Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience

by Colin Wilson

  He feels nevertheless that part of that ‘gnosis’ lodged deep in his mind, for he finds himself reading books and cosmology—for example, Hawking’s A Brief History of Time—and feeling he knows it all.

  In 1969, the novelist Robert Graves told me of a similar experience, which he had described in a story called ‘The Abominable Mr. Gunn’. He had been sitting on a roller behind the cricket pavilion when he received a ‘celestial illumination’, and suddenly ‘knew everything’. Graves describes it as ‘a simple method of looking sideways at disorderly facts so as to make perfect sense of them’. He could actually remember it after a night’s sleep, but it vanished as he tried to write it down, and kept crossing things out.

  Keel assumed that the experience was unique to himself until, in the 1960s, he came upon R. M. Bucke’s classic Cosmic Consciousness, in which Bucke describes how, driving home in a hansom cab, he suddenly found himself ‘wrapped in a flame-coloured cloud’ which made him assume that a nearby building was on fire. This was followed by ‘an intellectual illumination impossible to describe’ including the recognition that the whole universe is composed of living matter. The experience led Bucke to study the mystics, and to include in the book fifty studies of mystics through the ages, all of whom had had a similar experience.

  All of which would seem to indicate that what human beings need at this point in history—perhaps at any point—is something to rescue them from the tunnel vision that prevents them from grasping the extent of their ‘hidden powers’ and capabilities. It is interesting to note that the UFO experience sometimes seems to do precisely that. As, for example, in the case of Jacques Vallee’s correspondent—with whom we opened this chapter—who experienced ‘novel insights into . . . the Nature of Reality’ connected to her sighting of the shining disc.

  Bucke summarised his own conclusions:

  The simple truth is, that there has lived on the Earth, ‘appearing at intervals’, for thousands of years among ordinary men, the first faint beginnings of another race; walking the Earth and breathing the air with us, but at the same time walking another Earth and breathing another air of which we know little or nothing, but which is, all the same, our spiritual life, as its absence would be our spiritual death. This new race is in the act of being born from us, and in the near future it will occupy and possess the Earth.

  In other words, these new people exist in this same physical dimension as the rest of us, yet at the same time walk another Earth and breathe another air—as if living simultaneously in a kind of Fourth Dimension.

  [1]. See Riddle of the Future by Andrew Mackenzie, London, 1974.

  6

  THE FOURTH DIMENSION

  Vallee and Keel were not the first to recognise the connection between UFO ‘aliens’ and creatures of folklore. In the mid-1960s, an Englishman named John Michell, who had studied Russian literature at Cambridge, became fascinated by UFOs, and also by Jung’s book Flying Saucers—A Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (1958).

  Jung had spoken of the major changes that might be expected with the coming of the Age of Aquarius (due around the year 2000). In fact, he felt that the human race was on the point of a leap to a new phase of psychic evolution.

  He had noted that sceptical statements about UFOs were relatively unpopular compared with statements of belief, and reasoned from this that modern man experiences a sense of profound disquiet because of his lack of religious belief. (Jung believed that the religious impulse is as essential to man as the sexual impulse—‘the soul has a religious function’.) He attached deep importance to the mandala symbol, a circle signifying completeness (and hence an image of God), and saw the widespread belief in flying saucers as an indication of man’s longing for belief and certainty.

  In Flying Saucers, Jung appears to be saying that he believes UFOs to be a ‘projection’ of the collective unconscious of mankind—a projection being essentially a kind of hallucination, like a drunk’s visions of pink elephants. They are a projection of mankind’s longing for a saviour—or for what Jung calls individuation, a state in which all the inner conflicts of the psyche are resolved.

  John Michell’s interest in flying saucers was due partly to his interest in the environment, and the fear shared by so many in the 1950s that man might destroy himself with atomic radiation. He points out that the ‘UFO visitors’ were warning of the increasing pollution of the environment long before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring suddenly focused awareness in 1962.

