I can never forget the moment in February of 1986 when I turned away from a group of visitors who were waiting for me in a clearing near our house. The moment my hand touched the doorknob to go back in the house, there came from above the woods three cries, which I have described as the most perfect and yet most emotionally complex sounds I have ever heard. If a machine had emotions, this is what it would sound like.
On other occasions as well, I have noticed a strange sense of perfection attaching to sounds and movements made by the visitors. It is really uncanny, and every time I see it, the idea that I am dealing with a conscious machine comes to mind.
One of them once made a very telling comment to a close encounter witness. It told her, “We rearrange atoms.”
This is the holy grail of technology. If we could do that, we could make anything into anything. We could create completely novel materials. We could, in effect, do anything. I think that they may be able to do this naturally, because of the way their mental processes work. If they are seeing the world, as it were, from within, it’s not too hard to believe that they might also be able to change it from within as easily as we rearrange flowers in a vase.
Another suggestion that this may be true comes from that much maligned phenomenon, the crop circles. Of course some of them are manmade. There’s no secret about that. But many are not—which, because of how unlikely an unknown origin seems, is a matter for debate. Some of the earlier formations, such as the Julia Set laid down beside Stonehenge one afternoon in 1996, followed shortly after by the Triple Julia at Windmill Hill the same year, were intricately devised fractals. Many formations reflect geometric principles and mathematical formulae, but these early ones, astonishingly intricate, are hard to disprove as anomalies. Like almost the entire body of such formations, they illustrate math and geometry. Only a very few are images.
Is this because they are being made by somebody who thinks first in math and, therefore, is attempting communication with it, but in ways that we can see with our output-related brains and, hopefully, interpret? It seems possible to me. Perhaps it also explains why the first scientist not hidden behind the wall of secrecy who has received information from them is one of the world’s leading mathematicians and received his information in the form of a mathematical formula.
One approach is not better or worse than the other, but they are going to result in radically different ways of understanding the world. If I am right, then this difference is fundamental to the communications gap that exists between us and is likely to be the primary reason that they are not more present in our lives. They cannot communicate coherently with us until we—and by this, I mean both sides—have a clear idea of what the differences are between the ways we see and understand the world.
The reason we use an output strategy is that our dense, complex bodies need to see the world in a practical, useful way. If we utilized an input strategy, we might have a more accurate view of reality, but we are not going to be able to find food very easily at all. Perhaps our visitors, less dense, don’t have many physical needs, maybe none. They thus have had no reason to evolve an output-first strategy. Based on my observation of them, of how they react to me and how they reacted to so many people who wrote us letters about contact with them, I think it’s possible that that they really do see the underlying truth first, then—and only if necessary for some functional reason—the outcome. This would mean that they would see first the forces and math that lies behind the apple, and only if necessary the actual form.
I have no way of proving this, but when I see the differences between how I and they react to the world around us, I think that it could be the fundamental reason that we are so different.
I know of one case of a human being who has ended up using an input strategy, so I know that this is possible. This is the case of Jason Dwain Padgett. After a severe beating in December of 2002 he woke up in the hospital seeing the world as math. In other words, the beating caused him to experience what is known as “acquired savant syndrome.” Instead of seeing an apple, he found himself seeing the math behind it in fractal form. He had acquired mathematical synesthesia. In his 2014 book Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel, he describes his new perceptual perspective. Linda Moulton Howe has interviewed him, and some of his remarkable fractal drawings that appear on her website Earthfiles.com offer, I would think, an idea of how the visitors see reality. If so, then the gap between us is profound.
To attempt to bridge it, they also transmit information through images and by making reference to natural processes, using them as examples of what they mean to convey. In other words, they communicate in a very ancient way, which is similar to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. It is as if they must find things in the world around them that fit the concepts they are trying to communicate, and I don’t think that they would need to do that unless they were translating a vision that is founded in the underlying structures of reality into one that has meaning at the level of outcome.
If this is true, then it is this fundamental difference in the way our minds work that is generating the massive communications gap that we actually see. As will be seen later, they have come up with some clever strategies that do allow reliable and even rich communications, but they don’t involve sitting down across a table and conversing as we might among ourselves.
As this book is about beings and things that cannot now be detected and measured, it is about rejected knowledge. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t true, though. Voltaire dismissed fossils as fish bones tossed aside by travelers. The possibility of heavier than air travel was definitively denied by Lord Kelvin in 1895. Similarly now, the existence of the unknown that defines my own life and the lives of many others is denied.
It’s too easy to attribute this simply to the nature of intellectual culture. It goes deeper than that, all the way back to the issue of our use of output strategies.
