by Colin Wilson
The consequences are startling. When my senses are dull, reality seems curiously meaningless, as if I am watching a play by Samuel Beckett. But I remain convinced that I am awake and alive and ‘grasping reality’. This is clearly a mistake. When I am cheerful and excited—for example, setting out on holiday—everything looks more meaningful: in fact, I am seeing the world with what the artist calls inspiration. And, if I can escape my prejudiced assumption that this is nothing to get excited about, any more than the glow that comes with a glass of wine, I can suddenly grasp that my senses are not passive receptors of reality. Looking at the world around me is much more like writing a symphony or painting a picture than taking a photograph.
And if I could, so to speak, push myself further and further from the world, into Birkhauser’s ‘fourth dimension’, it would become steadily more meaningful until I was staggered by the revelation of its significance and complexity. The further I can push myself into the fourth dimension, which gives me detachment from everyday reality, the more I grasp the sheer strangeness of the world.
All this Jung knew intuitively, even if he never formulated it in precisely these terms. That is why he chose Jakoby’s Fire Sower and Birkhauser’s Fourth Dimension and the Rosicrucian woodcut of the pilgrim to illustrate the meaning of his book on flying saucers. He knew enough of the world of the paranormal to realise that mankind is being offered a revelation that could amount to a new kind of consciousness.
This is underlined by the book’s curious epilogue. After he had completed the manuscript, Jung received a copy of a book called The Secret of the Saucers by a ‘contactee’ named Orfeo Angelucci, a person who describes himself as a nervous individual suffering from constitutional inadequacy, who suddenly became an evangelist of the ‘flying saucer vision’.
Angelucci describes how, as he was driving home from the night shift on 23 May 1952, he experienced a sense of the dulling of consciousness, a dreamlike sensation, after which he saw a red, oval-shaped object on the horizon. Suddenly, it shot upward, releasing two balls of green fire, from which he heard a voice telling him not to be afraid. He stopped the car, and the voice told him that he was in communication with friends from another world. Suddenly, he felt very thirsty, and the voice told him to drink from a crystal cup he would find on the car wing. It tasted delicious. Then the space between the discs began to glow until it formed a kind of television screen, on which he saw a man and woman of supernatural beauty. They seemed strangely familiar to him.
Suddenly the screen vanished, and he once again heard the voice (which seems to have been telepathic), explaining that man had been under observation for centuries, and that every human being was precious to them, because ‘you are not aware of the true mystery of your being’.
The UFOs, it explained, came from a mother ship; but the space beings did not need flying saucers, since they were ‘etheric’ entities; the UFOs were used only to manifest themselves to man. ‘Cosmic law’ prevented them from landing and interfering in human destiny. But Earth was in great danger.
Angelucci was exalted by these revelations, and felt that Earth and its inhabitants had become shadowy. Two months later, on 23 July 1952, it happened again—the same dreamlike sensation, followed by the appearance of a kind of huge hemispherical soap bubble, with a door in it. Inside, he sat in a comfortable chair.
There was a humming sensation, and music came from the walls. He saw a coinlike object on the floor, and, when he picked it up, it seemed grow smaller. (It is trivial, apparently meaningless details like these that lend the story verisimilitude.) Then he was looking at Earth from outer space. The voice told him that Earth, in spite of its beauty, was a purgatorial world, full of cruelty and selfishness. He was told that human beings are simply mortal shadows of divinely created beings, and that they are trying to work out their salvation on Earth. Because Orfeo was not in the best of health, he had spiritual gifts which enabled the heavenly people to enter into communication.
As they were returning to Earth, there were more revelations, then Angelucci seemed to see all his previous incarnations, and understood the mysteries of life. He thought he was about to die.
When he was back on Earth, the UFO vanished. Going to bed that night, he noticed a burning sensation on the left side of his chest, and found a circular red mark with a dot in the middle, which he interpreted as a hydrogen atom.
Angelucci became an evangelist, preaching the gospel of the UFOs, and receiving a great deal of mockery for his pains. On one occasion, after seeing a UFO, he again met his ethereal companion, who told him his name was Neptune, and treated him to further insights about Earth’s problems and future redemption.
In September 1953, he fell into a trance which lasted a week; during this time, he was transported to another planet, with noble, etheric beings who fed on nectar and ambrosia. He was told that his real name was Neptune; his male teacher was actually Orion, while his female teacher was called Lyra. When Lyra treated him with tenderness, he responded with human erotic feelings, which shocked his celestial friends. It was only when he had learnt to purge himself of these feelings that he was able to celebrate a kind of mystic union with Lyra.
