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Part 4 of
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His tractor engine died. He was then confronted by a short humanoid being, which he pushed away, causing it to stumble and fall. But 3 other humanoids grabbed him and he was carried on board the craft.
The beings were 5 ft tall, wore tight-fitting
siren-suits and helmets, and communicated with one another by making
growling sounds. They stripped off his clothes and 'washed' him with
an oily-looking liquid. Blood samples were taken from under his
chin.
The woman began to caress him and he was surprised that he felt sexually aroused. They had sex twice, and the woman also took a sperm sample. Before she left, she pointed to her stomach and then to the sky. After getting dressed, Villas-Boas was taken to another room.
He thought of stealing a box with a clocklike
face as proof of his experience, but one of the beings immediately
pushed him away. After a tour of the ship he climbed down a ladder
to the ground and the craft took off. He had been on it for more
than 4 hours.
At the time the case was too bizarre for anyone to accept as authentic, even though Villas-Boas was a sincere, intelligent young man, who eventually became an attorney. It is significant that he remembered the abduction consciously and that no hypnosis was used.
The case set the tone for the abduction reports that would follow.
The light was still there and moved towards the window.
He closed the shutters but the light bled
through the slats and through the tiles of the roof, while he and
his brother watched. On 14 October, he was ploughing a field with
his brother late at night when they saw a bright light hovering in
the sky. He tried to get close to it, but it kept moving away
[1].
Terrified, he got back into the car and drove off at
high speed. Shortly afterwards, the couple heard a series of
electronic beeps and felt drowsy. Later they heard a second series
of beeps and found that they were nearly home. It was only some time
after the event that they realized the journey had taken 2 hours
longer than it should have done.
Under hypnosis they recalled that after the first set of beeps Barney had inexplicably turned off the main road and stopped before a group of figures on the road. They were taken on board a landed craft and subjected to a medical examination.
Betty believed she had communicated with the alien leader telepathically.
The couple agreed that the aliens were about 5 ft tall, with broad foreheads, but Betty remembered large noses and black hair, while Barney recalled no noses, just 2 slits for nostrils, and no hair. The hypnotist took the view that they were recounting a fantasy.
It is worth noting that after the Hills' close
encounter, they began to experience poltergeist phenomena in their
home, and that Betty had a past history of paranormal experiences
[2].
He dropped his fishing rod and fell to his knees.
Shortly afterwards, Da Silva was blindfolded again and taken back to earth. As the craft landed, he felt he was being dragged and lost consciousness.
He woke up alone near the town of Vitoria, about 200 miles from where he had been fishing. He was dehydrated and hungry, but drank from a stream and was able to catch some fish as he still had his rod with him. Only his identity card, which the aliens had examined, had disappeared.
He had a swollen knee where the ray had struck him and three open wounds on his neck where the helmet had rubbed against his skin.
He had been away four and a half days [3].
Fig. 9.1. Alien encountered by Antonio da Silva, May 1969 (courtesy of Harry Trumbore)[4]
One of the central questions in this case is how Da Silva travelled the 200 miles from Bebedouro to Vitoria, and where his physical body was during his 4.5-day absence.
If there had been witnesses and video equipment at both locations would they have observed him being taken aboard a craft, the craft taking off, the landing of the craft at the other location, and his emergence from it?
Most of the abduction could easily be a vision. Jacques Vallee points out the striking parallels between the man's experience and initiation ordeals.
Initiation rituals are characterized by the following general scenes:
All these elements are present in the case of Antonio da
Silva
[5].
After retrieving the bullet, he heard a twig snap (a common feature in otherworldly encounters). He turned to see a bow-legged humanlike figure, about 6 ft 2 inches tall, standing near him.
His skin tone was like that of an Oriental, and the face seemed to blend into the neck.
As in so many other cases, the being was dressed in a one-piece suit. His right arm ended in a cone-shaped device. The man, who later revealed that he was called 'Ausso', greeted him by saying, 'How you doin'?', and then asked if he was hungry. Before Higdon could answer, a small package floated toward him.
Inside were 4 pills, and he found himself taking one.
Fig. 9.2. Alien
encountered by Carl Higdon, October 1974.
