Our funny ultraterrestrials are not only sensitive to sound, they seem very sensitive to light. Historically, psychic manifestations take place in complete darkness. If there is a light, the phenomenon somehow puts it out. Long before the invention of the electric bulb there were thousands of carefully reported cases in which candles in sealed rooms (no possibility of a draught) suddenly went out mysteriously before the ghost made his appearance. Nonelectrical machines like clocks and even windmills stop abruptly in the presence of these forces.
Modern UFO incidents have generated thousands of reports of what is known as the electromagnetic (EM) effect. Automobiles stall and all their electrical systems fail when a UFO appears. Widespread power failures occur in UFO flap areas. Radios and telephones go haywire. Battery-operated cameras refuse to work. For years the UFO enthusiasts have regarded these events as proof that UFOs are surrounded by a very intense magnetic field. But the EM effect goes far beyond normal magnetic aberrations. A few years ago the Ford Motor Company conducted a series of tests to find out just how much magnetism it would take to stall an automobile. It was found that a magnetic field of 20,000 gauss would be required, and that such an intense field would certainly alter the normal state of magnetization of the car (and could be easily detected afterwards), and would bend and damage many of the delicate parts.[15]
Clocks and watches also stop in the presence of UFOs. Even watches made of non-magnetic alloys. This EM effect is not isolated to UFO cases at all. It also occurs in monster sightings, ghost stories, and even in our sea serpent mystery. The UFO enthusiasts have simply isolated and renamed a phenomenon long known to parapsychologists and ghost hunters. In some cases it bas been found that wires refused to conduct current while the UFOs were present. It sounds as if the phenomenon has the ability to drain off energy, particularly electrical energy, and paralyze all kinetic force. Wheels won’t go around. Clocks won’t run. Manually operated cameras won’t work. Our ultraterrestrials are able to manipulate, to enchant, all of our toys and machines. Even more alarming, they are able to manipulate human beings just as easily. Our brains are, after all, electrical organisms operating on known frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum.
As you can see, these mysteries have many built-in contradictions. Some entities or forces react negatively to high frequency sounds, while others emit such sounds. Part of the phenomenon avoids light. Part of it produces light, even light of blinding intensity. Yet if you project a powerful flashlight at one of the aerial lights, as I have done on a few occasions, the object will actually leap out of your beam. If the object is fairly close, you may find that your flashlight won’t work at all.
All of these forces have existed on our planet since the beginning, as I have already pointed out. But we are caught up in a game of re-explaining them in each generation as they manifest themselves in new ways. Today one group of pragmatic scientists are soberly investigating BHM while they scorn, even laugh at, the psychic investigators and UFO enthusiasts. Another group is bent on trapping sea serpents. Still others are chasing ghosts and poltergeists. None of these groups seems willing to examine the evidence of the others. Yet they are probably all pursuing the same intangible force. Before we can make any real progress, all of these separate studies must be brought together. The BHM smells may be more important than their footprints. The hums and whines of the flying saucers may not be produced by intricate machinery but may just be another indication of the complex forces at work in these cases.
Some of our sea serpents, hairy humanoids, and silver-suited spacemen have huge self-luminous eyes. It may be that these “eyes” are the only real things about some of these entities. The bodies to which they are seemingly attached are often shadowy and indistinct. The witnesses’ minds fill in the missing details. They see a pair of bright lights seven feet off the ground so they assume they are connected to a giant body in the dark. The same glowing patches become a sea serpent when seen inches above a lake.
In occult lore, eyes—or a single huge eye—play a very important role. The eye is an ancient symbol for the deity. Persons suffering from paranoia-schizophrenia see eyes everywhere. They turn on a water faucet and a huge eye oozes out. In Egyptology, the Eye of Horus is one of the most important symbols. It represents all sorts of mathematical equations. On every dollar bill, atop the pyramid on the obverse side of the Great Seal of the United States, there is this same great eye. On my field trips I am always alert for two phenomena: witnesses who see sudden flashes of light, “like a flashgun going off,” and people who have seen some sort of eye during their experience. The visions of eyes cannot really be rationally explained, but they are significant.
Every reader has probably heard of the famous “abduction” of Betty and Barney Hill. They were driving through the mountains of New England in 1961 when they were allegedly stopped by a UFO and whisked aboard by a group of little men who proceeded to give them a medical examination. The story first appeared in Look Magazine and later as a book.[16]
Barney was driving. Later he reported seeing a huge eye seemingly suspended in space in front of his windshield before he halted for the little men in black leather jackets who, incidentally, bore a remarkable resemblance to a group of normal young men he and his wife had seen earlier in a roadside restaurant. The floating eye is the tip-off that the Hills’ experience was largely hallucinatory.
Separating the real from the unreal in these cases is an awesome task. But this is the task I am undertaking here. A weird, unbelievable paranormal force is at work on this planet, and it is time we looked at it the way it is, not the way we think or wish it to be.
The most damning evidence against the physicality of the creatures is their amazing ability to vanish into thin air. Dozens of times in recent years, large posses of armed men, backed up by bloodhounds and helicopters, have searched the areas where the monsters were seen by reliable witnesses. Every rock, cave, bush, and gully was carefully examined. No trace of the animals, their nesting or sleeping places, or their feeding grounds has ever been found.
