Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience

by Colin Wilson

  Sue recalled being taken to an examination room and strapped on a table, where she was painted a mauve colour and physically examined—she found she was wearing a gown, although she had no memory of being undressed. When the examination became too intimate, she screamed. One of the tall beings placed a hand on her forehead and, ‘I went out like a light’.

  Later, she was taken on a tour of the ship, and she was also shown images on a screen, including Earth from space, and the place where she lived.

  At this point, she apparently told her captors that she did not want to go back, and they agreed she could stay. But when she saw John climbing into the car, and the car dematerialising, she changed her mind and said she wanted to go. Then she found herself sitting in the car. This may explain why John thought he was alone in the front of the car for a few moments before he realised Sue was there.

  The Days struck everyone who spoke to them as exceptionally forthcoming and honest. It should also be borne in mind that the usual objection—that an abductee has been influenced by other stories of abductees—does not apply in this case, since this all took place in 1974 (although they were not hypnotised until 1977), when there were no other abductee reports in Britain (and even in America they were rare).

  A number of important observations emerge from the case. The first is that the ‘aliens’ apparently intended no harm; apart from the uncomfortable physical examination, they seemed friendly, and treated the Days as intelligent fellow beings. The aftereffect was to make both of them more self-confident, and to cause them to become more aware of their own health and that of the planet. John’s nervous breakdown was apparently brought on by vivid dreams, and by the poltergeist activity. (Poltergeists have been responsible for more than one nervous collapse.) But he subsequently found another job involving more ‘artistic’ activity. Their ten-year-old improved at school. And the youngest, asked what he wanted to do when he grew up, declared that he intended to build a huge spacecraft to take thousands of people from Earth.

  In general, then, the case seems to support John Mack’s view that abduction experiences ‘open the consciousness’ of abductees. Mack also comments that his own experience of working with abductees provides a rich body of evidence to support the idea that ‘the cosmos, far from being devoid of meaning and intelligence, is . . . informed by some kind of universal intelligence . . . one to which human intelligence is akin, and in which it can participate’.

  But why the poltergeist activity? The likeliest explanation is that the poltergeists had nothing to do with the aliens, but that the experience had somehow ‘opened up’ the Days, weakening the divide that seems to separate human beings from other realms of reality—for example, Monroe’s ‘Locale II’—and making them vulnerable to attack. This again underlines the connection, noted so many times in this book, between UFO phenomena and the realm of the paranormal.

  For me, the most interesting thing that has emerged during my research for this book is the connection between the UFO experience and the experience of wider—or deeper—states of consciousness: such as Jacques Vallee’s case of the woman who experienced ‘novel insights into the nature of reality’, and who changed ‘from an agnostic to a gnostic’, after seeing a UFO on her way to Oxford. (This was followed, as in the case of John and Sue Day, by a ‘supernatural’ experience.) I have always been preoccupied with the oddly limited nature of human consciousness, and in my first book, The Outsider, I labelled it (rather arbitrarily) ‘original sin’. In a later book on Gurdjieff, I expressed it rather more precisely in the comment, ‘Human beings are like grandfather clocks driven by watchsprings’. Human consciousness seems too feeble to take advantage of our occasional flashes of insight.

  The nature of such insights is expressed by the writer—and student of Eastern mysticism—Paul Roberts, in an article he wrote on his own UFO experiences.[2] In ‘Making Contact’ he describes how he and two friends saw a flying saucer in 1969 in Cornwall. The enormous disc made a powerful electric whirring (unlike many UFOs, which are silent) and hovered motionless for over twenty minutes, during which it changed colour. Then seven or eight smaller discs came from somewhere, and merged with the larger one, although there was no visible opening. The saucer made off in a ‘slow vague zig-zag’ until over the Atlantic, then it banked and took off upward at a speed that one of them—a mathematician—thought to be over twenty thousand miles per hour.

  None of them reported the sighting, not wishing to be regarded as cranks, and they ‘took it in their stride’.