[6]
He then spotted the creature's ship in the distance, and was asked if he wanted to come along. Before he could answer he found himself inside a transparent cubical craft, strapped to a chair and wearing a helmet.
Ausso and another ufonaut were with him, and the 5 elk were crammed inside in a cage behind him. When Ausso pointed his arm at the controls, the craft began moving and Higdon saw the earth receding below him.
Moments later they landed on a dark planet that Ausso said was '163,000 light-miles' (!) from earth. Outside was a huge tower with a bright rotating light, and he saw what looked like 5 humans standing in the nearby plaza.
When Ausso pointed his arm again, Higdon found himself inside a room in the tower.
A device
came out of the wall in front of him and examined him for several
minutes. Ausso then told him he was not what they needed and would
be taken back. Ausso returned his rifle and floated the remaining
pills out of his pocket.
The truck stood in the middle
of a mudhole, with no tracks to show how it had got there. He used
the two-way radio to call for help and was eventually found. His
truck had to be towed out, and those involved concluded it must have
been deposited there from the air. He was taken to hospital, and
late the next day he began to regain his memory and equilibrium.
Much of Higdon's experience, however, sounds very dreamlike; some of the details were recalled with the help of hypnosis.
Higdon
passed a lie-detector test, and was considered to be a reliable
character. Other people had seen lights in the sky on the night of
the abduction
[7].
Suddenly they got into his wagon on either side of him, but Wolski continued on his journey without saying anything. He thought
they must be 'foreigners', since they had slanted eyes, prominent
cheekbones, and spoke in an unknown language.
He did so, then rose up into a dark rectangular room where he met 2 more 'foreigners' who told him to remove his clothes. After a brief examination with 'two plates', he was told to get dressed.
He galloped all the way home, then returned with his sons, and they found a series of trapezoidal, almost rectangular footprints.
A 6-year-old boy who lived nearby said he had seen an aircraft resembling a bus fly very low over a barn, then climb vertically into the air and vanish.
This incident is regarded as a benchmark abduction account, with little or no contamination from the outside world and none of the media exposure that characterizes American abduction stories [8].
Fig. 9.3. Left: Jan Wolski [9]. Right: The craft encountered by Wolski, May 1978 (courtesy of Harry Trumbore) [10]. Not recommended for interstellar travel!
Another intriguing case took place on the evening of 3 January 1979.
Americans Filiberto Cardenas, his friend Fernando Marti, and Marti's wife and 13-year-old daughter were driving home when their car engine quit. The 2 men got out and began to look under the hood. They suddenly saw alternating red and violet lights reflecting off the engine and heard a sound 'like many bees'.
The car began to shake, the light turned a brilliant white, and Fernando began to crawl further under the hood for protection. Meanwhile, Filiberto felt paralyzed and began to rise into the air, shouting 'Don't take me'.
Fernando saw him rising up, and by the time he got out from under the hood, all he could see was a bulky object that ascended and moved away. The next thing Filiberto remembered was being nearly run over by a car on the Tamiami Trail about 16 km from where he had been lifted up.
The police were sufficiently puzzled by the story
that they listed the type of offence as 'close encounter of the
third kind' in their official report.
Filiberto then remembered being taken to an undersea base.
He was again paralyzed and examined, and a sperm sample was taken. Afterwards, another caped, enthroned figure gave him instructions illustrated with images on banks of TVs.
After many similar
experiences that seemed to go on for many days, he was dropped off
near the Tamiami Trail after a lapse of about 2 hours.
There was a second meeting with the aliens, when Filiberto and his wife voluntarily walked up a ramp into the alien ship and had a friendly conversation with its nearly human occupants.
They were subsequently
able to remember this experience without hypnosis, but there were no
independent witnesses to confirm its objectivity
[11].
The engine stalled and Paulo had to stop the car on the side of the road. He then saw an object about 12 ft away.
A red beam of light was projected at the car and seemed to cause the door to open. Several small beings appeared, took Paulo into the craft, and made him lie down on a small table.
After fastening his arms, they lowered from the ceiling an apparatus resembling an x-ray machine. He felt a cut near his elbow, and the beings collected his blood. (Investigators from a UFO research group photographed the wound 3 days later.) Then he was shown 2 panels, one of them a plan of the town of Itaperuna, the other a picture of an atomic explosion. Paulo felt heavy.