Ancient investigators suffered the same frustrations when they turned out to track down the dragons, fire-breathing chimeras, horned demons, and hairy bipeds reported in earlier times. Then, as now, deep tracks pursued courses through muddy fields only to stop suddenly as if the animal had been snatched into the sky. The footprints in themselves are not impressive. Ghosts, fairies, vampires, dragons, and clove-hooved demons have all scattered such physical evidence in their paths to prove their reality and support the frame of reference in which they had been manifested. So thousands of years ago men concluded that the monsters were not real. The Greek word khimaira (“chimera”) came to mean an unreal, fire-breathing, smelly transmogrification. The word specter, meaning ghost or apparition, stems from the Latin spectrum, for the ancients noted that land-bound and aerial apparitions often passed through all the colors of the spectrum just as modern UFOs do. When new frames of reference, such as the fairy faith of the Middle Ages, were introduced, scholars and scientists performed careful investigations and ultimately concluded such things were unreal.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, once published a series of apparently authentic photos of the little people. Nessie, the phantom sea serpent of Loch Ness in Scotland, has been photographed several times, but divers, submarines, and all kinds of modern gadgets have failed to locate Nessie in the lake and confirm his existence. However, the photographic evidence for our Big Hairy Monsters and Sasquatches is depressingly inadequate. A few pictures have been taken, it is true, but they do not stand up under expert examination by biologists and anthropologists. Considering the wide range of the beasts’ wanderings, and their frequent appearances, there should be more photographic evidence than there is.
While these things seem very tangible to the surprised witnesses, they are actually as intangible as puffs of marsh gas—glowing one minute, gone the next.
Nevertheless, a growing band of anthropologists, college p
rofessors, and adventurers are convinced of their reality. Some well-financed expeditions went chasing the Sasquatch in the Canadian forests in 1973-74. They found more tracks, more witnesses, and even produced a couple of dubious photographs. Other expeditions have been busy at Loch Ness for years. Cameras have been mounted around the perimeter of the lake. A Japanese submarine was introduced into the murky waters in 1973. There were new sightings of the elusive sea serpent but no conclusive evidence was developed.
One of Nessie’s most persistent pursuers, F. W. Holiday, has now rejected the physical theory. He has studied the strange psychic manifestations which haunt the Loch and hinder the scientific investigators. In his most recent book,[17] Holiday outlines the weird coincidences and the fascinating historical material, which all point to a paraphysical explanation.
In August 1968, Holiday was present when Nessie reared his ugly head for a look around. Though there were a number of good witnesses along the shore, the beast chose to pop up in one of the very few places that were obscured from the various cameras!
“The Loch Ness Investigation Bureau had a camera truck at Quarry Brae,” Holiday reported, “and another one four miles away at Tor Point. The observers were watchful and keen but they had seen nothing. The phenomenon had concealed itself so there was nothing for them to see.”
Eager would-be UFO photographers the world over have been puzzled when their expensive cameras failed to function at the critical moment, returning to normal as soon as the UFO had soared out of view. Holiday cites a number of instances in which this has occurred at Loch Ness. In some cases, the cameras seemed to work, but the developed film came out completely blank. This has also happened to innumerable UFO photographers, ghost hunters, and BHM chasers.
Even more remarkable, there have been many instances in which UFOs, apparitions, and monsters seem to have deliberately posed for photographers. They have actually waited around while excited witnesses ran to their homes or cars for their cameras, loaded them with fumbling fingers, and returned to snap the picture. Chief Greenhaw’s silvery man in Alabama apparently posed (see Chapter 16), as did the Sasquatch photographed by Ivan Marx in 1973.[18] Nessie, too, has posed a few times over the years. As soon as the shutter clicks, the entity or object dashes away.
Obviously there is some kind of intelligence behind all these manifestations. It is very mischievous, with a great sense of humor. Would beings from some distant galaxy travel hundreds of light years to play such jokes on us? Parapsychologists devoted to poltergeist cases (a poltergeist is a noisy, troublesome but invisible “ghost”) have noted this same kind of joke-playing. After investigating many poltergeist cases, zoologist Ivan Sanderson compared their mentality with that of a small child or an animal like a monkey. In my own peculiar adventures with people claiming to be in contact with the UFO entities, I found that the representatives of that superior technology in the sky were astonishingly stupid, had a wild, even vicious, sense of humor, and also had furious tempers like the devils, demons, and valkyries of old.
By human standards these phenomenal entities are emotionally disturbed. The lonely explorers adventuring in the various frames or reference have struggled to endow them with human qualities, to find some rationale for their irrational behavior, to render plausible their totally implausible nature. Few have dared to confront the obvious truth: the source of all of these subhumans and parahumans is not sane. We have wasted the time of our greatest scientists, philosophers, and theologians for centuries in a futile effort to find wisdom in the follies of the superspectrum. When a hairy monster stalks across the landscape and peers into a bathroom window, the event has no meaning, so we invent a meaning for it. We have complicated our reality by developing whole cults of unreason to define unreasonable intrusions and make them important in our own lives. If the source is crazy for teasing us pointlessly, what are we who allow ourselves to be so easily teased?
