earth itself had been created
and had passed through many ages during which it supported different
kinds of non-human life.
The process of creation is explained somewhat in the religious and
occult texts. We are told that the first man, Adam, was an
androgynous being directly linked with the supermind of the
universe. He was a temporary transmogrification of energy - an
ultra-terrestrial who became locked into a physical form. Once this
descent occurred, he was given a mate so that he could reproduce.
The Earth was already inhabited by two distinct life forms. There
were primitive animals, which might have included cavemen as well as
lower beasts. Perhaps the cavemen were an earlier experiment which
was failing. There were also thousands, if not millions, of
nonphysical beings from the world of higher frequencies, who
occupied the Earth by sharing the same space with the planet.
These
beings may have been free from the greater intelligence (fallen
angels), or they may have been under the control of a lesser
intelligence. In any cases, the Earth was their personal playground.
They owned it.
Now suddenly, a group (or several groups) of ultraterrestrials from
a higher plane descended to Earth. They were forbidden to do certain
things. We can't even guess what those things were. In the
scriptures Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat the fruit of the Tree
of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This was probably more symbolism,
and the true meaning is lose.
A British scholar, Brinsley Le Poer Trench, has studied the ancient
scriptures carefully and produced two important books, The
Sky-People and Men Among Mankind to explain his theories. He
describes and defines the people of the Serpent. These people may
have been the fallen angels or devils who later plagued Adam and
Eve. If they felt they were owners of the Earth, they may have
greatly resented this hew flock of ultraterrestrials, and they may
have conspired to lead the Adam and Eve group to destruction by
getting them to violate the orders of their overlord.
A battle now takes shape. A lesser group of ultraterrestrials (UTs)
is in possession of the Earth. A bunch of newcomers invades the
planet, and perhaps their ruling intelligence has a plan - a very
long range plan - to wrest the earth from the owners. Masses of
energy can not fight with bombs, bullets, and arrows. They need a
physical battlefield and physical armies. The whole thing must be
played out like some gigantic chess game.
The first step is to create the necessary physical army. Tactics
must be invented so that the physical army can overthrow the
nonphysical owners. The game becomes incredibly complex.
If several different superintelligences were involved, then one group
of ultraterrestrials would descend or be materialized in Japan and
China, bearing the specific racial characteristics imposed upon them
by their overlord. Another overlord would plant his soldiers in
Africa; another would create Indians in North and South America; and
so on.
In the beginning one superintelligence may have tried to utilize the
Neanderthal men as his physical army. Ultraterrestrials were sent
down the frequency scale to help guide the cavemen. To facilitate
communication between the UTs and the Neanderthal men, the tall,
blond, normally sexless UTs were made to more closely resemble their
primitive contacts. They were given sexes but were forbidden to participate
in the pleasurable rites of sex… the Tree of the Knowledge.
The
Serpent People were sometimes able to control groups of cavemen
and managed to trick some of the TITs into breaking their chastity.
The UTs engaged in sexual intercourse with the cave-women.3
3 This crossbreeding between Adam (ultraterrestrial) types and lower
animals is suggested in Genesis 25:19-34, and relates a miraculous
birth.
This
produced strange responses in their materialized nervous system.
Emotions were born. Frequencies were changed. The
direct control of the superintelligence was driven from their
bodies. They were trapped on Earth, unable to ascend the
electro-magnetic scale and re-enter their etheric world. With the
loss of control they became animals, albeit highly intelligent
animals.
Since the UTs memories were part of the greater intelligence.-the
loss of contact meant also the complete loss of their former
identity. They were locked on this planet, leaderless, in a totally
strange and hostile environment.
The first UTs to be thus trapped became the first real men. They had
to learn to hunt and kill, to build fires and huts. They were lost:
the victims of the first battle between the Serpent People and the
ultimate intelligence.
Now the Serpent People or Omega Group, attacked man in various ways,
trying to rid the planet of him. But the supers intelligence was
still able to look over man, and new, more tightly controlled UTs
were sent to offer advice and assistance. Earliest man was told in
carefully simplified ways of his origin and purpose. The
superintelligence became God and early man worshipped Him in
many ways and under many names.
God worked out new ways of
communication and control always in
conflict with the Serpent People.
Much is made of the fact that Adam and Eve were terrified by the
first night, indicating that they were unused to a world without
light. Perhaps as ultraterrestrials they were accustomed to total
vision or perception of all the frequencies; life on those higher
planes would be bathed in continuous radiation, and there would be
no night or day. No time.
Now Adam and Eve were not only trapped on
this miserable little planet, but they were also caught up in a
world that moved in a single direction through the field of time.
This would take some getting used to, even if they couldn't remember
their previous existence as UTs.
Through intercourse with the existing cave people, the fallen UTs
produced the new races of man. They were the missing link. And in
Isaac's barren wife Rebekah suddenly conceived, and the Lord said
to her. Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall
be separated from thy bowels; and the one people shall be stronger
than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger.
Eebekah gave birth to twins and one, Esau,
'came out red all over
like an baity garment'.
Later Esau sold his birth right to Jacob.
Many ways all three of our hypotheses for the origin of man became
correct. Evolution is involved. Extraterrestrial descent is
involved. Creation is involved.
In some parts of the world the Serpent People successfully posed as
gods and imitated the techniques of the super-intelligence. This led
to the formation of pagan religions centered around human sacrifices.
The conflicts, so far as man himself was concerned, became one of
religions and races. Whole civilizations based upon the worship of
these false gods rose and fell in Asia, Africa, and South America.
The battleground had been chosen, and the mode of conflict had been
decided upon.
The human race would supply the pawns. The mode of control was
complicated as usual. Human beings were largely free of direct
control. Each individual had to consciously commit himself to one of
the opposing forces. After that commitment was made voluntarily, the
chosen force could possess the individual to some degree. The UTs
very carefully explained this process to the early priests who
interpreted it and tried to pass it on to their followers.
The rites
of baptism were born.
The main battle was for what was to become known as the human soul.
Once an individual had committed himself, he opened a door so that
an indefinable something (probably an undetectable mass of
intelligent energy) could actually enter his body and exercise some
control over his subconscious mind. This soul was directly linked
with the superintelligence and with all similar souls, thus making
possible mental telepathy, prophetic dreams, and other wonders.
In
those thousands of cases in which this subconscious force lapsed
over into the conscious mind, we find destructive fanaticism and
obsession. If the controlling intelligence was Omega (antihuman),
the stricken individual suffers from insanity or commits criminal
actions, social disorders, and so on.
If this soul abandons the living body, total disorientation could
conceivably result. The body might enter a mindless catatonic
trance. Persons with an advanced soul could consciously eject it
front their bodies for short periods and indulge in astral
projection. The body would appear to be dead, or almost dead, during
this period of desertion. In astral projection literature we are
told about a silver cord which seems to connect the free flying soul
with the sleeping body. If that cord is cut or broken, the soul
can't re-enter the body, and it dies or is possessed by an evil
force.
Astral projectionists claim that sometimes when they return
to their body,
they find a dark elemental engulfing it, trying to possess it during
their absence, and they have to fight the evil thing off.
The validity of astral projection is debatable, of course. But let's
suppose for a moment that it is a genuine phenomenon. If some people
can project themselves consciously and remember the experience, then
it is also possible that many others project their souls while
asleep. They're never aware that they're doing it. The liberated
souls fly about, perhaps rendezvousing with other souls to receive
orders or some programming process.
If the soul is some kind of ultrahigh frequency energy, then it could be visible to some
sensitive people as a blob of faint light in the night sky. In other
words, some UFOs could be astral travelers!
Flying saucer contactees usually end up talking about souls and
reincarnation (Karma): The UFO entities try to convey the truth
about reincarnation to the people they approach. Not many of these
people are able to properly interpret what they have been told.
Several major religions, particularly in the Orient, are based upon
the principles of reincarnation.
In Tibet when a Dalai Lama dies,
the priests go out and scour the mountains searching for a small
child who possesses specific birthmarks and other things which
identify him as the reincarnated High Lama.
Sometimes the search
goes on for years. When a likely prospect is finally found, several
religious and personal articles are spread before him. If the child
goes unerringly for those items which had been owned by the dead
Dalai Lama, he is declared the new ruler. This system works and has
been in use for centuries.
There are hundreds of carefully investigated and authenticated cases
of reincarnation. As might be expected, a majority of these occur in
India and other countries where belief
in Karma runs high. Usually,
small children are involved. Such children recall completely their
previous life in a distant village, and when investigators take them
to that village, they recognize everything and everyone, have a
tearful reunion with their former family, and are even able to
describe in detail how they died.
Actually, true reincarnation is impossible. Memory is stored by an
electrical system in the brain, and when the brain dies, all
memories are also cancelled out.
Our personalities, egos, emotional
structure, and memories are all part of the brain's complex
circuitry. The brain dies very quickly - as soon as the oxygen
supply is cut off. All of this circuitry dies with it, like a radio
being turned off. If the soul is merely a mass of high frequency
energy, then it would not retain either memory or personality.
When
the body, or host dies, this mass
of energy would be liberated either to rejoin the main intelligence
of which it is always a part or to find and possess a new host. It
would not carry along any memory of its previous body or life.
However, the computerlike superintelligence would have a complete
memory of that other life stored within it. It could feed that
information to another brain by
channeling it through any soul at
random.
A person recalling a past life under hypnosis (there are
thousands of cases of this) might actually just be tuning his
subconscious into the central computer. There may be some subtle
need on the intelligence's part to bring about interest and
investigation into a specific past life. So the hypnotized person is
fed the information.
In Oahspe we are told that all cases of reincarnation are the work
of mischievous spirits known as engrafters. An engrafter swoops down
on an uncommitted soul and possesses it, feeding a complete memory
of a past life into the brain.
The main information passed along to contactees is simply that the
human body provides a host for a fragment of this indefinable soul
energy. The major religions have been telling us this for thousands
of years, pointing out that the human race supplies the shells for
souls. Man's ego has demanded that he embellish this truth by adding
the belief that his pitiful personality is worthy of preservation
and that his memories and personality go along with the soul.
The
Omega Group has made a game of this belief at millions of seances,
happily posing as myriad souls of the dear departed.
Two or more intelligences are playing a game with us, vying for
complete control of our bodies and souls, according to all occult
and religious interpretations. It's a seesaw battle, and every
possible kind of deception and deceit is being employed by both
sides. They caa make us believe anything they want us to believe,
thanks to our swollen egos and flimsy brains.
They can make us see
anything they want us to see, thanks to our narrow field of vision
(we can only see a. .fragment of the electromagnetic spectrum) and
their apparent ability to manipulate energy and physical matter.
The parahuman
Serpent People of the past are still among us. They
were probably worshipped by the builders of Stonehenge and the
forgotten ridge-making cultures of South America. They directed us
to multiply and seed the earth. Their manifestations and
manipulations have generated thousands of cults, religions, and
frames of reference.
In recent years hundreds of UFO contactees have been warned by the
long-haired Venusians that our atomic experiments will lead to
disaster. Could it be, as some have said, that atomic bombs not only
kill cities, but that they also kill or disintegrate souls?
Then this anti-atomic-bomb posture of the ultraterrestrials
could be defensive. The bomb at Hiroshima may have blown a hole in
some other world beyond out space-time continuum… and a lot of moon
food may have been lost in the baraain.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE DEMISE OF
THE GODS
'If flying saucers are real,' the
skeptics say, "why don't they
contact us?"
The startling truth, as carefully recorded by the ancient
historians, is that the ultraterrestrials have always been in direct
contact with millions of individuals and that they actually ruled
directly over mankind for many years. In recent centuries their
influence has become more subtle, but it is always there.
According to the traditions of many isolated peoples, the first
great emperors in Asia were god-kings who came down from the sky,
displayed amazing superhuman abilities, and took over. There was a
veritable world-wide epidemic of these god-kings between 5000 and
1000 b.c.
The mighty Osiris and Isis walked into the Egyptian valley
out of nowhere and assumed command. The myths and legends of Greece,
India, and South America describe their rule. They were taller and
more imposing than the men of the time, with long blond hair,
marble-like white skin, and remarkable powers which enabled them to
perform miracles.
They displayed brilliant judgment and wisdom and
exercised remarkable organizational abilities. In most cases they
chose to reside on the highest mountains and hills available,
commanding balls of fire and bolts of lightning and travelling about
the skies in wonderful chariots.
In southern Europe Zeus and his court of phantom cohorts held forth
for centuries. In India a multitude of gods and demons appeared and
reappeared generation after generation. Others arrived on the scene
and made lasting contributions to folklore from Iceland to
Scandinavia. In Central America the legendary Quetzalcoatl appeared
among the Toltecs.
Me was a white man dressed in a long white robe
covered with tiny red crosses. He wore a great beard and according
to Toltec tradition introduced science and learning to the natives.
After many years of benign rule he simply vanished, promising to
return again one day. When Cortes, the Spanish conquistador, landed
in Mexico a thousand years later, the Indians greeted him with
delight, believing that he was Quetzalcoatl.
He took advantage of
their superstition and sacked the Aztec empire.
Deep in the wasteland of western
Australia the Aborigines still
cling to the ancient myths of the Wandjinas and regard as sacred the
petroglyphs carved into rocks depicting tall, robed figures.
The Wandjinas are supposedly a parahuman group who resided in Australia
thousands of years ago.
Berosus, an ancient Babylonian priest, recorded the fascinating
legend of Cannes, a remarkable creature who came up out of the
waters of the Persian Gulf to educate early man.
This legend,
"more
nearly fulfils some of our criteria for a genuine contact myth", Dr
Carl Sagan states in his Intelligent Life in the Universe.
Berosus
presumably,
'had access to cuneiform and pictographic records dating
back several thousand years before his time'.
His work was
translated into Greek and Latin and found its way into English in
1876. He quoted from Apollodorus, describing Oannes as a fishlike
animal capable of speaking to men.
The account explains:
This being in the daytime used to converse with men but took no food
at that season; and he gave them an insight into letters and
sciences and every kind of art. He taught them to construct houses,
to found temples, to compile laws, and explained to them the
principles of geometrical knowledge.
He made them distinguish the
seeds of the earth and showed them how to collect fruits... When the
sun set, it was the custom of this Being to plunge again into the
sea and abide all night in the deep; for he was amphibious.
Moses, of course, had another kind of encounter when he climbed to
the summit of Mount Sinai and received orders and taws from the
entity who settled there in a glowing cloud.
A central legend of
the Hopi Indians concerns the Kachina Clan: a
group of beings who were not people but 'spirits sent to give help
and guidance, taking the forms of ordinary people', according to
Indian historian Frank Waters.
The Hopi believe they came originally
from a Red City in the south and that their tribe was guided into
what is now the southwestern United States by the Kachina Clan.
These spirit beings taught the Hopis occult wisdom very similar to
the occult beliefs of the Europeans and Africans.
Finally they
departed, saying,
The time for us to go to our far-off planets and stars has not come
yet. But it is time for us to leave you. We will go by our powers to
a certain high mountain, which you will know, where we will await
your messages of need…
We are a spirit people,
and we will not be seen again by you or your people. But you must
remember us by wearing our masks and our costumes at the proper
ceremonial times. Those who do so must be only those persons who
have acquired the knowledge and the wisdom we have taught you…
The indigenous natives of the Americas, Africa, and the Pacific all
adopted ceremonial dress patterned after the garb of the
ultra-terrestrials, Just as the robes and trappings of the early
churches of the white man were patterned after the dress of the
angels and gods who allegedly visited them.
Traditionally, only the
witch doctors and students of the arcane wisdom of the elementals
were permitted to wear these garments and masks. The carefully laid
out procedures for the ceremonies and rites of these early peoples
were all dictated by these parahuman spirits.
For thousands of years
they quite literally had the entire human race dancing to their
tunes. The impact of these beings upon the human race is
indisputable. All human art began as part of our urge to pay tribute
to them. The arts of painting and sculpture, the arts of drama and
dance, and of course, the art of storytelling, were all products of
that urge.
It has been impossible to adequately summarize even a fragment of
this land of material here. Perhaps someday some scholar will
systematically assemble all of these records and establish some
order out of the chaos. The evidence is not as flimsy as this kind
of summary might make it seem.
Statues of strange. Oriental looking figures bearing a striking
similarity to the appearance of our contemporary Men in Black have
been found in the ruins of the
Olmec civilization in Mexico. We
really don't know very much about the Olmecs.
The first traces of their'Iost culture were uncovered in 1939, when archaeologist
Matthew Stirling found five gigantic basalt heads on the island of
La Venta. These heads weigh from twenty to thirty tons each and are
up to nine feet high. Each is wearing what looks like a football
helmet. Since then, cities and irrigation systems dating back to at
least 1200 b.c. have been discovered.
An Olmec calendar carved into
the stomach of an eight-inch jade statue begins with the year 3113
b.c.
"It is a masterpiece of mathematical and astronomical
knowledge, and it was the Olmecs, not the Maya, who developed it,"
Jeanne Reinart noted in Science Digest in September 1967.
Archaeologists have come up with an interesting theory for the
sexless Oriental-Eke statues. They suggest that the Olmecs
worshipped deformed children and that the statues represent
Mongolian idiots.
But would a people capable of creating a
masterpiece of a calendar worship abnormal babies?
The statues also
feature a distinctive cleft in their foreheads, and this falls in
line with the third eye lore of European occultism, Tibetan beliefs,
and even the mysticism of the Hop! Indians. The third eye is
supposedly the part of the brain which is linked to ESP and cosmic
consciousness -or direct communication with God.
The third eye symbol, an eye inside a triangle, is an ancient symbol
for the deity found in many cultures from Egypt to Micronesia. It
appears on the Great Seal of the United States atop the pyramid
(found on every dollar bill).
The Kachina Clan taught the Hopis that
an opening in the head existed so they could talk with God. At one
time trephination (cutting a hole in the skull) was a common practice
throughout the world, perhaps as part of some religious rite.
