THE EIGHTH TOWER: On Ultraterrestrials and the Superspectrum

by Keel, John A.

  After he released his photograph to the Associated Press, his life became a nightmare. First, he was hounded by crank telephone calls, many of them threatening. The engine of his automobile blew up. His wife left him. His house burned down. In mid-November, a month after his incredible experiences, the town council handed him his walking papers. Like many others who had been briefly exposed to the paranormal, his life suddenly came down in ruins around him.

  Another police officer, Dale Spaur of Ravenna, Ohio, was involved in a much-publicized pursuit of a low-flying unidentified flying object in 1966. It was seen by many other people along his route, even though the U.S. Air Force later announced that he had foolishly chased Venus. Within weeks after his story had hit the press, Spaur’s wife left him, and he was fired from the force. He suffered incredible hardships for years afterwards.

  Actually, such tragedies are commonplace. In many cases, witnesses with unlisted telephones were haunted by threatening calls after their sightings of monsters or UFOs, even when they had not reported their experience to anyone. Sudden misfortunes have plagued them, with fires and automobile accidents topping the list.

  Students of the occult can recognize this tragedy syndrome. Practitioners of witchcraft and the black arts are often engulfed in such horrors. The fairy lore of the Middle Ages is filled with identical tales. The wee folk, like the entities conjured up by glassy-eyed sorcerers, often turned on their human benefactors. But the lore can be traced much further back to that hazy age when men encountered gods on lonely deserts and mountaintops. The gods, according to the ancient saying, drove men mad and destroyed them.

  Long before the Europeans arrived, the North American Indians had developed a rich lore based on the appearances of the devilish “Trickster,” and the mischievous little people. While studying petroglyphs (Indian rock carvings) in Canada, Sigurd Olson came upon drawings of “a figure I had seen nowhere else.”[20]

  These were the Mannegishi, who, according to legend, are little people with round heads and no noses who live with only one purpose: to play jokes on travellers. The little creatures have long spidery legs, arms with six-fingered hands, and live between rocks in the rapids. When a canoe comes hurtling down, their greatest delight is to grasp the ends of the paddles, and if the craft tips over, their shrieks can be heard above the thunder of the water. If anything strange or unaccountable happens anywhere in the land of the Crees, it is the Mannegishi who are responsible.

  Every culture has its personal devils and devil theories. These are based in part on the purely subjective experiences of random lone individuals who suffered convincing hallucinations. When enough people have undergone similar hallucinations, their stories are accepted as being objectively real. A lore develops, followed by studies and analyses that arrive at conclusions founded on the testimonial evidence. Paradoxically, as more and more people accept the hallucinatory lore, the hallucinations increase and witnesses grow in astonishing numbers. The problem is compounded by the fact that certain types of hallucinations do not seem to spring from the percipient’s mind but seem to be created by an exterior force, a force which has the ability to bypass the normal channels of perception and broadcast directly to the percipient’s brain. Some dragons, sea serpents, and BHM are purely hallucinatory, while others are transmogrifications capable of snapping off tree limbs and stomping great footprints in the mud. The empty-eyed beings who look like us yet come from a far, far place beyond the reverse side of Alice’s magical mirror are in the same category, twisting out of the vortex of the superspectrum into our reality as lost as the wandering dead and as purposeless as the animated corpses of the secret voodoo rites. The transmogrified types can be seen by anyone who stumbles their way. The hallucinatory types are invisible to most of us, but psychics who have seen them have filled the occult and UFO lore with tales of dark encounters.

