Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred
Page 45
2. Fernandes and D’Armada, Heavenly Lights, 8–9; and Celestial Secrets, 148–49.
3. This is actually not the beginning. There were a number of preapparitions around 1916, including some very confused accounts of an unidentified figure dressed in a white sheet hovering over a holm oak tree that becomes a crystalline, white, angelic being in the later interpretations, a being that, in one account, has no head, in others switches genders, and in still another is accompanied by a shower of rocks from nowhere (Celestial Secrets, 44–72). During the months of the visions, a “fourth witness,” Carolina Carreira, also saw a luminous, childlike humanoid with blonde hair in the same vicinity (ibid., 73–84). Fernandes and D’Armada further point out that on March 10, 1917, a group of spiritualists published a mathematical cipher (135197) in a Lisbon newspaper that can be read as a prediction of a coming event on 13-5-19[1]7. More convincingly, and truly impossibly, they discuss another group of psychics in Porto who claimed to be receiving a prediction that “something transcendental” was about to happen on May 13, 1917. So certain were they that they published their (correct) prediction in the Journal de Noticías that same day, thus effectively describing an event in a newspaper as it happened. For the relevant historical documents and a full discussion, see Celestial Secrets, 3–28.
4. Ibid., 3–4. I have removed all use of italics when quoting from these two authors.
5. Ibid., 11.
6. Ibid., 20.
7. The children were not present in August. They were in jail, imprisoned in an attempt to put an end to the embarrassing spectacle. The apparition acted, at first, as if it did not know the kids were absent. Witnesses reported the usual thunder and bright flash followed by the familiar little cloud over the tree. It quickly rose and melted away this time, however.
8. Ibid., 36–37.
9. Ibid., 41–43.
10. Ibid., 65–68.
11. Ibid., 76.
12. Ibid., 63.
13. Ibid., 47.
14. Ibid., 57.
15. Ibid., 91. For a newspaper photo, see ibid., 92.
16. Ibid., 137.
17. Ibid., 140.
18. Ibid., 143–45.
19. Ibid., 156.
20. Paul Misraki, Les Extraterrestres (Paris: Plon, 1962). On September 18, 1962, Vallee visited Misraki in his Paris apartment just as this book was coming out (FS 1:66–67; see also 1:155–62).
21. Fernandes and D’Armada dedicate over twenty pages to this substance and the various theories used to explain it (Heavenly Lights, 83–104).
22. Fernandes and D’Armada, Celestial Secrets, 151–52.
23. Ibid., 153.
24. Ibid., 94. The fullest treatment of this psychotropic reading of aliens, now focused on DMT and ayahuasca, is Rick Strassman, Slawek Wojtowicz, Luis Eduardo Luna, and Ede Frescka, Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies (Rochester, Vermont: Park Street Press, 2008). The authors sum up their thesis thus: “that the secret gateway to alien worlds may be hidden inside our own minds and that humans already have been traveling in space and time and making contact with alien species,” via the chemical triggers or brain-filter suppressors of nature’s psychotropic plants (3).
25. Stanley Krippner and Michael Persinger, “Evidence for Enhanced Congruence between Dreams and Distant Target Material during Periods of Decreased Geomagnetic Activity,” in Fernandes, Fernandes, and Berenguel, Fátima Revisited.
26. Persinger’s readings also bear obvious parallels to the earlier work of John E. Keel, a Fortean writer who advanced a very similar set of electromagnetic or “superspectrum” readings of occult phenomena in his many books, including and especially The Eighth Tower: The Cosmic Force Behind All Religious, Occult and UFO Phenomena (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975).
27. Fernandes and D’Armada, Celestial Secrets, 42. They give no date.
28. Michael A. Persinger, “The Fátima Phenomenon,” in Fernandes, Fernandes, and Berenguel, Fátima Revisited, 7.
29. Raul Berenguel, “Mind Control and Marian Visions—A Theoretical and Experimental Approach,” in ibid., 63. Indeed, there is other research to suggest that exposure to high levels of electromagnetic radiation can produce many of the classical UFO (and Marian) phenomena: paralysis, loss of consciousness, visual impairment, and amnesia among them (Celestial Secrets, 89).
30. Fernandes and D’Armada, Heavenly Lights, 22. Similarly, Vallee notes that the Arabic astrological sign for Venus was seen on the unidentified flying object witnessed at Socorro, New Mexico, on April 24, 1964 (IC 134–35). The witness, a patrolman named Lonnie Zamora, insisted on seeing a priest before he spoke of what he saw, “because he thought he might have seen something diabolical” (FS 1:110).
31. Fernandes and D’Armada, Heavenly Lights, 21. See also Celestial Secrets, 237.
REQUIRED READING
1. Jim Schnabel, Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America’s Psychic Spies (New York: Dell, 1997), back cover blurb.