In my experience and that of so many people, the visitors are real. The dead are conscious entities. Communicating with both is neither a mystery nor a miracle. But because there is nothing here to measure, at least not yet, it’s impossible to prove these things using established scientific method. Therefore, they cannot be entered into the canon of events that are considered “real.” My intent here isn’t to offer that proof. It will come in its own time and in its own way. What I can do is describe how I have learned to use it and how this has enabled me to open access for myself to aspects of the greater world of which we are a part.
Looking back on what I was before I found the visitors in my life in comparison with what I am now, it is hard to recognize the plodding, frightened, wary man of those days. Their coming devastated me but also freed me. Had I not decided to challenge the fear that the 1985 incident left me with, I would never have been able to move on. I had been violated, and I was angry. But walking out of Dr. Donald Klein’s office after the session with him that brought it all together, I thought to myself that I wanted to continue the adventure. I just wanted to.
When I published Communion, it was easy for the close encounter experience to be scorned. While it can still be dismissed, it is now much harder to do what was done then and claim that the witnesses are simply delusional. The letters that Anne collected tell a story not of mental illness but of normal people having a tremendous variety of unusual experiences, which all center around one basic event: the approach and presence of small people with large, staring eyes and outsized heads, often accompanied by those dark blue trolls. As often as not, as happened in my case, dead people who appear to be alive are present as well.
The descriptions people have left of what happens to them next forms one of the most complex narratives of human experience ever recorded.
But is there any hard evidence? Any at all?
Aside from the many cases of multiple-witness experience, including some stellar ones at the cabin where I had my experiences, I cannot point to anything so telling as a video of aliens carting some
body off. On a personal basis, I have tried for years and in many different ways to obtain video or photographic evidence. I have studied many videos and had some particularly promising ones professionally analyzed. There are three that are compelling, two of which are almost certainly authentic. Neither of them portrays the sort of entities that are described in the literature, and that so many of us have seen. Instead, they show extremely strange looking stick-figures walking carefully along. The videos can be found by going to Unknowncountry.com, opening the search engine, going to the Out There section and searching on the term “stick figure.”
While genuine footage of otherworldly entities would appear to be quite rare, this isn’t to say that there exists no hard evidence of anomalous objects or materials that could be related to the close encounter narrative in some way. There is a great deal of UFO video, including video of similar objects taken at different places and times around the world. Moreover, releases of US Navy video over 2017 and 2018 has affirmed that UFOs are a genuine unknown phenomenon. In September of 2019, the Navy stated that these are indeed unknown objects. But are they spacecraft belonging to aliens? Possibly. They may also be intrusions from another reality, which is an important possibility to explore. Or they may be something so unknown to us that we simply cannot identify it in any meaningful way at present. I don’t see much evidence that they belong to an earthly foreign power. The reason is that there is so much good video going back years. If any country had devices of such incredible power, our world would not be as it is now.
In support of the idea that another reality might be involved—a parallel universe—there exist in the public record some high level analyses of metal from a UFO that has proved to have isotopic ratios that not only are not of Earth, but that cannot be generated in this universe at all, not unless there are areas of it operating under such different laws of physics from this one that they might as well be another universe.
What we are encountering might be aliens from this universe, sure. Having laid in their arms and gazed into their very strange faces, I could believe that. However, after all these years of experience with them, while physical aliens may be a component of the experience, I see it as being primarily something that has a different relationship to reality than we do. In order to avoid identifying them with a label that may not be accurate, I have always called them, simply, visitors. Throughout this book I will continue with that convention. I think, though, that there is also a greater presence behind them, or perhaps something entirely different, that has played an even larger role in our development than they have. This I will call “the presence.”
Engagement with the visitors amounts to a new kind of experience. There is a gap between us and them, which, I think, has to do with the difference in the way each side is part of reality. If they have evolved on another planet in this universe, they can certainly be expected to look, act and think differently from us. Add to that capabilities such as the ability to become invisible that seem like magic to us, and the issue of how to understand them becomes very large. Are they aliens with skills such as the ability to become invisible, or are they not from this universe at all and using some natural means or technological skill to penetrate into it?
Those are the sort of questions that we cannot really address without more data, but until the wall of secrecy that surrounds what we do know is breached, at least to some degree, we are not going to be able to address them meaningfully.
On rare but important occasions in our history, the larger presence that seems to be behind all this has made an appearance that has changed the world. All of these instances have had to do with religion and have involved the establishment of the idea that there is a single god. Because they have involved flashes of light, strange fires or shining beings, I call them “incidents of light.”
The journey began when the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten came to believe that the sun itself was god and was the only god. This was followed by a number of more direct interventions.
Sometime around 1500 BC, a Persian, Zarathustra Spitama, who was wandering in the countryside seeking enlightenment, came upon a shining figure that called himself Vohu Mana, who proceeded to teach him that god, while a single entity, was divided into two forms, order and chaos. Zarathustra spent the rest of his life trying to get people to worship order. Somewhat later, Moses encountered the burning bush, which directed him to lead the people of Israel into the land of Canaan. Then Paul the Apostle, shortly after the death of Jesus, encountered a glowing orb on the road to Damascus and became the first gentile advocate for Christianity. Later still, Mohammed found himself being taught by a glowing angel in a cave, and Islam was born.