He remembers being helped by Elvio, but does not recall how they got home.
Elvio managed to get Paulo on his feet and started with him by bus towards Itaperuna, where Paulo was examined by the first-aid station. The police sent a patrol to the site and found Paulo's car on the highway. Elvio was unable to explain what had happened to Paulo and why the door was open.
He did not remember when Paulo had
got out, and could not explain why they had taken the bus. The
police found no trace on the car that could explain the wound on
Paulo's arm.
He asks:
Another possibility is that instead of the mind
being influenced by means of advanced psychotronic devices acting on
the physical brain, the mind could be affected directly on the
astral level without the use of any physical technology.
There is certainly a great deal of evidence that UFOs can manifest physically and leave physical traces. In some cases people may have been physically taken on board these vehicles, and there are a few abduction cases in which the abducteé was apparently dropped off miles from the pickup point.
If humans are occasionally
taken on board materialized craft, then a physical medical
examination is not inconceivable, though it may only be a simulated
one, conducted by paranormal entities rather than by
extraterrestrial scientists. However, many aspects of abduction
experiences sound like visions or dreams.
Some of
these cases could be generated during the hypnosis session itself,
while others may originate in an actual unusual experience.
Several elements of the Hills' abduction tale, for example, seem to be derived from the movies Invaders from Mars and Killers from Space, an episode of the television program The Outer Limits, and a book by Donald Keyhoe entitled The Flying Saucer Conspiracy that Betty had read just after her strange experience [13].
The vast increase in media attention for abductions
in the past couple of decades means that no abduction stories are
likely to be entirely uncontaminated by cultural influences.
But this is
unlikely to be the whole story. For the motifs that find their way
into popular culture and into our own minds are themselves largely
drawn from the 'memory of nature', the 'collective unconscious' or,
in occult terminology, the astral world -- the thought-atmosphere in
which our minds are constantly immersed.
Keith Thomson suggests that 'perhaps something quite ancient from the world soul was making its periodic return, in a novel form, as part of a larger cycle or spiral of manifestation' [15].
Abductions are, after all, a recurrent theme in mythology and
folklore.
This may also happen during the transition between waking and sleeping and during dreams -- for even dreams are not simply products of our brains.
The brain is an extension of the mind, which
operates on different levels of the astral plane, and is part of the
collective mind of Gaia.
The woman was taken to a huge mother ship and shown round.
The next day her friend reported an identical experience, describing walking with her across the fields to the aircraft, and corroborating every detail on the plane till they parted company, when the man remembered going to a planet with golden cities on it.
Victoria LePage writes:
The subtle, mental body may undergo a purely visionary abduction experience based on a series of standard archetypal elements. And some experiences could involve astral travel, i.e. the temporary separation of the subtle mind from the physical and astral bodies.
* Both types of experience may be influenced by external agencies, as the astral world is inhabited by various kinds of beings, both high and low. In rare cases visionary or out-of-body experiences might begin after the witness has been taken on board a physically materialized craft.
However, as Michael Talbot says, most medical examinations are probably only a symbolic representation of the probing of the subtle anatomy of our 'energy selves' or souls [17]. Only an advanced adept could unravel all the various physical, astral, and mental factors involved in any particular abduction experience.
* The astral 'model body' or 'design body' ('linga-sharira' in Sanskrit) is said to be able to travel no more than a few meters from the physical body. However our consciousness can be transferred to a higher astral form or subtle body (sometimes called the 'mayavi-rupa', or 'illusory form') that can travel far from the physical and astral bodies, either spontaneously or intentionally.
Michael Grosso says that 'there is such an admixture of mythic and psychic elements, it is hard to take UFO narratives at face value' [18].
And John Whitmore comments:
Jacques Vallee, too, stresses that abduction stories should not automatically be taken literally:
In one case, a woman awoke in bed to see a helicopter over her house as if the intervening ceiling and roof had disappeared.
She also saw 2 unusual humanoid beings at the foot of the bed. Fortunately 2 friends were able to witness this scene: they saw a blue sphere of light around her (as she did) with brighter lights shooting through it, but they heard no helicopter and saw no beings. The blue light apparently created a virtual-reality scenario [21].
