The Voices at VanTassel's
Sub-Figura vel Liber Caeruleus

Excerpt from THE COSMIC PULSE OF LIFE
1976 Trevor J. Constable
 

"The voices at Van Tassel's were like no others I have ever heard."
Dr. Ralph E. Lapp

 

THE COSMIC PULSE OF LIFE
Chapter 3 - Finding a New Pathway
by Dr. Ralph E. Lapp

"...the scientific community has been corrupted or silenced by military domination."

My introduction to UFOs came through Major Donald Keyhoe's books "Flying Saucers Are Real," "Flying Saucers From Outer Space," and "Flying Saucer Conspiracy," which rightly rank as UFO classics.

Major Keyhoe laid the basis for establishment-type ufology by collecting verified data, recounting dependable sighting stories, and endlessly chasing down evidence. This approach essentially regards UFOs as extraterrestrial spacecraft, and has high confidence in existing scientific theories and those who adhere to such theories.

Purely mechanistic speculations are made from this seemingly safe base in reality. Personal experience forced me to diverge from this approach, but I pay unreserved tribute to the integrity, courage, and perseverance of Donald Keyhoe.

A professional U.S. Marine Corps officer and pioneer aviation writer, Major Keyhoe, risked a sound reputation and his literary career when he took up flying saucers. Through his books and labors with NICAP, he has made large personal sacrifices to make the world aware of alien visitation. He did this on the basis most likely to find the widest acceptance, working diligently to keep the subject respectable. Like all pioneers he had plenty of mud thrown in his face.

Keyhoe had been treated shabbily by official Washington and unchivalrously on many occasions by the broadcasting industry and the press. I once saw the sound deliberately shut off while he was speaking on TV. For years, he urged a formal UFO project by top scientists with Federal backing.

The Colorado University project under Dr. Edward Condon nominally provided the elements for which Keyhoe had long asked. Within a short time, he found that NICAP data supplied to the Colorado project were not being properly utilized and he withdrew NICAP support. Keyhoe has always deserved better than he received from official sources. He is an idealist in realist's clothing and this field would not have been as far along as it is without him.

On the basis of the evidence Keyhoe presents in his book, a rational person is compelled to accept the presence of UFOs, although not necessarily to accept that they are spaceships and nothing else. Keyhole's books and other classical UFO literature left me puzzled by one element I found sharply anomalous. There has been no communication between these alleged spacecraft and human beings. Such a silence did not jib with my own personal experience of the way our own world is run.

Practically all my life up to the time I learned about UFOs, I had been a professional in communications, both in a technical sense and in the realm of ideas. As a staff writer for radio programs in New Zealand in my teens and also as a radio actor, I eagerly learned and applied the art of communicating ideas from the written word via the human voice. In a technical sense, I qualified myself as a broadcasting engineer and as a shipboard radio officer.

In this latter capacity, under the flags of both New Zealand and Great Britain, I traveled all over the world before I was 25. This experience made me aware of the role played in civilization by communications because of my daily involvement in this field. The living standard of any country could be measured by its communications development - a criterion valid to this day.

The more refined the communications of a given country, the greater its technical advancement and the higher its living standards.

Communications are an index of technological achievement and material progress. The American people were able to see their astronauts aloft and walking on the moon, and to broadcast the spectacle simultaneously to the world. American communications are un surpassed and there was no insuperable difficulty to communication with earth from the moon.

To me it was logically untenable that a civilization capable of building a spacecraft would not be capable of communicating adequately. While I tended to accept Keyhoe's general view that there had been no orthodox radio communications with humans by UFOs , it seemed obvious that UFO designers and operators would be using a different system of communication to earth man's radio, as far beyond our methods as ours are beyond the tree trunk drum or Indian smoke signals.

There seemed to me to be no rational dissent from such a view. The propulsion methods employed by UFOs were generations in advance of anything planned by our brightest minds. The vehicles traveled in multiples of the best speeds attainable by mechanical aircraft. Communications development must have proceeded synchronistically with these technical advances.

Earth life has taught us this lesson in our own experience.

Our communications have progressed from the invention of the wireless telegraph to modern television within the lifetime of human beings who are still living. By the middle 1950s, under the stimulus of the space program, scientific attention was already turning to so-called extrasensory perception, or ESP, as a possible means of space communications.

By November, 1958, the august Westinghouse Corporation, citadel of corporate and scientific orthodoxy, had set up studies into mental telepathy as a means of long distance communication, under the direction of Dr. Peter A. Castruccio. Other corporations with pipelines to the Federal treasury have since followed this lead.