It is clear that Jung accepts that Angelucci is telling the truth; but he feels that his story amounts to ‘spontaneous fantasy images, dreams, and the products of active imagination’—Jung’s term for fantasy that takes on a dreamlike reality. And Jung goes on to consider two fantasy novels—Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud and John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos—as symbolic accounts of the coming of UFOs to answer modern man’s spiritual needs. In The Black Cloud, the cloud from space destroys most life on Earth, but proves to be alive and intelligent. Its purpose is to regenerate itself by recharging its energies near the sun. Jung sees the black cloud as a symbol of the collective unconscious, man’s dark side. In The Midwich Cuckoos, a whole village falls into hypnotic sleep, and when the villagers awake, they discover that all the young women are pregnant. The children prove to be of greater than human intelligence—the implication being that they were fathered by angels—and, when one of them learns something, all the others know it telepathically. (The same thing has happened in Siberia, Africa and an Eskimo settlement.) But human beings realise that these brilliant children will grow up to become masters of the Earth, and they destroy them. Wyndham’s conclusion seems to be as pessimistic as that of H. G. Wells in The Food of the Gods, where human beings try to destroy a race of giants—‘we must needs hate the highest when we see it’.
Jung’s reflections on ‘the flying saucer vision’ have clearly led him to some exciting conclusions—the major one being that UFOs presage a profound change in human consciousness, and an important step in man’s evolution. He says of the strange events at Midwich, ‘It is divine intervention that gives evolution a definite push forward’. And we can suddenly see why, although he regards UFOs as a kind of hallucination, he also regards them as far more than that. They are, he seems to feel, an expression of man’s ‘religious function’, a kind of revolt of the soul, demanding a life with more meaning; therefore they should be welcomed as a precursor of the millennium.
Yet it is difficult to accept this conclusion without certain reservations. The story of Geller and Puharich, cited in chapter 1, is a case in point; they received assurances from ‘the Nine’ that they were destined to change the world—but the sequel was anticlimactic. Similarly, Jack Schwarz was promised, ‘You are God’s vehicle to bring the truth that is meant to be’—but the promise was not fulfilled.
In the section on Puharich, we also encountered Dr. Charles Laughead, who passed on to Puharich various messages from the Nine. Laughead had been receiving these messages via a trance medium, and the ‘entities’ made a number of predictions, which all came true. Then the entities announced that the world was going to end on 21 December 1954—North America would split in two, the east coast would sink into the sea, and half of Europe would be destroyed. Only the chosen few—including Dr. Laughead�
��would be rescued by spaceships.
Laughead announced the news to the press, and, since he was a respectable academic at Michigan State University at Lansing, he was given wide coverage. With a band of believers, Laughead awaited the catastrophe—which, of course, failed to arrive. Laughead lost his job.
The case of ‘Dino Kraspedon’ is even stranger. I first heard the name when I came upon his book My Contact With Flying Saucers around 1960, and bought it to read on the train. It was translated from the Portuguese, and is told in a simple, unpretentious style which impressed me with its air of truth.
He tells how, in 1952, he and a friend were driving in mountains near São Paulo, Brazil, when they saw five flying saucers. They went back later and spent three days hoping to see more UFOs. But on the third day, ‘after a series of episodes which we will not go into here for fear of digression’, a saucer landed, and they were allowed to go on board.
The phrase about avoiding digression struck me as having the ring of truth; a liar would insist on going into minute ‘factual’ detail.
They went on board, were shown the craft and told how it worked, after which the captain promised to pay Kraspedon a visit some time.
A few months later, Kraspedon’s wife told him that a parson wanted to see him. Kraspedon was puzzled; being an atheist, he did not know any parsons. When he went downstairs, he recognised the captain of the spaceship, looking very well dressed and wearing a dog collar. He told Kraspedon that the deception was due to his desire not to cause Kraspedon’s wife anxiety. The parson stayed to lunch, and proved to be a man of considerable learning; he was able to quote the Bible in Hebrew and Latin, and also spoke English and Greek.
He explained that he was from a satellite of Jupiter, then proceeded to lecture Kraspedon on the nature of God and the universe.
At this point, expecting fantastic adventures—like George Adamski’s trip to Venus—I was surprised when the book turned into a rather intellectually taxing dialogue. Electrons were defined as ‘deformed magnetic space, propagated in wave form’, and God as ‘an oscillating charge superimposed on an infinite point, constantly causing a deformation in space’. Matter, he explains, is always being created from nothing, which is why the universe is expanding.
Kraspedon explains, in a chapter devoted to physics, that flying saucers make use of a limitless energy available in the earth’s atmosphere. ‘The atmospheric ionisation on one side gives rise to a fantastic pressure on the other. It is the detonator that unleashes a cyclone behind a saucer’.
And so it goes on. If Kraspedon is a crank, then he is certainly not a confidence man. The book is so dense with scientific discussion that few readers can have summoned the endurance to read right through it. Yet the chapter dealing with social ideas displays a reassuring common sense. He points out that even scientific progress has its dangers, and that if automation is developed (this was 1953) there would be a great loss of employment—a remarkable prediction of what has happened with the development of computers.
The space captain also suggests that most education could be conducted with the aid of sleep learning, and that criminality could be eliminated by the use of hypnosis. He predicts that man will learn to live far longer when he recognises that it is the force of the spirit that sustains the body. He shows considerable insight into the problem of atmospheric pollution, and how the atmosphere will cease to filter the rays of the sun. He predicts the gradual rise in earth’s temperature, and the melting of the poles. The apocalyptic scenario that follows is hair-raising.