  Michell’s starting point is not dissimilar to that of Erich von Däniken or Robert Temple. ‘The earliest myths describe the arrival on Earth of an extra-terrestrial race who, by their example, altered the whole course of human history . . . Once we can accept the, at first sight, fantastic idea that our present culture is an inheritance from a former visit of people from space, a great deal of what is now obscure becomes clear’.

  Evidence of these visitors from space can be found in myths, legends and folklore from all over the world. ‘The evidence of mythology provides a general account of the days when the gods were known on earth’.

  Michell notes that, according to legend, the arrival of the gods on Earth was preceded by portents in the sky, such as fiery circles. The Egyptian ‘eye of Ra’ is symbolised by a winged disc. His first book, The Flying Saucer Vision (1967), cites dozens of parallels between UFO lore and mythology, arguing, for example, that the dragon of folklore represents fiery discs in the sky.

  He is also inclined to believe that, like the fish gods of the Dogon, or the white gods who landed in South America, these ancient visitors brought wisdom to mankind; this belief has the corollary that mankind evolved very quickly, not—as Darwin believed—through slow stages. In fact, man’s brain did evolve with incredible speed—doubling in size so fast that scientists call it ‘the brain explosion’.

  The first thing that strikes the reader about The Flying Saucer Vision is the sheer range of its erudition. Michell seems not only to have read everyone from the ancient Greek geographers to modern anthropologists, but to have found much of his information in obscure byways of literature. This, he claims, was not due to a directed course of study so much as to synchronicities—Koestler’s ‘library angel’ directing his attention to books by chance.

  One of these serendipitous discoveries was the work of Alfred Watkins, the Hereford businessman who, as he was riding across country in June 1931, noticed that old churches, standing stones, barrows and hilltops were often connected by ‘old straight tracks’. Watkins called them ‘ley lines’.

  He thought these ley lines were old trade routes. But in the late 1930s, a dowser named Guy Underwood concluded that they are lines of some kind of Earth force, which is more powerful in the area of standing stones and other sacred sites—he speculated that the site was sacred because of this Earth force. Michell noted that certain areas with a high level of UFO sightings—like Warminster in Wiltshire and Glastonbury in Somerset—were often crisscrossed with ley lines, and suggested some connection. He also noted that the Chinese version of ley lines are known as dragon paths (lung mei). In effect, he was observing the tendency of UFO sightings to occur on straight lines—Aimé Michel’s ‘orthoteny’.

  Michell’s interest in UFOs caused him to turn his back on the characteristic culture of the 1950s, in which most of the fashionable intellectuals were leftists who believed that socialism would bring about the millennium. (My own first book, The Outsider, was regularly attacked by leftist intellectuals as a ‘fascist’ work, simply because it was not concerned with left-wing politics.) Instead, he pursued the subject of ley lines and sacred geometry, and his book The View Over Atlantis (1969) brought them to the attention of a wide audience, with the incidental side effect of making Glastonbury a centre of pilgrimage for ‘New Agers’.

  The wide appeal of the book was due to its romanticism. John Nicholson wrote in an essay on Michell:

  Hippies turned themselves into the new guardians of ancient skills and wisdom by rejecting industria
l society and communing at old sites, or going for mystical rambles along ley lines, keeping an eye open for UFOs. Like Red Indians, they touched the Earth and felt the stones giving off psychic energies or ‘vibes’. Some pop groups privately gave invocatory performances at the chosen time and place. It was all mixed up somehow as cosmic consciousness, and it gave many people many happy hours.[1]

  The appeal of Michell was due, in fact, to what Jung called ‘the flying saucer vision’—the power to see the world with new eyes. And here it is important to understand exactly what Jung meant. He wrote in an abstract, scientific style whose purpose was to guard against accusations of mysticism or irrationalism, and the result is that he often left a great deal unsaid. But what he left unsaid is made quite explicit by the illustrations. A painting called The Fire Sower, by E. Jakoby, shows a vast human figure towering above a city; the body and the head are made of fire, and the head, which is separated from the body, is a flaming ball that seems to be spinning on its axis. Jung comments: ‘Like an immaterial essence the fiery figure strides through the houses of the city—two worlds which interpenetrate yet do not touch’. Another painting, called The Fourth Dimension, by P. Birkhauser, shows a huge face hovering above a city. This, and other faces, look as if they are painted on a veil that hangs down in front of the city, and Jung comments: ‘This painting, like the previous one, depicts the collision of two incommensurable worlds’.

