Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience

by Colin Wilson

  Other time slips have also occurred at Versailles—Mackenzie details no fewer than seven. In July 1908, an English family named Crooke, who lived in the village of Versailles, twice saw the same ‘sketching lady’ in old-fashioned dress described by Misses Moberly and Jourdain. They realised she was a ‘ghost’ because ‘she appeared and disappeared several times, seeming to grow out of and retire into the scenery with a little quiver of adjustment’. And, in 1910, Maj. Robert Gregory—son of Lady Gregory—and his wife saw an ‘old-fashioned’ Versailles, including a thick wood. When they read An Adventure a year later, they returned to Versailles to find that the wood had gone, and that they were unable to recognise a single thing.

  Fotheringhay and Versailles have been the scenes of many important historical events, and have witnessed a great deal of tragedy. Did Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain see a ‘ghost’ of Versailles as it was about 1750? That seems unlikely—surely there is no such thing as the ghosts of a place? Then could their experience have been a kind of ‘tape recording’, the events of the past having somehow impressed themselves on the scenery? That is just possible—in 1960, in the cellar of the Treasurer’s House in York, a heating engineer saw a Roman legion with round shields marching through the walls and across the floor, and felt that they did not perceive him. (Historians were later able to identify the legion, and verify that they carried round shields.) On the other hand, Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain talked to some of the people in old-fashioned dress. And Dr. Moon seems to have felt that the gentleman in the cloak and top hat actually looked at him.

  So what is going on? Is time past still present in another dimension? Or is it present only in the minds of ghosts? Or can the individual television sets inside our heads tune in to other times and places, so they appear to be real? This would also imply that the world around us is perhaps not as real as it looks.

  Then there is the baffling problem of precognition—the ability to foresee some event in the future in precise detail. It may be the immediate or distant future. A pianist friend of mine was returning along the Bayswater Road in a taxi after a concert when he knew, with total certainty, that, at the Queensway traffic lights, a taxi would try to jump the lights and hit them sideways on; it happened exactly as he had known it would.

  Goethe, in his autobiography, tells how, having just said goodbye to his sweetheart, he was riding along a road in Alsace when he saw, coming to meet him, his own double (or doppelganger), dressed in a grey and gold suit. Eight years later, on his way to visit the same girl, he realised that he was now dressed in the grey and gold suit. He had ‘seen’ his future self.

  It would seem, then, that the commonsense view of time is somehow mistaken: the past and the future are in some sense present. There is also much evidence from psychical research that ‘spirits’ often confuse the past and future. During World War Two, an English woman with psychic gifts, Mrs. A. M. Kaulback, conducted a series of telepathy experiments with her two sons, who were in the forces, and concluded that many of her impressions came from ‘discarnate communicators’, including her deceased husband. On one occasion, her husband told her that her son Bill had just been given command of a battalion, and described the scene in some detail. He was right—except that the events he described occurred a month later. When she asked her ‘guide’ to explain this, he told her, ‘It is not easy grasping time between two planes’.

  John Keel also found that his UFO entities were often confused about the sequence of events they predicted. The explanation might be that they were not actually UFO entities, but some of the more dubious denizens of the ‘spirit world’. But, as Jacques Vallee points out, it cannot be assumed that the UFO entities encountered by ‘contactees’ like Herb Schirmer are telling the truth.

  It seems clear, then, that there is a type of entity that enjoys deceiving and misleading. Why this should be so is a mystery, since it is hard to see how they can benefit from it. Perhaps they simply enjoy their contact with human beings, trying to impress, like some casual pub acquaintance who launches into self-glorifying autobiography. But, in the case of many of these entities, the result may be a kind of long-term confidence trick.