  Two months later, Roberts was again by the sea, this time with only one friend, on a moonlit evening. A policeman warned them to be careful because ‘things have been happening around here’.

  When the policeman had gone, they heard a voice behind them, succeeded by a powerful humming sound that made the beach vibrate. Nothing was visible in the sky. Then, suddenly, the night was lit up ‘as if by a gigantic magnesium flare’. Before they could panic, a voice behind them said something like, ‘There will be no harm for you’. Then two shining entities emerged from the shadows—Roberts’s companion later described them as ‘angels without wings’. Roberts was aware of others in the background. Then a vast egg of light descended, and they suddenly realised they were inside it. They seemed to be surrounded by a kind of liquid light that chilled them. They both had a dreamlike sensation, and a sense of telepathic communication.

  In Making Contact (1997), Roberts writes:

  I confess it grieves me to report—since this seems mandatory in every Close Encounter of the Third Kind—that a good deal of what we heard involved dire warnings about the planet’s future unless we earthlings smartened up. The slight difference—and it’s one that both of us have only come to appreciate some thirty years later—was that we were being told that the Earth would be destroyed not so much by human actions as by the current human character. We were told that what we viewed as separate entities—people, flora, fauna, planet—are in reality but one entity. As was believed in the ancient world—and quite clearly, by such as Shakespeare—earthquakes and natural cataclysms are causally related to events in the human sphere, both as augurs or omens, and as reactions of cosmic outrage.

  And there was also good news. It doesn’t have to be this way. The planet’s fate could be altered, as could our destinies—but only if we changed ourselves. And we’d be shown how this could be done in due time, as apparently everyone is eventually shown in some way or other.

  After that, they saw the egg of light rise above them. The drone returned, and it streaked away into the night at 45 degrees.

  Roberts says they sat in silence for hours, then his friend said, ‘I suppose that changes everything’. They swore an oath not to speak of the experience—to protect themselves in academic circles—and Roberts records that, before writing the article, he had to get his friend’s permission.

  That is not quite the end of the story. In 1975, Roberts was with the Indian ‘miracle man’ Sai Baba in India—Baba is famous for being able to materialise objects from the air, and healing the sick. Roberts was talking with a nuclear physicist, S. K. Bhagavantam, and discussing space travel. Baba joined them and asked what they were talking about, and Roberts asked him about life on other planets and UFOs. In reply, Baba told him to shut his eyes. Roberts felt Baba’s thumb pressed on his forehead.

  Instantly, an inner vision of awesome beauty opened up before me. I saw world after jewelled world in a limitless cosmos of coiling self-illuminated spheres within spheres. I was in each world simultaneously, their myriad unique fragrances, textures, sounds, and landscapes, all apparent, their every inhabitant me and yet also not me. As with a dream, everything was projected from me, and yet existed independently of me, flowing in and out as fragile and as vital as breath. Yet it was truly infinite, no limit possible to the teeming life, which seemed made of undiluted joy. A universe that continued literally forever, worlds without end.

  (Making Contact)

  Baba told them, ‘O
uter space, inner space. Inner space the only real space’.

  Roberts asked him if he was saying that UFOs came from within the mind. ‘Not mind. Heart. Heart is God’s mind, isn’t it? Space men come from heart—heart of God’. He told them, ‘Close your eyes, nose, mouth, ears . . . Is the world there? No smelling, tasting, touch, sight, hearing. Yes? World is gone. But you are not gone. See, my dears, all things are really made by you, but for now you are thinking that God is making the grandeur of this universe’.

  When Baba was gone, Roberts and Bhagavantam experienced ‘a monsoon of understanding’. ‘The UFOs were real, all right. Yet their occupants are not flesh-and-blood beings like us. In spite of all the odds, we are unique. Nowhere in the universe is there a life form like us. The beings I’d seen with my friend were made of thought and light. They were ideas—but real ideas—and what they brought and still bring is a super-condensed form of truth’.