Hundreds of trephinated skulls have been found in Europe, Asia,
Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific islands.
Many of them date
back to 3000 b.c. Some show signs of healing, indicating that the
patient must have survived what is even today an extremely delicate
operation. Three hundred and seventy such skulls have been found in
Europe, but the finest examples come from Peru. The very thought of
thousands - or even millions - of early humans voluntary submitting
to having holes bored in their skulls with primitive flint
instruments is enough to make anyone's flesh crawl.
Some anthropologists speculate that trephination was used as a
treatment to get rid of possessing spirits. But the universality of
this very sophisticated operation makes this unlikely.
Were all those people seeking to open the door in their heads so
they could communicate with the supernatural? If so, who or what
taught the entire human race this process? And why?
In legend after legend from every part of the world we are told that
early man was primitive and stagnant until the appearance of the
god-kings. These mysterious beings introduced writing, laws,
agriculture, and perhaps even the rudiments of stone building and
medicine. The early peoples were so impressed and so grateful that
they dedicated much of their time and effort to preserving images of
the god-kings in great statues, temples, and monuments.
In fact,
many cultures left nothing behind except religious artifacts and
carvings lovingly detailing their encounters with the gods.
Identical beliefs appeared simultaneously in all parts of the world.
Identical forms of writing suddenly came into practice among
cultures completely isolated from each other. The Egyptians were not
the only ones who believed that the human body would one day be
resurrected whole and that therefore all earthly possessions should
be buried with it. Ancient tombs in China, Siberia, and South
America were also filled with relics for a future life.
How did this
relatively complex concept spread to the four corners of the Earth?
Even the earliest of men were not so stupid that they could sustain
a belief century after century without some kind of evidence to
support it. Nor would they be so stupid as to expend their energies,
materials, and talents building great monuments to those beliefs
without such evidence. Yet the reasonably sophisticated peoples of
India and Greece believed wholeheartedly in their gods for thousands
of years.
Their records demonstrated that these gods appeared
frequently before mortal men. taught them, tricked them, offered
them hope and faith, and cultivated their religions and beliefs.
Temples were erected on the spots where the gods had stood from
Stonehenge to Delphi. Often the percipients were instructed to build
a temple on this spot.
Gold (atomic number 79) has always played
an important role in all religions, and most religious buildings are
roofed with gold leaf from Buddhist temples to Muslim mosques and
Christian cathedrals.
Could it be that the mysterious rays of the
ancients are somehow able to adjust more easily to
the frequency of
gold? On holy days a great part of the world's population gathers
under these golden roofs to pray and meditate and perhaps to have
their minds probed by some invisible concentration of energy,
The modern cults and sciences have seized upon the god-king legends
to support their own beliefs and conclusions. Atlantologists prefer
to think that Quetzalcoatl and his kin were really from Atlantis.
The ufologists have churned out scores of books based on the premise
that spacemen visited Earth and gave mankind a helping hand in those
distant days.
It is quite true that the Kachina Clan and most of the
other parahumans claimed some relationship to other worlds and
far-off stars, particularly
the Pleiades.
In all these legends there
is another persistent theme:
that the god-kings mated with mortal
women, impregnated them and thus started a royal lineage.
Tradition
claims that
the bluebloods of royalty actually had
blue blood in
their veins in early history, perhaps as a result of this
crossbreeding. Even today some royal families suffer from hemophilia. The blood lacks the ability to coagulate and even a
small cut becomes a serious wound.
The mating of ordinary women with supernatural beings is an integral
part of all religious lore. It is emphasized in the Bible.
Some modern rulers such as the Emperor of Japan, still claim their
family can be traced all the way back to a god-like ancestor. The
pharaoh system in Egypt could have begun in this fashion with the
parahuman leader of the early Egyptians turning his rule over to a
human offspring. By 1000 b.c. most of the god-kings had withdrawn,
presumably going off to their legendary mountain hideaways.
Their
followers assumed, however, that their human descendants were
equally wise and possessed of magical powers. Being human, these
fallible kings often exploited the fears and beliefs of their
people. The later pharaohs successfully masqueraded as gods for
centuries. The earth had been divided up by the god-kings, each
ruling, even owning, a specific area.
This ownership was passed on
to the human heirs, and for thousands of years a few dozen families
literally owned the entire planet. They intermarried and managed to
keep the system going until modern times. Although the king system
degenerated slowly, it did not really collapse until 1848.
The god-kings did not put alt their eggs in one basket. They
established parallel systems of communication and control by
establishing priesthoods and strange secret cults and societies
whose main purpose was to perpetuate their esoteric teachings. But
again the flaws in man's basic character eventually surfaced. Greed
and the lust for power caused some of these groups to exploit the
populaces.
There were periods in history when some of these
priesthoods and societies even gained political control in Egypt and
elsewhere. It is probable that this happened in the burgeoning South
American cultures and may even have led to the downfall of some of
them.
A key claim of the early priesthoods was their purported ability to
consult with the ultraterrestrials through the use of special
plates, amulets, and crystals handed down to them. These artifacts
were usually worn about the head and heart during religious
ceremonies.
In the apocryphal Protevangelion we are told that
Joachim, father of the Virgin Mary, visited a priest and said,
' "If
the Lord be propitious to me, let the plate which is on the priest's
forehead make it manifest." And he consulted the plate the priest
wore and saw it and behold, sin was not found in him.'
Such a plate
is described In Exodus 28:36.
Early kings and dictators purportedly consulted with angels and
supernatural beings who appeared frequently to advise them.
Historical records assert that everyone from Julius Caesar to
Napoleon had meetings with mysterious parahumans who materialized
and dematerialized mysteriously.
The Sacred Crown of St Stephen is
supposed to have been delivered by an angel to a pope who permitted
Stephen I to be crowned King of Hungary with it in 1001.
The mysterious Gypsies sometimes claim their amulets and crystal
bails were given to them by ultraterrestrials. Numerous modern
flying saucer contactees display tektites and pieces of quartz which
they say were given to them by Venusians, Mr Ralph Lael, a
businessman in North Carolina who once ran for Congress, visited a
cavern deep in Brown Mountain under the auspices of the space
people, he says, and was later flown to Venus. He was given some
chunks of crystal as proof of his claims.
When Joseph Smith dictated the Book of Mormon to his wife, he sat
behind a screen with the gold plates, apparently translating them
with the crystalline devices he had found in the stone box.
Modern UFO contactee writings are filled with enigmatic statements
about crystals and how they hold some key to the mysteries of the
universe. There are many interpretations of such statements, but no
one has managed to crack their true meaning. In the past twenty
years, however, crystals have suddenly assumed great importance to
our technology. We call them transistors.
Although Bauwels and Bergier shrug off the UFO mystery in their
The
Dawn of Magic, they seem to subscribe to the cultist belief that
spacemen representing a superior technology once visited the Earth.
They offer their charming Cargo Cult Theory, speculating that early
man's religious rites were actually based upon their observations of
the strange behavior of the god-kings.
A god-king manipulated a radio and talked into a stick (microphone).
Presto!
A fleet of aerial vehicles soon arrived with supplies. After
the departure of the god-kings, men tried to imitate them by
chanting into sticks too, and so prayer was born.
This brings us full circle. The ultraterrestrials imitated the
appearance of man, and eventually man began to imitate them in his
rites and ceremonies. We made masks and costumes duplicating their
strange appearance. We hauled enormous rocks hundreds of miles and
carved replicas of their features for our temples and cities.
Where
civilizations of stone builders apparently committed themselves
entirely to the service of the god-kings and willingly sacrificed
thousands of their own people in bloody ceremonies on the sacred
hilltops in tribute to these beings. For many centuries human
sacrifices played an important role in the religion of all the
people of the Earth. In the Bible animal sacrifices are described.
Even Abraham led his son to a mountain and prepared to kill him in
sacrifice to the Elohim (the original biblical word, which is plural
and means
gods; it has been given singular translation in the modem Bible).
The early priesthoods wielded considerable power. Oracles and
mediums resided in the great temples, issuing accurate prophecies
(and many inaccurate ones). It was a time of miracles and magic. The
priests were the only educated men and as usual some were
unscrupulous enough to turn a neat profit from the beliefs of the
people.
But gradually the old tried-and-true methods for
communicating with the ultraterrestrials began to fail.
According to
legend, there was great rivalry among the gods. False messengers
betrayed the believers and caused all kinds of mischief. And around
500 B.C. a new force began to make its presence felt among men.
In India a wealthy young man named Siddhartha Gautama fell asleep
under a tree, so the story goes, and when he awoke, he was filled
with a great new philosophy - a new view of man's relationship to
the cosmos. He renounced all his worldly goods and set forth to
preach under the name of Buddha.
Around that same time a Persian named Zoroaster underwent a similar
experience and founded a great religion. While in far-off China the
great philosopher Lao-tse created Taoism and reshaped the thinking
of the Orient along with another contemporary, Confucius. In the
Middle East several of the biblical prophets, including Zachariah
and Daniel, were conversing with supernatural entities and
undergoing illuminating experiences.
None of these men knew that the
others even existed. Many centuries would pass before their
independent ideas and teachings would spread and overlap. Yet in
time these men, all contemporaries between 600 and 500 b.c, changed
the philosophical and theological structure of the civilized world.
Because of them that century stands as a landmark in the history of
our planet.
So the old priesthoods deteriorated, some were slaughtered outright,
and new beliefs were born. These beliefs centered around the
awareness that there was some force beyond the ultraterrestrials;
that mankind was only part of a larger pattern; and that individuals
were merely an extension of some distant, unknown intelligence.
The
stage was being set for a new conflict, a battle royal between the
old gods and this Cosmic Consciousness.
Muhammad appeared a thousand
years later to lead the Arab people away from the old gods, rallying
his people with the chant,
'There is but one God, and that
God is Allah.'
Instead of simply disappearing under the wave of monotheism, the old
priesthoods went underground, becoming secret societies devoted to
preserving the teachings of the elementals and the secrets
of communication.
There was already a tangled maze of such
societies, such as the Druids mentioned earlier, so the ultraterrestrials had plenty of followers even into the newly
enlightened age.
The Romans were still worshipping their gods on Mount Olympus, and
the Hebrews were firm in their belief of
Jehovah. Then one day three
expensively robed gentlemen with Oriental features strode into the
court of King Herod and informed him that a most remarkable child
was about to be born somewhere in Judea. Meanwhile the angel Gabriel
visited Mary and told her she was to bear this child.
The three
Orientals made their way to Bethlehem, accompanied by a brilliant
glowing object in the sky.
Joseph left Mary in a cave, according to the Protevangelion while he
went to seek a midwife to help with the birth. Then time stood
still!
Chapter Eight of the Protevangelion relates:
But as I was
going, [said Joseph] I looked up into the air, and I saw the clouds
astonished, and the fowls of the air stopping in the. midst of the
flight. And I looked towards the earth and saw a table spread and
working people sitting around it, but their hands were upon the
table, and they did not move to eat.
They who had meat in their
mouths did not eat. And they who lifted them up to their mouths did
not put anything in; but all their faces were fixed upwards. And I
beheld sheep dispersed, and yet the sheep stood stilt. And the
shepherd lifted up his hand to smite them, and his hand continued
up. And I looked unto a river and saw the kids with their mouths
close to the water and touching it, but they did not drink.'
Unbelievable though it may be, this paralysis of time is common in
UFO and psychic lore. It is almost as if the world is frozen like a
frame of a movie film projected on a screen. Time continues to flow
only for the percipient.
When Joseph returned to the cave with a midwife, they found it
filled with blinding light. The Christ child was born.
The birth, life, and death of Christ had been prophesied centuries
earlier. Brethren of the Qumran priesthood even established a
regular night-watch, scanning the skies of Judea in expectation of
some sign of the heavens. Although the exact birthdate of Christ
remains a controversy, most theologians and scholars believe that it
was sometime in the year 4 b.c.
That year, according to the
astrological records of the Qumran priests, 'a comet produced a
heavenly spectacle,' and there was a fiery conjunction of several
planets in the
zodiacal sign of Pisces. Pragmatists naturally assume that the Star
of Bethlehem was that comet, and to followers of Velikovsky, it
might have been the comet Venus.
Jesus appointed role seems to have been to try to lure the Hebrews away from Jehovah to worship the supermind of the cosmos, the God
of the Oriental Illumined Ones. In this he failed. The Jews had had
considerable experience with miracles and false angels, and they
viewed Christ with great suspicion.
The Romans who occupied Judea
were still worshipping their assortment of long-haired deities, so
they also frowned upon the activities of this strangely persuasive
man. However, the sequence of events surrounding the death of Christ
provided proof enough to sway many into Christian beliefs and lay
the foundation for the great Christian religions.
An eclipse of the sun threw the land into darkness as Christ hung
suspended on the cross, A violent earthquake which claimed many
lives followed. Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, later
collected the witnesses of these events and had them dictate to
scribes what they had seen. This record was sent on to Rome. Pilate
eventually committed suicide.
The body of Christ was placed in a cave, according to the historical
records, and a huge stone was rolled in place to seal the entrance.
Roman guards were stationed there to keep watch, They testified
later:
There was a great voice in the heavens, and they saw the heavens
open, and two men descend from thence with great light and approach
the tomb. And that stone which was put at the door rolled of itself
and made way in part; and the tomb was opened, and both young men
entered in. When therefore those soldiers saw it, they awakened the
centurion and the elders; for they too were hard by keeping guard.
And as they had seen, again they see three men come forth from the
tomb, and two of them were supporting one and a cross following
them.
In other texts these two young men were described as wearing
brilliantly white costumes, and the soldiers were reportedly
paralyzed 'like dead men', unable to move a muscle while the body of
Christ was being removed.
Later 'the heavens again were seen to
open' and a certain man to descend and enter the sepulchre.
This certain man remained behind, for when the soldiers and
followers of Christ approached the tomb, this being told them not to
be
frightened and advised them that Christ had been taken or had
risen.1
1 Sources include: The Gospel of Nicodexnus: X; The lost Gospel
According to Peter: Verses 9 - 13, Upton Clary Ewing, TJte Prophet
of the Dead Sea Scrolls; The Report of Pontius Pilate, Governor of
Judea. to Tiberius Caesar in Rome and Dr. Hugh Schonfield, The
Passover Plot. The same story, very abridged, is found in the BiWe:
St. Matthew 28; St Mark 16; St, Luke i4; and St Job;i 20.
Here we have an extraordinary sequence of events and coincidences.
Natural catastrophes struck die exact area where Christ died, A
group of witnesses heard a sound in the sky. saw a brilliant light,
and were rendered immobile as two beings descended, entered the
tomb, and removed the body. One entity remained behind to make sure
that everyone knew what had happened. Later the ghost of Christ
appeared before his disciples to further explain the concept of
resurrection.
A concept which, as has already been pointed out, can
be traced back to the early Egyptian civilization.
Christ's ministry was brief, spanning only a few years. He travelled
only a few hundred miles and spoke to only a few thousand people.
Nevertheless, his impact upon human history is undeniable and
immeasurable. Buddha and Laotse changed, the whole texture of life
in the Orient, and then five hundred years later Christ wrought a
similar change in the West.
A series of minor miracles, visitations, and supernatural
manifestations reinforced the beliefs of the early Christians, and
they willingly died in Roman circuses for those beliefs. Then
gradually the pure Christian concepts were absorbed into the
established god-king system. A succession of religious wars swept
the West, claiming the lives of millions.
Opportunists and
exploiters moved in as the Roman Empire collapsed (about a.d. 476),
and the Dark Ages began.
The biblical records were suppressed,
censored, and distorted. Various churches openly controlled the
kings of Europe and manipulated political affairs. By this time
mankind had been misled so often by false prophets and mischievous ultraterrestrials that new encounters on any level were harshly
dealt with.
When Joan of Arc [1412-31] rallied the French people
under the guidance of supernatural voices during the Hundred Years'
War, she was accused of sorcery and burned at the stake.
Radical developments in science and philosophy which ran contrary to
the accepted cosmologies of the time were regarded as the work of
the devil. Galileo was imprisoned for daring to suggest that the
Earth revolved around the sun.
European conquerors and missionaries went off to Africa, Asia, and
the Americas, wanton]? destroying whole civilizations (such as the
Incas) and deliberately disposing of their ancient records. Great
nations were plundered for gold. Great and noble cultures were
obliterated. A large part of man's past was forever wiped away. It
was humanity's darkest hour.
But despite the tenor of the Inquisitions and the vicious oppression
by the monarchies, the secret cults and societies survived, and
fragments of the ancient teachings and beliefs were preserved.
The day of the alchemist was at hand It
finally came with stunning velocity in the nineteenth century.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE SECRET OF THE AGES
Does your next-door neighbor make strange noises behind drawn
shades late at night? Have you ever seen him wandering across a
darkened cemetery dressed in a long robe, carrying a candle?
Maybe
he is just plain crazy.
Then again, maybe he is a member of one of
the thousands of secret societies and cults which still flourish
everywhere on this haunted planet. If these cults were not a
permanent part of the human condition it is highly unlikely that
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would have left their footprints on
the moon. And it is equally unlikely that we would have been able to
watch the event on a screen painted with moving electrons in our
living rooms.
Many of the true secret cults, are founded upon rites designed to
conjure up unearthly entities.
Over the centuries various fugitives
and defectors from these hidden organizations have published
fragments of these rites and beliefs. There are hundreds of
fascinating books available which spell out these strange truths. In
addition, there is a wealth of so-catled inspired literature
purportedly dictated by the entities themselves or produced through
automatic writing.
The previously mentioned Oahspe is one such book
and was typed by a New York dentist, Dr John Ballou Newbrough, in
1880.
