Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience

by Colin Wilson

  There is a clear distinction between out-of-the-body experiences, remote viewing and ‘astral projection’. The remote viewer remains in his body, fully aware of it, while his consciousness is elsewhere. In OBEs, the body is left behind completely, connected only by some kind of psychic telephone line (Monroe was often drawn back by the need to urinate). In ‘astral projection’, a kind of ‘double’ appears in another place, apparently sent by the unconscious mind, while the conscious mind usually remains unaware of what is happening. The basic condition for this type of projection seems to be an intently focused imagination, which suggests that it has some connection with Jung’s active imagination.

  Astral projection seems to depend upon some form of telepathy, or connection between minds. One of Brian O’Leary’s Princeton colleagues, Robert Jahn, quotes Paracelsus: ‘Man also possesses a power by which he may see his friends and the circumstances by which they are surrounded, although such persons may be a thousand miles away from him at the time’.

  Jahn is a professor of applied sciences at the Princeton School of Engineering, and his researches are central to this argument. In 1977, a female student had asked him if he would oversee her project on psychokinesis—‘mind over matter’. She wanted to know whether a random-number generator could be influenced by human mental effort. Jahn at first refused, explaining that such experiments were not the kind of thing they did at Princeton. Finally, he gave way, telling her that they would have to keep quiet about it.

  Her results proved so startling that Jahn himself began to repeat the experiments. These involved a machine called a Random Events Generator, in which binary pulses are generated by some random process, such as radioactive decay. It might be regarded as a kind of electronic coin-flipper. And if a coin is flipped often enough, the number of heads and tails will be equal.

  Jahn, and his colleague Brenda Dunne, brought people in from the street and asked them to try to influence the coin-flipper to make it produce more heads than tails. And the rate of success was amazing. (The parapsychologist J. B. Rhine had conducted similar tests at Duke University, after a gambler came to his office, and told him he was able to influence the fall of the dice—a claim he went on to demonstrate as he and Rhine crouched on the floor of the office.)

  Jahn and Dunne went on to study remote viewing. In one experiment described in their Margins of Reality, one subject, labelled ‘Agent’, went to downtown Chicago, while another, labelled ‘Percipient’, stayed behind in a TV studio.

  When Agent arrived downtown, a random-number generator selected one of ten envelopes that had been prepared earlier, each one containing a different location within a thirty-minute drive. The target that was selected was the Rockefeller Chapel, on the campus of the University of Chicago.

  Back in the studio, Percipient gave her impressions. She saw the arcade next to the Tribune building, and a fountain with a statue. She saw a building with turrets, and thin, long windows. She saw a heavy wooden door with a black bolt. It was, she felt, a church. She described the inside and outside the Rockefeller Chapel in some detail, all of which proved to be accurate.

  Now it may seem that this experiment is not about remote viewing so much as about telepathy between a sympathetic Agent and Percipient. But there is an interesting twist. Percipient gave her impressions of the chapel an hour and a quarter before Agent arrived downtown and opened the envelope. She was remote viewing the future.

  But then, we may recall, David Morehouse was able to remote view the past—he had to travel back six years into the cockpit of the Korean airliner shot down by the Russians. However, we feel somehow that this should not be too difficult—the past has happened, and left its traces behind, as in the Civil War Museum. But to remote view the future sounds absurd. Yet, as Jahn and Dunne point out, this is standard procedure in remote-viewing exercises carried out in many laboratories.

  In other words, what Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne are doing is demonstrating under test conditions that human beings—many of them selected at random from outside the lab—possess precisely the same kind of powers that contactees ascribe to aliens.

  What is even more strange is that this is not only true of human beings. In another experiment, a random peanut dispenser was placed in a Californian forest, and the experiments found that skunks, raccoons and foxes, in search of peanut snacks, were somehow able to influence it even more strongly than their human test subjects.

  I have suggested in From Atlantis to the Sphinx that our remote ancestors took ‘psychic powers’ for granted, and that one of the turning points in human evolution was the discovery of hunting magic, as portrayed in the caves of Cro-Magnon man. This hunting magic, which almost certainly worked, gave man his first sense of control over nature and his own destiny. I have also suggested that the religion of early man was based on the ‘collective unconscious’, and that it gave a tribe a kind of psychic unity—the same unity as is displayed by a flock of swallows who wheel simultaneously in the air, without any obvious signal, or a shoal of fishes turning all at once in the water. Obviously, human beings in a modern city do not need that kind of unity. In the past four thousand years or so, the individual has had to learn to stand alone.

  There would obviously be no point in trying to return to that earlier stage. But the kind of powers described by Robert Monroe and David Morehouse, and investigated by Robert Jahn in the laboratory, are a different matter. It is fairly certain that our Cro-Magnon ancestors could not have out-of-the-body experiences at will, or remote view what a herd of bison was doing. Such powers were almost certainly possessed by their shamans, but were as rare then as they are today.

  What is necessary at this stage in our evolution is not a ‘return’ to the psychic powers of our ancestors, but an expansion of our own potential powers, based upon the certain knowledge that such powers exist.

