Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience

by Colin Wilson

  The accurate predictions continued to occur. One ‘UFO entity’ called Mr. Apol, who talked to him on the phone predicted a major disaster on the Ohio River, and that, when President Johnson pulled the switch on the White House lawn to turn on the Christmas lights, there would be a major blackout. On 11 December 1967, a mysterious phone caller informed Keel that there would be an aeroplane disaster in Tucson, Arizona. The following day an air force jet crashed on a shopping centre in Tucson.

  The Ohio River was of particular interest to Keel, because—as already noted—he had spent a great deal of time during the past year at a place called Point Pleasant, in West Virginia, following up a UFO investigation which involved a strange winged figure who became known as Mothman, and every day he crossed the bridge from his motel on the Ohio side of the bridge into Point Pleasant. For a whole year, Point Pleasant had been virtually the UFO capital of America.

  On 15 December Keel was sitting in his apartment with a friend, watching the television, which was showing the ceremony on the White House lawn. He was surrounded by candles and torches. Another visitor, a TV producer who was making a programme on UFOs, had decided to return to his own home to watch the programme and await the blackout. President Johnson threw the switch, and the tree lit up. And the lights stayed on.

  A moment later, the programme was interrupted by a news flash. A bridge connecting Gallipolis in Ohio and West Virginia had just collapsed. Keel knew that there was only one bridge on that section of the river—the one he crossed regularly to Point Pleasant.

  It was as if the UFO entities had wanted him to be watching television at that precise moment, and had told him the absurd story about the national blackout. If they had predicted the collapse of the Silver Bridge, he might have done something about it, for everyone knew that the traffic it was now carrying was far too great for its size (it had been built in 1928, when traffic was lighter), and a campaign in a Point Pleasant newspaper might have averted the tragedy.

  A few hours later, the Australian prime minister, Harold Holt, went for a swim from a beach near Melbourne, and disappeared. The UFO entities had also predicted his disappearance.

  Keel comments, ‘I was lucky. I didn’t cry their warning from the housetops. I didn’t surround myself with a wild-eyed cult impressed with the accuracy of the previous predictions’. If he had—using his syndicated newspaper column—he would probably have found himself in the same unfortunate position as Charles Laughead.

  Was that their aim—to discredit him, perhaps to silence him? It certainly begins to look as if the UFO ‘entities’ are, as Jacques Vallee phrased it, ‘messengers of deception’. But why should they want to cause chaos and confusion?

  The first step towards an answer probably lies in recognising that the term ‘UFO entities’ gives a spurious impression of unity, which quickly vanishes when we begin looking at the bewildering variety of cases. If, indeed, a UFO crashed near Roswell in July 1947 (as seems highly likely), then it must have been a ‘nuts-and-bolts’ spacecraft, even if its technology was centuries ahead of anything on Earth. But the alien bodies reported by so many, and seen in an autopsy film (which may or may not be spurious), do not look in the least like the ‘greys’ of so many abduction accounts. And the greys reported so fully in the books of Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs, and John Mack do not seem to bear any resemblance to John Keel’s manic practical jokers, who often sound as if they stepped straight out of Batman.

  As Keel points out, Mr. Apol and his cohorts behaved far more like poltergeists. He remarks, ‘Bedroom visitants and poltergeist activity are a common factor in the contactee syndrome’. This in itself suggests that many people who believe they are in contact with UFO visitants may really be dealing with the ‘paranormal’ entities that the Society for Psychical Research investigated so extensively in the last part of the nineteenth century.

  Poltergeists, and other ‘spirits’ that manifest through Ouija boards, automatic writing and so on, seem to be unreliable more often than not. Many paranormal researchers prefer to regard them as manifestations of the unconscious mind, as I was once inclined to myself; I had to abandon this pleasantly simplistic theory because it fails to fit most of the recorded cases—as, for example, the following.

  On 15 September 1899, a boy working on the farm of George Dagg, near Quebec, was taken off to see the magistrate after two missing dollars were found in his bed; Mrs. Dagg assumed that the boy was also responsible for streaks of ordure on the floor. But, while they were on the way to the magistrate, more streaks of ordure appeared, exonerating the boy.

