by Lyall Watson
Another useful hint about the second level, again from Tiller, is that it might operate on a magnetic rather than an electrical basis. Psychics claim that the aura has two layers and that the thin dense one that lies close to the body can be distorted by a magnet. Dennis Milner, of Birmingham University, has photographs of coronas being unbalanced by the approach of a magnetized compass needle. [182] The neurophychiatrist Shafica Karagulla has been working with unusually sensitive patients for the last fifteen years and reports that one of these can identify north and south poles on unmarked magnets simply by looking at the color of the field she sees surrounding them. [140] The north-seeking pole always has a bluish haze, while that surrounding the south pole is reddish in color. When Karagulla held a magnet to her own hand, the patient described a red haze pointing toward the palm and repelling the fields of the hand. It proved to be the south pole of the magnet. When the north was used, its blue haze attracted and seemed to fuse harmoniously with the energy of the hand.
When measurements are made of the magnetic field strengths around living bodies, some are found to be significantly different. The Leningrad Institute of Metrology has discovered that the field surrounding the body of a local woman, Nelya Mikhailova, is only ten times less powerful than that Of earth itself. [210] This extraordinarily high reading may have something to do with the fact that Mikhailova is one of the most successful living psychokineticists. She has proved repeatedly under rigorously controlled laboratory conditions that she can move distant matter, apparently by the conscious effort of her will over the field that her body produces. In her most convincing demonstration, she succeeded in separating the white and the yolk of an egg placed six feet from the position where she sat strapped into an array of monitor apparatus. And while she was doing this, the instruments revealed that her pulse, her brain rhythm, and the field of electrostatic and magnetic energy around her body were all oscillating at the same frequency of four cycles per second.
It is unlikely that this synchronicity could be coincidental, and it might be significant that the rage of a temper tantrum is known to be accompanied by similar patterns. I have suggested elsewhere that all poltergeist phenomena may be produced unconsciously by someone in the vicinity who was suffering from a similar frustration of pent-up aggression. [294] It is known that meaningless things, like furniture being knocked over, most often take place near someone who is going through a period of difficult emotional adjustment. [228] At such times these people would find tremendous release in being able to lash out and lose their tempers, but they have usually reached an age where it is no longer socially acceptable to destroy the furniture. So instead of consciously kicking a chair over, they unconsciously get their force fields to do it for them.
If this theory has any value, then Mikhailova is a "conscious poltergeist." She certainly seems deliberately to summon up anger to do her work for her at a distance, but this is not necessarily true of all those who practice psychokinesis. I have worked several times with the very talented Israeli psychic Uri Geller, and he seems always to be very cool and collected. On one recent occasion on a live television program in London, Geller briefly handled an ordinary table fork brought directly from the BBC canteen and then put it down on a table two feet away, where I and millions of viewers watched it bend until the tines stood at right angles to the handle. A few minutes later he bent the minute hand of a wristwatch almost double, despite the fact that it was enclosed beneath an intact watch glass and never left my hand for a moment. On this same occasion, the studio switchboard was jammed, while the program was still being transmitted, by dozens of viewers all over Britain whose cutlery, rings, metal bracelets, and wristwatches had been variously distorted while Geller was performing. One can only suggest that his talents are sufficiently electromagnetic to be channeled in a broadcast transmission, because these things seldom happen when programs on which he appears have been prerecorded. [222]
Unconscious poltergeist activities are usually limited to a fairly small area. The only really good quantitative study was made on phenomena surrounding a young shipping clerk in Miami. He was tested in a large warehouse, and the movements of nineteen objects in his vicinity were both watched and measured. There was a definite pattern to the movements, with objects close to him traveling for short distances on a clockwise path with an outward component, and objects farther away moving longer distances in a counterclockwise direction toward the subject. The existence of this pattern, together with the fact that most movements started to the left and behind the young clerk, suggests that despite the random nature of the occurrences, they do follow a pattern that would be consistent with the existence of a physical force field.
It is odd how often patterns can be found to fit the occurrence of otherwise unexplained phenomena, and interesting how often these patterns turn out to be based on magnetic fields. Navigation is bedeviled by the fact that the earth's magnetic field is riddled with local deviations and irregularities. These faults have been very carefully plotted and the most persistent of them have become quite notorious. One of these lies off the Bahama Islands, another in the English county of Sussex, and a third near Prescott in Arizona. [144] Periodically, all hell breaks loose in one of these places and poltergeists start flinging things around, apparitions and unidentified flying objects appear, people and sometimes vehicles unaccountably disappear, mysterious fires break out, and there may even be hysteria or a form of mass madness. [212] There are thousands of these anomalous spots all over the planet, and each of them occupies a precise geographical location, nearly always with a long history of demons, monsters, and mayhem. To occultists, such places are "gateways in the etheric envelope of earth through which beings from other realities seep into our lives." To UFO cultists, they are "windows in the sky through which vehicles fly from other space-time continuums." To somewhat perplexed biologists like myself, they provide a fragile handhold on otherwise intangible phenomena.
