UFOs- Reframing the Debate

by Robbie Graham

  The environmental issues related to “fracking” have made headlines in recent years. Did you know it may be relatively easy to trigger such luminous phenomena? There’s been research into this since at least 1992 with fluid injection causing luminous phenomena.12 It seems highly likely that various human agencies have noticed this and may be using this to their advantage.

  Another researcher whose books I’ve been really fascinated by and who cites all the medical and electromagnetic literature on the physiological and consciousness effects of such EM fields is Albert Budden. His book is called Allergies and Aliens: The Electromagnetic Indictment. You may have heard about people who are hypersensitive to chemicals: they can’t get near the fumes of gas, or various other types of chemicals cause them extreme reactions. Well, there are also people who are electromagnetically hypersensitive who can’t wear a watch, can’t be near computers, can’t be under 60 Hz frequency fluorescent lighting. His contention is that the phenomena represent the collective unconscious trying to, as several other people have suggested, make us believe in them but that it’s a result of electro pollution. Another aspect of his “Electro-Staging” hypothesis is the phenomenon’s ability, like a poltergeist, to manipulate telekinetically the physical environment and use everything from water vapor to dust particles to larger size physical objects to cobble together a physical form through which to interact with the witness. He says, “the unconscious responds to external geo-generated EM fields during altered states of consciousness and presents perceptions and realities that are dramatizations of alien contact in order to establish an acceptance of the unconscious within society.”13

  Paul Devereux speaks of humanity’s Shamanism technology—lost techniques for accessing the world around us. He and others have documented the worldwide belief that Balls-Of-Light represent disembodied consciousness and spirits. Certain classes of BOL accounts are closely associated with miners and the earth’s interior. Within all the UFO-lore and the contactee stories, whether it’s belief in some kind of ascended masters under Mount Shasta or ideas about Shambhala or the Vril, or even in the science fiction pulp of Shaver and Ray Palmer, there is this consistent imagery of inner earth mythology. I believe this and other Gaian overtones are due to the probable source—the earth herself.

  The buzzing sounds associated with UFO close encounters and the hive mindedness of the beings reminds me of ancient traditions that deal with the oracular, the dispensation of prophecy and wisdom from the gods.14 Their messengers were often heard in association with the buzzing of bees. I think it’s not just the electromagnetic technological aspect of the sound but that there is obvious symbolism there that points to this idea of the hive, like the bees, and this hive mindedness; this hierarchy that is so often evident in the Theosophical traditions of so many esoteric groups, whether it’s the Ashtar Command and the various levels of their command structure and ascended masters and white lodges. I think, perhaps, these are reflections of the onion-like layers of Jung’s collective unconscious and more than merely analogous to the hierarchical taxonomy of biological classification.

  One of the most important things that abduction researcher Karla Turner added to the dialog on UFO abduction reports was the idea of the Virtual Reality Scenario.15 She talked about this a lot in her lectures and gave examples where the abductee, the experiencer, would see and experience one thing, but nearby witnesses would see something quite different but still anomalous and weird.

  There are a few examples of this in the literature where the researcher followed the abductee as they drove somewhere and watched them sit and never leave their car, but later on the experiencer would relate that, “Oh, the UFO came down, and I had this experience.” It’s not that these people are necessarily lying. They seem to have had some sort of fugue-like state, some kind of Out-of-Body-Experience. So many of the descriptions of these close encounters have the quality of OBEs. Karla Turner also believed that “abductees report alien-controlled information” and this alien Other force controls the perceptions of the experiencer.

  Back in the 1990s, Rupert Sheldrake’s book, A New Science of Life, was declared by Nature as “the best candidate for burning there has been for many years.”16 More recently his lecture was initially banned from the TED-Talks YouTube channel. I find a lot of the ideas that Sheldrake has espoused really important in trying to understand UFOs and related phenomena. His ideas about fields (not the physical electromagnetic fields that we’ve been talking about) involves looking at them more as an abstract idea. I think that they have relevance to the realms of Psi and remote viewing, Jung’s Collective Unconscious, and Aldous Huxley’s Mind-at-Large. I’ve often tried to put it this way: To me, morphic fields and morphic resonance theory are akin to the various esoteric ideas about the Akashic records and the collective unconscious. I suspect that pretty much any idea can be its own field and that such fields can be accessed non-locally by consciousness. I’m reminded of the famous incident where former military remote viewer of much ill repute, Ed Dames, was fooled into remote viewing a mythical character, but thought it was a Soviet missile attack because, well, he perceived that there was some metal object rocketing across the North Pole. It was red, and it was heading to the United States so of course, he saw it as a Soviet missile attack. But what had he been tasked with remote viewing? Santa Claus! If something as unreal or as quasi-real as Santa Claus can be remote viewed, well, then that pretty much means to me that these Akashic fields can be tapped, and I suspect that may be one way of communicating across vast distances in a way that we think of SETI doing but without the electromagnetic radio waves. Vallée suggested as much in his 1992 book, UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union: A Cosmic Samizdat, when he spoke of the Soviet technique of “biolocation,” or biological-field dowsing.17

  British UFOlogist Jenny Randles coined the phrase the “Oz Factor,” which is “a sort of inner tuning, as the percipient’s mind blocks out attention to all external sounds in order to note the message that is about to bombard his or her consciousness.” Again, I think this has relevance to Sheldrake’s species field. Within at least two of her books, Mind Monsters18 and Beyond Explanation,19 and within her UFO newsletter,20 she put forth this idea of Synchronistic Reality Mode and the ability for the human mind to take in this anomalous information in a parapsychological way and create a virtual reality telepresence experience.

