David spoke of how open-mindedness was the mark of real intelligence to him because “only an open-minded person can embrace new ideas and grow.”
“I went through a lot of confusion,” he said, “when I first started making my spiritual connections. But whenever I felt sort of ‘absurd’ in the ‘real’ world around me, I’d stop myself and listen to what my own intuition was telling me was real. I had been conditioned to believe in what I could prove rather than what I could sense. But the more I listened to my own inner voice, the more I got in touch with myself. It finally all became so simple. And now, so many people are doing the same thing that that has become what is real.”
David didn’t seem to be reviewing his belief struggles as any kind of identifiable blueprint for me. It was more just simply what he’d been through. And when he talked, it was with that same calm dignity.
Then, somewhere near the end of the dinner, he asked, “Have you ever seen a UFO?”
I was a bit startled to hear such a question from him. It was one thing to hear “John” discuss God, spiritual truth and extraterrestrials in one breath, and quite another to have a personal friend apparently about to make the same connection.
“No,” I said casually, “but I know a few people who have, including Jimmy Carter when he was Governor of Georgia. Carter never talked about it to me, but I saw the report he filed in the newspaper, and it seemed to be professional and unemotional, like most of the reports Jimmy Carter files.”
“Right,” said David. “What do you think they are?”
“God,” I said, “I don’t know. Maybe they’re secret military weapons nobody will talk about, or maybe they’re weather contraptions, or maybe they’re hoaxes, or maybe they’re from outer space. I don’t know. What do you think?”
He sipped his coffee and cognac and wiped the edges of his mouth with his napkin. “I think,” he said, “they are from outer space. I think the extraterrestrials in them are highly evolved spiritually. And I think they’ve been here for a long time.”
“For God’s sake!” I said. “What makes you think that?” I watched him as he swallowed another sip of coffee. I watched how his eyes blinked calmly over the candlelight. I watched for any expression that would indicate what he was getting at … why he should mention such a thing in relation to what we were talking about.
“Well, a lot of people have written about them.”
“A lot of kooks have.”
“And they’re all over the Old Testament. There are all sorts of descriptions that sound like spacecraft to me, and to many others, of course.” Again I was reminded of “John,” and indeed of my own readings. But David was continuing, “I think Von Daniken is a little kooky, but I believe he’s on the right track.”
“You mean Chariots of the Gods Von Daniken?”
“Yes.”
I could feel my “open mind” threatening to snap shut.
“Didn’t he do time in a Swiss jail for passing bad checks?”
“Sure. But what’s that got to do with what he uncovered? People are full of contradictions and what he did was wrong. He should have found another way to solve his problems because in the end he discredited himself. But not necessarily his work.”
After the session with “John” I read all of Von Daniken’s work—material that described his contention that many ancient ruins had in fact been constructed by highly advanced civilizations with extraterrestrial help: the Great Pyramid, Stonehenge, Machu Picchu in Peru, the airstrips on the Nazca Plains in Peru, etc.
He also contended that, for example, Ezekiel’s descriptions of wheels of fire were spacecraft as well as the pillar of fire that guided Moses and the Israelites for forty years in the desert, culminating with the parting of the Red Sea.
I saw the film Chariots of the Gods which alluded to the presence of extraterrestrials all through human history, offering cave drawings and monuments as proof of this contention. What had struck me as I watched the film was the reaction of the audience. They were riveted to the screen and when the film was over, no one got up to leave. They seemed genuinely entranced by the speculations yet unsure how to react. I listened carefully to people as they filed out of the theater. No one made sarcastic remarks or ridiculed the information. In fact, they weren’t threatened or intimidated one way or the other. They just filed out silently thinking to themselves until someone mentioned a hamburger. I remember being more interested in their reaction to the film than I was in my own reaction to it.
And now, just as John had done, David tied in UFOs with spiritual intelligence. I listened and questioned him further.
“You mean,” I asked, “that angels and chariots spitting fire and things like that in the Bible were really people from another world?”
“Yes, why wouldn’t advanced alien beings try to teach us higher spiritual truth? Maybe the God-force is really scientific. I mean, Christ and Moses and some of those people were capable of producing physical miracles, as we call them, that our science can’t explain. And too many people are reported to have seen those ‘miracles’ to allow them to be simply made-up myths. It’s got to be that the gifted ones knew something we don’t know.”
I took a sip of David’s brandy.
“Listen,” I said, “how did you come to make the connection between the spiritual possibilities of man and outer space?”
“Because,” he said, “it makes sense, doesn’t it? I mean, there is so much unexplained superior intelligence in ancient history and so much of it relates to religion and spirituality, or at least to the question of God.”
“Well, yes,” I said, “but that intelligence could have been extremely advanced human civilizations right here on Earth which disappeared or vanished or did themselves in or something. Why does superior intelligence have to come from some other world?”