It is an enormous work, offering a history of the human race
plus a complicated cosmology which amazingly has proven to be at
least partially valid. It describes, for example, the Van Allen
Belt, a belt of radiation encircling the Earth which was not
discovered until the advent of man-made satellites. It also contains
long chapters describing prehistoric secret societies.
There are isolated groups of rather paranoid researchers who make a
hobby of investigating secret societies. Foremost of these are the
superbuffs who believe that a super-secret government runs the
entire world. The death rate of these researchers is unreasonably
high, so their paranoia is understandable. Factions of the
superbuffery overlap into ufology, the John Birch Society, and the
assassination investigators.
All fringe groups seem to overlap, even
though they tend to ignore, and are even opposed to, each other.
Each secret society has its own vocabulary and explanations. Each
has developed a system of lessons and degrees to educate its members
slowly and lead them upwards to their own particular cosmic truth.
Some of these organizations are dedicated to the devil and his work.
Others are theologically oriented and aim at acquiring a closer
relationship with God.
The Orient is filled with such groups,
ranging from the esoteric cultists in the Himalayas to the secret
assassins of Persia and India. Advanced members of some of these
groups allegedly possess powers of telepathy and astral projection.
The lamas of Tibet are supposed to be able to whip up thought forms
and elemental at will through sheer force of mind.
The Gipsies have a secretive habit of congregating on isolated
hilltops to meet and converse with materializations. The Voodoo
rites of Africa and Haiti also call upon such entities. In Voodoo
demonic possession seems to be commonplace, and the zombie myths may
have a solid basis in fact. Evil entities are supposedly called
forth by the feared Voodoo priests to perform sinister deeds.
Papa
Doc Duvalier, the late President of Haiti, maintained power by
fostering the belief that he directly controlled the Voodoo elementals. Witch doctors of Africa and Juju practitioners in South
America are also credited with the ability to summon up
ultra-terrestrials and put them to work.
But the process works in reverse too, with the entities controlling
their masters. The literature on secret societies describes many
materializations of fearsome demons who frequently gave out orders,
directing the cultists to commit acts of murder and political
subversion. To disobey meant death, either at the hands of fellow
members or the entity itself.
Thus the ultraterrestrials are
presumably able to guide and control human events through evil men
lusting for power.
A young Jordanian in California, Sirhan Sirhan, studied the Rosicrucian
doctrines of inspired treatments of mysticism. He practiced
self-hypnosis and automatic writing, perhaps hoping to find a way to
power and prestige. In any case, he ended up in a hotel kitchen with
a smoking pistol in Ms hand and Senator Robert F. Kennedy stretched
out at his feet.
At his trial Sirhan claimed he had no memory of
that fateful night after he entered the hotel. Witnesses said they
had seen him talking briefly with a swarthy man who may have been a
Mexican or an Oriental. While sitting in the courtroom, Sirhan spoke
quietly of seeing celestial beings.
Fire usually plays an important role in secret rites. Rosicrucians
practice staring at a candle flame, trying to make the flame obey
their will. In the rites of witchcraft the devil is said to
materialize in a bonfire, stepping forward to have sexual
intercourse with the witches. His penis, it is said, is always ice
cold.
Sex is heavily intermixed with cuMst rites and beliefs, particularly
in black magic and witchcraft. Moon Children are supposed to be
produced when the devil or assorted demons have intercourse with
human females.
Apparently
John Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard tried to
produce a
Moonchild
in 1946.
Aleister Crowley fired off an angry
letter to the head of the American Magidc cult, saying,
"Parsons or
Hubbard or somebody is producing a Moon Child. I get fairly frantic
when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts…"
According to legend,
MoonChildren grow into exceptionally evil adults with extraordinary
powers. This does not apply of course to astrological Moon Children
born under the sign of Cancer (June 22-July 22).
In ufology lore there exist several reports from different parts of
the world describing how young men were taken aboard flying saucers
and invited to have sexual intercourse with blonde space-women with
long fingers and Oriental features. This appears to be a variation
of the MoonChildren and succubus phenomenon so well known in
religious and occult lore.
The reverse of this is the equally well-known incubus, or demon
lover, who forces his attentions on sleeping females. There are UFO
cases of this also. A California schoolteacher, Cordelia Donovan,
claims that in 1966 she met a man in a long white robe who kidnapped
her in a black Cadillac and gassed her.
When she awoke, she was
aboard a flying saucer, where she was raped by a well-endowed
spaceman.1
1 The full details of her incredible story are related by Jan
Hudson, those Se*y Saucer People.
There are innumerable rumors of space babies being born
in England, Australia, South America, Mexico, and the United States.
Such stories have had great impact on some UFO cultists who fear
that the flying saucer fiends are engaged in a massive biological
experiment - creating a hybrid race which will eventually take over
the earth.
Theologians and psychiatrists have been trying to cope with the
incubus-succubus phenomena for years, but no reasonable medical or
psychological explanation has been developed. Many cases can be
found in the psychiatric and occult literature, and author Brad
Steiger cites dozens in his two books, Sex and the Supernatural and
Haunted Lovers.
The long-fingered, blond elementals have intruded into every aspect
of human existence, even including sex.
Male and female
cultists have apparently been submitting their persons to these
lascivious spirits for millennia. They came to us first with the
flutter of angels' wings. Now they rape us aboard flying saucers.
The game remains the same, only the outward trappings have changes.
Rites to rouse the elemental^ have endured century after century. If
they didn't work, they would have eventually been abandoned.
Apparently they do work for somebody… and those who have results
write more forbidden books to perpetuate the practices.
There is Black Magic and White Magic. The Black Magicians supposedly
control, or are controlled by, evil entities. The White Magicians
summon up angels and good guys. Tradition has it that the two groups
have been in continual conflict throughout history, constantly
waging magical war upon one another.
One of the standard rites for materializing an angel requires the
services of a child aged six to eight. An altar is set up, candles
are lighted, the child kneels, and the magician chants certain
prayers meant to call up the invisible forces around us. The
ceremony is repeated for three days near an open window.
The
elemental is said to appear at the window in a blaze of light, and
magicians are warned not to get too close, lest they come down with
nausea, actinic burns, and other ailments identical to those
reported by low level UFO witnesses.
The descriptions of the gods of the ancient world often included
similar warnings. It was supposed to be dangerous, if not fatal, to
look directly at a god. Perhaps because some of these
materializations are composed of pure electromagnetic energy and
radiate massive doses of X-rays, gamma rays, and ultraviolet rays.
Such rays would produce the above medical effects.
Conjunctivitis,
an inflammation of the eyes, is a commonly observed effect among UFO
witnesses.
Both the literature of the secret societies and the more readily
available general occult literature warn about the hazards of these
practices. Poorly informed, emotionally unstable practitioners can
be overwhelmed by the forces they unleash. The blundering amateur
wizard can become possessed or driven insane or experience elaborate
hallucinations for extended periods.
All kinds of weird
manifestations can descend on him, ranging from poltergeists to
violent physical attacks by invisible hands. These classic psychic
attacks are very similar to the problems suffered by some innocent
UFO witnesses and contactees after their sightings begin. The two
phenomena seem to be inexorably linked.
Modern science, with its obsession about the physical universe
and the physical laws which run it, is only about three hundred
years old. 80 per cent of all the scientists who ever lived are
living at this moment, although in truth, most of them are
technologists and engineers rather then pure scientists. But that's
a point too minor to debate. Science was successfully suppressed
throughout the Dark Ages and even into the seventeenth century
(remember Galileo).
But another kind of science did exist.
The science of magic.
Ironically, magical beliefs of the past five thousand years are
based upon the same principles which rule modern scientific thought:
the study of atomic structure and electromagnetic energy. Astrology,
the forerunner of astronomy, was a highly advanced science thousands
of years ago. Some of the ancient calendars and , records are so
accurate and so detailed that there has been speculation that the
ancient astrologers may have had telescopes and ether sophisticated
instruments.
If they didn't, then they must have received some help
and guidance from someone who understood the structure of the
universe. The early astrologers were, of course, priests and
magicians. They systematically catalogued the visible objects in the
heavens, naming them, and interpreting their influence on man and
human events. Astrology became the first mathematical science.
While the astrologers were putting mathematics to work, other men
were delving into the mysteries of the physical planet Earth,
cataloguing metals, elements, and chemicals, and learning how to
combine them into new forms. They were the alchemists: the
sorcerers' apprentices.
They dreamed of finding some way of turning'
lead into gold. During some periods in history the alchemists were
supported by kings, while in other periods they were the victims of
superstitious purges which forced them underground. Their secret
societies preserved and circulated hundreds of manuscripts which
were half science and half mysticism. Many alchemists first entered
the field after encounters with ultraterrestrials and became the
proud, if furtive, predecessors of men like Cyrus Teed.
Men who were students of astrology, alchemy, and magic all at once
served as the educated elite during long periods of history, acting
as priests, scientists, and educators.
Some of them also belonged to
another elite group,
the master stonemasons, and they were able to
put their polyglot knowledge to work by designing the great stone
monuments and engineering the methods by which they were built.
In
time these master stonemasons formed a fraternity to preserve their
occult secrets and to assist one another as they
wandered from place to place seeking work. This was the beginning of
the Masonic Order. As the centuries passed, the Order expanded to
include businessmen, educators, and leaders.
Although the modern Masonic movement is looked upon with some
suspicion by the various buff groups, the ufologists delight in
pointing out that most of the men who signed the Declaration of
Independence were Masons, as was Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon
religion, Masonic lore has found its way into many of our
governmental symbols and institutions, including the Great Seal of
The United States which bears the slogan:
Novas Ordo Sectorum, 'A
New Order for the Ages'.
The design for the Great Seal is supposed
to have been handed to Thomas Jefferson in his garden one night by a
mysterious stranger dressed in a cape with a hood over his head.
The superbuffs have scuffled through history books to try to
pinpoint the origin and location of the fabled super-government and
the identities of its members. One group believes they are key
industrialists (particularly munitions makers) and bankers. Others
have produced dozens of books advocating anti-Semitism and claiming
that a secret inner circle of Jews has been working for generations
on a plan to take over the world.
One of the most vicious and most
successful racist books ever written came out of Russia in the last
century and is called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This
obvious hoax purports to be the Jewish master plan for gaining
control of the world's gold and the press. Oddly enough, Adolf
Hitler seems to have used Protocols as a guidebook in his bid for
power.
Jewish cultists have fought back with their claim that a
Catholic conspiracy exists. Jesuit priests are a favourite target of
this group. It is a fact that the Jesuits (the Society of Jesus)
engaged in so many political conspiracies in the eighteenth century
that the Vatican was compelled to dissolve the order in 1773.
It was
reestablished in 1814. Today the order is largely confined to
running schools such as Georgetown University in Washington D.C.
Following World War II, men like J. Edgar Hoover and the late
Senator Joseph McCarthy gave impetus to the public paranoia over the
Communist Conspiracy. This was partly based upon the spread of left
wing beliefs during the social unrest of the 1930s, when
intellectuals and working men embraced, temporarily, the Communist
ideology. It was based partly upon Joseph Stalin's mad machinations
in the early days of the Cold War.
The gradual thaw that followed
Stalin's death and the public revelations of his outrageous purges
ultimately broke the Communist Party in the United States. The
numerous organizations and buff groups that had been dedicated to
combating the partly real and partly illusory Communist threat began
to flounder and look around for a new cause.
They found it when in his final speech as President, Dwight
Eisenhower issued a guarded warning about the growth of what he
termed 'the military-industrial complex.' The assorted buff groups
scurried back to the earlier literature on the super-government.
They extended Ike's warning to include religion and came up with the
religious-military-industrial conspiracy - a plot against humanity
which supposedly included the churches - (notably the Catholic
church), the Pentagon, and the huge industries which were churning
out weapons that have never been used.
By the end of the 1960s our social and political problems had
generated a whole maze of new supposed conspiracies. The extreme
right and left wings found themselves in the absurd position of
advocating the same beliefs and fears. Everything from sex education
to the fluoridation of water became an issue within the context of
their beliefs.
As they stumbled about searching for a new
explanation behind the universal madness, many of these groups,
ranging from the John Birch Society to our youth subculture - the
Hippie movement - rediscovered
the Illuminati. The Communist
Conspiracy was nearly forgotten as everyone went after the
Illuminati.
Do the Illuminati even exist? It is very unlikely.
The buff groups
have confused some of the earlier secret societies with the process
of mystical illumination. Illumined individuals, like water, tend to
seek their own level and associate with their own kind. Often they
withdraw from society altogether, the ascetics of India being one
example.
There is another form of pseudo-Illumination, however, which is
actually a form of demonic possession and frequently produces
religious fanatics.
A majority of all the political assassinations
in history were committed by victims of this.
-
John Wilkes Booth and
his nine fellow conspirators are a prime example, as were Leon Czolgosz, who gunned down President McKinley in 1901
-
the young
student who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in
1914, thus launching World War I
-
most recently Benjamin Mendoza
y Amor, the Bolivian artist who attacked Pope Paul with a knife on
November 26,1970
Witnesses said that the latter would-be assassin
'looked like he was having an epileptic fit' - one of the classic
symptoms of possession.
Some buff groups regard these maniacal killers as tools of the
sinister Illuminati who have been pressed into service by hypnosis
or some other brainwashing technique. They are quick to point out
- that Jack Ruby pulled his gun and shot down Lee Harvey Oswald after
being triggered by an auto horn which suddenly beeped in the
basement of the Dallas police station. (No one has ever determined
who blew that horn or why.)
Ruby claimed to Ms dying day that he had
no memory of entering the police station or firing the shot.
Like many major myths, the Illuminati legend began in the Orient.
Around 275 B.C., Asoka, the Emperor of India, is supposed to have
founded the supersecret society of the Nine Unknown Men.
This group
was founded to collect, study, and protect the secrets of the
occult, science, alchemy, astrology, and psychology. As late as 1927
Talbot Mundy, a specialist in Oriental lore, was writing about the
mysterious Nine, implying that the society still existed and was
still running things from far behind the scenes.
In the tenth century young men were enticed into Persia's cult of
the assassins by drugs and beautiful young ladies. Pounded by Sabah,
the old man of the mountains who was purportedly one of the mystic
Nine, the cult conducted a reign of terror which continued into this
century. It may in fact still exist. They had tremendous political
influence during various periods of history. The brainwashed,
dragged members of the cult carried out their orders blindly, even
when those orders were suicidal.
A similar cult appeared in Afghanistan in the sixteenth century.
This was known as
the Roshaniya - the Illuminated Ones. like the
Hashishim assassin cult of Persia, the Roshaniya appears to have
been inspired by a. prophet in communication with the
ultra-terrestrials. It began as a mystical order which quickly
degenerated into a band of blind, drugged, mentally controlled
murderers.
They raised a lot of hell in Afghanistan for several
generations, and their secret teachings spread into Europe. The Alumbrados - the Illuminated Ones of Spain - appeared around 1600,
In France the Guerinets, another branch of the Illuminati, caused
some excitement in 1654. A professor of canon law at Ingolstadt
University in Bavaria, Adam Weishaupt founded the German Illuminati
in the seventeenth century.
One of the stated purposes of the Illuminati was to take over the
world and establish a New Order that was basically anti-religious.
They wanted to get rid of the archaic god-king system and all the
tyranny that went along with it. This was naturally a very unpopular
concept with the established authorities, and great efforts were
made to track down and execute the members of the cult. By the late
1700s the movement had been effectively crushed.
And the persistent legend of the Illuminati was born.
They had tried at one point to infiltrate and take over the
Freemasons, and this gave rise to the still prevalent belief (in
some quarters) that the Masons are actually a wing of the Illuminati.
Following the American Revolution a vast amount of literature
appeared claiming that the United States was actually part of the
Illuminati Plot and had been founded by secret members of the cult.
The Bill of Rights was in fact a very radical document for the
period with its insistence that all men are created equal, that
there should be freedom of religion, and that the affairs of man
should be governed by men elected to office.
The Illuminati
Conspiracy attracted the same kind of attention in the early ISOOs
as the Communist conspiracy did in the 1950s.
A French book, La Secte des Illumines, published in the 1790s
presented a description of the Illuminati initiation rites:
On the day of his initiation, the
candidate was conducted through a long, dark passage into an
immense hall draped with black... Ghostly forms moved through the hall, leaving behind them a foul
odor… His clothes were .removed and laid upon a funeral pyre. Then
his pudenda [genitals] were tied with string…
Now five horrid and
frightening figures, bloodstained and mumbling, approached him and
threw themselves down in prayer. After an hour sounds of weeping
were heard, the funeral pyre started to burn, and his clothes were
consumed. From the flames of this 'fire' a huge and almost
transparent form arose, while the five prostrate figures went into
terrible convulsions. Now came the voice of an invisible hierophant
[priest], booming from somewhere below…
This was of course a typical magical rite - the rousing of an
elemental. Most of the secret cults of ancient and modern times are
centered around such rites.
Most of them have preserved the same
truths throughout history with numerous variations. These same
troths were accepted by all the assorted priesthoods and religious
orders also, and all the early kings were trained to understand and
• accept them. They also formed the basis for the sciences of
astrology, alchemy, witchcraft, and Black Magic.
Terminology differed from group to group; each had a different label for the
various aspects, but they all believed - and still believe - in
these basic supernatural facts.
The first and most important secret that has been carefully guarded
and withheld from the public at large is that two or mere
worlds exist, composed of different forms of matter but occupying
the same space. Fait of the teachings of all cults includes
elaborate definitions of these different forms of matter. When the
nonsensical terms are translated into modern terminology, it is
apparent that these teachings are concerned with advanced physics,
nuclear energy, atomic structure, and things which have only
recently been discovered by modern science.
Electrical energy is
also discussed at great length in terms of vibrations, and this
material can be easily translated into contemporary terms of wave
lengths and frequencies. Ancient man knew that smashing the atom
yields pure energy. He knew that human eyes could only see a tiny
portion of the electromagnetic spectrum (visible light), and he
believed that other worlds or realities existed beyond the
limitations of his sight.