Kenneth Ring says that abduction experiences can be regarded as a variation of the archetypal initiatory journey, with its familiar sequence of separation, ordeal, and return.
The separation stage is the abduction, with the individual usually being spirited away against his or her will. The ordeal takes the form of the medical examination, which can be compared to the dismemberment motifs in traditional shamanic initiations.
Among the Buryat of Siberia, the
shamanic apprentice is taken away by his ancestors, and then
tormented by the Saajtani, who poke around his belly with knives,
cutting whole chunks of flesh off him, and throwing them about. The
'spirits' cook his flesh to 'ripen' it, and the initiate acquires
his inner knowledge during this procedure.
They frequently suffer feelings of confusion, disorientation, time loss, and memory impairment, but there is often a sense that something extraordinary has happened that will leave a lasting imprint.
Ring argues that, like near-death
experiences, which are another variant of the initiatory journey,
abductions take place in an alternate reality -- the 'imaginal
realm'
[22].
Yet, as Keith Thompson says,
Paul Devereux mentions the intriguing work going on with DMT, the most hallucinogenic substance known.
It is produced naturally in the human brain and occurs in psychedelic plants that have been used by shamanic peoples from time immemorial. For years people who have used this substance have reported rather similar experiences, such as encountering alien intelligences.
Also noteworthy are the
experiences of a man who has experimented with trying to enter the
lucid dream state directly from the waking state. He reported that,
deep into the extreme relaxation and concentration required, he is
interrupted by the tangible experience of being 'examined in the
dark by robots' or being 'operated on by small beings'
[24].
In a similar vein, Michael Grosso interprets abductions as symbolic evidence for disturbances in the collective unconscious.
Visions of unhealthy-looking beings (the grays), who sometimes claim to come from a dying planet, who examine captives and take genetic material to create a hybrid species mean 'we are the sick ones, and ... we, as a species living on planet Earth, are in need of regeneration'.
The fetal appearance of these beings suggests the child, the continuity of human life. According to Grosso, 'The "new man," the future of the species, is in great danger -- our future is threatened with extinction. ...
If we learn to cooperate with the
forces of rebirth, we may yet rise from the "examination table,"
resuscitated from our planetary near-death experience'
[25].
References to human interaction with:
Some of these entities were believed to kidnap people and subject them to stressful and surreal ordeals. 'Aliens' seem to be part of this spectrum of paranormal beings.
Fig. 10.1. An early painting of a woman being abducted by a mythical
satyr(courtesy of Keven Randle)
[1].
Some materialistic writers have argued that the 'gods' of old were really 'ancient astronauts'. There are certainly several accounts in religious writings that could be interpreted along UFO lines, though they need not involve extraterrestrials.
The biblical Book of Ezekiel, for example, opens with Ezekiel's description of how in 593 BC, on the banks of the Chebar River in Chaldea,
In its midst he saw 'the likeness of four living creatures'; each had a human form but with 4 wings and 4 faces (those of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle). In the midst of the creatures was 'something that looked like burning coals of fire'.
Beside the creatures he saw four wheels on the ground, each being 'a wheel within a wheel', and above the creatures he saw 'the likeness of a firmament, shining like crystal'. Above it was 'the likeness of a throne', above which was seated a human form surrounded by brightness.
Ezekiel fell on his face before 'the glory
of the Lord', and then heard a voice speaking to him.
In the light of modern close encounters his experience could have been partly physical and partly visionary.
Fig. 10.2. Left: The vision of Ezekiel, as interpreted by Raphael (1518) [[2].
Right: The
spaceship encountered by Ezekiel, as
interpreted by engineer Josef Blumrich (1974)
[3].
Vedic literature contains many accounts of encounters between humans
and other humanoid races, including interbreeding and abductions.
The beings are sometimes benevolent and sometimes malevolent, and
often come from other worlds. It also contains references to flying
cities, flying horse-drawn chariots, and various types of aerial
craft, some of which could vanish abruptly
[4].
The modern UFO phenomenon seems to be essentially a
space-age version of the long-standing interaction between humans
and the denizens of the psychic world. As
Jacques Vallee says, we
seem to be confronted with the reappearance of an occult current,
coloured with 'our new human biases, our preoccupation with science,
our longing for the promised land of other planets'
[5].