“Well,” he said, “I asked, myself that too. But you see there wasn’t just one example of superior intelligence. It happened all over the world and at different times. According to Plato and Aristotle and lots of other great minds, Atlantis really existed as an extremely advanced civilization. The Incas and the Mayans had as much astronomical and astrological knowledge as we have today, and maybe more. The Sumerians, who lived two thousand years before Christ, had highly developed mathematics and astronomy … I mean, I’ll give you some more stuff to read, but it indicates to me that this Earth has been observed and helped and taught throughout its human history by beings that knew more than we do; who knew spiritual as well as scientific, astronomical, mathematical, and physical truths that we are only beginning to fathom.”
The brandy was gone. And I felt my mind checking out.
“So, why couldn’t humans have learned it themselves?”
David pressed on, downing the ice water which was left. “Because there’s too much evidence to indicate that humans had help from ‘gods,’ from people who were advanced in a cosmic sense. Too many of the writings of ancient cultures talk about the ‘gods’ who went to and from the stars in fiery flying machines bringing ‘help and knowledge and promises of immortality.’ So I said to myself—why not? No healthy-minded scientist today believes we are the only life in the universe—right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it’s worth thinking about, isn’t it? I mean, why not take it seriously? It makes sense. It’s wild according to some accepted points of view, but it makes sense. Since you’re into all this, you might as well go further. Sorry to be so relentless.”
We paid the check (Dutch treat) and got up from our table. I was exhausted. By now my earthbound frustration with Gerry looked good. Relentless, David had called himself? That was a term usually applied to me. I was usually the relentless one with whatever I wanted to figure out. Now somebody was out-relentlessing me.
David gave me his stack of books and dropped me off at my beach apartment.
We had talked about life after death, life before birth, and now we were into life above life!
I thanked him and sa
id goodnight.
Chapter 18
“True fortitude of understanding consists in not letting what we know to be embarrassed by what we don’t know.”
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Skeptic
I had read concentratedly in the area of channeling and then on the subject of reincarnation, and always for my own spiritual guidance. I concentrated now on a new viewpoint—the possibility of extraterrestrial life and its connection to human life.
I read for days, until my eyes hurt.
A very brief synopsis follows of what I read. Much of this research was important to me in relation to what happened to me later. With respect to the Bible, I use its terminology—that is, angels, pillars of fire, and so on—because these are the words used by the ancients to describe phenomena in the terms understandable in their day.
In the book of Ezekiel in the Old Testament, Ezekiel described what the Earth looked like from great heights. He talked of what it was like to be lifted into a flying ship almost as though by a magnet. He described the back and forth movement of the vehicle as something fast as lightning. He referred to the commander of the craft as “The Lord.”
Ezekiel encountered people and ships like that four different times over a period of nineteen years. He spoke of how peaceful the people from the ships were when they made contact with humans, going to great pains to avoid causing fear. There was no sign of “hostility or reckless attitudes.” He said “The Lord” showed care and respect for him.
In the book of Exodus a vehicle that moved and led the Hebrews out of Egypt to the Red Sea was described as “a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.” The pillar hovered over the waters and parted them enabling the Israelites to escape into the wilderness. The “pillar” that led the Israelites for forty years as they wandered in the wilderness gave religious guidance all during that period, and an “angel within” provided Moses with the Ten Commandments. “Angels” are all over the Bible—in fact, the Bible more than suggests that “angels” were missionaries from another world.
During that forty-year period the Israelites were without a source for food or sustenance. But the “pillar of fire” was in charge. The Lord said to Moses, “Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you” (Exodus 16:4).
The “cloudy pillar” served as a beacon for Israel’s journeys in the wilderness. “For throughout all their journeys the cloud of the Lord was upon the tabernacle by day, and fire was in it by night, in the sight of all of the house of Israel” (Exodus 40:38).
The book of Numbers is more specific. The cloudy pillar directed every move the Israelites made. When the cloud moved the people moved, when the cloud stopped the people rested and made another camp (Numbers 9:15–23).
Moses was in day-to-day contact with a being in the “cloudy pillar.” The Lord spoke to the people one day saying “Hear my words; if there is a prophet among you, I, the Lord, make myself known to him in a vision, I speak with him in a dream. Not so with my servant Moses; he is entrusted with all my house. With him I speak mouth to mouth, clearly and not in dark speech; and he beholds the form of the Lord” (Numbers 12:6–8).
Until Exodus the Israelites didn’t really have a religion. They believed in a kind of promise. But during a forty-year period of wandering in the wilderness, angels implanted the gospel and religion from another world—the Kingdom of Heaven.
A select group of people was instructed in a course of behavior and ethics and worship … Moses, Abraham, Peter, St. Luke, Jacob, and so on. Jacob encountered angels on many occasions. Once he encountered so many he said, “This is God’s Army” (Genesis 32:2). The teachings were very concerned that people on Earth learn the values of love, the Golden Rule, and belief in life everlasting.
In the book of Acts, Christ instructed his disciples to take the message of his world to all of their world.