2. David M. Jacobs, ed., UFOs and Abductions: Challenging the Borders of Knowledge (Lawrence: University Press, of Kansas, 2000), 2.
INDEX
Abbot, Edwin, 21, 187, 258; Flatland, 21, 187
abduction: and Agobard, 161; and altered states, 280; Creighton, Gordon, 166, 303n36; experience of electromagnetically reproduced, 280; and Ezekiel, 153, 191; and folklore, 215–16, 285; and Fuller, John G., 165; and Hill, Barney and Betty, 165–66, 207; and history of religions, 273; and Mack, John, 23; and metalogic of encounter stories, 170–71; ninth-century version of, 161; Schirmer, Herbert, 273; and the sexual, 163–66; and science fiction, 166–68, 209–12, 273; and Simon, Benjamin, 165–66; and social-control thesis, 167–69, 185, 282; and Villas-Boas, Antonio, 164–66, 303n36. See also UFO phenomenon
Abrams, M. H., 71–72; Natural Supernaturalism, 297n98
absurdity, 146, 159, 170–71, 182, 212–13
agnosticism, 73; coining of word by Thomas Huxley, 40; and Fort, Charles, 99; and Jung’s view on flying saucers, 245; and materialism, 45
Agobard, Archbishop of Lyon, 160–61, 196, 303n31; De Grandine et Tonitruis, 160–61
altered states: and abduction, 280; and altered words, 57; and America’s religion of no religion, 231; awakened, 206; and drugs, 256; of eros, 90; and evolution, 83; and filter thesis, 256; and Fort, 132; of history, 21; and history of religions, 271; and magnetic sleep, 219; of Myers, 57, 83; and the paranormal, 271; and the psychical, 271; reproduced in alien visitation lab experiments, 280; and science fiction, 6; and technology, 173; and UFOs, 246
American Psychoanalytic Association, 15
Anatomy of a Phenomenon (Vallee), 152, 155, 156
Ann Arbor case, 301n8
Anton, Ted, Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu, 292n42
apophasis, 292n49
apports, 8, 290n3
Area 51, 184
Arnold, Kenneth, 151–53, 203, 207, 248, 301n12
Arpanet, 175, 180, 304n56
Astounding Stories, 208
As You Like It (Shakespeare), 98
Atmanspacher, Harald, Recasting Reality, 291n20
Atwater, F. Holmes, Captain of My Ship, Master of My Soul, 305n70
Aubeck, Chris, Prodigies, 309n50
authors of the impossible, explanation of category, 25
automatic writing, 25, 61, 80
Bacon, Francis, 13
Balfour, Arthur, 53
Ballou, Robert O., William James on Psychical Research, 291n18
Balzac, Honoré de, 239, 240; Louis Lambert, 240; Ursule Mirouet, 240
Barkun, Michael, A Culture of Conspiracy, 303–4n49
Barrett, William, 53, 54
Barthes, Roland, 220
Basel sighting, 153
Bateson, Gregory: Mind and Nature, 309n51; Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 309n51
Batman, 147, 301n7
Baudelaire, Charles, 239, 241
Beauregard, Mario, 261–65; The Spiritual Brain,
261, 311n26
Beckman, Fred, 181
behaviorism, 194, 255
Bender, Courtney, What Matters? manuscript, 310n5
Bennett, Colin, 111, 112, 308n34; Politics of the Imagination, 111
Bequette, Bill, 151
Berenguel, Raul, 281–82
Berger, Peter, 218, 238; The Heretical Imperative, 309n44; A Rumor of Angels, 238; The Sacred Canopy, 309n44
Bergier, Jacques, 186, 205–6, 307n10
Bergson, Henri: and creative evolution, 85, 217, 231–33, 245; and élan vital, 85, 232, 245; and filter thesis, 73, 264; and James, William, 85; and the mystical, 232–33; and psychical research, 84–85, 204, 232–33, 256; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 298n118
Bible: and Fort, 95–96, 101–2, 118, 129–31; and Ruskin, 40; and Sidgwick, 49; and Vallee, 190
Binet-Sanglé, Charles, Le fin du secret or The End of the Secret, 229
biolocation, 186
biology: as different from Fort’s metaphysic, 136; evolutionary, 70, 72, 117–18, 124, 260; neuro-, 261–63; and psychology, 69; quantum, 175; super-, 96
Blake, William, 217, 273
Blavatsky, Madame, 51, 55
Bloom, Harold, 20
Blum, Deborah: and apparitions coming clothed, 75; on Blavatsky, 55; Ghost Hunters, 291n18; on Myers loving ghost of Annie Marshall, 89–90; on Palladino, 51; on Piper, 56, 57; on Twain, Mark, 295n45