Spectre, the ancient word for ghostly apparition, sprang from
spectrum. Early peoples observed that these objects or entities were
able to reflect or cast off light wavelengths from the entire
visible spectrum from violet at one end to red at the other. They
knew they were seeing transmogrifications of electrical energy.
Countless modern UFO reports describe these same color changes.
UFOs often appear first as a purplish blob and then descend the
visible scale until they turn red, at which point they sometimes
solidify into seemingly material objects.
This process is fully
explored in the ancient literature.
Dualism, particularly stressed in the Orient, separates the world of
the mind from the world of the physical. It is believed that the
human mind and consciousness are merely a part of a larger universal
mind and that with proper training and study we can learn to tap
that universal mind. On the simplest level the masses try to do this
with prayer.
On the more esoteric level of the cults it is taught
that the mind can be made powerful enough to manipulate atomic
energy and thus control the material world. One of the great secrets
is that if a man can learn to visualize, say a chair, and can form
every atom of that chair in his imagination, he can actually cause a
physical chair to materialize. Or working in reverse, he can
de-materialize a physical object.
Such thought forms even include
animated entities. So the rites of magic are aimed at concentrating
the energy of human minds on a specific point in space and literally
wishing a being to appear. In theory the minds would be forcing
electrical energy to assume visible, physical form.
The infringement of the other worlds beyond the visible is the
cornerstone of occult belief. The inhabitants of those other
dimensions can supposedly manipulate energy much more easily than we
can. They can enter our dimension or reality and assume temporary
physical farm. Same can do this on their own. Others require the
assistance of human minds before they can materialize. The secret
cults have happily supplied this service for thousands of years.
Today there is a worldwide revival of witchcraft. Some American high
schools and colleges are even conducting courses in witchcraft.
The ultraterrestrials must be having a
field day.
Early man was quite convinced that these invisible worlds existed.
This led him to the secret of the ages: the belief that mankind was
actually controlled by the inhabitants of these other planes or
dimensions. The modes of control became the chief concern of the
cultists, magicians, and priesthoods. Political and religious
structures were set up to facilitate that control, as they have
already pointed out.
Dr Gordon Allen, an aerospace scientist, summarized a lifetime of
study into these matters in his book, Enigma Fantastique:
The purpose today is identical to the purpose in the times of the
magician-scientists of ancient times, the purpose of the controlling
priesthood of the Egyptians, the Caesars, the Roman Catholic church,
the Inquisition. The ecclesiastic control of tie various ruling
families had for its purpose the rule of the people in their
material bodies on this earth-plane.
A nation is said by Eastern philosophers to lie under certain occult
(or secret) controls. Nations who go to war on the earth-plane
reflect certain wars in Heaven.
It is true that the Masonic founders of the United States knew of
this occult control and even something of their own mission. Ruling
families of Europe knew of this occult control and believed
themselves in power by divine right, but occult control was secret
and not discussed by historians or political writers until just the
last few years.
All of this may be absolute nonsense, but we cannot overlook the
unhappy fact that these truths were completely believed for
thousands of years by the leaders of the world and therefore had an
appalling influence over human events and destiny.
Bloody religious
wars were fought for centuries as the different religions attempted
to gain total domination of the known world.
Even worse, man's own record of his early history was systematically
destroyed by the conflicting factions. The library at Alexandria,
Egypt, which housed thousands of years of history was sacked and
burned The remnants of early cultures were wantonly
destroyed. And then we were given a new history, generously dictated
by the ultraterrestrials, and we bogged down in the Dark Ages for a
thousand years. The human race quite willingly turned itself over to
the ultraterrestrials.
It was not until the nineteenth century that we began to claw our
way out from under occult rule. In 1848 the whole world exploded.
There were more than fifty major revolutions. Spiritualism was born
that year in Wayne County, New York, when two teenaged girls -the
Fox sisters - learned to communicate with a rapping poltergeist.
The
Communist Manifesto was published. Kings were dethroned. There were
major political assassinations just as mysterious as the murder of
President Kennedy. The first Woman's Suffrage Movement got underway
in Seneca Falls, New York. The whole world was suddenly in upheaval.
A host of brilliant inventors and scientists suddenly appeared
simultaneously, and the great Industrial and Scientific Revolutions
got underway. (Thomas Edison was born in 1847.)
Mankind hurtled into
a fantastic hundred-year period that saw the rapid development of
steam-boats, railroads, aeroplanes, and finally the atomic bomb.
Social structures everywhere were suddenly revised.
Ironically, the feared goals of the seventeenth century Illuminati
have now become a reality to millions of people. Red China and the
Soviet Union have gone to an extreme, suppressing religion and
carving out totalitarian states that appear to be steps towards
robotizing the human race.
But the technological advances and the conflict of political
ideologies are insignificant when compared to the amazing revolution
of the mind which has taken place - almost unnoticed - in the past
decade. The secret cults of the past have been replaced by the eerie
mysticism of the LSD cults and the Hippie movement Young people
everywhere are turning to witchcraft and Black Magic and engaging in
a sophisticated form of occultism which attempts to link their minds
with the Cosmic Consciousness.
It is easy to see why some buffs and cults are viewing all this with
alarm and trying to blame the mythical Nine Unknown Men or
Illuminati.
Anyone who studies history carefully can detect the presence of some
outside influence - an influence that has largely been detrimental,
even sinister. Yet the ancient gods and the modern Brothers from
space have come to us in a benevolent guise. They have never
practiced what they preached.
To support our outrageous hypothesis we must make two basic
assumptions:
(1) That the ultraterrestrials are teal in some manner
and are not merely a psychological phenomenon or myth
(2) That the UTs have a need for communicating with us.
If such a need exists,
then it would be logical for them to create secret societies or even
a whole race of people to carry out their wishes
To be truly
effective, such a race would have to be clannish and aloof from the
societies in which it moved. They would, undoubtedly, be so strange
and furtive that outsiders would soon surround them with legends and
nonsense.
A group like this does exist. They are spread all over the world. We
call them Gypsies. The ultimate secret society.
Nobody really knows where the Gypsies come from, not even the
Gypsies themselves! Some tribes have advanced the notion that they
somehow came from the sky. We do know that no Gypsies existed before
their sudden appearance in Europe in the fourteenth century. They
identified themselves as Dukes of Egypt.
They quickly established
themselves as remarkable magicians and clairvoyants and were
regarded as the fulfillment of EteMel's prophecy,
'I shall scatter
the Egyptians among the nations'.
Their talents for sorcery and
fortune-telling led to the creation of a whole body of myth. Even
the modern Washington seer, Jeane Dixon, claims that a wandering
Gipsy lady presented her with her first crystal ball when she was
eight.
Gypsies have their own language, which is derived from Hindi and
Tibetan. They apparently have no racial ties with the Egyptians at
all but probably came from India and Afghanistan originally. In
February 1968 a Gipsy tribe established a government-in-exile in
Paris to demand payment of reparations from the Germans for what
they suffered in World War II, claiming that four million Gypsies had
perished in Hitler's death camps. They also announced their plans to
re-establish Romanistan where Somaliland is today.
They even sought
United Nations recognition.
An estimated two million Gypsies now live in the United States, so
they outnumber the surviving Indians by a large margin. But they are
a silent minority, remaining by themselves, keeping their children
out of public schools, and suffering constant persecution without
complaint.
Gypsies do not use the mails or telephones, yet when a
prominent Gipsy dies, the word seems to spread instantly, and tribes
from all over the country converge for the funeral. They pay no
income taxes, even though some tribes seem to have accrued
considerable wealth and ride about in big black Cadillacs.
The Gipsy religion is a curious mixture of witchcraft, Black Magic,
and elementalism. Periodically, all the Gypsies will spring into
their
Cadillacs in the middle of the night and drive off to some isolated
forest or hilltop where, according to reliable sources, they
converse with materializations. Gypsies also have a curious habit of
turning up in Window areas during UFO flaps.
Morris K. Jessup caused the Gypsies to become part of the UFO lore
in the 1950s, when he received a series of strange letters from one
Carlos Allende. A couple of these letters were released to the UFO
buffs and have been a source of controversy ever since, In 1955 a
paperback copy of Jessup's The Case for the UFO arrived in the mail
at the Office of Naval Research (ONR).
The pages of the book were
covered with marginal notes penciled in by three different hands.
These comments indicated that the anonymous writers were extremely
knowledgeable in UFO matters and made a number of pointed references
which suggested they were Gypsies. Although Jessup himself dismissed
the annotations as some kind of hoax, the ONR was so impressed that
they had the whole book retyped and reproduced with the marginal
notes printed in different colors.
The reproduction was prepared
for the Navy by the Varo Corporation in Garland, Texas. One of Allende's letters to Jessup, dated January 13th, 1956, was
postmarked in Gainesville, Texas, which is about sixty miles north
of Garland. Only a few hundred copies of this Varo ' edition were
printed, and they were carefully distributed to a select few within
the Navy. Since it has always been almost unobtainable, very few UFO
buffs have ever even seen this interesting document.
The annotations discuss the Great Ark (which supposedly circles
Jupiter and has already been discussed) and try to answer some of
the questions Jessup raised in his book. Jessup was found dead in
his automobile in Dade County Park near Coral Gables, Florida, on
April 20,1959 -an apparent suicide.
But Carlos Allende has gone marching on.
A fantastic array of Allende imposters have turned up over the years
to bedevil and bewilder the UFO buffs. He has managed to turn up in
several different states at the same time. All kinds of letters and
phone calls have been received by buffs in his name. Those who claim
to have met him describe him as a swarthy man of Cuban or Spanish
extraction. He rides around in a black Cadillac, of course.
Until
the late 1960s Allende was nothing more than a myth bandied about in
very limited UFO buff circles. Then author Brad Steiger obtained a
photostated copy of the Varo edition and used it as the basis of an
article in Saga magazine. He was instantly inundated with new
Allende letters and even a letter from a woman claiming to be
Allende's widow.
In 1969 a man claiming to be Carlos Allende visited the Lorenzens,
who operate the civilian UFO research group, APRO, in Tucson,
Arizona. He presented them with an original copy of the Vaio
publication. How he managed to acquire the copy was not determined.
(The real Allende, if there is a real Allende, would not have had
access to a copy.)
Other mystery men of the Allende type have haunted the UFO
researchers for years. La the early 1960s a man calling himself
Zdeen Alexander toured the United States, amusing some flying saucer
enthusiasts and terrifying others. He answered to the usual
description. Some buffs claimed he was able to disappear in front of
their eyes. He visited prominent ufologists in New York and offered
to finance a newsstand UFO publication. In California he predicted
the appearance of UFOs in Santa Barbara, and those predictions came
true. After shaking everyone up, he simply dropped from sight.
The next mystery man appeared in Boulder, Colorado, during tie
Colorado University UFO research project. He arrived in a
chauffeur-driven Cadillac, inarched straight into the office of Dr
Edward U. Condon, head of the project, and announced that he was Mr
Dixsun and represented the Seventh Universe. He was, of course, a
swarthy little man wearing dark glasses. He offered to help Dr
Condon contact the space people, provided he received a substantial
amount of money. Condon was not exactly enthused, so Mr Dixsun got
into his Cadillac and drove off to rendezvous with Mr Alexander and
Mr Allende.
It is likely that some of these characters were actually Gypsies
playing some little game of their own. Many of these hoaxes were
very complicated and expensive, and the perpetrators obviously had
both imagination and a sense of humor. Flying saucer enthusiasts are
notably lacking in these qualifications. But why would anyone bother
to spend inordinate amounts of time and money contriving and
executing elaborate pranks against random cultists?
The answer seems to be that believers have always been dished up
manifestations which appeared to support their beliefs.
Believe in
the devil and he will appear, the old saying goes. An even older
saying, dating back to the dawn of history, states that those whom
the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.
An ancient madness is overtaking the human race in these closing
years of the twentieth century.
'Why don't they contact us?' the skeptics ask.
It might be better for us to ask,
'Why didn't they leave us alone?'
PART THREE
Alice laughed. There's no
use trying,' she said, 'one can't believe impossible
things.'
'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the
Queen. 'When I was younger' I always did it for half an
hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six
impossible things before breakfast.'
- Lewis
Carroll
Through the Looking Ottos
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
'HELLO,
CENTRAL - GIVE ME GANYMEDE'
High on a bleak mountainside 6,000 feet above sea level outside of
Colorado Springs, Colorado, a weird looking tower Jutted 135 feet
into the air in the summer of 1899.
It was designed and erected by a
tall, gaunt man named
Nikola Tesla - the now forgotten genius who
perfected alternating current and whose many contributions to our
electrical age are almost inestimable. Thomas Alva Edison walked
away with most of the glory, and Tesla ended up a burnt-out
eccentric alone and ignored in a dingy Manhattan hotel room.
But
while the spark was in him it shed a blinding glare.1
1 See Joihn J. 'Neil's Mogtaphy. Prodigul Genius, Neville Spearman.
That summer, using thirty thousand dollars given to him by Colonel
John Jacob Astor... Nikola Tesla was experimenting with radio. He
had built a powerful transmitter and receiver and was trying to
develop a method for broadcasting electrical energy through the air
to eliminate the need for expensive wiring systems. Energy that
could run motors and light lamps. He succeeded at least partially,
for the lights and equipment in his later laboratories worked
without wiring.
Thousands of miles away a young man named Marconi was also toying
with batteries and coils. That summer Marconi managed to broadcast
the letter V (three dots and a dash) to a crude receiver operated by
his assistants less than fifty miles away. These were the only
operable radios on the planet Earth.
But somewhere there must have been a third transmitter.
One night while Tesla was working alone in his mountain lab, his
equipment suddenly came to life, and he received an apparently
intelligent signal, though indecipherable. I was familiar, of
course, with such electrical disturbances as are produced by the
sun, Aurora Borealis, and earth currents,' he later wrote, 'and I
was as sure as I could be of any fact that these variations were due
to none of these causes. The feeling is constantly growing on me
that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to
another.
Tesla became the first scientist to intercept the mysterious
intelligently organized radio waves which permeate our planet and
have
baffled generations of scientists. He was a very odd man. sexless,
and mystical.
In 1900 he told a reporter,
'We cannot even with
positive assurance assert that some of them [ultraterrestrials]
might not be present here in this our world in tie very midst of us.
for their constitution and life manifestations may be such that we
are unable to perceive them.'
He amplified this in 1921 when American Magazine quoted him:
During my boyhood I suffered from a particular affliction due to the
appearances of images, which were often accompanied by strong
flashes of light. When a word was spoken, the image of the object
designated would present itself so vividly to my vision that I could
not tell whether what I saw was real or not… Even though I reached
out and passed my hand through the image, it would remain fixed in
space.
Two years after
Tesla's Colorado experiments, Marconi broadcast the
letter S (three dots) across the Atlantic, and a new era of
communications was born.
From the very beginning radio operators
throughout the world received signals which no one could identify or
understand. Some of these signals were so strong they seemed to be
originating only a mile or two from the receiver, and they drowned
out all other signals.
The only identifiable thing about these
enigmatic messages was the repetitive transmission of the letter v.
Marconi reported that stations of his company on both sides of the
Atlantic picked up these pirate signals even before World War I. la
1921 Marconi stated flatly that he believed that the signals were
coming from another civilization from somewhere in space.
By the time 1924 rolled around signals from Mars were a popular
theme in the Sunday supplements, and when the orbit of Mars brought
it close to the earth in 1924, a well organized program was set up
to intercept any possible transmission. Most of the major radio
stations and ham rigs around the world deliberately fell silent and
listened.
Dr David Todd, head astronomer at Amherst College, set up
a gadget known as the Jenkins Radio-Camera at a naval observatory.
(Jenkins was a pioneer TV experimenter.) Mars crept closer, and
everyone waited. On August 24, 1924 (note the date), amateur,
military, and government radio stations closed down their
transmitters. They were not disappointed. Freak signals of
unidentifiable origin were reported by awed listeners all over the
world. Dr Todd's apparatus whirred and clattered, and a long strip
of
photographic tape poured out of it.
When the tape was developed, it
displayed,
'a fairly regular arrangement of
dots and dashes along one side,' according to The New York
Times, 'but on the other side at almost evenly spaced intervals
are curiously jumbled groups, each taking the form of a crudely
drawn human face.'
The Jenkins device was technically incapable of producing drawings.
This amazing experiment hit the headlines everywhere, and hundreds
of amateur radio operators submitted reports of what they themselves
had picked up. Since there were very few commercial stations at the
time and most amateurs were operating crude, homemade equipment with
very limited capabilities, we have another mystery here. Those freak
signals had to be exceptionally strong.
There was no possibility of
a worldwide hoax, yet it did seem that the signals had to be of terrestrial origin. But from where and by whom ?
These signals continued to be received throughout the 1920s and
1930s. Dr Hugh Mansfield Robinson conducted one set of experiments
with a set of high-powered receivers in 1921.
He received intelligent signals on the
thirty-thousand-meter wave-length and Ernest B. Rogers, the engineer
in charge of the test,
'felt compelled to state that they
were of extraterrestrial origin, as there were no sending
instruments of that power on Earth.'
An amateur radio astronomer named Grote Reber reported receiving
strong dot-and-dash signals from space in 1939.
He had built a
thirty-foot dish antenna in Wheaton, Illinois {just outside of
Chicago), and said he often listened to the signals for eight hours
at a time. They seemed to come from one specific spot in the sky.
Radio astronomy was then in its infancy and signals were being
detected from both Venus and Jupiter. But these appeared to be
statidike natural phenomena covering a wide part of the band.
Professor Hermann Oberth, the German rocket pioneer, worked with
radio telescopes and suggested that intelligent signals were coming
from the distant stars of
Epsilon Eridani and
Tau Ceti, both of
which are about eleven light years away.
