by Colin Wilson
Linda Howe is inclined to believe in the authenticity of the Majestic 12 document, as does another well-known investigator, Stanton Friedman. Jacques Vallee, who devotes a chapter to the affair in Revelations, is deeply sceptical, and talks about his disgust with the gullibility of UFO believers in general. He is equally sceptical about Area 51, the aliens’ underground base.
In 1995, it looked as if new and conclusive evidence had come to light. A television producer named Ray Santilli announced that he had found film footage of a dead alien recovered from the Roswell crash. Santilli said he bought it from an old retired cameraman who wished to keep his identity a secret. This man had filmed the post-mortem on the alien at the request of the air force, and simply held on to it.
But is the film genuine, or is it a fake? The explanation about the cameraman who wishes to remain unidentified, and who therefore cannot be questioned more closely, throws doubt on the whole story. Japanese buyers were offered a filmed interview with the cameraman, ‘Jack Barnett’, who explained the poor quality of the film by saying that it was difficult to work around doctors. He referred to the aliens he had seen (and whose dying screams he had heard) as ‘freaks’, Santilli explained that he was a devout Christian whose beliefs would not allow him to entertain the existence of life on other worlds—which in itself sounds unbelievable for someone who has actually filmed them. Linda Howe includes the cameraman’s statement in full in High Strangeness.
In 1997, a book appeared which seemed to confirm everything the conspiracy theorists had suspected about a government cover-up. The Day After Roswell, by retired Col. Philip J. Corso, claims that not only were bodies and alien technology retrieved after Roswell, but that this technology—lasers, microchips, fibre optics, even the ‘death ray’ deployed in the Star Wars project—was stolen from the aliens.
Corso claims that in 1947, when he was at the Fort Riley base in Kansas, he sneaked into a storehouse on the night of 6 July 1947 (four days after the famous Roswell ‘incident’) and levered the top off an oblong box—one of several delivered that afternoon from New Mexico, where there had been a plane crash. Inside, in a kind of glass coffin, was a four-foot alien with a head shaped like a light bulb.
In 1961, Corso, now an assistant to General Trudeau in the Pentagon, found he had inherited a filing cabinet full of alien technology from the Roswell crash. Trudeau explained that the air force, the navy and the CIA all wanted to lay their hands on it, which is why they had to keep it hidden.
Corso describes how he headed a research-and-development team to study the technology, and ‘seed’ it at various large American corporations, such as IBM and Bell Laboratories, where it gave the Americans a leading edge over the Russians in the space race and the Cold War.
It is virtually impossible to assess such staggering information. Trudeau is dead, so cannot support or deny the story. Senator Strom Thurmond, Corso’s boss after he retired from the army in 1963, who wrote a foreword to Corso’s book, is on record as protesting that he had no idea of the contents of the book, and should not be seen as endorsing it. Certainly, it seems strange that alien bodies should be sent to Washington by road and stored overnight, rather than refrigerated and sent by air. But Linda Howe, who interviewed Corso for several hours at Roswell, during the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the ‘incident’, received the impression that Corso is genuine and telling the precise truth.
If so, it raises a difficult problem. The solution Corso wants us to accept is that UFOs are metal spacecraft from some other planet whose civilisation is more technologically advanced than ours. Their intentions are basically hostile; they perform cattle mutilations and abduct human beings in the knowledge that we can do nothing about it. Star Wars technology with its high-energy beams put them on notice that we can now defend ourselves. According to Corso, the enormous build-up of atomic weapons during the Cold War was not to defend the West against the Russians, or vice versa, but to warn the aliens that, if they tried annexing a part of Earth, they could be totally destroyed.
A number of objections are immediately obvious. If we have put the aliens on notice that we can destroy them, why are the numbers of UFO sightings and abductions not decreasing? And, if the build-up of atomic weapons during the Cold War was to convince them that we could destroy them, would they have not have seen through our bluff—seen that we would also have destroyed ourselves, by filling the atmosphere with atomic fallout and poisonous radioactivity?
