The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

by Colin Wilson

  Villas-Boas’s story would be an obvious candidate for the “hoax” category but for one thing. Dr Olavo T. Fontes examined him soon after the “encounter”, and found that Villas-Boas had been subjected to a very high dose of radiation. And at the point on his chin where he claimed the needle had been inserted for the blood sample the doctor found two small marks. Villas-Boas’s story is documented with convincing details in The Humanoids, edited by Charles Bowen.

  Like Hynek, the journalist John Keel was also mildly skeptical 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 an article like this one; it cannot even begin to convey the sheer volume of the sightings. Any skeptic should try the experience of reading, say, a hundred cases, one after the other, to realize that 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.

  Like Hynek, 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 2000-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. One of the most convincing sightings was made by the Russian painter Nicholas Roerich (who designed Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring ballet); in his book Altai Himalaya (1930) he describes how, making his way from Mongolia to India in 1926, he – and the whole party – observed a big shiny disc moving swiftly across the sky. Like so many modern UFOs, this one suddenly changed direction above their camp. (In many UFO reports, the object seems to defy the laws of momentum by turning at right angles at great speed.) It vanished over the mountain peaks.

  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 13 October 1917, when the Lady had announced that she would provide a miracle to convince the 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. Bender 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 materialized and dematerialized in his apartment, and on one occasion had transported him to a UFO base in Antarctica. 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”.

  The British expert on UFOs, Brinsley Le P
oer Trench (the Earl of Clancarty), reached a similar kind of conclusion on the basis of his investigations. He expresses them (in Operation Earth) as follows:

  . . . there exist at least two diametrically opposed forces of entities interested in us. Firstly, those that are the real Sky People who have been around since time immemorial. Secondly, those that live in an area indigenous to this planet, though some of us believe they also live in the interior of the earth. There is obviously a “War in the Heavens” between these two factions. However, it is not considered that battles are going on in the sense that humans usually envisage them. It is more of a mental affray for the domination of the minds of mankind.

  Jacques Vallee, one of the most serious and intelligent writers on the subject, finally came to a similar conclusion. In earlier books like Anatomy of a Phenomenon and Challenge to Science: The UFO Enigma, he studied case reports with unusual thoroughness (and many statistical tables). In Passport to Magonia (1970) he pointed out that the picture we can form of the world of the UFO occupants is more like the mediaeval concept of Magonia, a land above the clouds, than some inhabited planet. By 1977 he had come to the strange conclusion that UFOs are basically “psychic” in nature, a view he expressed in a book called The Invisible College. The invisible college is a group of scientists who are engaged in the study of UFO phenomena, and who decline to be intimidated by conservative scientific attitudes. Vallee, himself a computer expert, reached the conclusion that UFO phenomena are a “control system” – that is, that they are designed to produce a certain specific effect on the human mind. He explains in Messengers of Deception (1979): that after a year researching the similarity between UFO phenomena and psychic phenomena “I could no longer regard the ‘flying saucers’ as simply some sort of spacecraft or machine, no matter how exotic its propulsion”. He went back to his computers, and concluded: “The most clear result was that the phenomenon behaved like a conditioning process. The logic of conditioning uses absurdity and confusion to achieve its goal while hiding its mechanism. I began to see a similar structure in the UFO stories”.

