Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience

by Colin Wilson

  He has come to suspect that ‘Martians’ are deliberately bombarding Earth with cosmic rays. The idea disturbs him deeply. But when, at the end of the book, his wife asks whether he believes he is one of these ‘fairy changelings’, ‘everything became coherent and plain to him. Everything fell into place’. Suddenly it is obvious to him that he is a Martian. And, as they look down at their sleeping baby, they know he will be a Martian too. (Significantly, their names are Joseph and Mary.)

  But cosmic rays could hardly bring about the kind of change Wells has in mind. We now know that cosmic rays would not be a viable instrument for genetic engineering, being incapable of ‘fine tuning’. A far more practical way of bringing about a ‘change of mind’ would be by altering the consciousness of individuals—as discussed above—and then relying on what Rupert Sheldrake has called ‘morphogenetic fields’ to spread the change. Studying the experiments of the psychologist William McDougal with white rats, Sheldrake noted that not only were the rats able to pass on their laboratory training to their offspring (thus challenging the dogma that ‘acquired characteristics’ cannot be inherited), but that other rats in the laboratory which had played no part in the experiment (the so-called ‘control group’) had also picked up the same learning—apparently by some form of telepathic induction. But it could not have been simply telepathy, because even crystals behaved in the same way. Some crystals are extremely difficult to crystallise in the laboratory; but once a single lot has been crystallised, others also crystallise more quickly, even in distant laboratories. Sheldrake suggested that this form of ‘osmosis’ was due to a kind of electrical induction, and called his theory ‘the hypothesis of formative causation’.

  There have been many experiments that have confirmed it. For example, English speakers memorised two rhymes in a foreign language, one of which was a well-known nursery rhyme, while the other had been newly composed. As expected, the subjects found it easier to memorise the well-known rhyme—presumably because millions of people already knew it.

  So, if the UFO phenomenon is, indeed, a ‘control phenomenon’, then we would expect it to make an increasing impact on the human mind simply by this process of morphogenetic ‘induction’.

  During the writing of this book I have been experiencing an odd kind of synchronicity. Beside my bed there is a digital clock. And, when I look at it in the night, it often shows numbers in treble figures: 1:11, 2:22, 3:33, 4:44 and so on. Now the chance of that happening are obviously sixty to one. Yet it happens again and again—on one occasion, twice in one night. Once, I fell asleep after doing a particularly satisfying piece of thinking, and when I woke up, the clock showed 11:11. And this morning, when I knew that it must be sometime after four, I turned over, thinking (only half seriously) ‘I bet it will be 4:44’. And, sure enough, it was.

  This could be explained by various hypotheses. The first is coincidence, which I am disinclined to accept. The second is some sort of ‘outside intervention’, perhaps ‘spirits’, or even UFO entities, trying to tell me that I am on the right track—that bizarre phenomena and coincidences should not be dismissed as unimportant. This strikes me as just possible, but the principle of Ockham’s razor—which warns against the multiplication of entities—makes me view it as unlikely. The third is the hypothesis I have already considered: that we are living in an ‘information universe’, and that my unconscious mind may be trying to tell me that I can make use of its facilities more easily than I think. This, on the whole, seems to me the most fruitful explanation. Ian Watson told me that, while he was writing Miracle Visitors, UFOs seemed to ‘home in’ on him—not actual sightings, but endless snippets of information about them, including a number of reported sightings close by. And on one occasion, a man dressed in a black suit knocked on his door and asked if he could use the toilet—to Watson’s puzzlement, since there was a public toilet nearby, as well as some convenient bushes across the road. The man may have been a normal passer-by, or he may have been one of John Keel’s practical jokers.

  The information-universe theory—implying that mind can directly influence matter—recalls Robert Monroe’s observation about Locale II—‘As you think, so you are’. But then, there is no solid matter in Locale II, and our world consists of little else.

  Yet it would seem that the UFO entities have no problems with solid matter. And it is likely that we would be the same if we had reached their level of evolution. Our problem, when we feel trapped in matter, is that we find it very hard to believe that it can be tamed by any mental discipline. Yet, on a lower level, everyday life supports this contention. Apparently insoluble problems yield to determined effort. I am inclined to believe that the matter of this world yields to effort just like the finer matter of Locale II. But it has immense inertia, and yields slowly and painfully, like some gigantic rusty door. Half the battle is realising that it will yield if you push hard.

  When I began this book, my knowledge of UFOs was slightly wider than that of most newspaper readers, but not much. I had even written a small paperback on the subject. This did not prepare me for the effect of reading two hundred or so books about UFOs. These left me in no doubt that something was trying to communicate with us, but that direct communication would be counterproductive. It seemed to be an important part of the scheme to create a sense of mystery.

  When I read Miracle Visitors, I felt that Ian Watson had come the closest so far to suggesting a plausible solution, and this was because he had been willing to consider that the answer might lie in the realm of the ‘mystical’. But that notion obviously implied that the phenomenon could not be dismissed as practical joking or even the hybridisation of the human race. Something much stranger was happening.

  Now I had always been interested in mysticism, and the Hindu saint Ramakrishna had occupied a central place in my first book, The Outsider, while the second, Religion and the Rebel, was largely devoted to mystics.