  The novelist Jan de Hartog has described how this can come about. In a lecture to the American Society of Dowsers—and on another occasion, to me—he described how he had become interested in dowsing when he made the acquaintance of an animal healer at a health farm. The healer used a pendulum to make diagnoses. (It usually swings back and forward to indicate yes, and in a circle to indicate no—or whatever code the dowser chooses.) Together, they went to visit a ‘druid’ on the Cheddar Downs, and, practised dowsing and searching for ‘energy spots’. Then the druid told his friend that he ought to speak to a disembodied woman called Imogen, who was standing ten paces away. His friend took ten paces forward, then stopped, apparently absorbed. Hartog learnt later that he had not only become aware of a female presence, but that Imogen was able to communicate with him. His friend remarked, ‘I don’t know who that was, but it was definitely a woman’.

  Jan de Hartog describes the immense excitement that he and his friend felt, the sense of embarking on an amazing adventure. He went back to his farm in Pennsylvania, and his friend came and stayed, and taught him how to use the pendulum to receive messages. He would ask, ‘Are you there?’, and his pendulum would spin like an aeroplane propeller—there could be no doubt that he was not doing it himself. Then the message would be spelt out letter by letter.

  Jan quickly learnt that the entity who was communicating with him was called Eleanor, that she had been a White Russian doctor, and that he and she had been lovers in a previous existence. And while his friend was receiving messages from Imogen—assuring him that he should give up animal healing and concentrate on humans, and that he was destined eventually to heal the whole human race—Jan was having long sessions with Eleanor, who was explaining how to lose weight by eating certain foods and avoiding others. Eleanor had a strong personality, and their relationship was stormy—on one occasion, when she ordered Jan to restrict his dinner to one hard-boiled egg, he threw his pendulum at her.

  He also found himself in contact with an Indian called Old Oak, who instructed him about nature, and, on the whole, made more sense than Eleanor.

  Soon Jan found he could abandon the old slow method of spelling out messages letter by letter; he became more and more intuitive about what Eleanor and Old Oak were trying to tell him, and would write as fast as his hand could cross the paper.

  When winter came, both Eleanor and Old Oak advised him that there was going to be a cold spell, and it was time to invest in an electricity generator. He baulked at the cost, and eventually proved to be right—the cold front stopped a hundred miles away.

  The family decided to go to a dude ranch in Montana, where his daughter could ride. There Jan lived in a little cabin, and his wife and daughter in another. And now Jan learnt that he had a new companion—Imogen had also joined him. His friend had told him that Imogen was the ‘controlling spirit of all healing in the natural plane’. And Imogen lost no time in assuring Jan that he was a far more powerful healer than his friend. He was going to be one of the greatest healers of all time.

  All this, Jan confesses, filled him with misgivings—he felt that it was somehow ‘too big’. Yet it was all so fascinating—to be in communication with a disembodied intelligence—that he had no thought of giving up. He obviously felt as Geller and Puharich felt as they received messages from the Nine.

  Imogen declared that it was time he embarked on his healing career. The next day, she explained, when a group of them rode under a waterfall, a horse would stumble, and a woman would be badly hurt. Jan was then instructed—in precise detail—how to heal her, exactly how far away to hold his hands, etc. All this would leave him in no doubt of his powers.

  The next day, the riders approached the waterfall, and Jan prepared for the accident. But nothing happened. That night, in his cabin, Jan asked Imogen why. She explained th
at the spirit who had been detailed to trip up the horse had not turned up. Jan was horrified. ‘You mean to tell me that some perfectly innocent woman was going to be thrown from her horse, merely so that I could heal her?’ And, when it seemed that this, indeed, was what Imogen had intended, he suddenly knew beyond all doubt that he did not want to know her any more. He told her so, and suddenly all his powers vanished; the pendulum ceased to spin out messages, and he was once again alone.