  Here is an account of a visit from a hallucination published on February 7, 1824, in the New York Mirror and Ladies Literary Gazette, Volume 1, Number 28:

  DELUSION

  The following story will appear to you incredible and fabulous; and perhaps I need not assure you that I had great difficulty in believing it; but as I had it from the lips of the individual who forms the subject of it, and as he was a visionary, I attributed it to the affects of a disturbed imagination. The event (at least as far as this person’s mind is concerned) occurred in our day, and it is attested by many in the city of Nismes [I have been unable to locate a “city of Nismes” in any atlas. Perhaps the name has been changed since 1824. Perhaps it never existed. Author]. The tale is thus told:

  Mr. Graverol was alone in his study one day, about two o’clock in the afternoon, when a stranger was ushered in: as soon as he was seated, a conversation started up between the two. The stranger addressed Mr. G. in elegant Latin, saying that he had heard his learning spoken highly of, and he had come from a distant country to converse with him on things which had embarrassed the ancient philosophers. After Mr. G. had replied suitably to the compliment offered to his talents, some very obstruse subject was introduced, and handled in a scientific manner. The stranger did not confine himself to the Latin languages, but he spoke Greek and some Eastern tongues, which Ms. G. also understood perfectly. The latter was astonished and delighted with his guest’s profound information; and for fear some person should call on him and interrupt it, he proposed to walk, which was readily acceded to by the stranger. The day was delightful, and you know there are some beautiful walks in the neighborhood of Nismes. They left the house with the design of going through the gate, called Crown gate, which leads to some gardens, and a very fine avenue of noble trees. But as Mr. G.’s house was a considerable distance from the place above mentioned, they were obliged to cross several streets before they reached it. During the walk, Mr. G. was observed by many of his acquaintances (he being well known in the city) to use much gesture; what added to the surprise was that no person was seen accompanying him. Some of his friends sent to his wife, expressing their fears that he was deranged, and describing the manner in which he was noticed to pass through the streets. She being greatly alarmed at intelligence so extraordinary, dispatched several persons in search of him; but they could not find him, as he had gained the shady walks outside the city, with his new acquaintance. After expatiating on subjects of ancient and modern philosophy, and reasoning on the secrets of nature, they entered on the wide fields of magic and enchantment. The stranger agreed with great ingenuity and power, but he exceeded the bounds of probability, and Mr. G. cried out “Stop, stop! Christianity forbids us proceeding to such lengths, and we should not pass the prescribed boundaries.” He had no sooner said (at least according to the narration spread abroad), than the stranger vanished. Mr. G. being at that moment at the extreme end of one of the avenues, which was terminated by some pallisadoes, was compelled to return the same way he went. On turning around, and not perceiving his companion, he became greatly alarmed, and uttered a dreadful shriek which brought some men who were employed in pruning trees, to him. When these people perceived how pale and frightened he was, they gave him some wine, and then used all the means which they could devise to restore him to himself. As soon as he had recovered his recollection, he inquired if they had noticed where the gentleman had gone with whom he had been walking? He was very much agitated when these good people informed him that no one was with him when he passed under the tree where they were at work: neither had a single individual been in his company since he came in their sight, and they had observed him some distance before he reached them. They added, moreover, that when he passed, it struck them as being somewhat singular that he should be so deeply engaged in apparent conversation, although he was alone. Mr. G., on learning this, went immediately home, where he found his house in disorder and alarm, concerning reports that had reached his wife. He then related his adventure. When the story was noised abroad, it was publicly asserted all over the city, that the devil had visited Mr. Graverol! He was a very gentlemanly man, an
d an advocate, and related the circumstances to me as I have detailed them. When he concluded, he said, “This is accurately what happened; you are now acquainted with the facts as well as myself, and you may exercise your judgement respecting them as shall best seem fit. And all I can add, is the stranger was a very learned and eloquent man, and reasoned like a philosopher.”

  These subjective hallucinations have launched a thousand religions and eccentric cults. Sometimes the entities pose as members of some secret order of Brothers watching over the human race. Some claim to belong to a long-gone Elder race that once inhabited this planet and constructed the pyramids, Stonehenge, and the other ancient artifacts that baffle us. Others pretend to be from lost Atlantis or mental projections from a secret temple high in the Himalayas. Today they are inclined to identify themselves as denizens of another planet and add to the propaganda being circulated to advance the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH)—that is, that we are being visited by people from another galaxy.