  After that, typical poltergeist phenomena began—overturned milk pails, smashed windows, small fires, water poured on the floor. The poltergeist particularly seemed to enjoy tormenting an eleven-year-old orphan called Dinah Maclean; one day it half severed a braid of her hair, so it had to be cut off. Unlike the others, she was also able to hear its voice.

  An artist called Woodcock came to the farm, and Dinah told him that she had seen the spirit in the woodshed. They went there, and when she asked, ‘Are you there, mister?’ a gruff voice, which seemed to come from the air, replied with a stream of profanities. Woodcock asked, ‘Who are you?’, and the voice replied, ‘I am the Devil. I’ll have you in my clutches. Get out or I’ll break your neck’.

  Unintimidated, Woodcock fetched George Dagg, and a long conversation ensued. When Dagg asked, ‘Why are you bothering my family?’, it replied, ‘Just for fun’. Asked why it had thrown a stone at Mary, the voice replied that the stone was intended for Dinah, but had missed. At Dagg’s request, the entity also wrote a message with a pencil on a piece of paper, but lost its temper again when Dagg said, ‘I asked you to write something decent’.

  Requested to go away and leave them alone, the voice finally agreed that it would take its leave the following day, a Sunday. A large crowd gathered, and the voice held audience in the farmhouse. It seemed to have a remarkable knowledge of the personal business of the people who came in. When someone remarked that its language had improved, the voice replied that it was not the same spirit, but an angel—this was obviously untrue, since it was the same voice. But when, under questioning, it began to contradict itself, the old foul language reappeared.

  This entertainment went on for hours. During this time, Woodcock drew up a statement of the poltergeist’s activities which seventeen witnesses signed—broken windows, fires, a mouth organ being played by invisible lips, stones thrown, a large dining table overturned, and various other phenomena. It seemed that the children could see the entity, which gave its name, and mentioned that it had died twenty years earlier. (It asked for its name to be suppressed in the report.) The three children could see it as a tall man with a cow’s head, horns and a cloven hoof, as a big black dog, and as an angel in white robes with a starry crown. (Note the black dog—a shape that has always been associated with spirits in folklore.)

  Woodcock left in the evening, but the crowd found the spirit so interesting that they begged it to remain. By now it had ceased to speak in a rough voice and was singing hymns in high, flutelike tones. Finally it left, but said it would show itself to the children before it departed the next day.

  The next day, the children rushed in in great excitement to say that a beautiful man in white robes had picked up Mary and Johnny in his arms. He had remarked that ‘that fellow Woodcock’ refused to believe he was an angel, but he would show that he was. Whereupon he floated up into the sky in a kind of fire that seemed to blaze up from his feet; little Mary said ‘he was all red’.

  The children all told the same story, and repeated it without variations many times.

  If the same spirit had appeared a century later, it would undoubtedly have claimed to be the inhabitant of a UFO, and the children would probably have seen it climb aboard one as it departed into the blue. As it is, its departure recalls Elijah and his chariot of fire.

  Dinah was clearly the ‘focus’ of the poltergeist activity. Poltergeists manifest themselves by taki
ng energy from people, often children on the verge of puberty (as Dinah was)—probably because the sexual changes that take place during adolescence provide the necessary energy.

  Poltergeists, like ghosts, seem to be what mediums call ‘earth-bound spirits’—often people who do not know they are dead.

  Now compare John Keel’s comments about one of the UFO entities with whom he held long phone conversations in 1967:

  Mr. Apol had assumed a definite personality . . . I studied his psychology, his quick temper, his mischievous sense of humour. I argued with him on the phone, sometimes for two or three hours at a stretch. And I felt sorry for him. It became apparent that he did not really know who or what he was. He was a prisoner of our time frame. He often confused the past with the future. I gathered that he and all his fellow entities found themselves transported backward and forward in time involuntarily, playing out their little games because they were programmed to do so, living—or existing—only so long as they could feed off the energy and minds of mediums or contactees. I could ask him any kind of obscure question, and receive an instant and accurate answer, perhaps because my own mind as being tapped, just like my telephone. Where was my mother’s father born? Cameron Mills, New York, of course. Where had I misplaced my stopwatch? Look in the shoebox in the upper right-hand corner of the bedroom . . .

