While everyone watched in horror, “Prestes’s insides began to show, and the flesh started to look as though it had been cooked for many hours in boiling water,” according to Professor Carrion’s report.
The flesh began to conic away from the bones, falling in lumps from his jaws, his chest, his arms, his hands, his fingers, from the lower parts of his legs, and from his feet and toes. Some scraps of flesh remained hanging to the tendons, and none of those present dared to touch them. Soon every part of Prestes had reached a state of deterioration beyond imagination. His teeth and his bones now stood revealed, utterly bare of flesh.
Prestes meanwhile vigorously refused the food and water that were offered to him. But at no time did he appear to be feeling any pain.
Now his nose and ears fell off, sliding down his body on to the floor.
He was placed aboard a cart and taken to the nearest hospital, but he died en route.
Shades of Hiroshima!
How many other episodes of this type still remain undiscovered? Probably a good many. There have already been enough to fill two books.[22]
As you can see, we know a great deal more about this phenomenon than has ever appeared in your daily newspapers. We still do not know a thing, however, about their supposed technology, probably because no technology is really involved. What is involved in all these cases is the manipulation of energy, particularly the energies from the upper end of the electromagnetic spectrum.
The stultifying smells of the monsters, little green men (yes, they also stink), and the UFOs themselves could be the result of chemical reactions, the breakdown of earthly hydrocarbons when exposed to a force or energy unnatural to the earth’s atmosphere. The sulfuric content of our atmosphere is now quite high, thanks to auto exhaust fumes generally and the numerous refineries and chemical factories in New Jersey, the Ohio valley, and elsewhere. The moving fields of force cause a sudden new mixture to be formed in areas where the sulfuric content is high. The result is a potent cloud of hydrogen sulfide or, where there is more fluoride gas than sulfuric gas, hydrofluoride.
Individually our monsters and pseudo-spacemen have never revealed an intelligence beyond low animal intelligence, yet the patterns of the phenomenon indicate intelligent order and purpose. We have not been viewing the masters, only the slaves. To understand this intelligence—this thing that hides from us by donning a million silly disguises—we must examine the percipients and try to understand what they really experienced, not what they think they experienced.
PART THREE
I think we are property.
I should say we belong to something.
That once upon a time, this earth was No-man’s land, that other worlds explored and colonized here, and fought among themselves for possession, but that now it’s owned by something: That something owns this earth—All others warned off. — Charles Fort
19
“Stretching across Asia, from Northern Manchuria, through Tibet, west through Persia, and ending in the Kurdistan, was a chain of seven towers, on isolated mountaintops,” William Seabrook wrote in his Adventures in Arabia, “and in each of these towers sat continually a priest of Satan, who by ‘broadcasting’ occult vibrations controlled the destinies of the world for evil.”
Thoughtful men have always uneasily recognized that some superhuman force seems to manipulate human events and subtly guide human history. It was a natural step to divide such manipulations into two parts. The good (pro-human) events were credited to the gods, while the bad (anti-human) events were blamed on assorted demons and devils. It gradually became clear that the bad events outnumber the good, so it was obvious that the demons were pretty much in control. The earliest myths of Africa, Asia, and South America—myths produced by completely isolated cultures—contain many interesting correlations. They claim that in the beginning men were actually enslaved by the gods. We were like cattle in a pen, forced to build senseless monuments for the use of our masters and even to sacrifice our physical bodies to them. Many cultures continued these ritual sacrifices into this century. Even the Old Testament of the Bible carefully depicts God as a vengeful, jealous, egotistical tyrant who frequently punished man with horrible disasters.
When we emerged from the Dark Ages, we began to search for new demons who could be held responsible for the mess we were in. Religion slowly receded into the background, and our devil theories became more sophisticated. The Orient was particularly rich with devil theorists. The story of Seabrook’s seven towers occupied by chanting Satanists was only one of their inventions. Visiting “angels” materialized before awed prophets in every generation and planted the seeds of racial prejudice. The Jews and the blacks were the most popular scapegoats, but there were many others. Mystical human organizations and secret societies began to share the blame. The Catholics muttered about the Freemason conspiracy, while Jewish factions looked suspiciously towards the Vatican (and, in fact, the Society of Jesus—the Jesuits—did get involved in political plots in the eighteenth century). A pathetic little band of men who believed in such revolutionary ideas as freedom of the press and religious freedom and who called themselves the Illuminati horrified the church-dominated countries of Europe and were ruthlessly hunted down and slaughtered. The thirteenth president of the United States, a fellow named Millard Fillmore, later ran for office on the anti-Catholic platform of the aptly named Know-Nothing party. (He distinguished himself by installing the first bathtub in the White House.)