  The truth is that there could be no simple return to the past. Things have changed inevitably and permanently. We are all members of a global culture, and, for better or worse, that culture is as practical and down-to-Earth as ancient Rome.

  And there is one respect in which it is definitely for worse. Our scientific culture is basically sceptical. So we have a suitably down-to-Earth picture of ourselves as practical creatures whose chief business on Earth is to stay alive and provide for our children. When we hear about alien abduction, our first reaction is to dismiss it, and our second—if we get that far—is to wonder if we are about to be superseded by creatures to whom we must seem primitive and stupid.

  This chapter introduces a third possibility: that the ‘aliens’ may not be so fundamentally different from us—that they have simply developed powers that are latent in all of us.

  There is another reason why there can be no return to the past. Unlike every other creature on Earth, man has shown a voracious appetite for knowledge. In the time of Julius Caesar, most of that knowledge was stored in the great library of Alexandria. Now it is stored in hundreds of thousands of libraries and millions of computers. In other words, man’s development has been primarily left-brain. He has not bothered overmuch with the development of psychic faculties, which seems to be a right-brain ability; he regards the practical, technical approach as far more rewarding. The result is that modern man is stuck firmly in a left-brain universe.

  One UFO researcher, Donald Hotson, has thrown off an amusing and original theory that underlines this point. What, he asks, would have happened if, at some remote period in the past, the human race had split into two types, one of whom followed the left-brain path, while the other followed the right? The first thing that would certainly have happened is that the left-brainers would have developed a basic hostility to the right brainers, regarding them as ‘weirdos’. And the right-brainers might, for their own protection, have withdrawn from the practical realm of the left-brainer, perhaps to one of these parallel worlds of which Monroe and Vallee speak. Perhaps, Hotson suggests, UFOs are visitors from our right-brain half-brothers?

  It i
s worth trying to imagine what would have happened to a civilisation that decided to follow the right-brain path as obsessively as we have pursued the left. We have invented atomic power, computers and space travel. What would they have developed over the same period?

  In the mid-nineteenth century, a group of philosophers and scientists, impressed by man’s technological progress, decided to try to investigate scientifically the problem of life after death and psychic powers. For some reason, it didn’t work. They accumulated a great deal of very impressive evidence about life after death, OBEs, second sight, precognition and telepathy. But they had not really annexed the paranormal in the way that nineteenth century science had annexed chemistry, geology and abnormal psychology.

  We can see why. They were trying to annex the paranormal using the methods of science—measuring rods, flashlight photography, tripwires. And the paranormal was simply not willing to cooperate on those terms. As Brian O’Leary realised when he discovered that science had told him only half the truth, the investigator has to plunge in head first and look for first-hand experience. O’Leary had to learn that the paranormal exists as a separate realm, quite apart from our physical realm, which can be investigated with microscopes and telescopes and particle beams. It is literally a parallel universe.

  Yet it is possible to approach it in a thoroughly scientific spirit. An interesting case in point is that of Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, born in Russia in 1878. Ouspensky struck his followers as hard, pragmatic, impatient of all talk of mysticism or religion. As a follower of the teacher and philosopher Gurdjieff, Ouspensky applied this same pragmatic, scientific approach, trying to organise Gurdjieff’s ‘system’ into a practical methodology.

  One of the things Gurdjieff taught Ouspensky was about ‘self-remembering’. Self-remembering is looking at some object—say your watch—and being at the same time aware of yourself looking at it. This is extremely difficult to do. After a few seconds, you become aware only of yourself and forget your watch, or of your watch and forget yourself.

  Wandering around St. Petersburg at night, Ouspensky would practise self-remembering, and he noted that, as he began to succeed, he would feel that the houses were somehow aware of him, and that he could sense the individual history of each house. ‘They were living beings, full of thoughts, feelings, moods and memories’. We may recall that David Morehouse made a similar observation about Dachau. Passing through the stone wall into the camp, he noted: ‘It was at times like these that I learned that everything indeed has a spirit. The wall had its own history.’

  Ouspensky noted the same kind of thing looking at the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, and a factory behind it. As a friend drew his attention to this, he says, ‘I too sensed the difference between the chimneys and the prison walls with unusual clearness and like an electric shock. I realised the difference between the very bricks themselves’.

  In a piece called ‘Experimental Mysticism’,[3] Ouspensky describes how he embarked on the study of altered states of consciousness by means of some method which he refuses to divulge, but which was almost certainly the inhalation of nitrous oxide, with which many psychologists were experimenting at the time. His first observation in this new state of awareness was that ‘everything is linked together’, and that it would be impossible to say anything about it without saying everything at once. Everything is connected.

  Similarly, he describes looking at an ashtray in this heightened state, and becoming aware of ‘a whirlwind of thoughts and images’, including the history of tobacco, of copper, of mining, of smelting. He wrote down a few words in order to try to recall what he had glimpsed; the next day he read: ‘One could go mad from one ashtray’.