Finally, Kraspedon describes how he took leave of the spaceman at the Roosevelt station in São Paulo, and how the captain promised to return in 1956, or—if anything should prevent this—in 1959.
And that was all I learnt about Dino Kraspedon for many years—in fact, until I read John Keel’s Operation Trojan Horse in the 1980s. It was from Keel’s book that I learnt that Kraspedon’s real name was Aladino Felix, and that, in 1965, six years after publication of his book, Kraspedon began to make prophecies of disaster—for example, of floods that would take place later in the year. He proved correct, and floods and landslides around Rio de Janeiro killed six hundred people. In 1967, he appeared on television and foretold the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, which duly occurred.
When Aladino began to predict an outbreak of terrorist attacks and murders in Brazil in 1968, no one was surprised when he proved to be correct. Public buildings were dynamited and there was a wave of bank robberies. Finally, the police arrested eighteen members of the gang responsible, and learnt that they had planned to assassinate government officials and take over the entire country. And the name of their leader was . . . Aladino Felix, alias Dino Kraspedon. Arrested on 22 August 1968, he explained, ‘I was sent here as an ambassador to the Earth from Venus. My friends from space will come here and free me, and avenge my arrest. You can look to tragic consequences for humanity when the flying saucers invade this planet’.
But of course, Felix’s space friends did not arrive to save him from prison, although no doubt they had assured him that they would.
John Keel himself almost became a victim of these strange hoaxers. In 1966, after he had begun his full-scale investigations of the UFO phenomenon, as described in the last chapter, the phenomenon ‘zeroed in’ on him.
Luminous aerial objects seemed to follow me around like faithful dogs. The objects seemed to know where I was going and where I had been. I would check into a motel chosen at random only to find that someone had made a reservation in my name and had even left a string of nonsensical telephone messages for me. I was plagued by impossible coincidences, and some of my closest friends in New York . . . began to report strange experiences of their own—poltergeists erupted in their apartments, ugly smells of hydrogen sulphide haunted them. One girl of my acquaintance suffered an inexplicable two-hour mental blackout while sitting under a hair dryer alone in her own apartment. More than once I woke up in the middle of the night to find myself unable to move, with a huge dark apparition standing over me.
(Our Haunted Planet)
Travelling all over America to check UFO stories, he came upon dozens of people he called ‘silent contactees’, who regularly experienced UFO contact, and kept it to themselves. And the contactees acted as intermediaries. When a contactee was being visited by one of these entities, he or she would ring John Keel, and he would sometimes converse with it for hours.
His later conclusion was that the phenomenon was slowly leading him from scepticism to belief—then to disbelief. ‘When my thinking went awry and my concepts were wrong, the phenomenon actually led me back onto the right path. It was all an educational process, and my teachers were very, very patient’. In other words, it was, as Jacques Vallee has said, a ‘control phenomenon’ whose purpose was to alter his thinking habits. He notes: ‘Other people who have become involved in this situation have not been so lucky. They settled upon and accepted a single frame of reference, and were quickly engulfed in disaster’. He has in mind people like Charles Laughead and Dino Kraspedon.
Keel had reason to be suspicious. The entities played absurd practical jokes. They would ring up Keel’s friends, using Keel’s voice, and impart disinformation. He once sent an article to an editor, who told him next time he saw him that he could not use it; Keel read it and was appalled: his article had been switched for a ‘real piece of garbage’, sent in one of Keel’s envelopes. His phone bills became enormous, and he found out the reason one day when a friend accidentally misdialled his phone number, using the wrong last digit, and still got through to Keel. Keel discovered he was paying for two telephones. And the other was usually answered by someone who offered to take messages for John Keel. When Keel rang the number, and asked if there were any message, there was a gasp, and the receiver was slammed down.
In May 1967, the entities promised many of the silent contactees that a big power failure would occur. On 4 June 1967, there was a massive power failure in four stat
es on the East Coast. The contactees were then told—and in turn told Keel—that there would soon be an even bigger power failure across the whole country, and that the New York seaboard would slide into the sea on 2 July.
The day came and passed without incident. But now the entities repeated the strategy. Two plane crashes were predicted, both of which occurred. The rumour was spreading in hippie circles, and trance mediums and automatic writers repeated them. It was predicted that the Pope would be assassinated in Turkey, and that a three-day nationwide blackout would occur after that.
When Keel learnt that the Pope was scheduled to visit Turkey in July, he began to feel nervous. In the various ‘flap areas’—where contactees had spread the word—hardware shops had sold out of candles and torches.
Finally, Keel decided to move to one of these flap areas to await the blackout. Leaving Manhattan for Long Island, he bought three quarts of distilled water, reasoning that a three-day power failure would be accompanied by a water shortage. On Long Island he called on a contactee, and was told that he had just received a visit from a UFO entity, and that the entity had left him a message: ‘Tell John Keel we’ll meet him and help him drink all that water’. No one but Keel knew he had the water.
The Pope was not assassinated, and the power failure did not occur. That weekend, Keel saw several UFOs.