Supernatural

by Colin Wilson

  More interesting evidence can be found in another scholarly study, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (1966), subtitled ‘Evidence of Advanced Civilisation in the Ice Age’, by Professor Charles Hapgood. In 1956, a Turkish naval officer presented a copy of an ancient map to the US Navy Hydrographic Society. A student of old maps, Captain Arlington Mallery, concluded that it showed the Antarctic coast of Queen Maud Land in the days before its bays were covered over by ice—about six thousand years ago. Hapgood decided to recruit his students at Keene State College into the project, and got them studying the Piri Reis maps: Piri Reis was not (as Pauwels and Bergier state) a 19th century naval officer, but a Turkish pirate of Greek nationality who was beheaded in 1554, and whose seafaring maps had been preserved in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. These also showed Antarctic bays that have been frozen over for six thousand years; yet seafaring began only about 2,000 BC.

  The obvious conclusion seemed to be that a seafaring civilisation existed in 4,000 BC. This, admittedly, is hardly proof of Lethbridge’s space visitors – perhaps men built ships two thousand years earlier than anyone suspected, at the time the Sumerians were creating the earliest known civilisation in Mesopotamia (and, of course, before the birth of writing). What seems altogether odder is the evidence of another map—the Hamy-King chart—which showed a land bridge across the Bering Straits which has not existed for twelve thousand years.

  Hapgood argued that all this seemed to show that a worldwide civilisation with a powerful navy probably existed twelve thousand years ago—at a time when, according to historians, the earth was inhabited only by primitive Stone Age hunters, and the earliest farmers had not yet appeared.

  All this naturally excited devotees of the legend of Atlantis, (not to mention Mu, a similar civilisation which was supposed to have existed in the Pacific in an earlier epoch). The publication of Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods in the following year poured cold water on all this excitement, much as the birth of Spiritualism had caused the eclipse of Buchanan’s psychometry; Hapgood found himself tarred with the same brush and labelled a crank. Yet republication of his book, in a revised edition, in 1979, left no doubt that his theory of an ancient worldwide civilisation must be taken seriously.

  All this, of course, is still no proof of Lethbridge’s space men theory. In his book Timescale—a narrative ‘map’ of world history—Nigel Calder refers to our Cro-magnon ancestors, who replaced the more ape-like Neanderthal Man around thirty-four thousand years ago, as a ‘race of supermen, created by mutations among the highbrow subspecies living in warm regions’. This race of supermen survived the last great Ice Age, starting twenty-eight thousand years ago, and when the thaw began, about fourteen thousand years ago, nothing seems more likely than that they quickly learned to take advantage of the seas with their teeming fish population. So it may be that we merely have to revise our notions of history to accommodate the idea of a Stone Age civilisation with seagoing vessels. But it is far more difficult to believe that these Stone Age seafarers created complex maps—even if they scratched them on bark. Hapgood’s evidence suggests that we may have to choose between the legend of Atlantis, and the notion of ancient astronauts.

  In Legend of the Sons of God, Lethbridge is inclined to accept both. Atlantis, he thinks, may be a ‘garbled memory’ of the exploits of the Megalith builders. But he is also inclined to believe that flying saucers may also be the vehicles in which the ‘sons of God’ originally came to earth. Lethbridge had seen something that might have been a flying saucer in 1931—a shining disc like a large balloon floating down towards the road. (Nicholas Roerich, who designed Stravinky’s Rite of Spring ballet, saw one in 1926, when he and a party of travellers were making their way across the Himalayas from Mongolia to India; this one behaved like the traditional flying saucer in moving at a great speed and then suddenly changing direction). After discussing flying saucers at some length, he suggests that they could either be ‘space visitors’, or beings from some other dimension. (Lethbridge’s studies with the pendulum had convinced him of the reality of ‘other dimensions’1) But he is inclined to believe that the solution to the mystery lies in what he calls ‘bio-electronics’, the study of the living forces of the earth, which ancient man seems to have understood so well. Like John Michell, he believes that there is some connection between UFOs and the ‘magnetic’ forces of the earth. He also believes that there is a connection between these magnetic forces and the human mind. He goes on to suggest that ‘out of the body’ experiences are a proof of the human mind’s ability to escape our earthly ‘vibration rate’ and move to a higher one. (His neighbour at Branscombe—the ‘witch’—convinced him of this by paying an ‘astral’ visit to his bedroom one night, and later describing what she saw there.)