Boehme, Jacob, 72
Book of the Damned, The (Fort), 100, 298n1; Dreiser as agent for, 97–98; and James, William, 300n30; and the paranormal writing us, 99; and Pauwel, 206; and Super-Sargasso Sea, 127; and Super-Story, 125; and transgressive thought of Fort, 107–8; and UFO fibralvina, 280; and Wells, H. G., 300n37
Bourdieu, Pierre, 218, 220
Bowen, Charles, The Humanoids, 303n36
Boyer, Pascal, Religion Explained, 310n7
brain, left/right hemispheres of, 59, 259, 266, 269, 270. See also Human as Two; neuroscience
Braude, Ann, 51; Radical Spirits, 295n51
Braude, Stephen E., 12, 193, 290n12; ESP and Psychokinesis, 290n12; First Person Plural, 290n12; The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations, 290n11; Immortal Remains, 290n11; The Limits of Influence, 290n12
Brazilian UFO Wave of 1977, 183–84
Brennan, Marcia, 295n45
Breton, André: The Automatic Message, 296n72; and fantastic realism, 206; and Méheust, 217, 222; and Myers, 58, 76, 83
Broad, C. D., 73, 256, 284–85; Lectures on Psychical Research, 284–85
Browning, Robert, 86
Bucke, Richard Maurice, 63, 84, 231, 264, 297n82; Cosmic Consciousness, 297n82. See also cosmic consciousness
Buddhism, 11, 200; epistemology of, 254; and mysticism, 33, 159; and neuroscience, 120; and science fiction, 247; significance of decapitation in, 311n10
Bullard, Thomas E., 157–58, 215–16, 246, 302n28; UFO Abductions, 285
Bulwer-Lytton, Sir Edward, 16, 37, 291n27
Butler, Josephine, 45
Caillois, Roger, 293n69
Calcutta University, 18
Cambridge University: and fakery, 50; and More, Henry, 82; Myers’s education at, 44; and Sidgwick, 48–49; and S.P.R., 8, 41
Capra, Fritjof, The Tao of Physics, 123, 300n34
Cardan, Facius, 163
Carpenter, Edward, 84, 298n117
Carrington, Hereward, Eusapia Palladino and Her Phenomena, 296n53
Carroll, Lewis, 16
Carter, John, Sex and Rockets, 303n42
Casseres, Benjamin De, 94
Center for UFO Studies (CUFO), 155
Challenge to Science (Vallee), 152, 155–56, 194, 302
Charet, F. X., Spiritualism and the Foundations of C. G. Jung’s Psychology, 291n19
Child, Lydia Maria, 230
choc des sciences psychiques, Le, or The Shock of the Psychical Sciences (Méheust), 216
Christian, David, Maps of Time, 299n23
City College of New York, 176
Clarke, Arthur C., 1, 16, 143, 158; The Fountain of Paradise, 1
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 144, 155
cognition, 60, 83, 255, 266, 310n3
coincidental, the, 74
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 71
comparativism: and Darwin, 74–75; esotericism as category of, 19; and Fort, 104, 106–11; and interrelation of culture and consciousness, 202–3; Lehrich, Christopher, 297n105; and Méheust, 200; and Myers, 74–75; in the mystical, 297n105; occultism as category of, 19; and the psychical, 254; and Smith, Jonathan Z., 297n105; and synchronicity, 75; and telepathy, 75; and Vallee, 144, 158
Comte de Gabalis, Le, 161
Condon Committee, 149, 192
Confrontations (Vallee), 181, 183
Conscious Universe, The (Radin), 283, 286–87
Corbin, Henri, 19, 82
cosmic consciousness: and Beauregard, 265; and coining of phrasing, 297n82; and Dick, Philip, 32, 267; and Michel, 204; and Vallee, 169
Couliano, Ioan, 20–22, 24, 171; Out of This World, 292n43; The Tree of Gnosis, 20
Course in Miracles, 223
Cox, Serjeant, 7
Crabtree, Adam, 221; From Mesmer to Freud, 308n32; Irreducible Mind, 293–94n7
Creighton, Gordon, 166, 303n36
Crichton, Michael, 16
Crookes, William, 7–8, 53, 60, 80; Researches into the Phenomena of Spiritualism, 53
Crowley, Aleister, 51, 163, 295n48
CSICOPS, 308n29
Dale E. Graff, Tracks in the Psychic Wilderness, 305n70
D’Armada, Fina, 280–82, 286, 312n1; Fátima Revisited, 286; Heavenly Lights, 286
Darwin, Charles, 102; and comparative method, 74–75; and Fort, Charles, 132, 136; and Huxley, Thomas, 40, 45, 124; influence on Myers of, 39, 45–46; and the mystical, 71–72; and natural selection, 68–69, 75; The Origin of Species, 113; and sin, 46; and telepathy, 295n45; and Wallace, Alfred, 70, 295n45; and Wells, H. G., 124. See also evolution