  We’re now moving into a time when we’ve got this technology ourselves, in our pockets. Here is an artist’s rendering of someone wearing eyeglasses like Google Glass [not pictured in this essay, but described as follows]. In this example the person is getting information about somebody who is buried in a cemetery in the form of a “hologram” standing in front of them that looks rather like a ghost, but it’s simply them interacting with some kind of informational field, and it’s projecting information into an augmented reality, a virtual reality created by the glasses they are wearing. There’s an App for that! You can get an app for your smartphone that will use your phone’s GPS coordinate data with other databases to see if somebody has tagged the area where you are located with metadata. Then your app can extract that, and it can be displayed as an overlay with your phone’s camera display. Perhaps this is the same way that people, when they go into haunted houses, may be tapping into some kind of informational field that’s present and accessing past experiences embedded in that field.

  I think that the phenomena can be interacted with in a way that’s more akin to that portrayed in Carl Sagan’s book and movie Contact where Jodie Foster’s character experiences a very vividly real feeling of meeting with an extraterrestrial, except that it appears to her in the form of something that she can more easily comprehend. Instead of using radio waves, there is some other kind of biological field that can be tapped into and we can experience these things as perceptually real, and they may be from real beings somewhere else, or they could be right here just one dimension over. Or perhaps they are undetectable to us because they are part of a
mirror world left-handed molecular ecosystem.21

  I suspect that the UFO phenomenon represents a transpersonal virtual reality communications channel. These various altered states of consciousness facilitate anomalous information transfer, facilitate telepathy, remote viewing, and other forms of ESP. They are the interface mechanism for us to receive and transmit messages from not just our own collective unconscious and the archetypes, but to experience the collective consciousness of other beings and other intelligences, other species on this planet and elsewhere.

  Jenny Randles expressed that very possibility as a thought experiment on the UFO UpDates email list back in 2000:

  Aliens are in contact but not actually coming to earth. They are only capable of long range probes that treat abductees like receiving radio telescopes. These ‘psychic’ people are used to communicate, extract information about us and engage in inter-species relationships at a deep level of our inner selves. As such the aliens are real, the contact with them not physical, the experience of contact subjective, but reflective in a psycho-social sense of the ‘mental rape’ being conducted (hence the extent to which these experiences are visualized and dramatized in this way).22

  Dennis Stillings edited one of my favorite UFO books that has the greatest title ever, Cyberbiological Studies of the Imaginal Component in the UFO Contact Experience.23 Cyberbiology is defined as “consciousness-related aspects of relations to ourselves, and to other systems, including the environment.” This idea that somehow we are in a biofeedback type relationship with the phenomenon led me several years ago to write:

  The UFO phenomenon exists in a synergistic cybernetic interface with humanity. Whatever the true nature of UFOs, they interact with us within several different milieus, all of which are influenced by the media and culture. This media and culture in turn feeds back into the phenomena in a continuous cycle.24

  Through his editorial choice of essays, Stillings is supporting this idea that we’re dealing with some sort of cyberbiological planetary poltergeist.

  Another writer/researcher is retired colonel Thomas Bearden, who wrote a really fascinating book called The Excalibur Briefing.25 He, too, describes the onion-like aspect of the collective unconscious or the Akashic records and this idea that we could be interacting through this phenomenon—through the transpersonal channel that I’ve been trying to describe here—with various aspects of our own individual unconscious, the collective unconscious of the entire species or, as he breaks it down, to family, city, state, creed, nation, race, geographical area, species, biosphere, and the universal. Bearden expounds on the intricate physics he believes scientifically prove the Tulpoidal mechanism of this planetary poltergeist idea; that our collective anxieties are psychically manifesting in a worldwide type of poltergeist activity that causes physical manifestations.

  I think that there are these hierarchies and at any of those levels there could be a variety of independently operating consciousnesses that we could be interacting with. I really think that it’s quite possible that the reason we experience these apparent alien others as insectoid is because their ultimate origin could be the collective species unconscious of the insect kingdom. I mean, my God, we are committing insecticide every day. It would seem to be in their best interest to try to convince us to stop damaging the ecology of the planet.