He based his calculations
on his erroneous assumption that the signals were sporadic (they are
constant) and were only received every twenty-two years, thus taking
eleven years to go out and another eleven to be returned.
If the true nature of the central phenomenon is electromagnetic, and
if the earth is constantly being bathed in rays or beams of energy
under intelligent direction, then these manifestations are hardly
surprising. These signals could have existed long before we
developed the devices necessary to intercept them. Once we had the
necessary equipment, the source of the signals adjusted the
frequencies so. we could heat them.
It - or they - are also able to
play havoc with our communications at will… and there is evidence
that this is happening.
During the ghostflier wave over northern Europe in the 1930s,
isolated people in Norway and Sweden picked up enigmatic broadcasts
on their shortwave sets, purportedly the ufonauts chattering back
and forth over the airwaves, often in broken Swedish. The
Scandinavian press speculated that Germany or the Soviet Union might
be responsible for the broadcasts, but so evidence of this ever came
to light.
In countless modern UFO eases witnesses have claimed they received
strange guttural voices and dot-and-dash signals on car radios, TV
sets, and telephones while flying saucers hovered overhead.
Citizens' Band (CB) radios also have a habit of picking up these
signals in flap areas. On many occasions these voices and sounds
have been emitted by loudspeakers which were turned off or weren't
even connected.
A loudspeaker consists of an electromagnet which vibrates a cone of
paper or stiff cloth. When the cone vibrates, it naturally vibrates
the air and produces audible sound waves. Theoretically, a beam of
electromagnetic energy on a very low frequency (VLF) could activate
the magnet.
In January 1954, people throughout the Midwest allegedly heard a
strange voice coming from turned -off radios.
The voice stated in a
dull monotone:
'I wish no one to be afraid, although I speak from
space. But if you do not stop preparations for war, you will be
destroyed.'
Sven stranger, the same kind of message delivered by the
same kind of voice was supposedly picked up by the equipment at
London airport that month.
George Hunt Williamson, an anthropologist, claimed he was present
when an amateur radio operator established contact with another
world in the summer of 1952. Here's Williamson's account of that
experiment:
This test was of such a nature that if the messages were a hoax,
they would have been revealed as such immediately… He sent a
question over his transmitter [to the space people], and he received
an answer. Without any warning he quickly switched to 160 meters and
asked another question.
To his surprise an answer was soon
forthcoming! Any radioman knows that no power on Earth would have
enabled any operator to know where he was
switching to! Even if Mr R. had told the other operator that he was
going to switch to 160 meters, still they would not have found him
on that band until after the question had been asked.
And of course,
they couldn't have answered the question if they hadn't heard it!
Williamson spent a lot of time probing around the ancient ruins of
South America before he suddenly vanished without a trace in the
early 1960s.
At a flying saucer buffs' convention in Giant Rock, California, in
1954 one speaker informed the audience:
The entities of the spaceships and saucers can and do read the mind
of a radio operator, exchanging communications. They know when he is
several yards from his set and will give him time to reach it before
they signal… In one case involving something in the nature of mind
reading at a distance, these entities gave the answer to a
discussion going on in a room and not taken up or referred to on the
radio.
Quite a few amateur radio operators have joined the ranks of the UFO
contactees in recent years, perhaps because all night they sit
surrounded by equipment radiating powerful magnetic fields which can
somehow be utilized by the phenomena.
On August 3rd, 1958, ham
operators throughout the United States reportedly picked up a
strange broadcast on the seventy-five-meter international band. A
male voice claiming to be 'Nacoma from the planet Jupiter' warned
his listeners that the atomic bomb tests could lead to disaster.
He
spoke for two-and-a-half hours in English, German, Norwegian and his
own language, described as kind of musical gibberish.
'It was the most powerful signal ever picked up,' one account said.
There was plenty of time during the broadcast for hundreds to listen
in, and radio operators called in friends and neighbors and phoned
long distance to relatives in other states.'
The Federal Communications Commission later denied any knowledge of
the broadcast.
The far-off, far-out planet of Korendor checked in on a warm night
in July 1961.
An eighteen-year-old radio buff, Bob Renaud, was,
"browsing around the shortwave bands' in his home in a little town
in Massachusetts, when 'suddenly from the loudspeaker came a very
high pitched beep-beep-beep'. He was annoyed by it, he said, and
tried unsuccessfully to tune it out. 'It stopped,' he wrote later,
"but
was replaced by a soft, warm, crystal clear feminine voice that
said, 'Bob, we'd like you to stay on this frequency for a while."'
This space lady identified herself as linn-Erri (like the demons and
angels of yesteryear, the space people are fond of names containing
double letters).
Over the months that followed she dictated endless
treatises on what was wrong with us and what was right with her
world. The Renaud story quickly fell into the pattern of all the
earlier contactees. At 2 a.m. on the morning of December 22nd, 1962,a
car drove up in front of his house, according to his story, and
three rather normal looking men invited him to hop in.
They drove
him to ay isolated field where they demonstrated an antigravity
device which lifted a huge boulder a hundred feet in the air. Then
they pointed another gadget at it, and it disintegrated in a Dash.
Later they conducted him on a tour of a secret underground UFO base
in Massachusetts and even took him for a little flight in a flying
saucer.
Following the Korendians' instructions, Renaud claims he rebuilt a
TV set so that he could receive outer space TV shows. When
linn-Erri's face appeared on the screen, she turned out to be a
beautiful blonde, 37-22-26. She appeared to be eighteen or nineteen
years old but admitted to being seventy-four 'which in our society
is the prime of life'.
(Renaud's TV set probably operates on the
same non-principle employed by the celebrated Psionic Machine of
Thomas G. Heir-cnymous which was promoted by Astounding Science
Fiction for some years. If the parts are removed from, the Psionic
Machine, it continues to work anyway because it apparently operates
on some psychic force, like Ouija boards and dowsing rods do.)
Another ham radio operator was swallowed up by the contactee
phenomenon on January 30th, 1965. Towards midnight on January 29th
George M. Clemins, mayor of Monterey, California, and several other
people reportedly saw a brilliantly illuminated spherical object
hovering over Monterey Bay. It appeared to slowly descend out of
sight on the other side of the bay. Two hours later a
forty-five-year-old TV repairman named Sidney Padrick shut down his
ham radio rig and decided to take a stroll before going to sleep.
On
Manresa Beach directly opposite Monterey he heard a loud humming
noise and saw a strange machine shaped like 'two real thick saucers
inverted.' He was none too happy about this apparition, he admitted,
and so he turned and started to run away.
'Do not be frightened,' a voice reportedly boomed from the object
'We are-not hostile.' Mr Padrick kept running. 'We mean you no harm.
You are welcome to come aboard.'
Padrick stopped and considered, feeling slightly bewildered and
foolish.
A door slid open, he said, and he cautiously approached it.
The voice urged him on. He stepped into a small room about six by
seven feet, where he was greeted by a medium-sized man with very
pale skin.
He had, Padrick noted, a very sharp nose and chin and
unusually long fingers.
'His hands were very clean. The fingernails
looked as if somebody had just given them a manicure.'
Padrick said:
They wore two-piece suits with no buttons or zippers that I could
see. The bottom section actually included shoes - it looked like
boots which continued on up to the waistline without any break
around the ankles, just like a child's snowsuit.
They had soles and
heels similar to ours -I could hear them walking with a
"thump-thump" sound on the rubbery-like floor. The collar had a very
pretty design on it - it came down to a V in the front, and the
neckpiece, right around his neck, had a braid of some kind on it,
very pretty.
It had colors, but I can't tell you what they were,
because they weren't colors that I had ever seen before… much more
beautiful than ours.
When Padrick asked for the man's name, he was told,
'You may call me Zeeno.'
Although the witness didn't know it, the Greek word for
stranger (xeno) is pronounced zee-no. Being a technician, Padrick
was able to supply a detailed description of the interior of the
craft and was nonplussed when Mr Zeeno showed him a room 'similar to
a chapel'.
The color effect in that room was so pretty that I almost fainted
when I went in. A mixture of beautiful colors - I can't describe
it. There were eight chairs, a stool, and what appeared to be an
altar.
Zeeno said,
'Would you like to pay your respects to the
Supreme Deity?'
I didn't know how to accept it… I'm forty-five years
old, and until that night I had never felt the presence of the
Supreme Being, but I did feel Him that night.
After taking a short flight in the object, Padrick claimed he was
returned to the beach where he had been picked up. He reported his
experience to the Air Force immediately and was later interviewed
for three hours by officers from the nearby Hamilton Air Force Base.
They wanted an account of it, word for word,' he said in a later
telephone interview.
'I told them exactly what happened.
They were the first to hear it. There were certain details which
they asked me not to talk about publicly; but I think in telling it
everything should be disclosed. I can see no reason for anything
being held back. The Air Force didn't want me to say that Zeeno told
me the space people had no money.
They did not want me to disclose
the type and shape of the craft because they said that would
indicate the Air Force was not doing its duty. I told them I could
see no reason for that either. I know the Air Force believed it - I
know it from the standpoint that they did a lot of checking down
here in the area. They were here for quite some time after the
incident.
They didn't want me to divulge the saucer's means of
communication or power. [Padrick was led to assume that the object
was powered by light waves or magnetic rays].
Also, the man's name…
they didn't want me to repeat that… because "It didn't mean
anything."'
Reporters found that Sid Padrick was backed up by everyone who knew
him.
He was highly regarded as an honest man and was not a religious
fanatic or UFO nut. Ironically, the hardcore UFO cultists rejected
his story out of hand because of the unpalatable religious
overtones.
Everyone else, including the Air Force, took him very
seriously.
Radio amateurs continue to receive strange messages from somewhere.
Ham operators in flap areas have cautiously reported all kinds of
manifestations, including the materialization of entities in their
radio shacks. It is common for UFO contactees to hear alien voices
delivering personal messages to them from their ordinary home
receivers.
A number of people even claim that images of the spacemen
have appeared suddenly on their TV sets and addressed them directly.
The rapid increase of such cases since 1965 suggests that a new game
may be in the making. It sounds like a cliché science fiction plot,
but a time may come when a general message to the human race may
suddenly spurt from every receiver on Earth in every language.
Wouldn't that be a kick in the teeth!
During World War I very low frequencies (VLF} were briefly
experimented with. These are very long radio waves which require a
specially built receiver. In the last few years VLF stations have
quietly been constructed all over the world, although there are only
a few commercial receivers on the market, and very few hams have VLF
equipment. Most of that is of World War I vintage.
The U.S. Navy maintains several gigantic installations which cost
millions of dollars and serve the announced purpose of communicating
with our atomic submarines throughout the world's seas
(VLF can penetrate underwater).
To give some idea of their size, the
largest commercial broadcasting station allowed puts out fifty
thousand watts of power. The Voice of America has conventional
stations which broadcast five hundred thousand watts. Yet the Soviet
Union has a VLF station, EWB in Odessa, which is pouring out five
million watts! And the U.S. VLF station at Cutler, Maine, is putting
out two million watts. There are now 150 VLF stations all over this
planet, and aside from a few atomic submarines and a bevy of spies,
there's no one to listen.
What are all these stations broadcasting?
Well, station WWV
transmits nothing but time signals…if anyone needs to set a watch.
Teletypes are used by many stations exclusively. The teletype signal
sounds somewhat musical, like bagpipes, over a loudspeaker. Voice
transmission on the lower VLF channels is very difficult for a
variety of reasons and not much of it is being done.
Yet some
amateurs with VLF equipment have reported picking up guttural,
unintelligible voices at the very bottom of the scale around six
KiloHerz.
'All manner of strange (and often unexplained) radio sounds and
signab mysteriously appear on VLF receivers,' noted the Radio-TV
Experimenter, April-May 1967. (That issue gives details on how to
build a VLF receiver for a few dollars.)
The government is currently turning hundreds of square miles of
Wisconsin into a massive VLF antenna, causing quite an uproar in
that state.
Everytime the VLF transmitter is cranked up, telephones
for miles around go amok with false rings and strange noises. In
fact, many of the telephone problems currently plaguing the United
States can probably be blamed on VLF experiments. These very long
waves of electromagnetic energy can and do seriously affect
equipment operating in the lower ranges of the spectrum.
Another culprit is the National Security Agency, the James Bondish
organization that runs the CIA. We maintain a twenty-four hour
message service to our agents around the globe via VLF. These
messages are broadcast in code on the higher VLF channels. A voice
endlessly rattles off six-digit numbers. When the Cuban government
arrested Humberto Carrillo Colon, an alleged CIA spy, in September
1969, they found a unique VLF transceiver in his possession.
Cuban
counterspies claimed they had been monitoring his transmissions for
months and had broken the CIA code. Copies of Colon's alleged
messages were released to the Havana newspapers and reprinted in
Communist propaganda organs in the United States. A number of
oddities are buried in the dense text of these purported communiqués
with the CIA. In April 1969, Colon is supposed to have
reported a conversation with a Cuban official: 'On the way to the
hotel he told me that I would be witness to something historical.
THAT WITHIN SIX MONTHS THERE WOULD BE NO MORE MONEY.' (Capitals were
used in the published quote). He allegedly saw 'something strange,
like a whale or large fish, that was no such thing, more like a
minisubmarine or something like that' at Varadero.
On October 8th,
1968, during a visit to Holgiun, he reported: "About 8.30 I saw a
shooting star. First I saw a. red light on the horizon very fast
from right to left. I don't know what it was. I also saw a shooting
star… I wasn't even drunk.'
If the published reports are true - and of course, there is always
room for doubt - then it would seem that CIA agents have been
instructed to report anomalies and aerial phenomena.
In recent years voices calling off numbers on VLF channels have
frequently been intercepted by conventional equipment when weather
conditions were right. Tape recorders, sound movie projectors, TV
sets, and even public address systems have been picking up these
signals.
For some reason, public address amplifiers in churches in
England and the United States (such as the All Saints Roman Catholic
Church in Portland, Oregon, and the St Laurence Church in Cambridge,
England) have been especially prone to this type of interference.
Listeners usually conclude they are hearing broadcasts of taxicab
companies.
Actually, taxi companies use a much higher frequency, and
their signals are not likely to be picked up by low frequency
equipment, TV, incidentally, uses FM (frequency modulation) for
sound, and it should be nearly impossible for a TV set to intercept
any other signal.
At the other end of the radio spectrum on the ultra-high frequencies
(UHF) reserved exclusively for space satellites and manned-space
flight communications, there has also been a plague of anomalous
radio-signals. Back in November 1957, shortwave listeners everywhere
were baffled by a strange tonal pattern which was broadcast next to
the 20.00S frequency used by the two Russian satellites.
Both the
Soviet Union and the United States announced emphatically that the
signals were not related to the satellites.
'It isn't classified,'
an FCC spokesman declared. 'We just don't know what it is.'
They never found out either.
The signals were much stronger than
those being broadcast by Sputniks I and II, they were worldwide, and
they were picked up by stations at times when the satellites were
out of range on the other side of the world.
During his fourth pass over Hawaii in MA-9 (Faith 7) on May
15th, 1963, astronaut Gordon Cooper's voice transmission was
suddenly interrupted and drowned out by "an unintelligible foreign
language transmission" on the channel reserved for space flights - a
frequency which few if any amateurs are equipped to broadcast on.
If
the signal came from the ground, it had to come from Hawaii (VHF and
UHF are highly directional), but the FCC never arrested a Hawaiian
ham for the hoax, NASA recorded that transmission, a voice grunting
and speaking rapidly in a language that has never been identified.
Later space shots have been repeatedly troubled by these anomalous
transmissions. The broadcasts from our astronauts circling the moon
in 1968 and 1969 were often interrupted by strange noises. Anyone
listening to those NASA transmissions closely heard things like
Indian war whoops and strange music.
Because the space channels are
highly directional, these odd insertions had to come from space or
from specially equipped planes flying directly over the directional
dish antennae used to pick up the astronaut's transmission. NASA has
been uneasily silent about its investigations into these problems.
All of the American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts have seen and
photographed unusual lights and objects in space. The final report
of the Colorado University UFO study devotes a full chapter to the
unexplained astronaut sightings.
The late Frank Edwards, a famous radio newsman and author of flying
saucer books, made much of the weird radio signals that had been
received in Uppsala, Sweden, in 1961, the same area where the ghostflier broadcasts had been received in 1934-6. A group of young
radio enthusiasts had built tracking equipment and receivers that
could pick up the high frequencies employed by the American and
Soviet space programs.
As soon as they had their equipment in
operation, they picked up an extended (it lasted seven days and
nights) series of broadcasts, apparently from orbiting manned space
vehicles. These were in Russian and were taped and translated. A
hapless pair of cosmonauts was presumably lost in space.
They
discussed the critical situation they were in and wearily concluded,
'The world will never know about it anyway…'
They were wrong. Other amateur tracking stations in Italy and Alaska
were also tuned in. according to Edwards.
Edwards' conclusion was that the Russians had secretly sent two
cosmonauts into space, and they had been killed. There is one
problem. The Soviet space program was nowhere nearly advanced
enough for such an effort in 1961. Yuri Gagarin bad made his
historic orbital flight - the world's first - only one month before
the signals were received. The next manned flight would require
months of preparation. The Soviets could not and would not have
Attempted a two-man mission at that point in their program. It is
much more probable that the radio transmissions were the work of out
mysterious radio hoaxsters.
We can offer many other examples of complicated and seemingly
pointless radio hoaxes. A frantic distress signal swept the Pacific
early in 1968 and was received by marine radio stations and ships at
sea. The signals were triangulated and the exact position of a
purportedly distressed freighter was determined. Following the law
of the sea, several ships in the vicinity changed their courses and
rushed to the aid of the sinking vessel.
There was one slight hitch. The freighter in question was safely
docked in the harbour at Calcutta, India, and the would-be rescuers
found nothing but empty ocean.
A few months later the atomic submarine Scorpion vanished in the
Atlantic in the section popularly known as the Bermuda Triangle.