  Now all this may sound as if it has very little to do with the UFO phenomenon as examined by Jacques Vallee or John Spencer. Yet there are interesting echoes. In Stuart Holroyd’s Prelude to the Landing on Planet Earth, ‘Tom’ explained via Phyllis Schlemmer that Earth is of peculiar importance in the universal scheme of things, but that it is now acting as a kind of bottleneck, preventing the evolution of other planets.

  Sai Baba’s comment, ‘all things are really made by you’, sounds oddly like the view that seems to emerge from the Copenhagen Interpretation. The astronomer David Darling expresses it: ‘It comes as a powerful corroboration . . . that the conscious mind is crucially involved in establishing what is real. That which reaches our senses is, at best, a confusion of phantasmal energies—not sights, or sounds, or any of the coherent qualities that we project outward onto the physical world. The universe, as we know it, is built and experienced entirely within our heads, and until that mental construction takes place, reality must wait in the wings’.[3]

  As already mentioned, the physicist John Wheeler goes further. Starting from the position that a photon does not become ‘solid’ until it is observed, he points out that the double-slit experiment might be carried out with light from a distant star—light that started out billions of years ago. But, if light is a ‘wave of probability’ until observation causes the wave function to collapse, then we have to assume that the star (provided it is uninhabited) is also a wave of probability until its light is observed in the laboratory.

  This is, of course, the position expounded by Bishop Berkeley in the early eighteenth century—that our senses ‘create’ the world, although its existence is sustained by God. And if, like Dr. Johnson, you regard this position as mildly improbable (he kicked a stone to refute it), then you are unlikely to be convinced by Wheeler’s expression of it.

  Now another eminent physicist, David Bohm, was also unwilling to accept this new version of Berkeley. Being a Marxist at that time, he felt the Copenhagen Interpretation was a little too mystical, and was inclined to side with Einstein. Yet he was by no means a committed ‘classical physicist’. In 1943, he was working on plasmas at the Lawrence Berkeley Radiation Laboratory—a plasma is a very hot gas, most of whose atoms have been stripped of outer electrons, which circulate freely. Bohm noticed that the plasma behaved in many ways like a living thing, that ‘the plasma constantly regenerated itself and surrounded all impurities with a sheath, so as to isolate them completely’,[4] just as our bodies do with viruses. He had the impression that the electrons were alive. He noticed the same thing at Princeton, working on the study of electrons in metals: that also led him to feel that he was dealing with a living ocean of particles, each aware of what the others were doing.

  Talks with Einstein deepened his dissatisfaction with the Copenhagen Interpretation. Like Einstein, he wanted to feel there was something deeper than mere probability and uncertainty. He toyed with the idea of ‘hidden variables’, the notion of particles tinier than the electron that might account for its movements, then later suggested a kind of ‘field’ called quantum potential, rather like the nineteenth-century idea of the ether, in which all particles swam. These notions encouraged John Bell to formulate his Inequality Theorem, which led to the confirmation that two photons flying apart at the speed of light remain somehow in contact.

  On a BBC television programme, Bohm saw a demonstration that provided a metaphor for these ideas. A drop of ink was suspended in a glass jar full of glycerine. A cylinder with a handle ran down the centre of the jar, and when the handle was turned clockwise, the ink became a streak, and gradually disappeared into the glycerine. But, when the movement of the handle was reversed, the ‘streak’ flowed the opposite way, and condensed back into a drop of ink. The ‘order’ in the ink drop was apparently scattered—but was there all the time, merely awaiting an anticlockwise turn of the handle.

  Supposing, Bohm found himself thinking, there was a similar underlying order in the universe—like the order that seemed to govern the electrons in the plasma soup?

  Then Bohm came upon the idea of the hologram (see p. 71), which gave him an even better metaphor. The holographic film has the appearance of a meaningless interference pattern, yet, when a beam of light is shone through it, a picture appears in space.