  In other words, Ouspensky is saying that the things around us—houses, bricks, ashtrays—contain endless depths of meaning, which is actually perceptible to us in certain states of consciousness. Aldous Huxley had noted the same thing in Doors of Perception: that, under mescalin, everything seemed to throb with meaning to an almost painful extent. Huxley suggests that our senses actually filter out most of this meaning, because it would overwhelm us and make practical, everyday life impossible. We are like blinkered horses. Our senses, Huxley suggests, are designed to keep things out as much as to let them in.

  Could this, perhaps, explain some of the paradoxes of remote viewing—how, for example, David Morehouse could view a Korean airliner that had been shot down years earlier, and how Jahn’s subject could foretell what her friend would be looking at in an hour’s time? If, in fact, this world around us is suffused with infinite meaning, to which we have deliberately blinded ourselves, as if wearing a welder’s dark goggles, then it is obviously possible that we might have access to all kinds of meanings that we assumed had ceased to exist. An antiques expert looking at an old carpet or piece of furniture can perceive things about its history that would be invisible to the rest of us.

  There was, in fact, one eminent twentieth-century historian who believed that there is a sense in which we can gain access to the past. In the tenth volume of A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee describes ten occasions on which he felt himself transported back into the past, either as he stood on some historic site, or as he read some passage by a participant in the historic event.

  At first, it sounds as if Toynbee is speaking simply about history ‘coming alive’ through the imagination. But it soon becomes clear that he means far more than that. He describes how, in March 1912, he rounded the shoulder of a mountain in Crete, and found himself looking at the ruins of a baroque villa, probably built for one of the last Venetian governors three centuries earlier. He describes how, looking at the house, he had ‘an experience which was the counterpart . . . of an aeroplane’s sudden deep drop when it falls into an air pocket’. It felt, he says, like falling into a time pocket, to a time, 250 years before, when the house was hastily evacuated. It seems clear that what Toynbee experienced was very similar to Ouspensky’s feeling that the houses of St. Petersburg were speaking to him, or Morehouse’s experience as he passed through the walls of Dachau.

  On another occasion, at the site of the battle of Pharsalus (197 BC, he seemed to see the Romans wiping out the army of Philip V of Macedon with such brutality that he averted his eyes. As he did so, he caught sight of a group of horsemen fleeing from the battle—he had no idea of their identity. A moment later, the whole scene vanished into thin air.

  The full import of what Toynbee means by a ‘time pocket’ (if he had known the term, he might have called them time slips) becomes clear when he describes the experience that led him to write Study of History. In May 1912 he had been sitting in the ruined citadel of Mistra, looking down on the vale of Sparta. Over six hundred years it had changed hands again and again—Franks, Byzantines, Turks, Venetians. But then, in 1821, wild highlanders had poured through the city walls, massacring its fleeing inhabitants. And, from that day onward, Mistra had been a deserted ruin. His sense of this catastrophe was so real that he was suddenly overwhelmed by ‘the cruel riddle of mankind’s crimes and follies’, and received the inspiration for his gigantic Study of History, in which he attempts to glimpse some meaning and purpose in human history.

  What has happened is that the past has suddenly ‘become alive’; it has become as real as the present. In the same way, Proust’s novel Á la recherche du temps perdu (‘in search of lost time’, commonly known as Remembrance of Things Past) sprang from the single experience described by the narrator Marcel (who is Proust himself). Coming home one evening, cold and tired, Marcel tastes a little cake called a madeleine, which he has dipped in herb tea. It brings a strange sensation of pure delight: ‘An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses . . . I had now ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal . . .’. What has happened, he realises when he takes another taste, is that the cake dipped in tea has brought back his own childhood, when his Aunt Leonie used to offer him some of her madeleine dipped in herb tea when he came in from a long Sunday walk. The taste has revived the past
, made it alive, as if the intervening years were a dream. His vast novel is an attempt to repeat this experience.

  In a book called The Occult (1971), I coined a term for this curious ability to grasp the reality of some other time and place. I called it Faculty X.

  But Faculty X should not be seen as some psychic ability. Toynbee’s ability to ‘relive’ the past was based upon his exhaustive knowledge of it. He knew every detail of the manoeuvres at the Battle of Pharsalus. He knew all about how the Venetians had been driven out of Crete. He knew precisely how Mistra had been overwhelmed.

  What happened, quite clearly, is that, as he looked down on the ruined citadel of Mistra, he experienced something akin to Proust’s feeling as he tasted the madeleine; there was a kind of surge of vitality which, combined with imagination, suddenly made the past totally real.

  Ouspensky had expressed this when he wrote: ‘It seems to us that we see something and understand something. But in reality all that proceeds around us we sense only very confusedly, just as a snail senses confusedly the sunlight, the darkness and the rain’. In the flashes of Faculty X, the snail’s-eye view vanishes; what had been merely an idea becomes real.

  We can see that Toynbee was exercising a power that is peculiar to a modern man: it might, to some extent, be regarded as a paranormal faculty, but it is based on knowledge and the exercise of intellect. In this sense, it is quite unlike the powers traditionally exercised by shamans. These flashes of Faculty X could not have occurred if Toynbee had not spent years absorbing the history of Greece, and its language and literature and art. He had prepared the ground for Faculty X with left-brain discipline.