Even a 10-watt mentality could project the likely results of 50 years of such work, since science has almost routinely achieved any goal to which sufficient resources are applied. Blowing up the entire planet or extinguishing its life, is achievable today because men wanted this power.

College educated killers by the thousands have donated their lives to explosives and the slaughter of children, and it seemed inconceivable that Lifepositive scientific work aimed at the mastery of telepathy would not be just as successful.

Scientific mastery of telepathy in 50 years seems reasonable. Similarly reasonable is the proposition that entities utilizing propulsion methods 50 years or more ahead of ours would have communications 50 years ahead of ours. On the basis of what we on earth have been driven to explore, therefore, we might expect the aliens to be using telepathy. This expectation is reinforced by their non-use of radio in any mode we are capable of detecting, although UFO entities have at times communicated with pursuing USAF pilots via their VHF radiotelephone receivers.

In an ever-broadening investigation of the UFO subject, with my attention drawn to the communications anomaly, I became aware of the contact stories. Involving encounters of various kinds between alleged extraterrestrials and human beings, these stories already made up a bulky literature by the middle 1950s. I tackled them to see what I could find out about UFO communications. I began to hear about psychic communications with which I entered a new and wholly alien world.

Breaking down my structural resistance to such things was a primary problem. Such resistance is present in all persons who have been given either religious or scientific training. Religionists consider such communications to be "of the devil." Scientists consider the same area to be one of fantasy and illusion. I had been raised as a Christian Scientist. In that benign and tolerant religious system, the occult and psychic were deemed things better left alone.

The discs continued in the skies, and the communications problems could not be ignored. Already I detected an unhealthy and irrational fear, outwardly manifesting as ridicule, among the many trained persons of my acquaintance to whom I broached my general theories about communication with space entities. Friends in the aircraft industry passed on rumors of a man living in the high desert of Southern California who claimed to have telepathic contact with the entities piloting the flying discs.

Thus I came meet Mr. George Van Tassel, a pioneer in such communications, who later died in 1978. His distinction in this world was to obtain from his other-world communicants, advanced technical information.

This technical information is impenetrable to conventional scientific knowledge and to the mechanistic mind. Armed with the revolutionary discovery of the orgone energy - to which UFO intelligences have extensively referred to as "Primary Energy" - Van Tassel's early communications become a technical bonanza. Any trained scientist whose thought processes have been functionalized will be able to penetrate most of the early Van Tassel communications, and conceivably could create instruments and devices of a wholly new character.

At the time I went to see George Van Tassel at Giant Rock, he was regarded by scientists as a crackpot. Most laymen who came in contact tangentially with his writings undoubtedly regarded him as just another flying saucer nut. History will probably have a different verdict.

Investigators in this field must learn to participate - to bore in with the body, mind, and heart as a total human being - if they are to find their way to the truth. The old, on looking, withdrawn, and purportedly objective approaches have failed in this field. The case of George Van Tassel, as I experienced his doings and as they influenced me, is an example of how participation and the use of all one's personal resources of experience can open doors in UFO research. Sometimes the consequent problem of how to get some doors closed again becomes critical but one must dare to do in order to know.

Giant Rock derives its name from a colossal boulder that rests near the end of a remote, dry-lake airstrip in the high desert of Southern California. Around the Giant Rock, Van Tassel had created through the years a small living complex including a restaurant and his own home. He had also created the physical facilities for his annual spacecraft convention.

In the days when I first visited Van Tassel's place, he used to conduct communications with UFO intelligences from a chamber hewn out of the ground beneath the Giant Rock.

There was no technical apparatus for this communication. Stumbling down the rough stairs in semi-darkness, one was seized by the horrendous possibility that the giant boulder might roll and crush the chamber, complete with occupants. There were usually about sixty or seventy persons present at these seance type gatherings, varying from college professors to ordinary working people, and always including a sprinkling of reputable and successful businessmen.

Van Tassel's preparations for contact consisted mainly of focusing the minds of all present into an energetic unity. Songs were sung in unison. Prayers and chants followed. Then came silence as Van Tassel waited for contact. Singing, chanting, and prayers constituted the "call" phase of communications, differentiating the group of people with their common desire for contact with UFO intelligences, from the random psychic racket of the ordinary world.

The call phase is intended to stand out above the psychic background noise as a strong radio signal does above radio noise and weaker stations. Such a call in radio receives the immediate attention of any skilled operator monitoring the particular frequency in question. He reads the signal if it is code and if the person signaling is calling him, he answers.

Van Tassel in effect functioned as a psychic radio operator, focusing the power of his transmitter - the biological energies of his gathering - to attract the attention of someone with whom he wished to communicate.