  (Our Haunted Planet)

  Apol certainly behaves more like the Dagg poltergeist than the little green or silver-suited men reported by so many contactees.

  UFOs seem to share another odd ability with poltergeists: to be visible to one person, but not to another. Andrija Puharich records a number of occasions when he and Uri Geller were able to see UFOs that were invisible to others who were with them. Dinah Maclean and the other two Dagg children were able to see (and hear) the poltergeist when no one else could. Moreover, the poltergeist was able to appear to them in different forms: as a thin man with a cow’s head, as an angel, as a black dog.

  By comparison, ordinary ghosts seem relatively conservative. But they also seem to have the same odd ability to be seen by one person and not another. One typical case will suffice.

  In 1920, Cleve Court, near Minster, in Kent, was bought by the lawyer and founder of Northern Ireland loyalism, Sir Edward (later Lord) Carson. It had a pleasant atmosphere, but Carson and his wife soon realised it was haunted. There would be a knock on the door, and nobody there, and footsteps sounded along empty corridors in the old Elizabethan part of the house. Their six-year-old son told them he did not like the lady who walked along the passage outside his bedroom. A four-year-old girl named Patricia told them about the lady who often came into her bedroom, then pointed at the corner of the room. ‘There she is’. She became quite annoyed because Lady Carson could not see her. One child who was invited to the house a second time asked if the ‘poor lady’ would be there; when asked what she meant, she said, ‘The lady who walks in and out, and no one speaks to her’.

  In December 1949, Lady Carson finally saw the ghost for herself. She had got up in the middle of the night because her spaniel wanted to go outside. In the hall, the dog began to whimper and ran away, and Lady Carson saw a woman in a grey dress coming downstairs. She looked so solid that Lady Carson was about to ask her what she was doing, then she noticed that the figure was making no sound, and realised it was a ghost. The woman walked through an open door to an older part of the house.

  The researcher Andrew Mackenzie, who recounts the story in The Unexplained (1966), concluded that the ghost was the unhappily married daughter of a previous owner of the house—probably around 1700—who had never had the children she hoped for, which may explain why she appeared so often to children.

  At first sight, the dissimilarities between the Cleve Court ghost and John Keel’s practical jokers may seem to outweigh the similarities. But that may be simply that we have all heard so many ghost stories that they have a deceptive ring of familiarity, arousing memories of Scrooge and Hamlet’s murdered father. But if we try to forget these preconceptions, we can see that the Cleve Court case raises some fundamental questions. If we start with the assumption that the story is true—and Andrew Mackenzie is regarded as one of the most reliable of modern investigators—then we are faced with the notion that a woman who was alive in 1700 may still be wandering around Cleve Court, and almost certainly unaware that she is dead. So we reach our first conclusion: that, when we die, we undoubtedly do not simply cease to exist.

  But why could the child Patricia see the grey lady when she was invisible to Lady Carson? The obvious assumption is that Patricia was somehow ‘tuned in’ to her. And this raises more questions. When a living person walks into a room, I do not need to be ‘tuned in’ to see them. So we tend to make the assumption that there is an objective world ‘out there’, like some gigantic television screen that we can all see. It differs from dreams in that they take place inside our heads. But, when one person can see something that is invisible to another, it raises the strong possibility that the outside world is not a massive television screen that we all share. Perhaps we all have our individual television screens, and some can tune in to things that others fail to pick up. It begins to look as if one of our most basic assumptions—that I am ‘in here’, inside my head, while the world is ‘out there’, common to all of us—may be false, or at least simplistic. Our minds may play a far greater part than we think in creating ‘reality’. The grey lady’s mind is obviously creating her own reality, in defiance of the present owners of Cleve Court.