While I wouldn’t advocate that any of these incidents of light happened as described in the ancient sources, they represent the importance of light to the human mind and, I believe, reflect some sort of deep intention that seeks to bring to mankind an ever more coherent vision of the sacred, and a more and more useful understanding of morality.
Unless the incident at Fatima in 1917 when the sun danced before 50,000 people qualifies as an incident of light, for the most part we see individual creatures, generally small and surpassingly strange. Our visitors can and do take us into their own eerie realm and have been doing this occasionally for eons, as the many stories of such abductions in the literature of the fairy-faith will attest. Something changed dramatically in the mid-20 th century, though, as now we have not a few stories of enigmatic abductions but thousands and thousands of them being recorded by people all over the world. This is not a continuation of the fairy-faith. It is similar, but the scale is much larger. It’s huge.
This is the reality we are now facing. It leads to the question that forms the heart of this book: How are we to understand this? What is contact, and what sort of change is it bringing to us and our world? For it is bringing change, most certainly. Great change, even staggering change.
3
Why Certain People?
Is it that only certain people notice the presence of the visitors, or that only certain people are approached by them? One thing that became clear to Anne and me when we were getting letters was that contact is a family affair. Often, the experience runs in families. Surprisingly, there were some reports of witnesses being told during experiences that they were members of the visitors’ family, or they felt that this was the case.
Sometimes, though, the experience simply comes out of nowhere. An example came from a witness in Australia, who wrote, “In 1976 I was vacuuming my living room floor at about noon. I felt quite ill and thought I was going to vomit, so I sat down on the couch to see if the sick feeling would subside. I then saw that I was not alone; there were three strange little people standing alongside the couch, just looking at me. Two of them were short and fat, about four to four and a half feet tall, with broad faces and enormous black eyes, but with only a hint of where a nose or mouth might have been.” She goes on to say that they were wearing brown clothing and seemed to her to be workers. There was another one there who was about five feet tall and “wore a black shroud and had black wispy hair at the back of her head. Her face was very elongated with huge, dark, piercing eyes…” They demanded that she go with them. When she resisted, there followed a sort of mental tug of war, which finally ended when she thought her husband had come home and saved her. But when he really did return, four hours had inexplicably passed. She concludes with a statement that is also a cry from the heart of every close encounter witness I have ever known, “I wonder, where did that time go?”
Nothing ever recovered it for her, no discussion, no regressive hypnosis, nothing. She died some years later with the mystery still unsolved.
A third type of encounter that happens from time to time is one that is intentionally induced by the witness. I first heard of this from Marie “Bootsie” Galbraith, who had prepared a selection of cases that was distributed as The UFO Briefing Document: The Best Available Evidence, financed by Laurence Rockefeller and repub
lished in my Dell Books Hidden Agendas series. Bootsie told of some successful efforts to “call in” UFOs using laser pointers, but these did not lead to close encounters.
Sometimes they do, and if communication becomes more orderly, I think that this might work more often. However, it comes with a warning. In her book Extraterrestrial Contact, Mutual UFO Network Director of Experiencer Research Kathleen Marden reports the case of “Matt,” who became curious about UFOs after seeing one on the runway of the small airport he owned. He first signaled his interest by flashing an old navy signal light then by making an X with red rope lights on his runway. This worked to an extent, but he got the strongest reaction by aiming a laser pointer into the sky and clicking it on and off. He was soon seeing craft on his runway, but when he pointed the laser light at them, they would drop slightly then rush at him, flashing multicolored lights. His final experiment with this caused hemorrhages to pour from his nose and ears and ended his willingness to try this approach.
However, the visitors remained interested in him, and he found himself confronting the entities themselves, creatures similar in appearance to what the Australian witness saw. He could not stop the visitations, which became increasingly menacing. He began sleeping with a pistol in his hand. One night, he woke up to see a six-foot-tall entity standing at the foot of his bed. He fired the pistol at it, causing it to disappear in a flash of light, leaving behind a yellow substance spattered on the floor. Unfortunately, he was too distraught to collect it for analysis. There followed a shift into a sinister haunting, elements of which, like some of the events on his runway, were witnessed by other people.
After his family staged an intervention to force him into psychiatric treatment, his mother witnessed, with him, a different version of the world at the end of his runway, a savannah where wooly mammoths were grazing. A year of bizarre events and visitations made him feel as if he were living in a sort of hell. He began to see horrific entities and suffered a profound decline in his health. Just as Kathleen Marden was attempting to organize support from a sympathetic minister, he was hospitalized and died.
A New World Page 4