His calls were answered.

Out of the darkness from Van Tassel's direction would come booming the most dynamic and powerful voices I have ever heard. For years as a youngster, I studied voice and speech and as a young radio actor put these studies to practical use. I was always around accomplished radio actors and announcers, and on this account was extremely voice and speech conscious. I understand fully the art and technique of changing one's voice so as to act out an entire radio play doing two, three, or sometimes more, separate voices.

The voices at Van Tassel's were like no others I have ever heard.

George Van Tassel was an ordinary man and not highly educated. He spoke well but did not have an unusual vocabulary. He made occasional grammatical errors like most people. The intelligences that spoke through Van Tassel, utilizing his vocal apparatus as though it were a physical amplifier or transducer for their own thoughts, made no grammatical errors. The intelligences flowed in strong, forceful language without a split second of hesitancy. The effect was like having Orson Wells present, orating at the height of his powers.

Several of these intelligences would speak, one after the other. There was in each case a distinct change of the speech pattern, pace, voice timbre, accent, and subject matter. No radio actor could have done it.

Van Tassel's vocal mechanism provided a sound carrier, as it were, upon which all these other voices were impressed. There was no doubt that they were speaking through Van Tassel, not only because of these objective facts, but also because of something that I experienced, and therefore learned, by actually being there.

I found that I could hear, in a new way to me, the thoughts of these beings before they were transduced by Van Tassel's vocal apparatus. The effect was akin to monitoring a tape recording, the broadcast of which is briefly delayed. I knew what Van Tassel was going to say before he got it out as audible sound. Prior to this time, I had no psychic abilities or experience with any kind of psychic phenomena. All of it had been to me a tightly closed book. Now it was opening.

Blundering in where angels might be terrorized, I asked Van Tassel how he was able to develop his receptive ability. He gave me certain routines to follow. Not aware at this time of any element other than idealism in connection with UFOs, I followed Van Tassel's indications with diligence and persistence. Once, at a later time, I became for a brief minute, the " loudspeaker" used by these strange intelligences.

There was no doubt that communication was being carried on by these means, no matter what official science might think of it all. On one occasion in my presence, and subsequent to their promise to do so, luminous UFOs manifested in profusion above the nearby desert until dispersed by Marine aircraft from the 29 Palms base that were scrambled on intercept.

The troglodytic professor on the USAF payroll may smile but he does not know. The New Knowledge is the property of those who participate and I was unequivocally convinced that the entities piloting the discs were quite capable of communicating with human beings, without any need for radio apparatus. My empirical work had begun with a little research involving my own psycho-physical person.

With consuming interest I read the technical matter that these intelligences had communicated to Van Tassel. My electronics background was insufficient to penetrate this material but everything about it seemed to throb with life, even though it was beyond my comprehension. Reading the communications was an adventure in itself.

Worlds within worlds, densities within densities, energies, polarities, ethers - material with no seeming connection to earthly concepts - but all of it discussed with an overlay of good humor and love. From this time on, I began to think that just being an ordinary man might be an advantage in investigating this subject. I had only a little junk to jettison before tackling this New Knowledge.

The communications referred often to the primary energy in connection with spacecraft propulsion, and I knew that there was at this juncture no readily intelligible connection with earth science. There was something missing - something crucial -from the ever-multiplying trivia of modern knowledge at human disposal. Intuitively, I got on the trail of that missing something right then. These intelligences were doing things differently than us, and our men of science weren't trying to find out the answers. They were trying to kill UFOs, and pouring their energies instead into the rackety and uncertain fireworks at Cape Canaveral.

In "They Live In The Sky," I detailed my first psychic experiences and will not, therefore, repeat them here. Suffice it to say, that by persisting with the techniques learned at Giant Rock, I set the stage for an eruption of the unseen worlds into a consciousness - mine - not prepared for such an impact. Becoming sensitive suddenly to spectra of vibrations with which one is totally unfamiliar can be an unhinging experience.

In recent years, the so-called "psychedelic revolution" has exposed untold thousands of persons to the consequences of chemical tampering with consciousness. All such forcing open of doors is destructive of orderly inner development, no matter what the academic qualifications of its advocates.

There was in my case no visions of the unseen worlds or astral phantasmagoria but I did develop extreme sensitivity to telepathic impulses. I found that I could barely control the situation. In daily business life in the aviation industry, I would hear a sentence psychically before a client ever spoke the words physically. When the telephone rang, I knew who was calling before I picked up the instrument.