Once again mysterious radio signals were received by several ships
and naval stations and were triangulated, pin-pointing the exact
position. These signals were broadcast on the VLF frequency reserved
for atomic submarines and used the secret code names employed by the
Navy.
Planes and rescue vessels rushed to the spot and found
nothings In December, 1968, the Navy issued a statement announcing
that the Scorpion had finally been located hundreds of miles away
from the spot where the signals had presumably originated. The
signals were denounced as a hoax.
What kind of hoax? Did some practical Joker load some rare VUF
equipment into a small boat after somehow stealing a copy of the
Navy's secret code book? Did he then sail out into the middle of the
Atlantic, broadcast his false signals, and then somehow sail back,
managing to elude the planes and rescue ships on the way?
Anomalous radio broadcasts also played a baffling role in the
assassinations. Four minutes after President Kennedy was shot in
Dallas. Texas, in 1963, someone was broadcasting on the police hands
in Dallas, offering a description of Lee Harvey Oswald. This was
long before the police had even heard of Oswald or had any reason to
think that he might have been implicated in the assassination. None
of the regular police dispatchers had broadcast that alarm. Who did?
The question remains unanswered.
Immediately after the Rev. Martin Luther King was shot in
Memphis, Tennessee, in April 1968, a phony broadcasting the police
band sent all the police rushing to the wrong side of town, while
the alleged killer went off in the other direction unhindered.
Our radio pranksters are a fact, not a myth. They operate in all
languages and are obviously equipped with rare, specialized
transmitters so powerful they can drown out all conventional
signals. Their enterprises are usually pointless, sometimes harmful,
never explainable. It must be a very expensive operation , ..if it
is purely terrestrial. But many of these incidents smack of the
mischievous work of our ultraterrestrials.
Our phantom broadcasters have also zeroed in on super sophisticated
scientific equipment. At 4 am. on the morning of April 8th, 1960,
the great dish antenna of the radio telescope at Green Bank, West
Virginia, swept across the skies and focused upon the predetermined
target: Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti. This was Project Ozma, the
search for intelligent signals from outer space, headed by Dr Otto
Struve and Dr Frank Drake.
They tuned their equipment to 1420.4
megacycles (they had calculated that communication over vast stellar
distances would be most feasible at this wavelength -the frequency
of hydrogen). Eureka! Even before they could switch on their
loudspeakers a powerful signal blasted in, •knocking the needles off
the dials,' as Drake put it. They received a very strong series of
pulses, about eight per second, so uniform that they had to come
from an intelligent source.
After recovering from their initial excitement, the scientists
re-checked every part of their equipment but could find nothing
wrong. The signals lasted for about five minutes and then stopped
abruptly. Later the Naval Research Laboratory revealed that its
staff had been listening to these same signals for the past six
months.
Two weeks later the men at Green Bank tuned into the signals again.
This time they carefully moved their antenna away from the two stars
as they listened, and they found the signals continued to come in
loud and clear. This proved that the transmissions were not coming
from a star but were very probably of local, terrestrial origin from
some unknown but amazingly powerful transmitter.
Rumors that secret radar experiments were responsible for the
signals proved unfounded. Radar does not use that wavelength, does
not pulse eight times per second, and could not affect the highly
directional radio telescope.
A trio of Soviet scientists, Gennady B. Sholomitsky, Nikolai S. Kardashev and
I.S. Shklovskü, won world-wide headlines in 1965,
when they announced that they had received radio signals from
beacons of some supercivilization in space.
Later other radio
astronomers discovered that these signals were coming from
fantastically huge stars labeled quasars, the furthest out of all
known objects in the universe. The signals are apparently natural
radio propagation. The Russians later retracted their theories
about the civilization, causing the UFO buffs to howl 'Cover-up!'
once more.
In 1967 Dr Drake and other scientists working at the Arecibo, Puerto
Rico, radio-telescope installation detected waves of hissing and
static coming from four different points. Experimentation revealed
numerous other invisible sources of radio waves in space and these
objects have been tagged pulsars. The current theory is that pulsars
are the hardcore remnants of a supernova which has collapsed
inwardly and is made up of densely packed neutrons.
So far it seems
that the magnetic fields of the pulsars are one trillion times
greater than the Earth's. The sky may be filled with these things,
and if any should ever happen to wander into our solar system^
things could become very uncomfortable on this planet.
Sadly, the United States lags far behind in radio-telescope research,
Germany, Britain, Holland, Australia, and even Argentina and Israel
are building bigger and better instruments to probe into these new
mysteries.
Meanwhile mankind is unwittingly overloading or overcharging the
Earth's atmosphere with all kinds of magnetic and radio waves. As
the man-made electromagnetic field increases, it clashes with the
natural magnetism of the Earth. The result is that apparatus
dependent on small magnetic fields (such as generators, computers,
and tape recorders) are now being thrown askew by these larger
blankets of incompatible electro-magnetism.
Nikola Tesla calculated that the Earth's natural fields lie at a
frequency of about 150 kilocycles. Perhaps when there is an
interchange between the Earth's fields and the rays or fields coming
in from stellar sources such as pulsars, an overcharge develops in
some areas, indulging power failures and malfunctions of electronic
equipment.
One of the few really secure facts in ufology is that
there have been hundreds of power failures simultaneous with the
appearance of unidentified flying objects. The popular notion that
UFOs cause power failures could be erroneous. It is possible that
the appearance of UFOs and the accompanying power failures could in
some cases be the result of this cosmic energy exchange.
During the great Northeastern Blackout of 1965 several local power
companies completely independent of the affected main power grid
also failed. Interestingly, while normal AM radio frequencies
continued to operate that night, short wave and VLF transmission and
reception in the affected regions were hopelessly jammed with
static. This alone indicated that an extraordinary electromagnetic
condition existed.
Following the big blackout. New York's Con Edison
power company quietly installed expensive magnetic shielding devices
around key equipment and new, heavily shielded cables were
introduced in sensitive areas. Since 1965 Bell Telephone Company has
been switching from overhead lines to more expensive, heavily
shielded cables buried under the ground.
In the summer of 1970 all the electronic gear in the video tape
studios of Waddell & Reed, Inc., in Kansas City, Missouri went
haywire,
'Something made our equipment completely sensitive to everything
around us,' the manager of the studio, Mrs Kevin Eisenbrandt, told
the Kansas City Star (August 5th, 1970).
The nearby Commerce Bank
experienced similar problems with their computers and electronic
gear at the same time. Experts called in to investigate were
baffled.
In far-off Noebbet, Denmark, a sawmill closed down in October 1970,
economically ruined 'by mysterious forces that have blown out fuses
by the thousands, bulbs by the hundreds, and electric motors by the
dozen'. Hans Nielsen, the owner, told reporters that the
disturbances began eighteen months earlier.
Scientists and
technicians measured twenty-nine thousand 'lightning-like electrical
discharges in mill installations in one day'. The bursts occurred
even when all electricity to the mill was cut off.
Incidents such as these are on the increase. Electromagnetic
pollution is becoming a serious worldwide problem. Another more
grisly aspect of the phenomenon, death by lightning, is also on the
rise. A worldwide wave of lightning deaths took place in August and
September 1970. In a number of cases the fatal lightning bolts
lashed out of a clear, cloudless sky.
Satellites whizzing around the Earth have detected a powerful beam
of VLF energy being projected intermittently from a specific area of
empty ocean near Antarctica. This has inspired scientific
speculation that the Earth may be broadcasting natural radio waves
into space on the same order of the waves coming from Jupiter and
Venus.
A few years ago newspapers carried a puzzling report from Greenland,
describing how a group of scientists there had discovered a massive
object buried deep in the ice. It supposedly broadcast a
strange radio signal at regular intervals. This odd report was never
verified, and nothing further was ever published about it.
One of the persistent UFO rumors of the early 1950s claimed that an
unnamed scientist in Washington had in his possession a tiny box
which had been extracted from a 'crashed flying saucer in New
Mexico'. According to the rumor, the box emitted a loud beep every
fifteen minutes and so one could figure out what it was made of or
how it worked.
Radio itself is supposed to have been one of the secrets of the
ancient mystical societies: a closely guarded means of communication
between members. A form of primitive crystal sets was allegedly used
by the brothers of the Rosenkreuz (Rosy Cross
- the Rosicrucians) centuries ago. It is even possible - there is no
way of knowing for sure - that the mysterious plates and amulets
used by ancient priests may have been crystal sets of some sort,
tuned to some secret mountain transmitter.
We do know that the atmosphere of our haunted planet is overloaded
with electrical energy today, ranging from manmade radio signals on
every frequency to mysterious, patterned signals from some unknown
source.
While our scientists have been tuning their
multimillion-dollar equipment into remote hisses and squeaks from
distant stars, hundreds, if not thousands, of ham radio operators
and teenagers with homemade coils and condensers have been listening
with awe to the wild, unidentifiable, and obviously intelligent
signals radiating from and around our own planet.
These signals ejdst. They existed from the moment Tesla first tuned into them
accidentally. If the present trend continues, more and more people
will be hearing these strange voices and signals from their radios
and TV sets in the future. We live in a world ruled by electro-magnetism,
and there is every indication that someone - the Earth's phantom
Inhabitants - learned to utilize these forces long ago.
In time we
may learn to separate the natural static and the CIA codes from the
truly enigmatic waves that are flowing all round us.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
WHERE IS
EVERYBODY GOING?
Strange things happen on the twenty-fourth of die month. People
vanish.
On October 24th, 1593, a Spanish soldier standing guard in
Manila in the Philippines suddenly disappeared. Twenty-four hours
later he found himself in Mexico City, some nine thousand miles from
Manila, without any idea how he had managed to travel so far so
fast. We could dismiss the seemingly factual historic account of
this case if it weren't for the disturbing fact that such things
continue to happen on a regular basis.
On October 24th. 1967, Bruce Burkan, nineteen, found himself sitting
in a bus terminal in Newark, dressed in a cheap, ill-fitting suit
with exactly seven cents in his pocket.
He didn't have the foggiest
notion what he was doing there, not could he remember anything that
had happened during the previous two months. On August 22nd, 1967.
Burkan and his girlfriend went to a beach at Asbury Park, New
Jersey. He left her later to go and put a coin in a parking meter.
He was wearing nothing but a bathing suit. When he failed to return,
his friend went looking for him. She found his locked cat where he
had parked it.
Burkan's family held a well publicized search for him, but not a
single clue turned up. Finally they conducted a funeral service in
his memory, giving him up for dead. After his reappearance on
October 24th, tie young man told reporters, There's one thing that
really bothers me. I have fiery red hair. Where was I that despite
all the publicity no one recognized me?"
On August 15th, 1967, seven days before Burkan's still unexplained
disappearance, a thirty-seven-year-old research scientist named Paul
T. MacGregor left his office at the Polaroid Corporation in Boston.
Massachusetts, and started out for Camp Kirby to join his
vacationing family. He never got there. One month latex he walked
into a police station in Buffalo, New York, and told them he didn't
know who he was.
His identity was traced through the labels of his
clothes and the inscription on his wedding ring. Doctors at the
Meyer Memorial Hospital examined him and said they were convinced
that he was suffering from amnesia.
Who 01 what had met him on that Massachusetts highway that night and
caused Ms mind to shut off the past?
Despite all the movie and soap opera plots that have revolved around
amnesia, a simple blow on the head rarely induces the condition. The
traditional medical explanation is that an overwhelming emotional
trauma is the cause of most amnesia. A man murders his wife in a fit
of rage, and then his mind wipes out his entire memory.
A child sees
his dog run over by a car and erases the painful memory by blotting
out that entire period of his childhood. Skilled psychiatrists can
Spot this form of amnesia and cope with it. But most of the amnesia
cases induced by paranormal happenings, such as encounters with
fairies or flying saucers, are not so easily diagnosed and dealt
with. The nature of the trauma is never fully determined.
Every July there is a sudden rash of new amnesia cases in the
national press, coincidence with the traditional July peak of UFO
sightings. Thousands of people who have been exposed to psychic
phenomena and UFO manifestations have suffered lacunar amnesia; that
is, they find they are unable to remember a short period of time
before, during, or after their experiences.
Others appear suddenly
in different parts of the world, sometimes knowing who they are but
baffled that they are suddenly so far from home. A Londoner suddenly
finds himself in South Africa. A girl from Cleveland awakes to
discover she is in Australia. An unemployed Swedish milkman suddenly
finds himself on a golf course on a remote island resort for the
very rich.
A woman in Allentown, Pennsylvania, soberly related this strange
story; she said she and her husband maintained a small summer
cottage in the Pocono mountains, a mere thirty-minute drive from
their home. One Saturday morning in July 1966, the young couple got
into their car and started out for the cottage. As they drove along
the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which seemed strangely devoid of traffic
that day, they saw a large circular object in the sky ahead of them.
It looked as if it was going to land directly on the turnpike, she
said.
Her husband, mildly alarmed, pulled over to the edge of the
road and stopped. They watched as the object, a shiny metallic thing
with large black spots or windows, flew very low over their car.
Then it was suddenly gone. Her husband started the car again, and
they drove on to their cottage. It was not until after, they arrived
at their destination that they looked at their watches. It was 1.30
pm. They had started out at 9.30 am. For some reason which neither
of them could understand, it took them four hours to make a drive
that normally took thirty minutes!
On a warm night early in August 1966, a Philadelphia policeman named
Chester Archey, Jr., set out on a routine patrol in North
Philadelphia. He drove instead through that door into the unknown.
Archey, a veteran of fifteen years on the force, suddenly found
himself in Pennsauken, New Jersey, where he became involved in a
minor accident as he drove around in confusion.
"I don't have an
idea how I got there," Archey protested at a police hearing later.
"I don't even know where Pennsauken is!"
In occult and UFO lore there are hundreds of reports of this
phenomenon.
It also seems to work in reverse. Witnesses claim that
they drove or even walked incredible distances - sometimes hundreds
of miles - in incredibly short periods of time. It is as if they
crossed over into another dimension where time and space have a
different relationship.
There is also a peculiar cloud phenomenon connected with some of
these
teleportations, or transferences.
According to the newspaper Diario de Córdoba, a well-known Argentine businessman suffered a
strange distortion of time and space in 1959. He reportedly got into
his brand-new car one morning in the city of Bahia Blanca,
Argentina, and started to drive away from his hotel, when a strange
cloud seemed to envelope his vehicle. The next thing he knew he was
standing alone on a deserted spot in the countryside.
He hailed a
passing truck and asked the driver to take him to Bahia Blanca.
Looking at him as if he were some kind of maniac, the driver
explained that they were in Salta. Bahia Blanca was over a thousand
kilometers away. He drove the befuddled businessman to the nearest
police station, and they called the police in Bahia Blanca.
The
police later called back and confirmed that the businessman's car
was still outside the hotel with its engine running. Strangest of
all, only a few minutes had elapsed from the time the man had first
climbed into the car - yet he had somehow been transported over a
thousand kilometers.
Bahia Blanca is a busy Window area and has been the site of many
strange psychic and UFO reports in recent years. In May 1968, Dr
Gerardo Vidal and his wife said they were driving outside the city
when their auto was caught up in dense fog, and they lost
consciousness. They came to on a strange road. Their watches had
stopped, and the surface of their car was badly scorched.
They soon
learned that forty-eight hours had passed, and they were now in
Mexico, many thousands of miles north of Bahia Blanca!
On March 4th, 1968, a leading Japanese newspaper, Mainkhi, carried
an unbelievable story about an automobile disappearing in
Ml view of a crowded highway. The reporting witnesses were three
officials of the Fuji Bank on their way to the golf course at
Ryugazaki. As they drove outside of Kanamachi, they said they saw a
black car ahead of them going in the same direction.
Aside from the
driver, they could see an elderly man in the back seat reading a
newspaper.
'Suddenly a pug of something gaseous, like white smoke or
vapor,
gushed from somewhere around the black car, and when this cloud
dispersed (a matter of not more than five seconds), the black car
had vanished,' the newspaper account said.
The trio of witnesses were so shaken by the incident that they
stopped and reported it to the police, and so another inexplicable
oddity was added to our bulging files.
Could that car in Japan have
been taken by the same unknown force that transported the Argentine
businessman a thousand kilometers? Could the same force have been at
work when British Wing Commander J. Baldwin flew into a cloud and
never came out again during the Korean War? Other pilots in his
formation scoured the area but could find no trace of their
commander or his plane.
Was it the same kind of cloud that literally
devoured a whole regiment of British soldiers near Sulva Bay,
Turkey, in 1915?
An entrenched group of men later signed affidavits
swearing they had watched the One-Fourth Norfolk Regiment march into
a peculiar brown cloud that hugged the ground in their path and that
none of them reappeared on the other side. After a few moments the
cloud rose up and flew away, the witnesses reported, joining a group
of similar clouds which then sailed off against the wind. No one
from that regiment was ever seen again.
Eight hundred men gone -or
taken - from the face of the earth!
On August 4th, 1968, Gradela del Lourdes Jimenez, eleven, was
playing outside her home in Cordoba, Argentina, when she too was
caught up in one of these mysterious clouds.
'I wanted to go back indoors and watch TV,' she told reporters from
the newspaper Cordoba, 'and then just as I was about to turn around…
a white cloud, like mist, appeared on the front path.
It gradually
came towards where I was, and then I could no longer see the other
houses, and I couldn't move or call out to Mummy… And after that… I
don't know anything more… until I found myself on a square where
there were lots of people and lots of little boys…'
She knocked at a nearby house, and the residents turned her over to
the police. How had she travelled from a Cordoba suburb to the Plaza España in the heart of the city?
Mr Gordon Creighton, a retired
British consular officer, collected the reports and translated
them for Flying Saucer, Review, September-October 1970. He reports
that the child suffered fits of weeping and cold chills following
the incident.