  This led to the breathtaking idea that perhaps the universe itself might be a hologram that springs out of an underlying reality. As a child, Bohm had been struck by the way that water forms a vortex flowing down a plughole; it looks quite different from still water, yet it is merely water obeying hidden laws—laws of what Bohm later called ‘implicate order’, the order ‘enfolded’ in the hologram.

  But, of course, what makes the hologram so fascinating is that every part of the photographic plate contains an image of the whole. The universe is not composed of disconnected parts: there is a fundamental ‘interconnectedness’. An individual consciousness clearly plays a major part in converting the waves on the plate into a meaningful reality.

  So Bohm has created his own answer to Einstein’s objection to the Copenhagen Interpretation—that ‘God does not play dice’. The notion of ‘dice’ is an illusion—there is an underlying order.

  The book in which Bohm expressed this conclusion, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, appeared in 1980. For some odd reason that I have never discovered, his publishers decided to send me a proof copy (then entitled simply Wholeness and Implicate Order) to ask me for a quote for the dust jacket. It was obvious to me that Bohm was a tremendously exciting thinker, and that he was trying to bridge the gap between science and the philosophy of meaning. I said as much, and, in due course, found my quote—the only one, as it happened—on the dust jacket. Even so, it was some years before I grasped the seminal importance of the book I was recommending.

  On page 191, I encountered a concept that left me puzzled and confused. ‘It may be said . . . that space is full rather than empty . . . that what we perceive through the senses as empty space is actually the plenum, which is the ground for the existence of everything’. What space was full of, it seemed, was something called ‘zero-point energy’, so called because it still pervades space even at a temperature of absolute zero.

  It was many years before I found out what he was talking about. A writer named Donald Hotson sent me the typescript of a book on the identity of Shakespeare’s ‘Mr. W. H’. that was so erudite and amusing that I took the trouble of making his acquaintance when I next found myself in New York. There I was surprised to learn that he regarded Shakespeare scholarship only as a sideline—his uncle happened to be the Shakespeare scholar Leslie Hotson and the book sprang out of an argument with him. Donald Hotson’s major interest was quantum theory and its bearing on cosmology. When I returned to England, he sent me the typescript of a book called Virtual Quantum Reality.

  If the Shakespeare book had impressed me, this left me stunned. Short, clearly written, with a dry humour reminiscent of Mark Twain, it argued that Einstein was probably wrong—not just about the Copenhagen Interpretation, but about virtually everything.


  Now my friend Martin Gardner, in a book called Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, had argued that Einstein is the happy hunting ground of half-educated cranks, and that anyone who tries to disprove Einstein is a crank by definition. But Hotson was clearly no nut. His temperament was closer to that of Charles Fort, except that he knew far more about physics.

  He began with Maxwell’s discovery that light is a form of electromagnetic energy, and his assumption that the waves of this energy are carried by a medium called the ‘ether’, which permeates all space, although it cannot be detected. In 1897, two physicists named Michelson and Morley reasoned that if the Earth is passing through this ether like a ship through water, there ought to be an ‘ether wind’ whistling past us. To detect this, they shot one beam of light across the ether wind and back, and another up and down it for the same distance. Simple mathematics shows that a swimmer who goes up a river and back takes longer than he would take to swim the same distance across the river and back. The difference between the two times should have revealed how fast the ether wind was blowing. In fact, the experiment detected no ether wind whatever.

  A Dutch physicist named Hendrik Lorentz was not discouraged by this. In 1904, he made the suggestion that perhaps our Earth itself is a huge ‘standing wave’ in the ether—a suggestion that nowadays makes far more sense than it did then, since we know our Earth is made of electrons, which are waves (until observation turns them into particles).

  At this point, Einstein produced his Special Theory of Relativity. It sprang out of the thought that if he was sitting astride a beam of light, and travelling away from the clock in the Berne main square, the time would remain unchanged as he looked back. He went on to consider Maxwell’s insistence that nothing could travel faster than light. But suppose you were sitting on the front of a train travelling at half the speed of light, and you shone a torch ahead of you, the torch beam surely had to be travelling at one and a half times the speed of light?