A constant struggle soon ensued for control of my physical vehicle - myself against unseen interlopers. I was fighting continually against various forms of automatism. Anyone who doubts the reality of occult things would have no doubt whatever concerning them were they to endure an experience of this order. I emerged from it all with a solid respect for the reality of the occult that I have never subsequently lost.

My difficulties were extreme and I felt that I was slowly losing my battle to retain my mastery of myself. I bitterly regretted having ever meddled in UFO communications. The "intelligences," into whose realm I had broken, poured confusing rubbish into me. There did not seem to be anyone to whom I could talk about my difficulties without already seeming to be "around the bend." All was not lost, however, for a great man was at hand.

Dr. Franklin Thomas was a publisher of many small UFO books as the owner of the New Age Publishing Company in Los Angeles. Many of these books dealt with the things I had stumbled upon. He used to give lectures in his Glendale Boulevard book shop on Friday evenings and I resolved to attend.

Franklin Thomas was a diminutive, slight, sharp-featured man, wrinkled of face and generally shabby. He seemed indifferent concerning his physical person. His lectures were delivered in a soft, low-pitched voice but with a lucidity that I found enthralling. He could cover the esoteric aspects of widely divergent subjects in such a way that he constantly wrought seemingly unconnected things into a higher synthesis. I knew that he could assist with my problem.

He was heavily burdened in his struggling business and his health was failing. He knew he was dying and, at a period when he needed all of his reserves of strength, he spent as little time as possible after his lectures talking to those who pressed him with questions. He listened carefully to me. There was an understanding nod and a knowing glint came into his eye. I asked him help me. He agreed.

He was the most accomplished occultist I have ever known, an adept and master teacher functioning as one of us in the workaday world, but otherwise something much more. At a time of loose talk about the occult and occultism, to have known and been taught by Franklin Thomas was an occult experience in itself.

This shabby little man had conscious control of the hidden forces of nature, and he wielded his powers in setting me free. I became, in a short time, complete master in my own house again and the ability I had forced on myself to function telepathically was brought under control. This was the first step toward suppressing the faculty entirely.

The essence of gaining control was to confine the receptions to a given time of day and never to depart from this regimen. Then it became every other day, every third day, and finally the spurious door to the unseen was closed and sealed.

Every student of esoteric matters who wishes to make genuine progress in the development of his inner life, will find the avoidance of psychism and psychic phenomena - as an involved party - absolutely essential.

During this period when I had these daily contacts and before all such activity was halted, some information was passed to me concerning the UFO mystery in many of its aspects. I had learned, through Franklin Thomas, how to sort out the otherworld telepaths. Those intelligences which would seek to communicate without controlling had what seemed to be the valid information.

Through Franklin Thomas and his gentle guidance, I began to discern that the mystery required a sound working knowledge of occult science for its overall comprehension. My knowledge of these things was so limited that it was absurd to think that anything of great value could be passed through me. I was an inadequate instrument for any such purpose. Recognition of this fact by me accelerated my phased withdrawal from psychic activity.

During these limited contacts, information was nevertheless passed from the "other side" that went against many of the commonly accepted conceptions of UFOs. Later publication of this material was to make me a sort of pariah even in the way-out UFO field. The truth is unwelcome in this world and it hurts because of its innate power to disturb.

The entities I contacted conveyed to me, in essence, the following basic information:

1. UFOs are space ships but their vibratory makeup is not fixed in the physical-material density. They are mutants.

2. UFOs have their main existence in a density that is invisible to human beings of normal vision.

3. The intelligences behind the space ships are various orders of etheric beings; that is, beings differently constituted to man and normally invisible to him, yet capable of materializing at will when necessary or required.

4. A war is in progress for the mind of man, a veritable battle of the Earth that will determine the future course of evolution.

5. There are negative forces from beneath man seeking to drag him down and positive forces assisting him to fulfill his destiny in freedom.

6. There are normally-invisible living things in space that are not space ships.

7. Space is filled with primary energy currents of which existing earth science knows nothing.

8. Infrared film, exposed between dawn and sunrise in high, dry locales will frequently objectify invisible objects of various kinds living in and passing through the atmosphere.

This information permitted the formulation of a skeleton UFO theory and also opened a pathway to obtain objective proof of the presence of UFOs. The latter would come to hand only if the communicating intelligences had told me the truth. I had work to do, both of a theoretical and empirical nature.

At this point, Franklin Thomas had a serious talk with me. I pass on now his fundamental wisdom.

"You have reached a point where you have a sort of assignment - a task to discharge. I cannot tell you where it will lead - to discovery or to disappointment - but I can tell you with certainty that success, if it is to come to you, demands that you cut off all psychic activity and abandon it entirely.