There are periodic waves of disappearances which create brief
sensations in the newspapers and are quickly forgotten. No one ever
manages to find out where these people have gone. In 1912 five men,
all unrelated, disappeared unaccountably in a single week in
Buffalo, New York. Montreal, Canada, had a wave of missing persons
in July 1883, and again in July 1892.
Children vanish more frequently than any other group. We're not
talking about ordinary runaways. In August 1869, thirteen children
vanished in Cork, Ireland. No sign of kidnapping or foul play. That
same month there was a wave of disappearing children in Brussels,
Belgium. Another group of youngsters melted away in Belfast in
August 1895.
And again in August 1920, eight girls (all tinder
twelve years of age) disappeared forever in Belfast.
The latter part of the nineteenth century produced several classic
disappearances. On Thursday, September 23 rd, 1880, a fanner named
David Lang took a few steps into an open field near Gallatm,
Tennessee, and vanished instantaneously in front of several
witnesses, including Judge August Peck. Where did he go? A long and
thorough search of the field never produced an answer.
Five years
later on Thursday, April 23rd, 1885, another farmer named Isaac
Martin walked into a field near Salem, Virginia, and like David
Lang, dissolved into nothingness.
Christmas Eve (a twenty-fourth, naturally), 1889, an eleven-year-old
boy named Oliver Larch joined the legion of the missing when he went
outside his home near South Bend, Indiana, to get a pail of water.
His family heard him cry out,
'Help! Help. They've got me!"
His
footprints led fifty feet away in the fresh snow and then stopped.
His bucket lay a few feet beyond that point. There were no other
marks of any kind. It was as if Oliver larch had been scooped into
the sky off the face of the earth.
This type of sudden, inexplicable disappearance still takes place.
In the summer of 1969 a seven-year-old boy named Dennis Martin was
whisked away in Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee.
One second he was walking along with Ms father and other relatives,
the next second he was gone. Every stone and crevice was searched. A
massive hunt was launched with more than fourteen hundred people
looking under every bush. The boy was never found.
Children began to disappear in the city of Villa Velha, Brazil,
early
in December 1969, according to Brazilian correspondent Eduaido
Keffel of the German magazine Die Bunte llhstriette, March 24th,
1970. Within a few weeks a minor mystery had exploded into a
frightening epidemic. Scores of youngsters, ail between the ages of
nine and fifteen and all from poor families (ruling out any ransom
motive), vanished without a trace.
The police in the state of Espirito Santo rallied their forces and began a massive search for a
sinister kidnapping ring. But they had no leads. The disappearances
seemed random, were not ordinary runaways, and none of the children
knew each other or shared a common school.
Then in February 1970, four of the missing youngsters reappeared
separately. Two were stumbling about the streets blindly, suffering
from amnesia. The other pair were able to remember fragments of
their adventure, but their stories were as bizarre as a James Bond
tale. They had been stopped on the street, they said, and offered a
ride in a large American style limousine (quite a treat to a poor
Brazilian youngster).
Once they were in the car, they were given a
cigarette {apparently drugged) and they lapsed into unconsciousness.
One returnee recalled that he awoke in a small hut, tied hand and
foot, when a stranger entered, freed him, and told him how to find
the nearest police station. An eleven-year-old girl identified as Vani said her kidnapper was a woman named Laura. Laura fed her
sweets and then took her to a field where an aeroplane was waiting.
Vani began to scream and fuss, and surprisingly Laura gave her some
money and returned her to her viliage.1
1 Jessup discussed the case of the teleported Spanish soldier
mentioned at the opening of this chapter in his book The Case for
the UFO. Among the annotations in the later Vato edition there was a
pointed description of bow the soldier had made so much trouble that
they decided to let him go.
Most of the Brazilian victims were boys, although a few girls were
included. Once the kidnapping wave received publicity, a number of
youths had narrow escapes, fleeing the big cars and their mysterious
occupants when they were offered a lift. Local police never caught
up with these cars and speculated they were dealing with some kind
of slavery ring.
Actually, children have been disappearing in large numbers for
centuries all over the world, and most of these cases have remained
unsolved. In the Middle Ages it was popularly believed that fairies
and leprechauns frequently stole children away. The Indians of North
and South America also have many myths and stories about children
being kidnapped by the little people.
The notion that parahumans kidnap children is deeply entrenched in every culture. In
more recent times Gypsies have often been accused of kidnapping.
The celebrated Pied Piper of Hamelin, Germany, is more than just a
charming children's story. A stranger actually did appear in Hamelin
in the Middle Ages, and he lured away 1,50 children never seen
again. The event is still commemorated with an annual festival in
Hamelin.
In a.d. 1212 a teenaged boy in France, Stephen of Cloyes, began to
hear voices which inspired him to collect together fifty thousand
children for the pathetic Children's Crusade. They marched off to do
battle with the infidels and disappeared en masse. The popular
explanation is that they were all seized by slavers.
One of the first colonies to be established in the New World - the
Roanoke Island colony begun in 1585 off the coast of what is now
North Carolina - disappeared magically, Virginia Dare, the first
child of European descent to be born on this continent, was among
the missing.
The local Indians were not hostile and were as
befitted
by the vanishing colony as the explorers who came searching for it.
Another entire village, a remote Eskimo settlement in northern
Canada, lost its entire population sometime in August 1930. The
Northwest Mounted Police found the village abandoned, but its thirty
inhabitants had left behind their food, clothing, kayaks, rifles,
and dogs. Since no Eskimo is likely to travel very far without his
precious rifle or his dog, the police were baffled.
A two-week
investigation of the area failed to yield any clues. Strangest of
all, a grave on the edge of the village had been opened, and the
body was gone. Grave robbing is an unspeakable crime among the
Eskimos, and it is very unlikely that they dug up the body and fled
the village, leaving behind their weapons, tools, food, and their
dogs.
At the other end of the world in Antarctica an American scientist
vanished without a trace on May 7th, 1965. He was Carl Robert Disch,
twenty-six, and he was assigned to the Byrd Station, operating
equipment to investigate VLF radio noises for the National Bureau of
Standards.
He set out to walk from his hut to the main station a
short distance away, following a hardline that was strung as a guide
for the path between the two points. When he failed to appear after
forty-five minutes, the other scientists went out searching for him
in tracked vehicles.
If Disch had fallen and was lying in the snow,' Ron Sefton the
leader of the Byrd Station explained to William J. Perkinson of the
Baltimore Sun,
'the huskies would have seen him long before the
searchers did. Similarly, if he had fallen and was covered by
drifting
snow, the dogs would have sighted the mound and rushed out to
investigate it. That's the way huskies are.'
The search went on for three days and covered a thirty-five-mile
area around the hut.
Disch's own dog, 3 husky called Gus,
disappeared shortly afterwards. Some of the searchers claimed they
saw mysterious lights and heard engine noises in the distance.
Antarctica is, of course, uninhabited except for a handful of
international scientists who work very closely with one another.
Aeroplanes, ships and submarines have also disappeared by the
hundreds. In quite a few cases the missing ships or planes were
later found, mysteriously abandoned by their crews. One of the first
and most celebrated of these incidents took place on July 24th,
1924, whith Lt W.T. Day and Pilot Officer D.R. Stewart went off in
a single-engined biplane for a routine patrol over the Arab desert.
A search party found their plane the next day, parked on the desert
and completely intact, in excellent working order. There was
gasoline in the tack, and no sign of trouble or violence. The
footprints of the two men were clearly visible in the sand. They had
taken a few steps away from the plane - and then the footprints
ended abruptly, like young Oliver Larch, they had taken a stroll
into thin air.
An Italian ufologist, Alberto Fenoglio, reported rumors of a
similar disappearance in the Soviet Union in 1961. A small mail
plane was reported missing but was quickly located in perfect shape
near the remote town of Tobolsk, Siberia. 'Everything on board -
engine, radio, mailbags, etc. - was in perfect order,' Fenoglio
stated. "The tank contained fuel for two hours of flight The four
passengers had vanished without a trace. A distance of about three
hundred feet from the aircraft there was a huge, clearly defined
circle on which the grass was all scorched and the earth depressed.'
Over fifty pilots and men of the United States Air Force have lost
their lives or disappeared suddenly while pursuing unidentified
flying objects. Their deaths have been officially documented. Their
names and the peculiar circumstances surrounding these tragedies
have been released to a bewildered and sometimes disbelieving press
and public. Some of these incidents involved aerial-collisions with
invisible objects.
On June 11th, 1938, the Chicago Daily News described the crash of a
U.S. Army bomber outside of Delaware, Illinois. Nine men were killed
after what one ground witness described as a 'sudden crash in
midair'. Crash with what? No one knows.
Three more pilots died on June 8th, 1951, when four jets crashed
simultaneously near Richmond, Indiana. Another four jets came to a
strange end near Lawrenceyi Ue, Georgia, cm December 3.1955.
The
tower operators at the Dobbins Air Base heard one of the pilots
exclaim,
"We can't miss it".
Moments later all four planes came
diving out of the clouds in flames.
After a thorough study of the debris of a Jetliner which crashed
outside Calcutta on May 2nd, 1953, the British Ministry of Civil
Aviation announced that it had 'collided with a fairly heavy body'.
Witnesses said that there was no other plane near the doomed
airliner when it 'seemed to stop short in midair' and crashed.
A B-47 smacked into something solid in October 1955, and only one
man survived. He was quoted in the newspaper accounts as saying that
the plane was 'struck in midair', and the jolt was so terrific he
thought they had struck the ground. The crash took place near
Lovington, New Mexico, and authorities said there were no other
planes in the vicinity. One ground witness did claim, however, that
a ball of fire appeared near the plane just before the crash. A
couple of weeks later, another B-47 met with an identical fate in
Texas. Witnesses said they saw 'a ball of fire with sparks shooting
out of it' just before the plane went down.
Are there invisible things haunting our airways, endangering planes,
pilots, and passengers?
Ufologist Jerome dark uncovered an extraordinary item from an old
1939 newspaper.
"On a day in late summer, 1939j a military transport
left the Marine Naval Air Station in San Diego, California, for a
routine flight to Honolulu," Clark wrote in Flying Saucer Review.
"About three hours afterwards several urgent distress signals
sounded from the plane and then silence. Later the craft came
limping back to execute an emergency landing. When Air Station
personnel entered the plane, they found every man of the crew,
including the co-pilot who had lived long enough to pilot the craft
back to its base, dead of unknown causes."
Each of the bodies carried large, gaping wounds, and the outside of
the ship was similarly marked. Air Station men who touched parts of
the craft came down with a mysterious skin infection.
One of the most puzzling aspects of the whole affair was that the
.45 automatics carried by the pilot and copilot as service pieces
had been emptied, and the shells lay on the floor.
A smell of rotten
eggs pervaded the atmosphere inside the plane… Mysterious skin
infections and rotten egg odors [hydrogen sulphide] are phenomena
familial to all UFO researchers, It would seem
that the transport was attacked - apparently without provocation -
by some sort of strange aerial intruder.
Air Force records show that one of the first cases of an
electromagnetic effect took place over Iwo Jima on August 28,1945,
when a C-46's engines failed as three UFOs maneuvered around it In
those days military men called UFO's Foo Fighters.
The Foo Fighters
baffled both Allied and Axis pilots over Germany and Japan in the
final days of the war. Bomber crews were also reporting constant
appearances of little green men who invaded their planes and caused
all kinds of mischief. The press labeled them Gremlins and the
popular conclusion was that the crews were merely hallucinating
because of the high altitude and thin atmosphere. Since then there
have been thousands of little green men reports from all over the
world. They are now an integral part of the flying saucer lore.
People in Florida were also watching aircraft in the autumn of 1945,
the common assumption being that the objects were some kind of new
secret weapon. Then on December 5th, 1945, one of the most famous
disappearances in aviation history occurred.
Five TBM Avenger
torpedo bombers took off from Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station on a
routine training mission. Fourteen men were aboard. Although the
weather was perfect, the flight soon ran into some kind of trouble.
Radio contact with the base ended abruptly. A Martin Mariner flying
boat carrying a crew of thirteen was sent up to find the missing
Blight 19. Twenty minutes after it took off radio communications
with it also ended abruptly.
Altogether, twenty-seven men and sis planes completely disappeared a
few miles off the Florida coast that afternoon. An extensive search
by land, sea, and air was conducted for weeks afterwards. It was one
of the biggest searches in history, and it failed to turn up a
single piece of debris... not even an oil slick.
The disappearance of Flight 19 and the rescue plane marked the
official beginning of the Bermuda Triangle mystery, In the
twenty-five years since, a total of seventeen planes have vanished
in the lozenge-shaped area southwest of Bermuda, carrying with them
a total of 190 people. A number of ships, together with their entire
crews, have also melted away there forever.
Such incidents can be
traced back as far as 1846. Ivan Sanderson, who has made a study of
this phenomenon, believes there are at least six of these vile
vortices, as he calls them, spaced evenly around the world. The
Devil's Sea off the coast of Japan, for example, has swallowed up so
many ships that fishermen carefully sail around it.
The Navy took the disappearance of Flight 19 very seriously.
In
January 1946, a group of Naval Intelligence officers were ordered by
President Truman to form an investigative body called the Central
Intelligence Group. This was the forerunner to the CIA. In the
spring of 1946 the CIG participated in a series of secret hearings
in Washington. The wives and relatives of tie missing men were flown
to Washington to attend the meetings. Since then most of these
people have refused to discuss the subject at all.
But one mother of
a missing man did confide to a researcher Art Ford, the famous disc
jockey who has made a hobby of investigating the Flight 19 case,
that she believed her son was still alive 'somewhere… maybe in
space'.
During 1965-6 the National Bureau of Standards mounted special
microphones and instruments along the coastline facing the Bermuda
Triangle to try to pick up sounds that might lie above the range of
human hearing. They succeeded in recording odd whispering sounds of
unknown origin. The Navy quietly conducted a new search of the
Triangle in 1967, spending over five million dollars to search the
ocean floors with special research submarines and devices. As usual,
they failed to find any trace of the missing planes and ships and
were unable to come up with any new explanation for the mystery.
Sanderson's cautious theory about the vile vortices, as expounded in
his book Invisible Residents, is that these areas are plagued with
magnetic and gravitational anomalies. Maybe the planes fell up!
In the summer of 1970 a giant Soviet cargo plane carrying supplies
to earthquake-stricken Peru disappeared south of Greenland Planes
from several countries searched the area for days and failed to find
a trace of it. That September three adventurers set out in a balloon
from New York, hoping to cross the Atlantic. They too vanished and
repeated searches could not locate their supposedly un-sinkable
gondola.
Everyone has heard of the Marie Celeste, the ship found floating
crewless in the Atlantic in 1872. There have been scores of similar
finds. Usually such ships are completely intact, often with food
cooking on the stoves and the galley tables set for dinner. The
crews and passengers simply abandon ship, leaving all their personal
effects behind, Five such ships were found adrift in the Bermuda
Triangle area during June-July 1969.
In the spring of 1969 a British sailor named John Fairfax was
crossing the Atlantic alone when he reportedly observed two
brilliant lights on the horizon. They separated and flew higher into
the sky.
As be watched, fascinated, he claims he entered a
motionless trancelike state.
'It was more than just seeing them,' he
related afterwards.
'It was this force. It was as though they were
saying to me: "Do you want to come with us?" And I was fighting it
and saying back: "No, no, nol" It was like telepathy, like being
hypnotized."
After the objects swooped away, Fairfax realized for the first time
that the cigarette he was holding had burned his fingers.
In January 1970, another ship drifted ashore at the island of
Trinidad, It was the Sta Filomena and had accommodations for seven
persons. There was no one on board.
A C-46 loaded with five tons of meat disappeared over the Caribbean
in April 1970. The usual fruitless search was conducted.
Submarines too have shown a tendency to vanish in tightly spaced
waves or eyries. Back in 1939 before World War II got underway, four
subs vanished in four months. They belonged to Japan, the United
States, Great Britain, and France. During the week of January 21st,
1968, both a French and Israeli submarine disappeared without a
trace in the placid Mediterranean.
They were hundreds of miles apart
when they performed a disappearing act almost simultaneously.
Searching parties reported unidentified flying objects in the area,
and one group of would-be rescuers detected a metal object and
thought they had found one of the missing craft But the object
scooted away and was never explained. Since then four more subs
belonging to the United States, England, and France have vanished.
The most recent, the French Eurydice. was swallowed up on Wednesday
March 4th, 1970, in the Mediterranean, Somebody seems to be
collecting submarines.
People, planes, ships, submarines, and even automobiles are
constantly disappearing suddenly and inexplicably all over this
haunted planet of ours. Naturally, these mysteries have attracted
the flying saucer researchers, and two ufologists apparently joined
the missing voluntarily on November 11th, 1953.
Wilbur J. Wilkinson
held a responsible position with the Hoffman Radio Corporation in
Los Angeles and according to his wife,
'had tape recordings of
conversations with men from other planets who landed here in
saucers'.
The den in his home was lined with UFO photographs and
weird symbols and formulations, supposedly passed along by Ettle men
from the planet Maser who were preparing to invade Earth.
Wilkinson's partner, Karl Hunrath, claimed to have information about
landed saucers and talked his friend into renting an aeroplane so
they could try to find it.
They took off from the Gardenaj
California
airport with a three-hour supply of gasoline. That was the last
anyone saw of them. A widespread search failed to turn up either the
plane or the two men.
At least one eyewitness claims to have seen a UFO seize a plane in
midair and carry it off. Eugene Metcalfe of Paris, Illinois, has
signed a notarized affidavit avowing that on Wednesday, March 9th,
1955, he was watching a jet fighter shoot across the sky, when
suddenly a gigantic object 'shaped like a call bell' descended over
it.
This object, Metcalfe said, literally swallowed up the
fast-moving jet 'as easy as a hawk would a chicken' and then
disappeared upwards with its prey. A fighter and its pilot were
reported missing in the region that day!