Geologists, physicists, and psychiatrists are now investigating these anomalous areas and finding, more often than not, that the archeologists have beaten them to it. Stonehenge, Delphi, and Baalbek all lie slap in the middle of a "window" area. And so, too, do Lourdes and Bethlehem. The Vatican in the Middle Ages ordered priests to build new churches wherever possible on the sites of old temples, because the tradition of sacred places is one that is deeply engraved and based largely on observations of abnormal manifestations which may date back thousands of years. Careful examination of the local traditions shows that they specify not only a particular place but also a predictable time. The Bell Telephone Laboratories recently made a computer study of some of the unusual occurrences collected by the indefatigable Charles Fort -- and found that frogs fell from the sky most often on Wednesdays, but usually according to a cycle of 9.6 years. When cycles of this kind are plotted against cosmic events, they correspond precisely to interactions of solar and lunar influences producing unusually large fluctuations in the earth's magnetic field and placing additional strain on the existing faults in haunted places.
In December 1945 five TBM-3 Avenger torpedo bombers of the United States Navy took off from Florida and disappeared without trace somewhere off the Bahamas. A Martin Mariner PBM flying boat with survival equipment was sent out after them, and that, too, vanished into thin air. In the last seventy years more than a hundred ships and planes and over a thousand people have been swallowed up whole in this notorious area.ns Several attempts have been made to plot this hole in the sky and to correlate it with other black spots. The most complex is that made by Bruce Cathie, a captain flying for the National Airways of New Zealand. [45] He believes that these points fall onto the lines of a grid of rectangles each forty-five square nautical miles in area, set up on mathematical co-ordinates based on the harmonic relationships of gravity, the mass of earth, and the speed of light. His mathematics has the strained quality of a numerologist trying desperately to prove a point at all costs, but the patterns he contrives do seem to coincide with
the location even of things like earthquakes and volcanic activity. After working very carefully through his argument, I am still not certain what direct connection there is between gravity and De Gaulle, but Cathie was able to use his system to predict publicly the exact day and time of the explosion of the French nuclear device over Mururoa Island on September 25, 1968.
The most appealing aspect of Cathie's grid is his claim that it makes sense of all the apparently unrelated mass of sightings of unidentified flying objects. This is no longer a matter of concern only to the much-maligned lunatic fringe, for a Gallup poll taken in November 1973 shows that the majority of Americans, 51 per cent, now believe in the reality of so-called flying saucers. [306] Eleven per cent, that is, a possible 25 million people, claim to have actually seen a UFO of some kind. Marsh gas, car headlights, Venus, and spots in front of the eyes are no longer adequate explanations for a phenomenon of this magnitude. There may be something in the theory now gaining ground that man migrated to earth from some other planet, or was seeded here by some superior race, or was actually produced by the union of that race with earthly animals. The discovery of things such as ancient maps containing aerial views of continents undiscovered at the time and of machined blocks of metal embedded in coal banks laid down before the dawn of man add up to a body of evidence that is growing large enough to become a valid alternative to the little pile of fossil fragments on which the evolutionary theory of man's development is based.
I do not think that there is going to be any simple answer to all these problems. No theory based only on Mount Ararat, or Atlantis, or a collision with Venus, can account for all the facts. I am impressed by the historical and archeological evidence for a very old and highly developed civilization, perhaps even contemporary with Neanderthal man; but as a biologist I find it impossible to believe that we have no evolutionary link with the other animals around us. This is why I find something like Cathie's grid so appealing. It sets up a mechanism based only on earth's natural rhythms, which allows almost anything to happen. Given only that there are certain spots on our planet's face that house persistent energetic anomalies, we can easily come to terms with the idea that it is in these places that mutations will most often occur; or new ideas will be generated; or collective hallucinations will take place; or things will behave abnormally; or changes in physical state will be most simple; or visitors will leave or first appear.
I also believe that we are far too quick to attach the blame for many mysteries to some convenient extraterrestrial intelligence. We may well be right to do so, but not until we have exhausted the possibilities inherent in ourselves.
The amount of money spent on investigations at Loch Ness alone is proof that everyone loves a good monster. The local tourist board would be delighted if it could be demonstrated beyond doubt that the loch was a staging post for the arrival and departure of horse-headed, many-humped denizens from Orion, but perhaps there is a simpler explanation. I first started visiting the loch and talking to people who had seen something there in 1960, and right from the beginning, I was impressed by both their honesty and their helplessness. It is certain that phenomena occur very often in Loch Ness, but it is equally certain that these happenings are strangely, almost deliberately, elusive.