During periods of UFO
sightings elsewhere in the American Southwest,
Hopi Indians have
observed blue star kachinas ('spirits') in the night air above the
mesas
[8].
But some people may believe they have experienced a oneness with the Divine, made contact with their own higher selves, had an inner revelation or, alternatively, had an encounter with demonic beings [9].
Some Christian fundamentalists see UFOs as demonic, while others suspect they might be angels. If all the evidence is considered, they can be seen as sometimes the one and sometimes the other -- including everything in between!
Beginning in 1230 with the establishment of the Inquisition, stories of demonic possession and witchcraft would cause misery and death for tens of thousands of people for the next several hundred years.
The 15th-century work Malleus Maleficarum (The Witch's Hammer) set out several criteria for possession that bear a striking resemblance to modern descriptions of alien abduction. People possessed by demons were allegedly able to float through the air, communicate telepathically, and had knowledge of future events and enhanced intellectual abilities.
Witches were said to be able to pass through solid doors and walls, to fly, to steal and eat babies, to disguise themselves by taking on the shapes of other beings, and to engage in sexual orgies [10].
Thus similar
themes existed then as now, and rather than being purely imaginative
inventions they could be derived in part from actual physical or
astral experiences.
But it is interesting to note that in a 15th-century French calendar showing the tortures inflicted by demons on people they have taken, the demons are depicted piercing their victims' abdomens with long needles [11].
Fig. 10.3. A 15th-century representation of demons inflicting tortures.
From the Kalendrier des Bergiers (courtesy of Jacques
Vallee)
[12].
Priests and nuns sometimes claimed they had been seduced by succubi and incubi respectively.
Although they often awakened only after the demons were gone, nocturnal ejaculations were seen as physical evidence that the demons were collecting sperm for interbreeding purposes.
Nuns began to claim they had been raped in the night by incubi and injected with sperm collected by the demons.
Once such tales became popularized, many townspeople began to have similar experiences, with certain events occurring in a specific order. As time passed, the act of having sex with demons came to be seen as a definite sign of witchcraft. Women claiming this experience were arrested and their bodies examined for any scars or marks that would indicate the presence of their demonic lovers.
Some of them were then executed [13].
Fig. 10.4. An incubus straddling the chest of a sleeping victim
(courtesy of Kevin Randle)
[14].
Clearly, nocturnal emissions alone hardly amount to evidence of sex with demons!
In some cases, tales about incubi and succubi may well have been rationalizations of forbidden sexual impulses arising from enforced celibacy. But this does not explain everything. Many countries have traditions of similar attacks, sometimes called 'old hag' attacks, which are characterized by paralysis and a feeling that someone is pressing down on the sleeping person.
Nowadays, such experiences are simply attributed to 'sleep paralysis', but giving a phenomenon a scientific-sounding label is not the same as explaining it. It may be that during the transition between waking and sleeping, people are more susceptible to receiving impressions from the inner self or other astral entities, of a high or low nature.
Some of the descriptions of 'demonic' attacks, past and present,
suggest that sexual interaction with ethereal entities is quite
possible, and sometimes these entities can assume a visible or
tangible form.
She added that there is a 'ghastly
connection' between the 'spirit' husbands and wives of mediums and
the fauns, satyrs, incubi, succubi, sylphs, nymphs, and
'elementaries' reported by medieval mystics and kabalists
[15].
In particular, the astral souls of humans of a particularly lustful and malicious nature (known as 'elementaries') may be conscious after death, especially if their lives have been cut short. Largely devoid of reason, they follow their animal instincts and try to cling to material life by vampirizing the living.
Such 'demons' can become tangible and visible by attracting matter from the surrounding atmosphere, from the body of the victim if the latter is a medium, or from any other person in whom there is little cohesion of the lower elements, possibly as a result of some disease.
Ethereal
attackers can also be generated by the victim's own intense
imagination, or they may be sorcerers or black magicians who have
the power of projecting their astral forms
[17].