Darwinism. See evolution
Dasgupta, S. N., 18
Davis, Erik, TechGnosis, 304n63
Dawn of Magic, The. See Morning of the Magicians, The (Pauwels and Bergier)
Dearborn Observatory, 150
deconstruction, 16, 111
défi du magnetisme, Le, or The Challenge of Magnetism (Meheust), 199, 216
De Grandine et Tonitruis, 160–61
democracy: linked to psychical phenomena, 230; and mysticism, 231; and other worlds communicating, 130; right mind as source of, 260–61; of the spirit, 51
Dennett, Daniel, The Mind’s Eye, 258, 311n8
Denzler, Brenda, The Lure of the Edge, 304n50
Derrida, Jacques, 220; and différance, 108; on discourse, 217; on ghosts, 17; Specters of Marx, 291n29; “Telepathy,” 16, 291n29
Descartes, René, 23, 119, 204
Devereux, George, Psycho-analysis and the Occult, 284
Dick, Philip K., 16, 258; autobiographical description of Valis, 71–72; and cosmic consciousness, 32, 267; and epilepsy, insufficiency of diagnosis, 34, 293n66; and the fantastic, 33; and neuroscience, 258, 267–68; resynthesized by Valis, 31–32; and science fiction, 31–32; The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, 293n62; and Vallee, 187, 303n46, 306n94; and writing from hesitation between real and unreal, 34. See also Valis
Dickens, Charles, 86, 235
Didier, Alexis, 203, 227, 233–42
Dimensions (Vallee), 181–84
Dingwall, Eric J., 51
Disch, Thomas M., The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, 293n66
DNA, 260, 266
Dodds, E. R., 10–11
Doniger, Wendy O’Flaherty, 20; Dreams, Illusion and Other Realities, 292n41
Doyle, Arthur Conan, 16, 222, 239, 242
Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (Kant), 11
Dream Telepathy (Ullman, Krippner, Vaughn), 4
Dreiser, Theodor, 97–100, 124, 140; The Dream, 299n13
Duke University, 8, 24
Dumas, Alexander, 239, 241;
Joseph Balsamo, 241
Durand, Gilbert, 214
Durkheim, Emile, 9, 222, 308n33
Eckhart, Meister, 202, 292n49
ectoplasm, 8, 51, 133; coining of term, 53
Edge of Reality, The (Hynek and Vallee), 152
Edwards, Jason, 289n1
Einstein, Albert, 21, 60, 150; and atomic bomb, 148; and historiography, 20, 292; and magic, 117; on space-time, 5, 11, 20, 163, 188; and telepathy, 80, 298
Eisenbud, Jules, 6, 193, 285, 308n35; The World of Ted Serios, 285
élan vital, 85, 232, 245. See also Bergson, Henri
Eleusis, 11
Eliade, Mircea, 5, 222; Autobiography, 291n35; and Couliano, 20; Encyclopedia of Religion, 9; on esotericism and occultism, 17–19, 292n40; and Freud, 19–20; A History of Religious Ideas, 310n2; intellectual lineage of, 20; and light and sperm, 292n40; and literature of the fantastic, 5, 19; Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions, 291n33; Ordeal by Labyrinth, 291n34; paranormal experiences of, 18–19; on the paranormal in folklore, 17–19, 216; and the sacred, 9, 255; The Secret of Doctor Honigberger, 18; Two Strange Tales, 291n37
Ellenberger, Henri F., The Discovery of the Unconscious, 308n31
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 294n14
Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (Hastings), 9–10
Encyclopedia of Religion (Eliade), 9
En soucoupes volantes or On Flying Saucers (Méheust), 25
Entangled Minds (Radin), 286, 290n8
erotic, the: and abduction, 163–66; and Butler, Josephine, 45; and the mystical, 88, 179, 222, 267, 295n48, 310n5; and the occult, 50–51; and the paranormal, 23, 51, 236; and sexual magic, 163–64, 295n48, 303n42; and Spiritualism movement, 50–51; and telepathy, 85; and UFO phenomenon, 301n23; and Vallee, 163–64. See also Myers, Frederick W. H.: and the erotic
Esalen (Kripal), 200, 300, 305, 306, 310
Esalen Institute, 179, 185, 200, 296, 306
Essays: Classical (Myers), 47
Essays: Modern (Myers), 47
Etudes d’Histoire Religieuse (Renan), 48
European wave of 1954, 149
Evans, Hilary, 208; Intrusions, 307n16
Evans-Wentz, Walter, 161–62, 303n34