  However, some of these apparitions can actually materialize into our physical reality and produce physical evidence of their existence. Tall stately Indians (usually wearing a metal headpiece of some sort) have actually appeared at thousands of séances and even shaken hands with all the sitters before walking through a wall or just fading away like a motion picture projection.

  This is not a rare phenomenon. It is extremely commonplace.

  Each year thousands of these transmogrifications appear briefly all over the earth. They are usually accompanied by one or more telltale manifestations—sulfuric odors, bright flashes of light, or actual changes or distortions of the landscape where they appear. In olden times, witnesses to such events were said to be enchanted, because they honestly thought they had seen things they could not possibly have seen, and often they suffered displacement in time and space along with amnesia.

  One of the newer members to the contactee club is a well digger named Carl Higdon. While hunting elk in the Medicine Bow National Forest in Wyoming during the last week of October 1974, Mr. Higdon suddenly turned a corner and found himself in a time warp. He spotted an elk, took aim, and fired.

  “I could see the bullet going out the end of the gun,” he later mused, “and this is not normal. I saw the bullet go out about 60 feet and it just stopped and fell.”

  Like so many others, Higdon’s personal sense of time had been suddenly altered. A brief second was expanded until the speeding bullet seemed to be moving in slow motion. This can be compared to a normal dream in which a long, involved story can be played out in the dreamer’s mind in a few seconds. The dreamer has left our reality and slipped into “dreamtime.” (It is interesting that the aborigines of Australia refer to the ancient, dimly remembered age of the gods as “dreamtime.”)

  As the bullet slowly fell to the ground, Higdon saw a man in a skin-tight black suit with a slanted head, no chin, and a yellow complexion. This being approached him and asked if he was hungry. Higdon admitted he was, and the man in the cosmic wetsuit handed him a package of pills and told him to take one. After Higdon obeyed, he followed the man to a transparent object, which flew off to a tower illuminated with rotating multicolored lights. There Higdon was examined by some kind of machine, apparently rejected as a 4F, and returned to the Wyoming forest.

  In other cases the contactees have been handed strange cigarettes or cups of an oily liquid. I call this the ambrosia factor. It can be traced back to the days of Greece and Rome when those who were privileged to have a meeting with the gods on Mount Olympus were offered cups of the magical cure-all said to render the drinker immortal. Since no one has ever run across a 3,000-year-old man, we can assume that ambrosia’s only effect was to make the drinker high enough to commune with the gods, just as Higdon’s pill probably conditioned him for his time-bending adventure in the UFO tower.

  In May 1969, Jose Antonio, a Brazilian soldier, underwent a similar experience when he was kidnapped by a group of tiny humanoids and transported to a cavern-like room of stone. There his captors offered him a drink from a stone cube with a pyramidal cavity in the center. It was a dark green liquid, he reported, with a bitter taste. But he said he felt better after drinking it.

  George Adamski, a controversial contactee in the 1950s, imbibed with some beautiful Venusian ladies and said his space drink tasted like water but was “a little denser, with a consistency like a very thin oil.”

  Some adventurous earthlings have even taken a bath in the stuff. The story of Antonio Villas Boas of Brazil is now well known. In 1957 he was allegedly taken aboard a UFO and introduced to a sex-starved blonde spacewoman. Before his X-rated experience began, the little men on board the craft took off his clothes and bathed him with a wet sponge. “The liquid was as clear as water,” he later told Dr. Olavo T. Fontes, “but quite thick, and without smell. I thought it was some sort of oil, but was wrong, for my skin did not become greasy or oily.”

  Larry Foreman of California didn’t receive a ceremonial anointing, but during a series of UFO contacts near Socorro, New Mexico, in the 1960s, he claims to have tasted ambrosia. To him it was “some kind of punch, a berry of some kind, I think.”