  Lethbridge died in September 1971, before publication of Legend of the Sons of God. What is clear from that book—and from his final posthumous work The Power of the Pendulum—is that he was experiencing a problem that seems to haunt all investigators of the paranormal. They begin by studying some phenomenon that personal experience led them to accept (as Buchanan’s experiences with his students convinced him of the reality of psychometry), and they propound some basically commonsense theory to explain it in scientific terms. Then more evidence turns up that contradicts the theory—like Buchanan’s discovery that psychometry worked just as well on a newspaper photograph that had not been in contact with its original. The theory is then expanded slightly to try to accommodate the problem—at which point some new anomaly makes its appearance . . . And so on, until it is clear that no purely rational theory can accommodate all the facts.

  Many who have decided to look into ‘flying saucers’ have encountered the problem. One of these was an American journalist named John Keel, who had prepared a radio documentary as early as 1952, and decided that the evidence for UFOs could not be dismissed.

  Like so many others, John Keel was also mildly sceptical about flying saucers until he tried the unusual expedient of studying the subject instead of passing a priori judgements. In 1952 he prepared a radio documentary on things seen in the sky, and came to believe that—even then—there had been too many sightings of flying saucers to dismiss them as mistakes or lies. In 1953, in Egypt, he saw his first UFO, a metallic disc with a revolving rim, hovering over the Aswan dam in daylight. Yet even so, it was not until 1966 that he decided to undertake a careful study of the subject, and subscribed to a press-cutting bureau. What then staggered him was the sheer number of the sightings—he often received 150 clippings in a day. (In those days press clippings were only a few pence each; twenty years later, at about a pound each, the experiment would be beyond the resources of most journalists.) Moreover, it soon became clear that even these were only a small percentage of the total, and that thousands of sightings were going unrecorded. (This is in fact the chief disadvantage of a chapter like this one; it cannot even begin to convey the sheer volume of the sightings. Any sceptic should try the experience of reading, say, a hundred cases, one after the other, to realize why the ‘delusion’ theory fails to hold water.) What also fascinated Keel was that so many witnesses who had seen UFOs from their cars had later seen them over their homes; this suggested that the ‘space men’ were not merely alien scientists or explorers, engaged in routine surveying work.

  In the following year, 1967, Keel was driving along the Long Island Expressway when he saw a sphere of light in the sky, pursuing a course parallel to his own. When he reached Huntington he found that cars were parked along the roads, and dozens of people were staring at four lights that were bobbing and weaving in the sky; the light that had followed Keel joined the other four. Keel was in fact on his way to interview a scientist, Phillip Burckhardt, who had seen a UFO hovering above some trees close to his home on the previous evening, and had examined it through binoculars; he had seen that it was a silvery disc illuminated by rectangular lights that blinked on and off. The nearby Suffolk Air Force Base seemed to know nothing about it.

&nb
sp; Keel was impressed by the witnesses he interviewed; most were ordinary people who had no obvious reason for inventing a story about UFOs. His study of the actual literature convinced him that it was 98 per cent nonsense; but most individual witnesses were obviously telling the truth. Keel had soon accumulated enough cases to fill a 2,000-page typescript; this had to be severely truncated before it was published under the title UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse.

  As his investigation progressed, Keel became increasingly convinced that UFOs had been around for thousands of years, and that many biblical accounts of fiery chariots or fireballs are probably descriptions of them. In 1883 a Mexican astronomer named Jose Bonilla photographed 143 circular objects that moved across the solar disc. In 1878 a Texas farmer named John Martin saw a large circular object flying overhead, and actually used the word ‘saucer’ in a newspaper interview about it. In 1897 people all over American began sighting huge airships—cigar-shaped craft. (This was before the man-made airship had been invented.) Dozens of other early. ‘UFO’ sightings have been chronicled in newspaper reports or pamphlets; Chapter 26 of Charles Fort’s Book of the Damned—written thirty years before the UFO craze—is devoted to strange objects and lights seen in the sky.