  Another friend of mine, Joe Fisher, had an equally disillusioning experience with ‘spirits’, which he describes in a remarkable book called Hungry Ghosts. He is a journalist in Toronto, and was one day contacted by a woman who, under hypnosis, had become the mouthpiece for ‘discarnate entities’. He went along to see for himself, and a spirit with a reassuring Yorkshire accent spoke through her mouth and told him that he had a female guide called Filipa, a Greek girl who had been his lover in a previous existence, three centuries earlier, in a village called Theros, on the Greek–Turkish border. Joe was inclined to believe him, since he had always had a powerful affinity for Greece. Soon, like Jan de Hartog, he was in direct contact with Filipa. He would relax, and a buzzing noise in his head would precede a feeling of bliss and communication. Filipa was a sensual little thing who liked to be cuddled, and soon Joe’s present love affair broke up, his girlfriend feeling she was no match for a ghost.

  But, although he trusted Filipa, he began to experience doubts about some of the other spirits who came through at the seances. One claimed to be an ex-RAF pilot called Ernest Scott, who gave details of his wartime experiences. On a trip back to England, Joe decided to verify these stories, having no doubt whatever that they would prove genuine. The airfield certainly existed; so did the squadron with which Ernest Scott said he had flown. But Scott himself was not in the squadron records; he had never existed.

  Joe tried to track down the farm where the Yorkshire spirit claimed he had lived in the nineteenth century. The geography was accurate; so were many other details. But the basic facts were simply wrong.

  Joe also tried to verify the background of a lovable World War One veteran named Harry Maddox. Harry’s accounts of World War One battles were accurate; but Harry himself had never existed.

  In spite of these disillusionments, Joe had no doubt that Filipa was genuine. He felt that she ‘possessed more love, compassion and perspicacity than I had ever known’. On a trip to Greece, he tried to locate the village of Theros, where he and Filipa had lived and loved. It did not exist. But he was able to locate a town called Alexandropouli, which Filipa told him had been nearby. When he got there, however, he learnt that Alexandropouli was a mere two centuries old; it did not exist when he and Filipa were supposed to have been lovers. Filipa, like the others, was simply a liar.

  Now I agree that all this is extremely confusing: time slips into the past, glimpses of the future, poltergeists who play practical jokes, ghosts who do not know they are dead, entities who claim to be the spirits of living people, and who tell lies for the fun of it . . . What is it all about? How can we make sense of such a farrago of absurdity?

  Only one thing seems to stand out with some certainty. This normal, solid world around us is just a façade, and, while we believe that it is the world, the only world, we are deceived. This assumption that we are in a perfectly ordinary, logical world, and that we know most of the rules, traps us in a kind of permanent tunnel vision. Gurdjieff even used the alarming simile of hypnotised sheep, who are kept in a state of trance by a magician who wants to save money on fencing, and so assures the sheep that they have nothing to be afraid of, and that nothing bad is going to happen to them. I am inclined to think his pessimism unjustified. But there can be no doubt whatever that this ‘illusion of normality’ causes us to waste our lives and fail to grasp our potentialities. If, instead of this vast façade of triviality that surrounds us, we could become aware of the complex realm that lies on the other side of it, we might stop wasting our lives.

  Now it is this far wider, more inclusive view of reality that Jung and John Michell call ‘the flying saucer vision’—clearly not a particularly appropriate name, since it applies to far more than flying saucers. John Keel seems to come closer to its essence when he says (in The Eighth Tower, 1975):

  The extradimensional world is not a place where trees grow and politicians steal. It is a state of energy. All kinds of information about our trivial reality are stored in the energy field through a system of particles or units of energy in a negative or positive state, just as our brains store information by opening and closing billions of nerve switches called synapses. The field is like a massive radio wave and certain human brains have the ability to tune into it. Some of these brains are adjusted to the frequency of the bank of future data. So they receive glimpses of the future in sudden thoughts, visions (images in the conscious mind), dreams (images in the unconscious mind), or a combination of all three. Since the superspectrum is outside our time frame, its system for measuring time is different from ours, and few humans with precognition are able to unscramble the time cycle of future events.