  Absurdity and confusion are certainly one of the most puzzling and irritating aspects of the UFO stories. Vallee devotes a chapter of The Invisible College to studying the case of Uri Geller. Geller, the Israeli psychic and “metal-bender”, was “discovered” by the scientist Andrija Puharich. Geller’s powers aroused such worldwide interest that it seemed inevitable that the first full-length book about him would become a bestseller. In fact Puharich’s Uri: A Journal of the Mystery of Uri Geller (1974) came close to destroying Puharich’s reputation as a serious investigator. It seems to be full of baffling confusions and preposterous and inexplicable happenings. Yet it also provides some vital clues to the mystery of “space intelligences”. In 1952, long before he met Geller, Puharich was studying with a Hindu psychic named Dr Vinod when Vinod went into a trance and began to speak with an English voice; this trance-entity announced itself as a member of “the Nine”, superhuman intelligences who had been studying the human race for thousands of years, and whose purpose is to aid human evolution. Three years later, travelling in Mexico, Puharich met an American doctor who also passed on lengthy messages from “space intelligences” – the odd thing being that they were a continuation of the messages that had come through Dr Vinod. When Puharich met Geller in 1971 the “Nine” again entered the story; while Geller was in a trance a voice spoke out of the air above his head explaining that Geller had been programmed by “space intelligences” from the age of three – the aim being to prevent the human race from plunging itself into catastrophe. Puharich goes on to describe UFO sightings, and an endless series of baffling events, with objects appearing and disappearing and recorded tapes being mysteriously “wiped”. Puharich assured the present writer (CW) that he had left out some of the more startling items because they would be simply beyond belief.

  After Puharich’s break with Geller, the “Nine” continued to manifest themselves through mediums. The story is told in Prelude to a Landing on Planet Earth by Stuart Holroyd, and it is even more confusing than Puharich’s book. The “Nine” finally sent Puharich and his companions on a kind of wild-goose chase around the Middle East and other remote places; the main purpose was apparently to pray for peace, and the “intelligences” assured them that they had averted appalling international catastrophes.

  In fact, the mention of mediums may provide a key to the mystery. Modern spiritualism began in the mid-nineteenth century, when “spirits” began to express themselves through the mediumship of two teenage girls named Fox; soon thousands of “mediums” were causing mysterious rapping noises (one knock for yes, two for no), making trumpets and other musical instruments float through the air and apparently play themselves, and producing spirit voices – and even spirit forms – by going into a trance. No one who has studied the phenomena in depth can believe that they were all fraudulent. Moreover, the theory that they were somehow produced by the unconscious minds of the participants must also be reluctantly dismissed, since in many cases “spirits” were able to use different “mediums” in order to reveal fragments of the same message – fragments which interlocked like a jigsaw puzzle.

  But what soon becomes equally clear to any student of the subject is that the “spirits” cannot be taken at their own valuation. As often as not, they told lies. Emanuel Swedenborg, the eighteenth-century visionary, warned that there are basically two varieties of spirit, a “higher order” and a “lower order”. A psychiatrist, Wilson Van Dusen, who studied hundreds of cases of hallucinations at the Mendocino State Hospital in California, noted that “the patients felt as if they had contact with another world or order of beings. Most thought these other persons were living. All objected to the term ‘hallucination’”. And he noted that the hallucinations seemed to fall into Swedenborg’s two categories: “helpful” spirits (about one-fifth of all cases), and distinctly unhelpful spirits whose aim seemed to be to cause the patients misery, irritation and anguish.

  It is, of course, a major step for any normal, rational person to accept the real existence of disembodied spirits, or “discarnates”. Yet anyone who is willing to study the evidence patiently and open-mindedly will undoubtedly arrive at that conclusion. In fact, anyone who has ever tried automatic writing or the ouija board or “table turning” has probably reached the conclusion that there are “intelligences” that are capable of manifesting through human beings. But the question of the precise nature of these entities is altogether more baffling. It seems clear that some can be taken seriously, others not. Many seem to behave like the traditional demons of the Middle Ages, telling whatever lie happens to enter their heads on the spur of the moment. Some of these “intelligences” – known as poltergeists – can even manifest their presence by causing objects to fly around the room, or causing mysterious bangs and crashes. One interesting characteristic of the poltergeist is that it can cause an object travelling at high speed to change direction quite abruptly, in defiance of the Newtonian laws of motion. This also seems to be one of the characteristics of the flying saucer.