Consider one example. On August 26, 1968, F. W. Holiday, of the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau, was watching the water from a camera platform at Abriachan on the south bank. [122] The loch at this point is about a mile wide and there were two other official camera trucks stationed four miles apart at Tor Point and Quarry Brae on the north bank, so that between them the three observers could see every part of the eastern half of the loch. Holiday was nearing the end of seven hundred hours of watching and knew that a sighting, which occurs on average once every five hundred hours, was long overdue. He says, "I kept a sharp lookout from first light onwards and continued the watch through breakfast. Just after 9.30 Mrs. Pickett (a tourist camping nearby) came out into the sunshine and started washing the dishes. The prospect of a chat, after the boring hours of watching, was too good to miss. That is the only logical reason I can give for walking 50 yards over the grass, leaving camera and binoculars behind me, to talk to the Picketts." Soon after their conversation began, a large black undulating object began ploughing through the water along the opposite shore with white foam streaming from its back. Holiday continues, "I stared at this spectacle for about two seconds without speaking. The experience seemed curiously unreal and I remember registering the idea that I must be suffering from some form of hallucination." He was not, because the Pickett family and other witnesses all saw the same thing, but none of them had cameras, and as soon as Holiday raced back to his equipment, the object disappeared.
Frustration of this kind is common at Loch Ness, but what makes this occasion noteworthy is the fact not only that the monster appeared when Holiday had moved away from his camera for the first time in weeks, but that it chose the one small spot on the entire loch where trees and rocks would conceal it completely from the two other still vigilant cameras on the north shore. It first appeared on the eastern edge of this tiny blind spot and finally disappeared just before it would have moved into vision at the western end. This tantalizing and apparently omniscient behavior on the part of monsters is familiar to watchers everywhere -- and occurs just as often in investigations of UFOs.
Both monsters and saucers have occasionally been photographed at a distance, both have sufficient reality to be picked up on the screens of sonar and radar equipment, and yet neither leave behind any good material evidence that can be analyzed and used to prove their reality beyond doubt. Monsters conveniently fade away at the crucial moment, and saucers actually disappear like ghosts when observers get too close. Carl Jung correlated UFO reports with psychic manifestations and shrewdly suggested that both might in some way be connected in our minds, perhaps by a collective consciousness. He said that "the psychic aspect plays so great a role that it cannot be left out of account." [136] The French astronomer Jacques Vallée drew a similar parallel between UFOs and early European supernatural lore and noted that many accounts of flying saucer landings include all the classic manifestations of religious apparitions and the fairy faith. [279] He concluded that "the mechanisms that have generated these various beliefs are identical."
The similarity between traditional elves and some of the "dwarf entities" reported in UFO accounts has been used to argue that saucers have been landing here for thousands of years, but the argument also goes the other way. The undoubted similarity can, perhaps more reasonably, be used to suggest that the UFOs were no more real then than they are now. The merits of both physical and mental arguments are considerably diminished by the discovery that psychokinesis exists, that it is possible to produce physical effects at a distance by purely mental means. Some special people can do this well under almost any conditions, but the research suggests that many otherwise normal people can produce the phenomena in certain circumstances. Perhaps one of the necessary conditions is provided by the magnetic flaws that exist at special places. Perhaps fairies, dwarfs, elves, leprechauns, dragons, monsters, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, poltergeists, and flying saucers all exist. And perhaps the cynics who say that it is all in the mind are also right, because all these things exist or are produced at the second, or etheric, level.
The strange behavior of all apparitions suggests that they obey laws not quite like those of conventional physics, and that they probably belong to a reality with slightly different space-time references. The fact that those who come closest to these phenomena usually receive information structured to support their own beliefs or fears suggests that these apparitions cannot be entirely independent of the minds of those involved. Taken together, these two suggestions provide the basis for a concept that could account for a great many mysteries. The allocation of all these unexplained odds and ends to the already mysterious area of the mind does not seem at first sight to be a very productive procedure, but I believe that the discov
ery of bioplasma and the possibility of its holographic action make the mind more amenable to investigation than it has ever been before.
It is possible that these elusive phenomena may one day be objectively weighed, measured, and arranged sufficiently tidily for even the most mechanistic scientist to regard them with equanimity. Some may take place, perhaps with the aid of electronics like television transmitters, at greater distances from the causal body than we had any reason to suspect, but it becomes clear that most must be produced directly by a living organism. I think it quite likely that Holiday's monster was created, or at least set up at that particular time and place, by his own unconscious. I begin to believe that we have the ability to do things like that -- and to make them sufficiently tangible to appear on film or radar. If this is so, then the weighing and measuring could be a long way off, because the power that can produce contrary manifestations of that kind will almost certainly lead us on a wild chase before it allows itself to be cornered and completely tamed.
The same talent seems also to be producing auditory manifestations. In 1959 Friedrich Jürgenson was recording the call of the Swedish finch in a forest near Stockholm when he discovered that his tape was also picking up other extraneous voicelike sounds. [138] He assumed that his machine had been damaged during the journey from the city and had it serviced before trying again a few weeks later. He recalls that "on playback I first heard some twittering of birds in the distance, then silence. Suddenly from nowhere a voice, a woman's voice in German: 'Friedel, my little Friedel, can you hear me?' It was as if the speaker had to make a tremendous effort to speak and the voice sounded anxious. But I am sure beyond a shadow of doubt that this was the unmistakable voice of my mother who ... died four years earlier. That was how it began."