After his death, his astral form became attracted to her, and as she was of a mediumistic temperament, he found the necessary conditions to become partly materialized. It required a long-continued effort of her will and a course of treatment before she finally managed to rid herself of the incubus [18].
Evans Wentz heard of a case involving a
man who was in love with a 'fairy woman' who visited him every
night. Finally he became so worn out that he began to fear her. To
escape, he emigrated to America, but she continued to haunt him
there
[19].
The
mother and her eldest son also reported seeing 2 dark solid figures
with oriental faces in the bedroom, at times struggling with one
another. In addition, the mother claimed that on several occasions
she was sexually assaulted by 3 semivisible beings who left large
black-and-blue marks on her body
[20].
Jacques Vallee says that most of the entities encountered in early UFO sightings during the last half century fall into 2 main groups:
These types have since been largely displaced by
the widely publicized grays.
There are stories of them stealing or borrowing things from humans, especially food, helping with domestic chores, entering into bargains, deceiving or attacking travellers, and guarding or revealing treasures.
As in some modern alien encounters, they were sometimes seen pailing water from streams and wells. There are also stories of them threatening, pinching, beating, paralyzing, blinding, and even killing human witnesses.
In other stories they
would place humans in trances, play pranks, and then flee, climb to
a cloud, or simply vanish. Physical evidence, such as footprints,
was sometimes reported in connection with such incidents.
Fairies were usually regarded as nonhuman nature-spirits (elementals), or as the 'spirits' of the dead (decaying astral shells or corpses of discarnate humans, rather than genuine human souls).
Sometimes they
were regarded as fallen angelic beings who had been exiled from
heaven. They were considered to have ethereal bodies that were
normally invisible, though perceptible by clairvoyants.
Like modern aliens, they often worked at night, and showed great interest in reproductive matters: they allegedly seduced humans and gave birth to their offspring. There are numerous accounts of abductions by fairies. Many people claimed to have been kidnapped and taken to their underground palaces.
Some men returned with bizarre tales of having been forced to mate with the fairy queen. The fairies would also kidnap females, especially pregnant women or young mothers, and steal healthy children, sometimes substituting a child of their own, known as a 'changeling'.
This belief is found not only in Europe but also in
China and the American Pacific.
He concluded that many
changelings were so called merely because of some bodily deformity
or because of some abnormal mental or pathological characteristics
capable of ordinary rational explanation, but that other cases
involving a change of personality were often best explained by
possession
[22].
They are
sometimes associated with strange lights in the sky. Ikals are said
to fly, attack people, and, in the modern reports, carry a kind of
rocket on their backs and kidnap Indians. Occasionally people have
been paralyzed when they came upon the ikals
[23].
Malaysian tradition assigns the strange female to a group of
beings called Bunians, who are known for abducting children. They
are not associated with UFOs
[24].
In American Indian folklore, Trickster is an essentially formless entity, usually called Coyote, Raven, or Hare, which plays all sorts of tricks on other animals and on humans.
He is often involved in animal and human mutilations --
decapitating, skinning, and eviscerating his victims. He is even
described as coring out the anus of animals -- a staple feature of
cattle mutilation reports
[25].
The contacteés are rather like modern prophets; some of them had face-to-face meetings with benign beings in a remote spot, sometimes even in the desert, while a saucer hovered nearby, whereas others received messages telepathically.
The messages tended to be high in ethical and prophetic content, with appeals for humans to change their ways before the coming apocalypse.
Many contacteés emerged
with heightened psychic abilities and spiritual awareness, only to
face harassment, ridicule, and scorn from 'nonbelievers'. Some of
the more famous 1950s contacteés ended up feeling betrayed by the
space brothers when their prophecies failed to be fulfilled.
In the 6th century AD, an Arabian man called Mohammed had a vision of the Angel Gabriel 'in the likeness of a man, standing in the sky above the horizon'.
He was ordered to become a
prophet, and over a number of years he would periodically go into
trance and dictate messages, which were later compiled to form the
Koran
[28].
Abductees speak of being confined in quarters usually termed dank, oppressive, and dimly lit.
The landed 'saucer' becomes a scene of
traditional underworld torments, a prison of suffering inflicted by
primeval demons. Both contacteés and abductees often report finding
their encounter experience transformative, along the lines of a
cosmic rite of passage. And while the space brothers, with their
handsome human forms, are akin to angels of light, the sinister 'men
in black' correspond to angels of darkness.