  Jacques Vallee was intrigued by the number of cases in which UFOs behaved in a manner that contradicted the notion that they were simply the artifacts of some superior civilization; some have dissolved into thin air; some have vanished into the earth; some have expanded like balloons, then disappeared. Some “spacemen” seem to have the power of reading thoughts and of predicting events which will occur in the future. Many of them like Puharich’s “Nine” insist that their purpose is to prepare the human race for some astonishing event, like a landing of UFOs on earth; but the landing never seems to occur.

  Yet it may be simplistic to believe that UFOs are simply an up-dated version of medieval demons or nineteenth-century “spirit communicators”. Vallee’s belief is that the phenomenon is “heuristic” that is, is designed to teach us something. Modern science and philosophy have accustomed us to materialistic theories of the universe, to the notion that
living creatures are a billion-to-one accident, and that the human reality is simply the reality of our bodies and brains. In Flying Saucers, A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, Jung suggested that UFOs may be modern man’s response to his craving for religious meanings, and Vallee seems to accept at least the basic implication of this theory. Like Jung, he also seems to believe that coincidences may be more than they seem. In Messengers of Deception, he describes his interest in a modern religious cult called the Order of Melchizedek, which believes that its basic doctrines have been received through extra-terrestrial intelligences. Then, as noted in chapter 54, he began collecting all he could find about the biblical prophet Melchizedek. In February 1976 he asked a female taxi-driver in Los Angeles for a receipt; when he looked at the receipt it was signed “M. Melchizedek”. He looked up Melchizedek in the Los Angeles phone directory; there was only one . . .

  This leads Vallee to an interesting speculation about the underlying reality of the world. He points out that we are confined to our space-time continuum, and all our concepts of knowledge are based on space and time. So in a library our “information retrieval system” is based on alphabetical order. But modern computer scientists have developed another method; they “sprinkle the records throughout storage as they arrive, and . . . construct an algorithm for retrieval based on some type of keyword . . .” He concluded: “The Melchizedek incident . . . suggested to me that the world may be organized more like a randomized data base than a sequential library”. In a computer “library”, the student enters a request for “microwave” or “headache” and finds twenty articles that he never even suspected had existed. Vallee had entered a request for Melchizedek, and some psychic computer had asked: “How about this one?”

  In The Flying Saucer Vision (1967), the English writer John Michell also takes his starting-point from Jung. Michell accepts Jung’s view that the UFO phenomenon is somehow connected with the “religious vacuum” in the soul of modern man. He associates UFOs with ancient legends about gods who descend in airships, and his conclusions are not dissimilar to those of von Däniken, although rather more convincingly argued. But Michell also has an original contribution to make to “ufology”. In his researches he had stumbled upon Alfred Watkins’s book The Old Straight Track (1925), in which Watkins argues that the countryside is intersected with ancient straight trackways which were prehistoric trade routes, and that these tracks connect “sacred sites” such as churches, stone circles, barrows and tumuli. Watkins called these “ley lines”. Michell argues that the ley lines are identical with lines that the Chinese call “dragon paths” or lung mei. The Chinese science of feng shui, or geomancy, is basically a religious system concerned with the harmony between man and nature; it regards the earth as a living body. Lung mei are lines of force on the earth’s surface, and one of the aims of feng shui is to preserve and concentrate this force, and prevent it from leaking away. Michell was mistaken to state that lung mei are straight lines, like Watkins’ leys – in fact, the Chinese regard straight lines with suspicion; the essential quality of lung meis is that they are crooked. But Michell takes an important step beyond Watkins in regarding ley lines as lines of some earth force; he believes that ancient man selected spots in which there was a high concentration of this force as their sacred sites. Points where two or more ley lines cross have a special significance. Michell also points out that many sightings of flying saucers occur on ley lines, and particularly on their points of intersection – for example, Warminster, in Wiltshire, where a truly extraordinary number of sightings have been made. In a book called The Undiscovered Country, Stephen Jenkins, another serious investigator of such matters, points out how often crossing-points of ley lines are associated with all kinds of “supernatural” occurrences, from ghosts and poltergeists to strange visions of phantom armies. Once again we seem to have an interesting link between UFOs and the “supernatural”.