The whole story of the ‘capture’ of a living alien sounds dubious. A large number of the UFO reports cited in this book suggest that, if the aliens wanted to recover a lost comrade, they would have no difficulty whatsoever. The same reports suggest that their technology is so far ahead of our own that to speak of intimidating them with Star Wars technology sounds as ludicrous as fighting a modern war with cavalry and muskets.
But the real objection to Corso’s scenario is that it puts us back more than half a century to the view that UFOs are nuts-and-bolts craft from outer space, whose technology is simply more sophisticated than our own. Jacques Vallee started from this assumption, as did John Keel. Both were soon forced to abandon it as they became aware of the complex nature of the phenomenon. Vallee’s Invisible College begins with a chapter called ‘The Psychic Component’, then goes on to speak about the visions at Fátima and the Virgin of Guadaloupe. John Keel’s experiences in West Virginia left him in no doubt that he was dealing with some kind of psychic phenomenon, with an element of mischief that has something in common with poltergeists. Most of Linda Howe’s abductees—Jim Sparks, Wanna Lawson, Linda Porter, Judy Doraty—would also agree that the ‘nuts-and-bolts craft’ theory fails to even begin to cover their experiences.
In a book called Open Skies, Closed Minds (1996), Nick Pope, a British Ministry of Defence official who investigates UFOs for the government, comments that he is often asked, ‘Is there an official cover-up?’ and always replies, ‘Not in Britain’. If that is true—in spite of the assertions of ‘witnesses’ who claim that sites like Rendlesham are underground UFO bases—then it seems a reasonable assumption that Vallee and Keel are correct, and that there is no significant cover-up in the United States either.
Somehow, Corso’s explanation of the UFO phenomenon seems too crude and simplistic. And our basic intuition tells us that, whatever the final explanation of the phenomenon, it will not be as straightforward as that.
[1]. From Architects of the Underworld, 1996, by Bruce Rux, p. 147.
9
ALIEN POWERS?
In The Invisible College, Jacques Vallee discusses the curious experiences of Robert Monroe, a broadcasting executive who, in the late 1950s, began to have spontaneous out-of-the-body experiences. Monroe’s description of these, in Journeys Out of the Body (1972), makes a powerful impact of sincerity and honesty. Prof. Charles Tart, who studied Monroe, had no doubt of his genuineness. Monroe went on to form the Monroe Institute, a nonprofit organisation whose aim is to teach people how to induce out-of-the-body experiences and ‘altered states’. Monroe’s subsequent books, Far Journeys (1985) and Ultimate Journey (1994), have—no matter how impossible they sound—the same air of painstaking honesty.
Yet their implications are as bewildering as anything described in this book. If Monroe is telling the truth, then we live in an even stranger universe than some of those astonishing abductee reports suggest, and there is something wrong with our basic assumption that we are simply material beings living in a material world.
And this, at least, sounds a promising starting point for trying to understand what lies behind the UFO phenomenon.
Monroe was a businessman, whose career was in radio and electronics. He was experimenting with sleep-learning devices, and this almost certainly influenced what happened to him.
One Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1958, when he was forty-two, he listened to a tape whose purpose was to induce aural concentration. Later, after a light lunch, he was seized with abdominal cramps, which he though
t might be food poisoning. They continued until midnight, then went away. He wondered whether they might have something to do with the tape he had played.
Three weeks later, as he lay on the couch on a Sunday afternoon, ‘a beam or ray seemed to come out of the sky to the north at about a 30 degree angle from the horizon’. He described it as ‘like being struck by warm light. Only this was daylight and no beam was visible, if there truly was one’.
He began to ‘vibrate’, and became paralysed. With a great effort he forced himself to sit up. ‘It was like pushing against invisible bonds’.