Its higher reaches merge into the akashic or spiritual realms. The astral light is sometimes called 'nature's picture gallery', as it contains a record of everything that has ever happened on earth, both in the present evolutionary cycle and in past cycles.
Since it
records thoughts, emotions, and deeds of every conceivable quality,
it comprises everything from the collective 'unconscious' to the
collective superconscious.
In theosophy, 3 kingdoms of elementals are generally distinguished, which are placed below the mineral kingdom.
This means that the consciousness-centers (or monads) manifesting as elementals are in the earliest stages of their evolutionary growth, and still have to pass through the other kingdoms of nature: i.e. the mineral, vegetable, animal, human, and 3 superhuman (or dhyani-chohanic) kingdoms.
From another standpoint, there are 7
kingdoms of elementals, as there are elementals associated with each subplane (or cosmic element), in increasing grades of ethereality or
spirituality.
Although they do not possess self-consciousness, conscience, or free will, those associated with the higher subplanes can display a degree of intelligence. Most elementals have no permanent form of their own, and can change shape with great rapidity.
They adopt shapes (and also clothing) that mirror the pictures and thought-forms existing in their environment, including human minds. The higher elementals may take the form of beasts, either living or extinct, and those on the mental plane tend to assume a more or less human shape. Some elementals are said to be hostile towards humans, and others friendly.
The elementals of the air are the most dangerous, because
of their close connection with the desire part of the human
constitution
[30].
Superhuman
entities associated with the 3 highest kingdoms of nature inhabit
the higher astral or akashic realms.
The earth is also
subject to influences from other planets and solar systems and some
of these could at times be involved in UFO manifestations. Only an
advanced adept could speak with certainty on such matters.
During such phenomena, the medium and other sitters
are often 'vampirized' to some extent by the astral entities
involved; the elements required for the materialization are drawn
from their bodies, depleting their vitality. In alien encounters,
too, less-developed astral entities -- whether they manifest
physically or not -- may feed off the emanations of witnesses,
including intense emotions of fear and pain, especially if the
witnesses are at all mediumistic.
In such areas geomagnetic and electromagnetic conditions may be more conducive to astral manifestations.
It is significant that more UFO sightings occur during periods of intense magnetic activity and in areas characterized by magnetic disturbances and anomalies. Many sightings also occur around reservoirs, lakes and rives (water being a concentrated form of etheric energy).
There may be various factors at work which cause
astral visitations to become easier or more difficult at periodic
intervals.
The possibility that genuine extraterrestrials who have evolved on other physical planets or even on nonphysical planets are visiting earth cannot be ruled out.
However, the incredible diversity of entities
and their often weird and eccentric behavior suggest that the
majority are temporary manifestations of shape-shifting elemental
entities, moulded by pictures in the earth's thought-atmosphere.
Their craft, too, may be temporary manifestations modeled on astral
images rather than the product of a technology that has evolved on
some other planet.
In fact most ufologists
prefer to ignore such accounts and their parallels with UFO
encounters so that they can continue to propagate the modern,
space-age myth of extraterrestrial visitations.
But there is little doubt that
many people have had genuine strange experiences in which they enter
an altered state of consciousness and see visions that incorporate
patterns of archetypal themes and images, drawn from the collective
psyche and modified by contemporary cultural obsessions and
individual preconceptions.
There is no reason to think that there is a single intelligence or consciousness behind it. It is an agglomeration of many things, from spontaneous manifestations of playful elemental lifeforms, to phenomena orchestrated by unseen intelligences, not necessarily benevolent. We are witnessing projections from the multilayered mind of Gaia, of which our own minds are one facet.
The answer to UFO encounters appears to lie not
so much in the stars as in ourselves.
The military must often
look on helplessly while strange lights circle round their
installations and leave their jet fighters standing. Most scientists
are happy to dismiss and ridicule the whole phenomenon as it does
not fit into their narrow conceptions of reality.
The UFO
phenomenon deserves to be investigated with a critical but open
mind. Or as one 'alien' reportedly said: 'You should believe in us
-- but not too much!'
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