  Many contactee experiences can be compared with dreams, as already noted, and, like normal dreamers, it is probable that physical sensations occurring during the trance are translated into the context of the dream. If you are sleeping and a mosquito digs its stinger into your arm, you might dream that you are being stabbed with a hypodermic needle. The UFO contactees are having an experience on two levels. On the real level, their body is paralyzed in a trance and is being subjected to who-knows-what-kind-of manipulations, while on the mental level they are enjoying a dream of spacemen and UFOs. As with ordinary hypnosis, the trance state overlaps into reality and they are unable to distinguish between the two. Later, when they look at their watch, they are amazed to find that hours have passed when the whole thing seemed to take only a few minutes, or, vice versa, minutes have passed when it seemed to take hours. Higdon’s sense of time was accelerated. His whole adventure took much less time than he thought.

  Unpleasant sensations experienced during the trance include sharp pains in the solar plexus, the area long believed to be a center of psychic powers. Betty Hill thought a long needle was being driven into her stomach while she was aboard a UFO. Her husband, Barney, was supposedly in another chamber, where the little ufonauts pulled out his false teeth and examined them in amazement.

  In my investigations I have been troubled to find that thousands of people have apparently had contact experiences without remembering them. They might recall seeing a UFO approaching their car, but the rest is a blank, and, until I begin my complicated questioning, they have no inkling that more might have happened. Those who do seem to remember the experience are programmed to remember only misleading nonsense about spaceships and eerie medical examinations. This ploy has been very effective and has kept most self-styled UFO investigators off the track for years.

  It is probable that a majority of all people in every generation have a direct experience with the superspectrum sometime during their lives. In ancient times people sipped ambrosia and mentally visited the palaces of the gods while something else was actually happening to their bodies. During the Middle Ages we met with fairies and leprechauns, took a swig from their jug, and visited their magnificent underground palaces while something else was actually happening to our bodies. In modern times we visit flying saucers while something else is actually happening to our bodies.

  Those who do not drink a syrupy or oily liquid are triggered by a flash of light. Many UFO contacts (and religious contacts with angelic apparitions) begin with a sudden flash of light—energy from the superspectrum tuned to the exact frequency of the percipient’s brain. The flash induces the trance-like state, but the percipient thinks he or she is still wide-awake and that the hallucination that follows the flash is a part of reality. They remember seeing the flash, and then an entity comes out of the darkness holding some kind o
f flashlight or even a camera. Or they see a pulsing light, become transfixed, unable to move, and the light slowly changes into a wondrous spaceship. Helpless, they are hauled aboard, tossed onto a table, and given a medical going over—they think.

  Although the hallucinatory cases have enthralled the hardcore flying-saucer believers for years, they do not offer us much information about the actual phenomenon. The “hard” cases of physically real entities are a little more promising. In this category we have the celebrated “Men in Black” (MIB)—sinister beings who ride around in black Cadillacs and menace practitioners of witchcraft and black magic, and over-earnest UFO investigators. For years the UFO cultists believed the MIB were agents of the CIA and the U.S. Air Force hell-bent on “suppressing the truth” about flying saucers. Their tactics, and their facial features, are often identical to those of the UFO pilots themselves. They spray gas into the faces of their victims, or they make them swallow a pill or smoke a peculiar cigarette. Their eyes sometimes are a fiercely glowing red, so they hide behind dark sunglasses of the wraparound type. They prefer black suits and black turtleneck sweaters.

  Whoever—or whatever—they are, they’ve got us surrounded.

  17

  In the 1960s the Men in Black led me on many merry chases. With my usual impeccable logic, I reasoned that I would never be able to catch a flying saucer, but if the MIB were real (and the testimony of many people indicated they were), I might be able to head them off at some cosmic pass and force their big black automobile to the side of the road.

  On a number of occasions I actually saw the phantom Cadillacs as advertised, complete with sinister-looking Oriental-like passengers in black suits. On Long Island, following the directions given me in an anonymous phone call, I pursued one of these cars down a dead-end road where it seemingly vanished into thin air (there were no side roads or turnoffs). On other days I arrived at witnesses” homes only minutes after the MIB had driven off. Their empty threats, passed along by concerned percipients, filled my mailbox and rang in my ears for years.