  Keel admits:

  I’m embarrassed now when I recall how I stood in darkened fields with contactees who suddenly began talking in a deep baritone, declaring themselves to be from outer space. No matter how devious and complicated the questions I asked, they always seemed to have a quick and reasonable answer. They seemed to know everything about everything, just as demons in religious cases of possession know the most minute details about the lives of their exorcists—as Stanislav Grof discovered when he tried to exorcise the girl with the criminal record.

  Keel summarises: ‘Demonic possession is just a game perfected by countless believers across the centuries. Spiritualism is another. And, of course, the outer-space game is the latest development, and currently the most important’.

  Now we can begin to see why Jung thought that UFOs are ‘psychic projections’ which can nevertheless affect photographic plates and radar screens. He did not make some hard-and-fast distinction between the physical and mental worlds, but recognised that they are somehow intermingled. In 1928, Jung came upon alchemy in a Chinese work called The Secret of the Golden Flower, and came to the conclusion that alchemy is basically about the transmutation of the mind, and the discovery of the self. He asked a Munich bookseller to find him as many ancient alchemical works as he could, and, as he struggled with these infuriatingly obscure texts, came to feel that alchemy is a strange mixture of the physical and the mental. By sheer willed concentration, the alchemist can create states that Jung calls ‘active imagination’, whereby he can enter his own unconscious mind in a kind of wide-awake dreaming. So stories of alchemists—like Nicholas Flamel, who actually turned mercury into gold—may well be true; alchemy operates by the same strange laws as ‘quantum reality’, where the observer plays an all-important part.

  So what might be called ‘UFO reality’ would seem to be a realm like alchemy and quantum reality, where two apparently incompatible realities come together. In fact, they are far from incompatible; they only appear to be so because we are trapped in our tunnel vision, which assures us that this world is physical, and that we are inescapably tied to it. Yet we are always catching glimpses of a larger reality that tells us this is untrue. Even as simple and commonplace an experience as setting out on holiday makes us aware of it: that curious feeling of happiness and excitement is far more than mere anticipation of leisure. It is a glimpse of something far richer and bigger and more complex, a feeling that we are on the verge of discovering some secret. And the secret somehow belongs to the same type as a young person’s discovery of music or art—or, for that matter, sex. It is a promise of freedom, of far more freedom than we believe we possess, and also of control over our own lives.

  [1]. An English Figure: Two Essays on the Work of John Michell, 1979, p. 41.

  7

  OH NO, NOT AGAIN!

  We have already encountered Harold Wilkins, as the author of one of
the best of the early books on flying saucers. But in Mysteries Solved and Unsolved (1959) he recounts a tale that he certainly felt had no connection with flying saucers.

  One day in the summer of 1906, three children went into a field known as Forty Acres, a mile outside Gloucester, and disappeared. They were a boy, age ten, and two girls, age five and three, the children of ‘a rather uncouth railway guard, or brakeman, named Vaughan’. Harold Wilkins joined in the search. ‘We paid particular attention to the northeast corner of the field, where the pasture was bordered by tall, old elms, a thick hedge of thorn and bramble, and a deep ditch, separating it from a corn-field. Every inch was probed with sticks, and not a stone left unturned in the ditch. Had a dead dog been dumped there, he would certainly have been found’.

  The case was reported in the national press, and the Vaughan family received many postal orders from sympathetic readers. But, when the vicar called to express commiseration, he was turned away with the comment that Vaughan ‘didn’t want no bloody parsons rapping at his door’.

  Four days later, at six in the morning, a ploughman going to work in the cornfield looked over the hedge, and saw the three children asleep in the ditch. The children simply had no idea of where they had been for three days and nights.

  The ploughman was denied any share of the reward on the grounds that he had probably kidnapped the children to claim it—which was absurd, since the reward was not offered until after they had vanished. Besides, he lived in a small cottage in a tiny hamlet, where everyone knew everyone else’s business, so it was impossible.

  The missing boy was still alive after World War Two, and verified that he did not have the slightest idea of what happened from the time they went into the field to when they woke up four days later. This, Wilkins comments, is ‘characteristic of the amnesia which marks these phenomena’.