  Another area relevant to the connection between humanity’s collective anxieties and UFO contact phenomena is the work done by courageous ethnologists and anthropologists on UFO encounter and alien abduction narratives. There has been a number of theses and dissertations done on this that deal with the idea that what we’re seeing in the narratives is not so much a reflection of physical, real encounters but that they are a reflection of societal problems that are going on. Anthropologist and Adjunct Lecturer at Florida International University, Dr. Steven Mizrach, wrote a very controversial article back in the 1990s called UFO Abductions and Race Fear.26 He was expounding upon the work of James Pontolillo: Demons, Doctors, and Aliens: An Exploration Into the Relationships Among Witch Trial Evidence, Sexual-Medical Traditions, and Alien Abductions, which was put out by the International Fortean Organization in 1993. Susan Lepselter, Associate Professor within Indiana University’s Anthropology Department, did her dissertation here in Austin, Texas on The Poetics of the Uncanny. It is a fascinating read and has just been published by Michigan University Press as The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny. Also of relevance to issues of race, captivity narratives and power role reversal is the dissertation, Taken: Constructions of race, biology, and Colonialism Informing the Alien Abduction Narrative in the United States by Carol Suzanne Matthews, University of Kansas (2001).

  If there is such a worldwide phenomenon of earth energies that is tied into some sort of GeoPsyche and that is connected to our collective anxieties, could that channel (and the earth energy organelle programs of socio-cultural control flowing through it) have been hijacked by human agencies for nefarious purposes?

  Another classic quote from Vallée:

  I believe there is a machinery of mass manipulation behind the UFO phenomenon. It aims at social and political goals by diverting attention from some human problems and by providing a potential release for tensions caused by others.

  UFOs are real. They are an application of psychotronic technology. That is they are physical devices used to affect consciousness. They may not be from outer space. They may, in fact, be terrestrial based manipulating devices. Their purpose may be to achieve social change on this planet.27

  Several years ago, Greg Bishop interviewed parapsychologist Dean Radin and they spoke about this idea of psychotronic devices and how they could affect the local geomagnetic environment in ways that affect people’s consciousness, perhaps as an unintended by-product of whatever the device is intended to do:

  … exotic military hardware—experimental gizmos—most of which is mistaken for UFOs. Some of which can indirectly (not intentionally) cause people to perceive things. You can imagine that having this gigantic electromagnetic thing hovering in the air, it changes the local environment in ways that makes people’s brains go funny. That sort of stuff apparently really does go on.28

  Michael Persinger of Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, is the researcher who proposed the Tectonic Strain Theory that is akin to Paul Devereux’s Earth Lights Hypothesis. Whereas Devereux is very much a Gaia kind of guy, Persinger is a much more materialist reductionist, hard science guy. While there are claims that his research has yet to be replicated, he’s developed what’s come to be called the God helmet, which is a series of magnets in a head-mounted device that can induce experiences similar to Out-of-Body-Experiences, as well as a sense of a felt presence similar to that described in abductions, hauntings, and close encounter-type phenomena.

  Persinger doesn’t believe there is any alien Other within these phenomena. Yet, in 1977, he and Gyslaine F. Lafrenière also put forth the idea of the GeoPsyche that, “essentially involves the interaction between large numbers of biological systems and the geomagnetic environment within which they are immersed.”29

  I should add that Persinger’s and Devereux’s earth-generated luminous phenomena ideas are not widely accepted. Another of my favorite Canadian researchers, Chris Rutkowski, has written several highly critical counter arguments to Persinger’s and Devereux’s theories that are worth considering.30

  When researching UFOs, one inevitably comes into contact with stories of mind control: tales of close encounters, telepathic contact and control, stories of electronic harassment, gaslighting, and gang stalking, etc. You’d have to have been living under a rock to have never heard of the CIA’s MKUltra project. All of these stories of alien ESP, military RV (Remote Viewing), unwitting human experimentation by government, earth energies influencing perception, led me to dig deeper into MKUltra and related projects.

  It continues to blow my mind every time I read about just how widespread these
programs were and how our government became as bad as our enemies. If you’ve never heard of Operation Paper Clip, it involved the importation of Nazi scientists from Germany after World War II. More than 1,500 of these engineers, scientists, and technicians were seeded throughout the United States educational system, across universities from one coast to the other.

  The best book I’ve found on these mind control projects is Hank Albarelli, Jr.’s, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments.31 That book is huge, and is filled with facts about the CIA’s MKUltra program. There were many subprograms—MKNAOMI, MKDELTA, Blue Bird and others. Of course, there are also the rumors that have yet to be substantiated of Project Monarch, but all of these projects had as their aim things like a truth serum, enhanced interrogation techniques, and Manchurian candidate style mind-controlled assassins.

  Albarelli also writes about how MKUltra employed magician John Mulholland to investigate psychic researcher Andrija Puharich and the famous Kelly Hopkinsville case. Which makes me wonder, were they just trying to get his assessment of cases and people that they felt were not trustworthy, or were they having him follow-up on their own mind control experiments?

  What does this have to do with UFOs? Several researchers have suggested, over the years, that some or all UFO close encounters and alien abduction experiences might be the result of continued MKUltra type research. Vallée was talking about these issues in interviews with other leading ufologists like Jerome Clark (for FATE magazine) back in 1978:

  “What we do know is that you can make people hallucinate using either lights or microwave or electromagnetic energy. You can also make them pass out; you can cause them to behave strangely, put them into shock, make them hear voices or even kill them.”32