  In the early 1980s, I had formulated the notion that there are, for practical purposes, eight levels of consciousness. If we regard unconsciousness as Level 0, then Level 1 is dreaming. Level 2 is mere passive consciousness, in which the mind is simply a reflecting mirror, taking no interest in its surroundings. In Level 3, the mind is now active, but feels a helpless pawn of ‘fate’, or its environment. Level 4 is so-called ‘normal consciousness’, the kind we experience every day. It still has a strong underlying feeling of helplessness and pessimism. But Level 5 is what I have labelled ‘spring-morning consciousness’, that wonderful sense of clarity and wide-awakeness, when the world seems to sparkle with meaning. This tends to last a few hours at most, so Level 6 was a more permanent version of Level 5—such as might be experienced, for example, by a couple on honeymoon, for whom everything seems perfect. Level 7 is what I have called (in chapter 9) ‘Faculty X’, the strange ability to grasp the reality of other places and times by some kind of imaginative effort. And Level 8 is mystical consciousness, about which it seems impossible to speak without contradicting oneself. (Ouspensky’s chapter ‘Experimental Mysticism’ in A New Model of the Universe is probably as good an introduction to the subject as exists.)

  It will be noted that, below Level 5, all the states are basically passive; after Level 5, they are all active. Above Level 5 we achieve ‘nonleaking’ consciousness, and the result is a glimpse of amazing possibilities. It is rather like scrambling to the top of a high cliff, and getting your head over the top, and seeing an extraordinary landscape that will take months or years to explore.

  In a book called Seeing the Invisible (1990), a collection of religious and mystical experiences submitted by ordinary readers, I had been impressed by how often the ‘glimpse’ seems to come from ‘outside’. For example, a wireless operator described how, in the Western Desert during World War Two, he was lying in a state of exhaustion after days of battle when a ‘torrent of ideas’ began to flow into his mind, insights about the universe, the meaning of reality, and infinity. He felt strongly that ‘no effort of mine was in
volved in what was, for me, a highly superior piece of thinking’. He was flooded with delight, and, after perhaps ten minutes, seemed to hear a voice in his head saying, ‘That’s quite enough to be going on with’.

  He states that he cannot believe that what happened originated inside him. ‘Perhaps, unwittingly, I tapped some universal source of knowledge’.

  And, as I came upon more and more people whose vision of reality had been transformed by contact with UFOs, it seemed to me that what he had experienced was a form of what Jung called ‘UFO consciousness’.

  Now I myself had had enough experiences of ‘nonleaking’ consciousness to know that it produces a tremendous feeling of delight. I once experienced it driving through very deep snow along a narrow country road, and concentrating for dear life to avoid landing in the ditch. When I finally arrived back on the main road, I realised that all this concentration had made my mind glow with a new kind of intensity, throwing light on places it had never reached before. Everything I looked at seemed immensely interesting, and I felt that, now I knew it could be achieved by effort, there was nothing to prevent me from exploring this fascinating realm at the top of the cliff. I have not achieved it on a regular basis, although I have succeeded on half a dozen occasions (once seated for hours in a passport control office in Damascus), but I can usually get somewhere near to it on long train journeys or car drives. It consists basically in ‘closing the leaks’ and then feeling consciousness begin to glow.

  So I had no doubt that, if the UFO entities—specifically the ‘talls’—had pushed their way beyond our present stage of evolution, then I had a good idea of what it felt like.

  My long-term preoccupation with human evolution showed me the next part of the answer. Cro-Magnon man was probably the first human type to feel that he was no longer a mere animal at the mercy of nature, because his hunting magic gave him a sense of control, of being able to take a short cut to capture his prey instead of relying on luck. It seemed clear then that human evolution involves a slowly increasing sense of control over the mind (control over the material world follows), and that there is no obvious upward limit.

  Accounts of abductions offered the final clue. Many of them seem to make no sense; nothing much seems to be achieved. But, when Beth Collings asked a ‘grey’ why he was driving a needle into her navel, he replied, ‘It is part of the change’. And she later realised that she had been abducted since childhood, and that so had her father and grandfather, and probably her grandchildren. Why make an effort over several generations unless the purpose is to create a new kind of human being?

  Not long before Andrija Puharich’s death, I was asked to write an article about him, and rang him at his home in America. When I asked him what he was working on, he told me that he was studying supernormal children. ‘You wouldn’t believe how many of those kids there are out there. They seem to be on genius level. I know dozens, and there are probably thousands’.

  And this, I suspect, is the beginning of the change that the UFOs are working on.

  [1]. Other Realities, Noetic Sciences Review, Autumn 1992.

  [2]. Why magazine, Autumn 1997.

  [3]. Equations of Eternity, 1993, p. 103.

  [4]. Quantum Implications, Essays in Honour of David Bohm, edited by B. J. Hiley and F. David Peat, 1991, p. 3.

  [5]. See my book The Psychic Detectives.

  [6]. Faust, Prologue, translated by A. G. Latham.

  [7]. See my book, From Atlantis to the Sphinx, 1996.

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