  Keel was also interested by the parallels between reports of ‘space men’ and descriptions by people who claim to have had supernatural experiences. The ‘angel’ that instructed Joseph Smith—founder of the Mormons—to go and dig for engraved gold tablets sounds very like the kind of space visitor described by Adamski and so many others. During the First World War three children playing in meadows near Fatima, Portugal, saw a shining globe of light, and a woman’s voice spoke from it. (Only two of the three heard it, although all saw it, suggesting that it was in their minds rather than in the objective world.) Crowds began to visit the spot every month where the ‘Lady of the Rosary’ (as she called herself) appeared to the three children—only the children were able to see and hear her. But on October 13, 1917, when the Lacy had announced that she would provide a miracle to convince tie world, the rainclouds parted, and a huge silver disc descended towards the crowd of seventy thousand people. It whirled and bobbed—exactly like the UFOs Keel had seen- and changed colour through the whole spectrum; all watched it for ten minutes before it vanished into the clouds again. Many other people in the area saw it from their homes. The heat from the ‘object’ dried the wet clothes of the crowd. Keel cites this and other ‘miracles’ (such as one that occurred in Heede, Germany), and argues that they sound curiously similar to later UFO accounts.

  There also seemed to be a more sinister aspect to the UFO affair: witnesses began to report that ‘government officials’ had called on them and warned them to be silent; these men were usually dressed in black, although sometimes they wore military uniforms. No government department had—apparently—ever heard of them. Albert K.Bencer of Bridgeport, Connecticut, suddenly closed down his International Flying Saucer Bureau in 1953, and declared that three dark-skinned men with glowing eyes had pressured him into abandoning his researches. Most UFO enthusiasts blamed the government; but when Bender published his full account ten years later it was obvious that something much stranger was involved; the three men materialised and dematerialised in his apartment, and on one occasion had transported him to a UFO base in A???arctica. Jacques Vallee, another scientist who had become interested in the UFO phenomenon, noted the similarity between this story and medieval legends about fairies and ‘elementals’.

  When Keel began to investigate sightings in West Virginia of a huge winged man who seemed to be able to keep up with fast-moving cars, he himself began to encounter vaguely hostile entities. A photographer took his picture in an empty street, then ran away. Just after arranging to meet another UFO expert, Gray Barker, a friend revealed that she had been told about the meeting two days ago- before Keel had even thought of it. ‘Contactees’ would ring him up and explain that they were with someone who wished to speak to him; then he would have conversations with men who spoke in strange voices. (He sometimes got the feeling he was speaking to someone in a trance.) Keel would be instructed to write letters to addresses which upon investigation proved to be non-existent; yet he would receive prompt replies, written in block letters. On one occasion, he stayed at a motel chosen at random, and found a message waiting for him at the desk. He says (in The Mothman Prophecies): ‘Someone somewhere was just trying to prove that they knew every move I was making, listened to all my phone calls, and could even control my mail. And they were succeeding.’ The entities also made many predictions of the assassination of Martin Luther King, of a planned attack on Robert Kennedy, of an attempt to stab the pope; but they frequently seemed to get the dates wrong. Keel concluded that ‘our little planet seems to be experiencing the interpenetration of forces or entities from some other space-time continuum’.

  But this is enough to remind us that, according to Kardec, this has been happening throughout human history. Stone Age shamans performed their magic ritual dances to enlist the aid of the spirits in hunting game. Bronze Age priests performed their religious ceremonies to ensure a good harvest. Devotees of the witch-goddess Aradia performed their nature rituals to enlist the aid of the moon goddess to aid the poor against the rich. Mediaeval witches invoked the Devil to make their spells effective. Upper-class Frenchwomen in the age of Napoleon indulged in ‘table turning’—and later in automatic writing—to interrogate the denizens of the spirit world . . . And fifty years later, Spiritualists learned to ‘contact the dead’ through the agency of mediums. It is arguable that they were all doing much the same thing—achieving contact with various bodiless entities who may or may not be what they claim to be.