16
Where was Dan Koehler on August 19, 1973?
Mr. Koehler is the tallest man in the United States, standing eight feet two inches tail. But at 8 p.m. on that warm summer evening, someone even taller went striding down the main street of the little village of Buffalo Mills, Pennsylvania. Whoever he was, he seemed to be at least nine feet tall and looked very human except for his clothes, which were cut in an odd way and were made of a strange shimmering material. As he passed along the street, doors slammed shut, and startled faces peered anxiously around the corners of taut lace curtains. His dark, penetrating gaze transfixed the amazed passersby in Buffalo Mills while he loped along casually, his long legs barely seeming to touch the sidewalk.
He passed through the town quietly, peaceably, and walked into oblivion, just another one of the hordes of peculiar visitors who appear out of nowhere periodically, often in the center of major cities, and then dissolve again into the unknown.
A few months earlier a similar stranger entered a bar in Tres Arroyos, Argentina. He was also unusually tall and had a discomfiting gaze. The customers in the bar gaped in astonishment as he walked into the men’s room. Several minutes passed, and when he didn’t reappear, the owner decided to check. The little windowless men’s room was empty. There was no other way out. The barkeeper called the local police, and they examined the john minutely. Apparently the seven-foot-tall stranger in the funny suit had flushed himself down the toilet.
There ate hundreds of stories of this kind every year, troublesome little mysteries that rarely receive much attention. Individually, these incidents are senseless and unimportant. But they keep occurring year after year, decade after decade, century after century, in every part of the world. Often, aside from their bizarre appearance, these creatures manage to call attention to themselves through some quirk of speech (when they speak at all), odd behavior, or unusual garment. Frequently their hair is a peculiar shade, as if it were badly dyed or as if they were wearing some kind of homemade wig. In 1954 one of these characters allegedly turned up in Kentucky wearing odd shoes. According to a witness:
Several months ago a young man, boarding at my house, took me to lunch in a basement restaurant. When we had finished eating our lunch, we each went to the Rest Rooms. When I came out of the Ladies Room, my escort was standing by the revolving doors that lead upstairs. He said: “Meg, did you see that man sitting on that seat back there, with shoes that had a place for every toe?” I said: “No, Jack.” He suggested: “You go back into the Red Room, look at him, and come back out.”
I did. This man was sitting there with his hands on his knees. He was a tall man. His head and shoulders were higher than any other person’s there. He did not say a word. He just watched everyone. When he saw me look at him and at his feet, he got up and walked out. He was wearing a dark brown suit, and his five-toed shoes were dark brown. His toes were long and big, and his foot looked narrow at the heel.
A writer named Charles Fort (1874-1932) collected hundreds of stories about these mysterious strangers in the 19th century and presented them in a series of books published in the 1920s. He called them “a procession of the damned.” The parade goes on. The damned still march among us, their feet lurching to the beat of a distant and very different drummer. For our part, we ignore them or laugh uneasily when we hear about their periodic and senseless visits.
A small group of people who call themselves Forteans lovingly collect and file such anecdotes after documenting them as carefully as possible. The Buffalo Mills story was published in The INFO Journal, the organ of the International Fortean Organization, after being first reported in the Jeanette (Pa.) News-Dispatch. The Argentine story was translated from a South American newspaper and published in Case Histories, a serious magazine published by England’s highly respected Flying Saucer Review. The tale of the man with the funny footwear in Kentucky was recorded by the late Harold T. Wilkins, the great British researcher.[19]
If we accept these stories at face value, we could believe that this planet is the home of a wide assortment of parahuman entities
who do not pay taxes, vote, or contribute one whit to our fluctuating economies. Some of them climb out of flying saucers and hitch rides with passing motorists (there are many such reports). Some seem to reside in our swamps and cemeteries. All of them are absurd.
The lore of these strangers extends far back in history and permeates every society. In other ages we tended to regard them as agents for God or the devil. Today millions accept them as visitors from outer space, and some flying-saucer cults even believe that thousands of space people now live in our midst unnoticed.
Until a few years ago, these characters seemed to prefer the company of backwoods farmers and tribesmen in isolated areas of the world. But as the popular belief in extraterrestrial visitors spread, the entities began to select police officers, doctors, lawyers, schoolteachers, and other so-called reputable types as witnesses. Down in Falkville, Alabama, Police Chief Jeff Greenhaw even managed to take a picture of an unidentified walking object.
It happened on Wednesday, October 17, 1973. Chief Greenhaw spotted the critter standing on the edge of a gravel road. It was shaped like a man, he said later, “but it looked like his head and neck were kind of made together.... He was real bright, something like rubbing mercury on nickel, but just as smooth as glass—different angles gave different lighting. I don’t believe it was aluminum foil.”
Greenhaw grabbed the camera he kept in his police car and snapped a picture. Then he turned on his blue flashing light and the entity dashed away, moving stiffly like a robot but running “faster than any human I ever saw.”
THE EIGHTH TOWER: On Ultraterrestrials and the Superspectrum Page 13