  This seems to be demonstrated by another episode in this strange story. Carson’s family physician was called Dr. E. G. Moon, and he confided to Lady Carson a baffling experience of his own. One day in 1930, he had called on Lord Carson, and was on his way out when he paused at the front door. What he saw was a totally different scene from the one he expected. His car had vanished; so had the thick hedge and the drive. Instead, there was a muddy cart track. Facing him, about to enter the house, was a man wearing a coat with multiple capes, a top hat, and gaiters. He stared at Dr. Moon, who found himself wondering what on Earth was happening. He retreated back into the house—probably wondering if he had come the wrong way—then looked back again at the open door. The man had disappeared, and his car was parked where he had left it, among the familiar modern-day scenery.

  Dr. Moon had experienced what is known as a ‘time slip’. They are far less rare than might be supposed—in fact, Andrew Mackenzie devoted a whole book to them called Adventures in Time (1997). It contains, for example, a detailed account of the experience of the two English ladies at Versailles, who in 1901 were apparently transported back to the Versailles of Marie Antoinette, and ten years later described it in their book An Adventure. Then there is the account of the three Royal Naval cadets who walked into a Suffolk village one Sunday morning in 1957, and found themselves back in a deserted medieval village, probably at the time of the Black Death. Mackenzie also tells the story of the Scottish spinster who was returning to her home in the early hours of the morning when she saw flickering torches in the surrounding fields, and men in strange clothes examining corpses. A lengthy historical investigation revealed that what she had seen was probably a re-enactment of the aftermath of the battle of Nechtansmere, fought in AD 685.

  One of the characteristics of virtually all these stories is that the participants experienced an odd sense of oppression, of dreamlike unreality—which, in the Versailles case, Charlotte Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain assumed to be a slight fever—and which, as Jacques Vallee points out, is often experienced in UFO sightings. (The contactee Angelucci reported the same thing.)

  One of the oddest tales in the book, recorded by the Society for Psychical Research, concerned a Mr. J. S. Spence, who spent several days in Devon in 1938. He experienced the same dreamlike oppression, and an odd feeling of being watched. At the top of a steep cliff he found a newly built dry-stone wall that stretched to the edge of the cliff. The next day, visiting the same spot, he was puzzled to fin
d a very old, ivy-covered wall in bad repair.

  Thinking that he must have taken the wrong path, he decided to go back the next day and try to solve the mystery. On the third day, he again found the new wall at the top of the cliff. But he had an odd feeling of dizziness. And as he moved forward, over apparently solid ground, he suddenly slipped and fell vertically. He found himself on a narrow ledge near the top of the cliff, with a twisted ankle. Far below, the sea was pounding on the rocks. Mr. Spence succeeded in climbing back to the top—and found the old and broken wall, much of which had obviously collapsed into the sea when the edge of the cliff gave way. He had been trying to walk on ‘solid ground’ that had vanished in a previous century.

  There are dozens of such recorded ‘time slips’—probably hundreds. I myself collected one from a woman named Jane O’Neill, who visited Fotheringhay church with a friend in 1974, and was much impressed by a picture of the crucifixion behind the altar, with a dove over the cross. But a friend who accompanied her saw no such picture, as they discovered later when they compared notes. When they revisited the church, the friend proved to be right—there was no picture. But Jane O’Neill also failed to recognise the inside of the church. For she had seen it as it was when it was a collegiate church, which was pulled down in 1553.

  There have been other recorded time slips at Fotheringhay. In August 1976, a schoolmaster named Priest and his wife were approaching the church when they heard sounds of ‘a primitive kind of music’ with trumpets and drums. They assumed some kind of rehearsal was taking place inside, but, when they opened the door, the church was deserted, and the music had stopped. Back at the church gate, they again heard the music, this time more faintly. They later discovered that they had visited the church exactly five hundred years after the funeral ceremony of Richard, Duke of York, but this may or may not be the answer.

  In 1941, a policeman visiting the church with a female cousin heard the sounds of monks chanting, but the sounds stopped as abruptly as a radio being turned off when they opened the door and found an empty church. The ‘ghost hunter’ Peter Underwood has accounts of several other time slips at Fotheringhay, always on hot August days.