To his alarm, it kept on happening. He was afraid that he was seriously ill, but medical checks showed nothing wrong with him. Then one day, with his hand hanging over the edge of the bed, he felt he could push his fingertips through the rug and the floor, to the ceiling of the room below.
A few weeks later, he found himself floating against the bedroom ceiling, with his body below in bed. Terrified that he might be dead, he swooped down to his body, and re-entered it.
When the ‘vibrations’ came again, he imagined leaving his body, and found himself floating in midair. When he willed himself to stop, he stopped. Again, he was able to re-enter his body.
Next time, he tried leaving by simply willing, and again it worked. A powerful sexual urge made him feel ashamed, and he returned to his body.
Oddly enough, he had never heard of out-of-the-body experiences—OBEs—and learnt about them only when he was recommended to read some of the classic texts by Sylvan Muldoon and Oliver Fox. Muldoon had experienced his first OBE when he was twelve, waking up in the middle of the night and finding himself floating above his bed. His book The Phenomena of Astral Projection (1951) surveys dozens of examples taken from the enormous literature of OBEs. Oliver Fox learnt to ‘astral project’ through ‘lucid dreaming’—becoming aware that he was dreaming as he lay in bed, and then controlling the dream. Later, he learned to induce OBEs by lying down and relaxing into a semi-trance state.
Robert Monroe was soon able to leave his body at will. On one out-of-the-body occasion, he decided to call on a doctor friend who was ill in bed, and saw the doctor leaving the house with his wife and walking to the garage. He checked later and found that the doctor had felt better and decided to accompany his wife on a drive to the post office. Monroe was also correct about what they were wearing.
He paid an astral visit to Andrija Puharich—having warned him that he might ‘visit’—and found him writing in his study. Puharich broke off his work and spoke to him; he later confirmed that Monroe’s description of his study was accurate, but he had no recollection of the visit, or the conversation that Monroe remembered.
Monroe was inclined to wonder if he had somehow fantasised the conversation with Puharich. But later similar experiences showed that he often received information known only to the other person.
This is interesting. Does it mean that Monroe’s astral being was communicating with Puharich’s, without the latter’s knowledge? Or is it possible that such events are somehow blotted out, as when we wake up from sleep? If so, could this, perhaps, explain why so many abductees suffer amnesia about their experiences?
Monroe did not enjoy astral projection in ‘this world’ (which he calls Locale I). It presents the same problems that a diver with a face mask would encounter diving to the bottom of the sea. But he felt at home in a realm he calls Locale II, a nonmaterial world which is the natural environment of the astral body, and to which we move after death. Here, he says, ‘thought is the wellspring of existence . . . As you think, so you are’. He says that Locale II ‘seems to interpenetrate our physical world’, and that the best explanation for it is the concept of vibrations, ‘an infinity of worlds all operating at different frequencies, one of which is this physical world’. Once again, this is a notion we have frequently encountered in this book.
It is also, he says, a timeless world, ‘where past and present exist co-terminously with “now”’. Perhaps the best way to understand this is to think of a novel. It has ‘time’, yet when you have finished it, you can turn back fifty pages and travel back to earlier events.
Oddly enough, Locale II does have some solid objects; these, he thinks, are created by thought—a notion that, again, might have some bearing on UFOs.
The area of Locale II nearest our physical reality is peopled with ‘emotionally driven’ beings who have never learnt any kind of self-discipline in our world; Monroe sees the acquisition of self-discipline as one of the most important purposes of our life on Earth. ‘If it doesn’t happen in physical life, it becomes the first order of business upon death’.
Immediately beyond our physical reality there is an area that Monroe calls ‘the H Band Noise’. This is the hubbub of all the thought that emanates from all living things on Earth, a kind of ‘disorganised, cacophonous mass of messy energy’ and emotions.