In earlier times the ultraterrestrials
established religions among
men which, while they seemed benevolent, introduced the practice of
making human sacrifices to the gods. This barbaric sacrificial rite
was common throughout Europe, Asia, the Pacific, and South America
for thousands of years. Only the finest specimens of the tribe were
accepted for sacrifice - beautiful young virgins and muscular young
men.
In most cultures the victims volunteered. It was in fact a very
high honor.
They were feted before they were led to a high holy
place or the top of a pyramid. In some cultures they were taken to a
sacred island and left there. They were always gone the next month
or year when the tribe returned with new sacrificial victims.
Physical sacrifice continued into biblical times and persisted in
some cultures until only a few centuries ago. The brutal
inquisitions of the Middle Ages claimed more millions of victims and
included mass disappearances of people who were presumably hauled
off to some dungeon never to be seen again. Robed and hooded men
pounded on doors in the middle of the night and dragged away whole
families.
The record shows that the ultraterrestrials have a need for physical
human beings. Once they were quite open in demanding specimens to
serve that need. Times have changed though, and their methods are
more subtle. Thousands of people disappear annually without a trace
(not counting the hundreds of thousands who are fleeing the law,
creditors, and spouses).
They once exploited the human race in the
guise of benevolent gods living on hilltops; they now exploit us
through the modern myth of extraterrestrial visitors from distant
stars.
Perhaps the planet Earth is nothing more than a gigantic farm, We
unfortunately are the crop.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE REVOLUTION
OF THE MIND
The new man is living amongst us now I He is here I' Adolf Hitler
declared. *I have seen the new man. He is intrepid and cruel. I was
afraid of Mm.'
Hitler's Germany was a phenomenon that will be studied by scholars
for centuries to come. This mad genius created the ultimate secret
society. He exhumed all the ancient symbols - the swastika was an
old Oriental symbol - and gathered around him a fascinating
assortment of perverts and, yes, Black Magicians.1
The skull and
crossbones adorned the uniforms of the dread Gestapo.
A double
lightning bolt was the symbol of his Storm Troopers. Each man had it
secretly tattooed out of sight under his armpit. (Rioters at the
Democratic Convention in Chicago in 196S were puzzled when the
Chicago police forced them to strip to the waist and raise their
arms so their armpits could be explored. Were the cops looking foe
SS agents?)
Hundreds of books about the Nazi movement have been written since
World War II, many of them authored by intimates of Hitler and
members of the Nazi inner circle. One recurrent theme in this
literature is Hitler's mediumship and apparent demonic possession.
His strange epileptic-type fits were classic manifestations of
possession.
Dr Achille Delenas wrote,
'A person close to Hitler told
me that he wakes up in the night screaming and in convulsions. He
calls for help and appears to be half paralysed… He utters confused
and unintelligible sounds, gasping, as if on the point of
suffocation.' Often when fully conscious.
Hitler would suddenly cry
out,
'He is here! There! In the
corner'.
He would point to empty
space, apparently seeing entities that no one else could see.
Was it
madness? Or was Adolf Hitler haunted by, even directed by, ultraterrestrials?
It is known that many men in Hitler's inner circle were members of
the ancient Rosicrucian-style
order Thule, a secret society that
is supposed to have had its beginnings in Thule, Greenland, in
ancient times. Himmler, Hess, and other prominent figures in the
Nazi party spoke privately of strange goals: of creating a New Order
in which the masses would be robotized to serve a select inner circle, who
in
turn would serve undefined supernatural forces.
Dr Joseph Goebbels,
Hitler's brilliant minister of propaganda, won his PhD with a thesis
on The Spiritual and Political Undercurrents of the Early Romantics.
In 1925 he wrote,
"I want to be an apostle and a preacher".
He
became instead an apostle to the strangely mesmeric little
ex-corporal who set out to rule the world. like his boss, Goebbels
had an incredible sense of history and the ability to sway the minds
of large groups of people.
Hitler, it is said, had such imposing
presence and such a brilliant, decisive, seemingly logical mind that
when generals and officials barged into his office prepared to argue
with him about issues and decisions, they left cowed and awed,
convinced he was the greatest man alive.
All kinds of kooks and cultists were welcomed into the Nazi inner
circle. Many of them suffered from messiah complexes, convinced
that Hitler was going to save the world rather than destroy it.
Vidkun Abraham Quisling, the Norwegian traitor, is a minor bat
typical example. Quisling's father was a clergyman who had visited
with angels and written books about them.
In 1929, Quisling himself
published About the Matter That Inhabited Worlds Outside Ours and
the Significance Caused by It to Our Philosophy of Ufo. Later he
wrote another massive book called Universismus, which summarized his
cosmology and outlined a new religion. He founded the Norwegian Nazi
party in 1933 and served as Premier during the German occupation of
Norway, after virtually handing the country to Hitler on a platter.
He was executed at the end of the war.
'After Quisling was imprisoned in 1945, he was convinced that he
would have been able to reach the acme in all sections of art and
science," Dr G. Langfeldt wrote in the Psychiatry Digest in May
1970. 'Of interest with respect to his paranoid ideas is that during
the trial Quisling maintained on several occasions that he believed
in a new world of God to come to this earth and that this
faith had been the driving force in all his actions.'
Quisling, like Hitler, was dominated by an overpowering sense of
historical mission and, having failed in that mission, degenerated
into a babbling lunatic. ,
European Gypsies were rounded up by the Nazis and slaughtered as we
have already noted. Hitler also maintained all-out war against
scientists and philosophers who did not conform to his own beliefs
and cosmology. Nazi gangs burned down the archives of Rudolf
Steiner's Anthroposophical Society and attempted to wipe out his
life's work. (Sterner was a major philosopher and student of the
occult
who made many outstanding contributions to human knowledge.)
Books
were wantonly destroyed, and the leading thinkers and intellectuals
of Europe were either killed or driven into exile.
In his drive for world domination Hitler created a scientific
establishment which developed new rocket weapons, revolutionary
aircraft (such as jets), and worked towards atomic fission. The
influence of this new science changed the world forever in the
1940s. One direct result was our voyage to the moon aboard craft
designed by men trained in the laboratories of Nazi Germany.
In retrospect the Nazi era was a repetition of the earlier patterns
of history. It is a pattern which will undoubtedly be repeated
again, perhaps in the not-too-distant future.
One facet of Hitler's madness was demonic obsession with liquidating the Jews. Actually, Ms racism was much broader than
anti-Semitism. To him all races were inferior to pure German stock.
He sought to create a super race which could run a worldwide
government. And his fixation with the Jewish question was Ms urge to
invalidate the ancient prophecies and thus alter the whole history
of the future.
This brings us to the sticky and highly unscientific subject of
prophecy. From the beginning the ultraterrestrials have presented
man with a fairly complete outline of his future and Ms destiny. On
one level, millions of individuals have received precise predictions
of future events in their own lives through mediums, oracles, and
prophets who communicated with ultraterrestrials.
On another level,
every major culture has attempted to preserve their prophetic
teachings by carving them in stone or sealing them in tombs and
caves (as the Dead Sea Scrolls). All of these occult and religious
records from all parts of the world offer essentially the same
predictions. The Bible's Revelation of St John is an outstanding
example. It explains to us that the final war, Armageddon, will
begin in the Middle East after the Jews have resettled In their
ancient homeland. Obviously, if Hitler's evil crusade had succeeded,
Israel would never have been created, and Armageddon would have been
averted.
Nostradamus, a French physician in the sixteenth century, composed
many verses' which have since proved to be precise predictions of
events which came centuries after his death (he even described the
rise and fall of Napoleon).
One of his most quoted prophecies is:
The year 1999, seventh month. A great King of Terror will come from the skies, … Around this time Mars to reign for the good cause.'
Oriental armies will sweep across the world, according to many of
these prophets.
Even the Hopi Indians have a tradition that great
hordes will invade North America from the Orient. The number 666 is
stressed in the Bible and many other works. Invert it and you have
999.The Bible states repeatedly that all kinds of wonders will
appear in the sky before the end comes. Man has been warned to be
wary of false prophets and not to go into the desert to meet them.
Scores of modern UFO contactees have had their encounters in remote
desert areas.
All religions promise that the end of mankind will come suddenly,
like the thief in the night. Some refer to this event as the Second
Coming, the reappearance of Christ, the Harvest. The Hopis call it
the Purification. To take the sting out of this threat - and the
destruction of all humanity must be regarded as a threat -
religious, interpreters have presented it as a step upwards towards
the immortality of the individual soul.
But if science is on the
right track, if the soul is merely an extension of some giant energy
field in the sky, then the process is more in line with the moon
food concept of the Oriental philosophers. Withdrawal of these
extensions or controls of the supermind of the cosmos would mean
that the individual would be absorbed into it and cease to exist as
a separate physical unit.
Ego, personality, and memory, being
properties of the physical body, would be left behind.
There are two fundamental forms of religion:
(1) the worship of
elemental's and supernatural manifestations, already discussed
(2) the awareness of and submission to the supermind of the cosmos. The Cosmic Consciousness.
Buddhism is the best example of the
latter. The former concentrates on worshipping manifestations, while
the latter is devoted to understanding the whole.
We are witnessing a worldwide phenomenon today: mass illumination of
millions of people, particularly young (under thirty) men and women
in all walks of life. This process is quite well understood but
never openly discussed in the mass media. In 1900 a Canadian
psychiatrist, Dr Maurice Bucke, published the first Important study
of the subject, Cosmic Consciousness.
Illumination is basically a
sudden, overwhelming insight into the whole structure of the cosmos
and man's relationship to it. Suddenly, for a few brief seconds the
percipient understands everything with incredible clarity.
In some
cases the process occurs over a long period in the form of short
flashes of insight which gradually add up. In others it takes place
instantaneously with the percipient seemingly bathed in a reddish
glow or caught in a beam of brilliant white light cast down from the
skies (thus we have the ancient phrase, 'He has seen the light").
No one is ever exactly the same after an illuminating experience.
Mediocre men become great leaders, preachers, statesmen, scientists,
poets, and writers overnight! Others divorce their wives, quit their
jobs, and embark on new careers which catapult them into unexpected
prominence. Some fear for their sanity at first because the
experience is so overwhelming. Some are unable to cope with it and
disintegrate into various kinds of fanatics.
Illumination often accompanies UFO sightings, particularly when the
witnesses are caught in a beam of light from the objects. Their IQ
later skyrockets, and their lives change appreciably. But as in all
aspects of the general phenomenon, there seem to be other forces
Imitating this process and producing false Illuminism.
Young people
experimenting with LSD and other hallucinogens sometimes have
experiences which they believe are contacts with the Cosmic
Consciousness but which ultimately prove to be destructive. Charles
Hanson is a good example of this. Some LSD users do, however, appear
to undergo a pure form of Illuminism, but it is likely that they were
already illumination prone and would have had the experience
eventually anyway.
Psychic abilities appear to be hereditary, and this includes
illumination. Many people attracted to metaphysics spend years of
their lives following the secret teachings, meditating, and
disciplining their minds in an effort to gain godhead (another term
for mystical illumination). More often than not they only succeed in
opening themselves up to possession and hallucinations similar to
those incurred by the use of psychedelic drugs or the practice of
Black Magic and witchcraft.
Today's young people are rapidly gaining
firsthand knowledge of the phantom world of demons and ultraterrestrials as a result of such efforts.
The Hippie
underground newspapers and comic books are now filled with a new
lore of demons and demigods as well as much inside information on
the cosmology of the super-mind. Dr Timothy Leary started the
stampede to illumination and the Cosmic Consciousness in the late
1950s with his LSD experiments. Today the drug scene is a very
important part of the youth subculture, much to the alarm and
confusion of the over-forty crowd.
The notorious musk festival at Woodstock in the closing days of
the last decade was actually a mass illumination experience. The
seemingly schizophrenic and destructive philosophy being touted by
today's young people is in fact identical to the program of the
Illuminati three centuries ago.
A revolution of the mind is taking
place almost unnoticed and certainly undeciphered by the older
population and their Establishment. There is a worldwide movement
against violence and war (the cornerstone of civilization over these
past several thousand years).
Another offshoot of the process is the rapid decline of organized
religion. People who have attained direct personal contact with the
Cosmic Consciousness (or who at least believe they have attained
such contact) have no need for the rites and trappings of the
old-time religions. There is no need to go to church when your own
head is your church. The fear of death and the promise of
immortality have always been one of the main appeals of all
religions.
But as Dr Bucke noted in his study, one of the effects of
illumination is the complete elimination of the death fear. The
percipient suddenly understands with convincing clarity that he is
merely part of the larger whole and that he is assured of
immortality because his consciousness, the actuating mechanism of
his physical body, survives as a part of the supermind.
The Bible
thumper's concept of heaven and hell is quite different from the illuminated's insight into the cosmic structure.
This is not a
movement towards atheism, as many horrified adults believe.
According to the young people, it is instead a movement away from elementalism and the many misinterpretations the ultra terrestrial
manifestations have inspired.
Within a few years many of our present orthodox beliefs may seem as
archaic and ridiculous as the belief in Zeus. This movement towards
a higher truth has been predicted for a thousand years. In Catholic
lore the last pope will be an apostate who will supervise the
decline of the church. He will be named Peter, as was the first
pope. The prophecy states that the final pope before Peter will be
assassinated. In 1967 the Vatican removed the Throne of St Peter
from the basement, dusted it off, and put it on display for the
first time in centuries.
The birth, life, and effect of Moses, Christ, and others were
predicted well in advance. In these times we have been subjected to
a new series of prophecies which extends beyond the earlier
prophecies describing the days before Armageddon and the ultimate
Harvest.
Jeanne Dixon and several other seers claim that the
anti-Christ was born somewhere in the Middle East on February 5th,
1962.
He will, they say, rise up and attract a huge following in the
1980s and will
lead a large segment of humanity into the crisis-filled 1990s. There
was a massive conjunction of planets on February 5th, 1962, and
Oriental astrologers caused considerable excitement with their
claims that the world would come to end on that day.
Arthur C Clarke, the British scientist, studied the UFO phenomenon
in the early 1950s and summarized his findings in 1953 in the form
of an astonishing novel, Childhood's End. He visualized the flying
saucers as part of the psychic system of our environment, peopled by
giant, winged beings remarkably similar to
the strange Mothman
allegedly seen by hundreds of people in the Ohio Valley during 1966-67s.
He described a last generation of children endowed with heightened
psychic abilities and the total
Cosmic Consciousness.
While the
Overlords silently watch from their flying saucers, this final
generation suddenly merges into a single vast unit of energy and
ascends to join the supermind of the cosmos. Their development is
completed. They have reached the climactic stage of cosmic evolution
- a form of intelligent energy which no longer needs the physical
shell and all of its accoutrements.
Close observers of today's youth subculture, from Dr Leary to R.
Buckroinster Fuller, detect the tremulant beginnings of such a last
generation among those born after 1945. As they came of .age in the
1960s a whole new cycle began. The Beatles really got the ball
rolling with a cultural upheaval that is still continuing. Fantastic
changes in political and occult belief have occurred almost
overnight.
Anyone who reads the daily newspapers can see that we are
headed at breakneck speed into a new society with a whole new set of
values. If the present trends continue, the decade of the 1970s will
be filled with violence and confusion as the restructuring takes
place on every level of society. The process is visible behind the
Iron Curtain and in China also.
The year 1848 really marked the beginning of this massive collective
overhaul of our planet. We now seem to be in the final stages of
something -something of cosmic proportions. In order to play out the
prophesied game, the ultraterrestrials will need to create a new
Hitler. The men who will confront him and hopefully defeat him are
presently sitting on floors in Greenwich Village, Paris, and Hong
Kong, stoned on pot and tripping out on LSD.
At least two American
presidents, Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, showed all the
signs of having undergone illumination. Winston Churchill and
Charles de Gaulle were also likely candidates, as were Gandhi and
possibly the late Gamal Nasser of Egypt. But there ate no apparent
Illuminati on the world scene at the moment.
It is certain, though,
that they will appear at the appropriate moment.
They always have.
The sexual revolution is another key part of all this, for sexual
repression and frustration have always been a basic cause of
violence, peculiar social attitudes, and destructive psychoses.
Fools that we are, we have always been in the habit of electing
misfits to lead us - from Julius Caesar, who was an epileptic, to
Adolf Hitler. Hitler's peers tried to crucify Sigmund Freud when he
first dared to suggest this. But history demonstrates that he was
right. We have followed an insane course for thousands of years.
Once we took our finest young men to the top of a pyramid and cut
out their hearts with pomp and ceremony. Today we send them off to
battlefields. Once they happily climbed the pyramid under their own
power. Now they are rebelling. They are questioning the system that
wants their heart.
The real hope of mankind may be that the system
will break down or be drastically altered in the few years before
our unknown Arab hears a voice in Ms head, dons a red cape, and
gallops into the United States to free the Hopi Indians.
The members of WOW are still watching as they have always done,
probably with considerable amusement.
The ultraterrestrials are
still running about in their black suits and a thousand other
disguises, whispering in our ears, setting race against race, and
nation against nation. Our modern witch doctors, the scientists, are
planting atomic bombs in known earthquake faults on the floor of the
Pacific to see what will happen.
Great civilizations blossomed and died here before us. Others will
certainty come after us, unless we leave the planet in such a
polluted, radioactive state that it will be rendered unlivable for
physical beings.
But even then we will have left our imprint behind. Thousands of
years from now real visitors from some distant star may enter our
solar system. They may stand upon our barren moon and look down at
the burnt-out cinder that was once Earth, and they may find a metal
plate among the craters.
It will puzzle their scientists because
obviously the moon is uninhabitable and has never been settled. The
plate will be just another erratic for their museum. They'll forget
about it and never try to decipher the cryptic lettering.
The
lettering that states,
'We came in peace for all mankind'.
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