  But the clearest indication of his meaning can be found in a woodcut called The Spiritual Pilgrim Discovering Another World, which Jung believed to be a Rosicrucian work dating from the seventeenth century. In fact, later research suggested that it dates from the nineteenth century—but, in a sense, the nineteenth century, the century of romanticism, is even more appropriate. The picture shows a rainbow (or celestial sphere) arching over a pleasant land of woods and meadows, with the sun, moon and stars in the sky. But the pilgrim, crawling on hands and knees, has pushed his head through the rainbow, into a totally different world—a strange, symbolic landscape, with four great discs in the sky, two of which have spokes, and may be a reference to Ezekiel’s chariots. The pilgrim has left ‘this world’ behind, and has broken through into another reality. This is what Jung meant by ‘the flying saucer vision’.

  What Jung has done is to make absolutely clear why flying saucers have exercised such a powerful influence on the human imagination in the second half of the twentieth century. It is the romantic—and religious—craving for ‘another reality’. We are all so accustomed to struggling with the world of practical necessity—what Heidegger calls ‘the triviality of everydayness’—that most of us have come to accept that ‘that is all there is’. But, in the past few centuries, man has also developed the power of imagination. Unlike our down-to-Earth ancestors, we have all become ‘mental travellers’, and those who have never been abroad can travel in an armchair watching a television set. We have all learnt to experience escape from the triviality of everydayness through the imagination.

  However, that only sharpens the contrast between this everyday world and the world into which we ‘escape’. Our deepest secret wish is to see the real world transformed. Rimbaud claims to have taught himself how to see ‘a mosque in place of a factory, angels practising on drums, coaches on the roads of the sky, a drawing room at the bottom of a lake: monsters, mysteries’. But the increasing possibility that our planet is being visited by creatures from another world or another dimension seems to turn Rimbaud’s dream into reality. Dozens of poets and artists of the nineteenth century committed suicide because they could not believe in their own dreams. And now, in the second half of the twentieth century, it seems that the creatures of that ‘other reality’ have decided to pay us a visit. And this is also what Jung meant by ‘the flying saucer vision’.

  Now it might seem that Jung is entangling himself in hopeless contradictions. He regards UFOs as hallucinations, projections of the collective unconscious, then admits that they are visible on radar screens and in photographs. During an interview with the aviator Lindbergh in 1959, Jung made it clear that he thought flying saucers were factual, and was rather cool when Lindbergh expressed his own disbelief.

  Lindbergh quoted his friend General Spaatz (of the US Air Force): ‘Don’t you suppose if there was anything true about this flying saucer business, you and I would have heard about it by this time?’ Jung countered with, ‘There are a great many things going on around this Earth that you and General Spaatz don’t know about’.

  To disentangle all this, we need to know, to begin with, that Jung believed that the unconscious mind can produce physical effects—he called them ‘exteriorisation phenomena’. In his autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he tells how, as he and Freud were arguing about the reality of the paranormal, there was a loud explosion from the bookcase, which made both of them jump. Jung’s diaphragm had begun to glow with heat as he and Freud argued, and Jung was convinced that he had caused the effect. ‘There is an example of an exteriorisation phenomenon’, he told Freud. ‘Bosh!’ said Freud. ‘It is not’, said Jung, ‘and to prove my point, I predict that in a moment there will be another’. As he spoke there was another explosion from the bookcase.

  Jung had been studying psychical research since his teens, and had no doubt of the reality of the paranormal. One day as he sat studying his textbooks, there was a loud report from the next room. He rushed in to find that a walnut table had split from the rim to the centre. There was no obvious reason: it was a cool day, and the wood had had seventy years to dry out. Soon after, there was a loud report from the sideboard, and Jung found that the breadknife had snapped into several pieces. Jung took it to a cutler to see if he could suggest an explanation; the cutler said it looked as if someone had inserted the knife into a crack and deliberately broken it.