There is also an area that Monroe calls ‘the Belief System Territory’. Since, in Locale II, you are what you think, people who are deeply involved in some religious belief remain trapped in their beliefs, which are fortified by other believers. In Ultimate Journey, Monroe even describes an encounter with a Neanderthal woman who is trapped in a system that demands that she sacrifice herself to the sky god. These believers have to outgrow their ‘system’ before they can progress. (All this bears a remarkable similarity to Swedenborg’s descriptions in Heaven and Hell.)
Monroe also had experiences with the dead. Sleeping in a strange house, he saw a woman, who clasped his hand in both of hers; the next day he learnt that she had died in the same bedroom, and that she had a habit of taking people’s hands in both of hers. He visited a doctor friend who had died but failed to recognise him because he was so much younger; it was only when he saw a photograph of his friend as a young man that he knew he had met him ‘out of the body’.
Monroe notes that sex can take place in the astral plane, but that it is a kind of sexual ‘shock’ that occurs when two entities come close. And he makes the interesting observation that the human sexual act is only a feeble attempt to duplicate another intimate form of communion that occurs beyond the body.
In his second book, Far Journeys, Monroe goes on to tell something of what happened after he opened The Monroe Institute, at about the time of the publication of his first book. His group developed a technique he calls hemi-sync, or hemisphere synchronisation.
This depends on the fact that the left and right hemispheres of the brain are virtually two different people. The left hemisphere of our brain deals with logic, language and practical matters; it has the temperament of a scientist, and is known as the dominant hemisphere because it is more assertive than the other half. The right deals with intuitions and feelings, and recognition of patterns; it has the introverted temperament of an artist.
The odd thing is that it is the left half that we call ‘me’. This becomes apparent in patients who have had the ‘split brain operation’—severing the nerves between the two halves—to prevent epileptic attacks. They become literally two people. In one experiment, a patient was shown an apple with the right eye (connected to the left brain) and an orange with the left (connected to the right brain) in such a way that neither eye knew what the other was seeing. Asked what he had just seen, he replied ‘Apple’. Asked to write with his left hand what he had just seen, he wrote: ‘Orange’. Asked what he had just written, he replied ‘Apple’.
One patient was shown a dirty picture with her left eye, and blushed. Asked why she was blushing, she replied truthfully, ‘I don’t know’. The left half of her brain—where she lived—didn’t know.
These two people inside our heads operate on different wavelengths. Monroe developed methods of using patterns of sound to create an identical wave form in both hemispheres, so the two halves ceased to be out of step. He found that it could produce a marvellous calming effect which was conducive to ‘altered states’ and OBEs.
Monroe’s experiments with a team of ‘explorers’
led him to some important conclusions about extraterrestrial life. His out-of-the-body explorers were sent to the moon and other planets, and found no sign of life, not even vegetation. Even outside the solar system, they found nothing worthwhile. ‘It seemed to us a sterile universe’.
Then there came a major change. It came about through a small alteration in the ‘affirmation’ that subjects were asked to memorise before they began, which was basically the assertion that ‘I am more than my physical body’. When another paragraph was inserted about desiring the help and cooperation of other intelligent beings, the subjects began to experience frequent contact with nonhuman entities. One ‘explorer’, a physicist, had lengthy telepathic contact with two beings, whom he felt to be a man and a woman, but their attempt to answer his questions led to frustration. The physicist suspected that he saw them as male and female because he was imposing on them the shapes he found most familiar, and that they probably saw him in the shape they found most familiar. Another subject, an electronics engineer, talked to a being who said Earth was his ‘territory’, and got the impression that the being was some kind of helper.
Ultimate Journey is certainly the strangest and most controversial of Monroe’s books. A reader who comes to it without reading the first two might well dismiss it as fantasy. A long chapter is devoted to Monroe’s work in helping spirits who did not realise they were dead—for example, the woman who had died in the same bedroom proved to be still there, waiting for her husband to return. When these ‘earthbound spirits’ had been successfully convinced, they would suddenly vanish—presumably to a more productive level.