  In the light of this recognition, we can begin to understand the strange experiences of a contemporary scientist, Dr Andrija Puharich, who has also been drawn into the bewildering world of the paranormal. Puharich started life as a nerve specialist who became interested in the phenomenon of telepathy—apparently the most innocuous and scientifically explainable of all paranormal phenomena. He began a series of experiments with the well-known medium Eileen Garrett, who was placed in a Faraday cage (an electrified cage) to test whether telepathy is some kind of electromagnetic radiation like radio waves. Apparently it was not: Mrs Garrett was able to tell Puharich that his friend Henry Wallace wanted to reach him urgently while she was in the Faraday cage. Minutes later, Puharich’s secretary came in to tell him that Henry Wallace was on the telephone. Puharich’s book Beyond Telepathy (1974) was to become a classic of parapsychology.

  Now Puharich became interested in a young Dutch sculptor named Harry Stone, who, when examining an ancient Egyptian pendant, fell into a trance and began drawing hieroglyphics. An expert on Egyptology confirmed them to be genuine hieroglyphics of the period of the Pharaoh Snofru. They identified the writer as a scribe called Ra Ho Tep, who mentioned that his wife was called Nefert; both identifications proved to be historically correct. Puharich watched with fascination as Stone went into a trance and wrote out messages in ancient Egyptian—and learned from them of a ‘cult of the sacred mushroom’, of which historians had never heard. Another acquaintance also fell into a trance, identified herself as someone born in ancient Syria, and also spoke of the cult of the mushroom called amanita muscaria, which was claimed to cause ‘out of the body experiences’. Puharich had his one-and-only such experience during the investigation. Ra Ho Tep demanded a sacred mushroom while Stone was in trance, and applied it ritualistically to his tongue and the top of his head. In a subsequent ESP test, Stone scored 100 per cent, and was able to see through a brick wall.

  Soon after this, a Hindu scholar, Dr D.G. Vinod, went into a trance while visiting Puharich, and speaking in a deep, sonorous voice quite unlike his own high pitched tones, identified himself as M, a representative of ‘the Nine’—short for Nine Principles and Forces, superintelligences whose purpose was to help the human race. If Puharich had known anything about the history of witchcraft and Spiritualism
, he would probably have told M to get lost. As it was, he felt highly privileged and awaited further developments, which were not slow in coming. Vinod relayed more messages from the Nine, and materialised a ball of cotton; and a couple named Laughead, whom Puharich had met by chance, also delivered messages from the Nine which were consistent with previous ones, convincing Puharich of the genuineness of the space people . . .

  Next Puharich investigated a Brazilian ‘psychic surgeon’ called Arigo, and watched him performing delicate operations with a kitchen knife, cutting open patients, removing tumours with his hands, then sealing the incision by pressing its edges together with his fingers. But when Puharich was informed of Arigo’s death in a car crash—by telephone—he learned that he had received the message before Arigo crashed.

  In 1971, Puharich heard about a young Israeli psychic named Uri Geller, and hurried off to Tel Aviv to meet him. He watched Geller perform successful feats of mind reading, saw him break a ring which a woman held in her clenched fist merely by placing his own hand above it, and bend spoons by gently rubbing them with his finger. One day, Geller fell into a trance and told Puharich how, at the age of 3, he had fallen asleep in a garden, and been awakened by a space craft which had knocked him down with a beam of light. Then a strange metallic voice, speaking from the air above Geller’s head, informed Puharich that it was a ‘space being’ who had programmed Geller at the age of three, and that its purpose was to help Geller avert an immensely destructive war. The same ‘space man’ later identified himself as one of the Nine. Whenever these beings communicated, they caused the tape recording to dematerialise.