  Then his fifteen-year-old cousin, Helen Preiswerk, began to develop mediumistic powers. One day when the family was playing at ‘table turning’, she went into a trance, and began to speak in a voice totally unlike her own, and in literary German. When she woke up, she had a severe headache. Other ‘spirits’ later spoke through her, including a girl who chattered in a mixture of French and Italian—neither of which Helen could speak. Later, Helen was taken over by a woman who called herself Ivenes, and who claimed to be ‘the real Helen Preiswerk’. She was obviously far more mature and intelligent than Helen. Eventually, Helen became a dressmaker, and she died at the age of thirty.

  In the fifth chapter of Flying Saucers: A Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, Jung points out that radar sightings do not prove conclusively that UFOs are spaceships, because there are cases where they are seen yet not picked up on radar, and cases where they are picked up on radar but cannot be seen. All this, of course, was written in 1958, when the erratic behaviour of UFOs was not fully recognised—although Jung admits that some cases are so weird that he prefers not to mention them. It was after that time that investigators like Jacques Vallee and John Keel became aware of their ‘psychic’ aspects. It seems fairly clear that Jung was actually the first to grasp intuitively the strangely dual nature of UFOs.

  This again is underlined by his choice of illustrations—particularly The Fourth Dimension. In the early twentieth century, the notion of the fourth dimension—a dimension at right angles to length, breadth and height—was immensely popular, largely due to the works of the mathematician Charles Hinton. Many scientists believed that it was merely the limitations of the human mind that prevented us from seeing it, and a mathematician named Johan von Manen actually claimed to have had a kind of vision of a four-dimensional cube and sphere. Then Einstein suggested that the fourth dimension was simply another name for time. After all, if you agree to meet someone at a particular spot in a city, you not only have to specify where to meet them—in the second-floor lounge of a hotel on the corner of Third Avenue and Twenty-first Street—but what time, otherwise the other three-dimensional coordinates are useless.

  Now it is quite plain that, by ‘the four
th dimension’, Birkhauser means something quite different from either Hinton’s extra dimension of space, or Einstein’s concept of time. The veil through which the strange faces seem to be staring is obviously not a part of the physical universe, but a kind of parallel universe. And that thought may well have come to Birkhauser from his own experience as a painter. A painter cannot stand before a canvas and turn on his inspiration like a tap, and the same applies to poets and musicians. If an artist feels dull and tired—entangled in the mere physical world—he cannot summon inspiration. The inner freedom responsible for inspiration requires a kind of mental ‘push-up’ from the world of space and time.

  The apprehension of beauty cannot be explained in mere physical terms, for, if we feel dull, we fail to see it. It is doubtful whether a cow appreciates the view from its mountain pasture, no matter how magnificent, for it is too involved in the physical world. So to see beauty requires the same kind of inspiration that the artist requires to paint it. Living itself—insofar as it involves consciousness—means living in a kind of parallel universe, from which we view actuality, as a person looking out of the window of a skyscraper sees the street below as a separate reality.

  Why do we not recognise this? Because the consciousness that forms a kind of fourth dimension is as transparent as the air that separates the person in the skyscraper from the street below. The world is made of solid matter and our bodies are made of solid matter, so we feel that we are merely a part of the world—although slightly less substantial and real than houses and buses.

  In fact, consciousness is made of a different kind of substance from the world, and we exist as living beings insofar as we push ourselves away from it. It is not quite true, as Bucke implies, that mystics breathe a different air and walk a different Earth from the rest of us. We all exist in two worlds at the same time.

  The implications of this insight are revolutionary. If someone asks me what I thought of a television programme, I do not feel that I am being asked to do something that contradicts the physical laws of the universe. Yet if my parrot had been standing on the back of my chair, watching the same programme (as he occasionally does), he would have been unable to form any judgment. Because, in spite of being a bird, he would not have been able to take the same ‘bird’s-eye view’ of the programme as enables me to form a judgment. Forming judgment, grasping meaning, appreciating beauty, all demand the same faculty as the artist calls inspiration, which consists, in effect, of pushing ourselves away from the world, taking a bird’s-eye view of it.