In the New Testament Christ said: “You are from below, I am from above; You are of this world, I am not of this world” (John 8:23). He said he was in constant contact with beings from his world and he called them “angels.” He said the angels were very concerned about the success of their message on Earth.
When I finished reading the Bible notations, I turned to David’s other books.
On the Plains of Nazca in Peru there are what appear to be airstrips thousands of years old, and at the same location there are earth paintings of animals, birds, and a figure with a helmet similar in shape to those used by our modern day astronauts. The airstrips and drawings can only be seen from an airplane at a fairly high altitude.
The astrological calendar of Tiahuanaco in the City of Tiahuanaco, 13,000 feet high, symbolically recorded astrological knowledge based on the premise of a round Earth 27,000 years ago. The revolutions of the Earth in accordance with the sun, moon and other planets were all correct.
The Legend of Tiahuanaco told of a golden spaceship coming from the stars.
At Sacsahuaman lies a monument of rock 20,000 tons in weight which was extracted and transported from some distance away and then turned upside down.
Sand vitrifications had been found in the Gobi Desert and at old Iraqi archeological sites, resembling the vitrifications of sand produced by the atomic explosions in the Nevada desert in our times.
Cuneiform texts and tablets from Ur, one of the oldest writings of mankind, told of gods who rode in the heavens in “ships” or gods who came from the stars possessing terrible and powerful weapons and returning again to their stars.
The Eskimos talked of the first tribes brought to the north by gods with metal wings.
The oldest American Indian sages mentioned a thunderbird who introduced fire and fruit to them.
The Mayan legends spoke of how the “gods” were able to recognize everything: the universe, the four cardinal points of the compass, and the round shape of the Earth. The Mayan calendar was so highly developed that its calculations projected for sixty-four million years.
The religious legends of the pre-Inca people said that the stars were inhabited and that “gods” came down to them from the constellation of the Pleiades. Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian and Egyptian cuneiform inscriptions presented the same picture: “gods” came from the stars and went back to them; they traveled in fireships or boats of the air, and possessed terrifying and powerful weapons and promised immortality to individual people.
The ancient Indian epic, Mahabharata, about 5000 years old, talked of flying machines, navigated at great heights over vast distances, that could travel forward, backward, upward, and downward at incredible speeds.
In the Tibetan books, Tantyua and Kantyua, there were constant mentions of flying machines in prehistory. These they called “pearls in the sky.” Both books emphasized that the information was secret and not for the masses. Whole chapters in the Samarangava Sutradhara were devoted to describing airships whose tails spouted “fire” and “quicksilver.”
Ancient peoples lifted hundreds of tons of stone from one place to another. The Egyptians brought their obelisk from Aswan, the architects of Stonehenge brought their stone blocks from southwest Wales and Marlborough, the stonemasons of Easter Island (known to the natives as the Island of the Bird Man) brought their ready-made statues from quarries miles away.
And the Great Pyramid of Giza stood unexplained.
David’s notes said that according to scientific and geological research today, the Great Pyramid is constructed on the exact geophysical land center of the Earth. In other words, if one were to spread the land masses of Earth out flat, the Pyramid would be in the exact epicenter. Its measurements correspond (using Pyramid inches) to the polar diameter and radius of the Earth and also accurately correspond to the measurements in time and movement of the equinoxes and the solar year. And that is only the beginning of the mathematical marvels built into the Pyramid of Cheops. Within the halls, rooms and passageways of the Pyramid, the measurements correspond in time to momentous historical events known to the civilizations of Earth, except that
they were prophesied rather than simply recorded. The time frame of the great flood was prophesied accurately as well as the rise and fall of man’s spiritual and worldly involvement; the birth of Christ and the crucifixion, the ruling of kingdoms by great leaders, outstanding wars between nations and the development of religious and moral movements among people. The two world wars were accurately prophesied in time as well as their respective post-war agreements. Again, I read that Christ’s teachings about reincarnation were struck from the Bible during the Fifth Ecumenical Council meeting in Constantinople in the year 553 A.D. The Catholic Encyclopedia itself states, in regard to the Fifth Ecumenical Council meeting, that “anyone asserting the belief in the preexistence of souls” would be anathema.
When I finished reading what David had given me I was exhausted. It was true that I had heard much of what I read in dribs and drabs throughout my life, but somehow having it compiled and organized in written form with respected and credible researchers and scientists and archeologists and theologians backing it up—it was different. The accumulation of evidence was too powerful to take casually, much less dismiss. And it certainly wasn’t possible for me to comfortably ignore.
I didn’t know what I thought about it really. I only know I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
I wondered why it was so new to me. Every now and then I’d see a scientist or someone like Carl Sagan allude to the “inevitability of extraterrestrial life in the cosmos” on television. But I hadn’t seen anyone present all this overwhelming material at one time, which seemed to point to the need to take our extraterrestrial past more seriously—particularly in relation to spiritual understanding and the birth of monotheism.
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