Throughout Mongolia and Tibet there are myths describing the all-powerful king of the world who lives in a fabulous underground city high in the Himalayas. His minions, nasty but relatively normal-looking gentlemen in black garments, sally forth from the city occasionally to stir things up among the surface dwellers. The Shaver mystery, which was the prelude to the flying-saucer wave of 1947, claims that deros (detrimental robots) live in underground caves and control us through the use of fiendish rays. A writer named Richard Shaver introduced derodom in a series of novelettes published in Amazing Stories beginning in 1944. Editor Ray Palmer was astonished when he received thousands of letters from readers who testified they had had personal experiences with the deros. But if you ask any policeman, you will find that one of the most universal of complaints is the paranoid belief that someone is aiming deadly rays at the apartment or home of the complainer. The Shaver mystery gave thousands of lonely misfits a frame of reference, a devil theory, for their own misfortunes. Yet it was rather uncanny that Shaver somehow foresaw the appearance of flying saucers, Men in Black, and many other accoutrements of the UFO age.
In the 1920s and 30s the legend of the International Bankers provided a frame of reference for the MIB activities. The International Bankers were supposed to be an elite group of munition manufacturers and financiers who were running the world from behind the scenes. A small group of so-called Superbuffs still flourishes and believes that a powerful, moneyed secret committee runs the world. And, of course, the Central Intelligence Agency has earned the wrath of all devil theorists, both right and left wing.
The big UFO waves of 1947, 1952, 1957, and 1966 were each followed by a revival in the belief that beings from outer space were invading us and preparing to take over the world. Since they look just like us, they could move into the vacant house next door and we would hardly notice.
Each of us creates his own personal devil theory. Dr. Jung’s collective unconsciousness was his. Ivan Sanderson’s living planet was his. But in the years ahead a true devil theory will take form around the superspectrum, and as we come to understand it more fully, we will reduce its influence on us and, in the process, unload many of our religious and occult reliefs. If we’re lucky and intelligent, we may even be able to bring the superspectrum under our control, just as Dr. Frankenstein’s monster took over the castle.
The word biosphere came into popular usage in the 1960s. It means the whole earth, including all animal and plant life and the ecological systems that support them. We now see this planet a
s a total organism, and it is suddenly conceivable that this organism has an intelligence of its own and is able to control its many parts. The ancient Greeks had their own version of the biosphere in their goddess Gala, Mother Earth. She bore a son, Uranus, then had an incestuous relationship with him that produced the first earthly race—the twelve Titans. Both Uranus and the Titans worked their way into the UFO lore in the 1950s when innocent contactees met entities professing to be the old gods. Uranus represented the heavens, so it was logical for him to join with Gaia in forming a whole.
A British research chemist, James Lovelock, gained fame 1974 when he revealed that freon, the gas used in aerosol cans, was collecting in the upper atmosphere and endangering the ozone layer. We are about to spray ourselves into extinction. Following this discovery, Lovelock unveiled his “Gaia hypothesis.” He sees the earth, its atmosphere, and all its life forms as part of single gigantic system, controlling and being controlled by the total organism. The Greeks, Sanderson, and Jung were all ahead of Lovelock, but he is bringing legitimacy to their metaphysical concepts. The ultimate devil theory—the Eighth Tower—is now taking shape in scientific circles. The earth itself is alive, and the earth’s mind is our God, just as ants thriving in the artificial environment of a glass ant farm may worship the small boy who tosses crumbs into their narrow, sandy world.
There are actually many models of this superorganism. Our own bodies are made up of billions of separate cells, each with the ability to reproduce and each with a kind of instinctive intelligence of its own. By banding together they assure themselves of a food supply, among other things, for our bodies are chiefly designed to provide the groceries to these single cells. Unfortunately, when a key part of the larger organism is badly damaged, the flow of food ceases and the whole unit dies. The earth is in the same danger. If a key part of an ecological system is disturbed or damaged, the whole organism could shut down. This process has already begun. Ocean algae, which supply a large part of the earth’s oxygen, are being polluted out of existence. We are hastening things by spewing all kinds of garbage into the atmosphere, including freon. Angry scientists with furrowed brows appear on late-night shows and grumble that man has only 15 or 20 years left, but the news has not had any real effect on us. Animals in the Central Park Zoo are dying of lead poisoning from the fumes of automobiles. On nightly weather forecasts TV weathermen soberly discuss the pollution count and more and more frequently announce that “today’s air was unsatisfactory.” In November of 1966, I drove fifteen hundred miles and never once broke free of the heavy, putrid layer of smog that covers the Northeast. More recently I was flying a private plane above the pristine Catskill Mountains when a vile odor invaded the sealed cabin. I threw a suspicious glance at my passenger and studied the dials and gauges, thinking that perhaps engine fumes were getting into the cabin. “It’s those factories down there, “ my friend explained, pointing to a row of cement factories thousands of feet below us on the scum-covered Hudson River.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once wrote a short story titled “The Day the Earth Screamed.”
The earth is screaming. It has a virus called mankind. For years now the mysterious entities materializing on the back roads and deserts have been telling us to discontinue our atomic foolishness because we are upsetting “the balance of the universe.” Perhaps the supermind is just worried that we will perfect a Doomsday weapon and blow ourselves up, destroying the whole planet as well. The earth may have the same kind of instinct for self-preservation that all lesser organisms share, and as we wantonly commit suicide, we are killing our cosmic host. Self-preservation may be the only real instinct of the supermind. All of its manipulations may be motivated by that single urge.
Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by the earth organism not to punish men but to preserve itself. Our greatest single racial memory—the memory of a flood that destroyed most of the planet’s surface in some far-off time—may have been a cosmic bowel movement when failing experiments with nature were purged and the whole process was started over again. The Eighth Tower is not a perfect creator. It makes mistakes. Even insane mistakes—for sanity and order are inseparable, and the seeming order of the universe conceals great chaos. The distant star clusters wheeling aimlessly in the void are the buttons of the straightjacket that confines this screaming planet. Another sad racial memory is in the making.
20
A newspaper in Philadelphia carried an odd little story in its back pages several years ago, a story that did not appear anywhere else and has never been confirmed in any fashion. Frayed photostats of the article still circulate among the cultists and buffs dedicated to many different devil theories. The fact that there was never any follow-up is proof again, some say, of the great governmental conspiracy to conceal the truth. More likely the whole thing was a hoax dreamed up by a bored newsman on a slow day. Such hoaxes are more commonplace than you might want to believe. Some are concocted by mischievous teletype operators working the night shift. Others are planned for April Fools’ Day issues and spread among Forteans minus the date.
Whatever the case, the yarn excited devil theorists everywhere. It told how an unnamed scientific expedition of unnamed scientists was exploring Greenland with special instruments when they detected a massive object buried deep under the ice. It was rectangular and appeared to be a construction of some kind. But what really stirred the scientists, according to the story, was the fact that the thing was emitting radio signals! The implications were staggering. A huge electronic device existed in barren Greenland, planted so deep in the ice that it must have been there hundreds, even thousands, of years. Who put it there? Who was it broadcasting to? The UFO cultists presumed it was the work of extraterrestrials and was sending tellurian weather reports to some receiver on Andromeda. The Atlantologists speculated that it was the legendary power transmitter of lost Atlantis. (Charles Berlitz, a member of the tiny band of Atlantis searchers, has suggested that the hundreds of ships and planes that have vanished inexplicably in the notorious “Bermuda Triangle” were the victims of that ancient crystalline power source—a true Eighth Tower now boiling away under hundreds of fathoms of ocean.)
However, one of the truths of the earth organism is that it has always been surrounded by mysterious organized radio signals. As soon as we applied our feeble brains to the problems of radio telephony, we detected these powerful signals. But they may have been the same signals that fed Moses’s brass snakebite machine, and transmitted prophecies of the future to the breastplates and amulets of the ancient priests.
Back in 1899, a tall, spare man named Nikola Tesla built a strange-looking tower on a six-thousand-foot mountain outside Colorado Springs, Colorado. Tesla was a genius way ahead of his time (among other things he invented alternating current), and that summer he was experimenting with radio. The only radio transmitter in existence anywhere on the planet in 1899 was Marconi’s primitive apparatus located in Europe. It used long waves and had a range of about fifty miles. Nevertheless, Tesla’s receiver picked up organized, intelligent signals from somewhere!
“I was familiar, of course, with such electrical disturbances as are produced by the sun, Aurora Borealis, and earth currents,” he later wrote, “and I was as sure as I could be of any fact that these variations were due to none of these causes... The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.”
Twenty years later, following the War to End All Wars, Marconi publicly announced that his receiving stations had also been picking up unidentified signals from an unknown source, and, like Tesla, he speculated they might be coming from outer space.
The phantom signals persisted, often coming in with such power they seemed to be broadcast from someplace very close o the receiver, not from outer space. Innumerable scientific projects were set up to study these signals in the 1920s, but their source was never pinpointed. On occasion their intensity was measured, and it was found they were more powerful than any known
man-made transmitter then in existence. Interest in the signals ran so high that on August 24, 1924, all government, commercial, and ham radio stations voluntarily shut down their transmitters and listened. Around the world men bent over their crude receivers and pressed their earphones against their heads, listening to the strange signals. Dr. David Todd sat in the naval observatory watching a device called the Jenkins radio-camera as it spewed out a moving strip of photographic paper. When the strip was developed, it was covered with eerie images—not dots and dashes but tiny drawings of human-like faces! The Jenkins machine was technically incapable of producing such drawings!
In the 1930s, experimenters discovered that radio waves were pouring in on us from distant stars and the science of radio astronomy was born. Today the world is covered with huge dish-shaped antennae listening to the static and noises from deep space.
The cosmic hoaxer who drew those faces on Dr. Todd’s paper strip is still with us. All kinds of curious radio hoaxes are reported each year. NASA’s highly directional space radios using ultrahigh frequencies (UHF) have been plagued by everything from Indian war whoops to the sounds of fire sirens, and astronauts on their way to the moon have listened to strange music and mysterious voices on channels reserved exclusively for space transmissions. (Very few impish amateurs could afford the equipment necessary for these hoaxes.)
THE EIGHTH TOWER: On Ultraterrestrials and the Superspectrum Page 17