 

Everything for you, henceforth, must be in the full light of consciousness, with no communication of any kind with any unseen forces, no matter what their purported wisdom. Contact must be with your own High Self - Your Atma - and nothing inferior to that."

This advice was followed. All psychic activity was terminated.

My experiences had convinced me that the disc occupants communicated by means of thought transference - telepathy in its many variants - and that communication with earthlings would be unlikely via any other method. Communication seemed to require either that the human being surrender in some way the function of his organism to beings that he could not see or that new devices for manipulating the primary energy of which these entities spoke would have to be designed.

These new cosmic electronics would use biological energy. Experience has already shown that such devices were quite different to, and enormously advanced over, anything possessed by earth men. Later on, my adventures would bring me to a remarkable personality who had made revolutionary strides into cosmic electronics but, for the moment, I did not know where to begin.

I did know, in a fashion that permitted of no contradiction, that if ever UFOs were to be understood and comprehensive theoretical approaches made to the subject, I would have to resign myself to years of study and research. This endeavor would, by its very nature, lie outside the boundaries of official science.

Despite the resources and facilities that they commanded, the official scientist were getting nowhere in penetrating the UFO mystery, and my brushing personal involvement with the technology behind UFOs taught me why they failed and would continue to fail: humans were looking in the wrong places for their answers, and they were looking in the wrong way.

Man, to their mode of cognition, was $2.98 worth of chemicals organized in a complex way. Complexity of organization was held to be the only difference between man and the chair on which he sat. I was already interested in the energy that propelled me acr oss the room. When I asked learned physicians about this energy and what it was, I found that they became angry.

Already I was beginning to think that there might be a functional identity between my personal power source - the biological energy that drove me across the room - and the energy that drove the discs across our skies. Learned, able men with the highest academic qualifications were evading confrontation with both.

Franklin Thomas continued to tutor me in his quiet way. Everything he taught me concerning occult knowledge was given to me in such a way that I could dovetail it with something I could personally observe in the outer world. When I reported having noticed something different about a common feature of our environment - thereby illustrating that I had dynamically understood and applied his teachings - he would give me something more.

He steered me to the work of Dr. Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian philosopher, scientist and founder of the Anthroposophical Society.

The scope and sweep of this universal genius was staggering. As I plunged into Anthroposophy, I realized that I was in contact with a body of New Knowledge and a methodology for penetrating the unseen worlds that was wholly healthy and demanded the best that was in me for its pursuit and application. My whole life began to change.

Gone forever was the craven search for "messages" from spacemen. Dr. Steiner had presented in modern scientific form, for modern consciousness, the necessary cosmo-conception and valid indications for the renewal of human life and culture along functional lines. His work was not confined to things normally deemed of the spirit. He went deep into such seemingly compartmentalized realms of thought as medicine and economics, pedagogy and biology, pharmacology and zoology, drama, philosophy, and agriculture. Everything he touched, he renewed and revivified.

Jules Saurwein, the Paris savant who had known all the great thinkers of the times, deemed Steiner the most impressive figure in European cultural life in the 20th century.

With my mounting suspicion of orthodox conceptions, I contrasted the two or three lines devoted to Steiner in the encyclopedias with the overwhelming, massive literature he left his fellow humans. I could not square the incomprehension and the sequestration of Steiner's genius with the inflated biographies in the same encyclopedias out lining the lives of the life-killing developers of nuclear weaponry.

Franklin Thomas presented me with a monumental book entitled " Man or Matter" by Ernst Lehrs, Ph.D., one of Steiner's own students. An electrical engineer and mathematician, Dr. Lehrs presented in this book not only the history of man's cognitive impasse - out of which has sprung the Great Impasse of ufology - but also the method of surmounting these difficulties. All of it was presented in a healthy and modern way on the bedrock laid by Goethe and later modernized and expanded by Steiner.

Lehrs spread himself out over such seemingly unrelated disciplines as optics, biology, meteorology, geology, botany, and mechanics, unifying these diverse fields in a functional approach so that one could see the inner connections they all bore to each other.

This book had a decisive influence on me. I had already begun field research in UFO photography. I was putting to the test the fundamental suggestion for photographing invisible presences in the atmosphere of the earth that had been given to me during the final phases of my experiments with psychic communication.

"Man or Matter" acquainted me with the Goethean approach to optics, light, and color; and, the more I experimented, the more Goethean I became. Lehrs also dealt in detail with the visual ray or eye beam - a ray of biological energy by which consciousness is carried outside the body to objects in space. Armed with this knowledge, some simple occult exercises, and conventional cameras with conventional infrared film, I began the practical field work.

The knowledge involved and methods employed will now be described.