Simultaneously, in far-off China, the great philosopher Lao Tzu appeared, introduced Taoism, and reshaped the thinking of the Orient along with another contemporary, Confucius. In Persia, Zoroaster founded a new religion based upon his encounters with Ahura Mazda, one of our freaked-out friends from nowhere, while the biblical prophets Daniel and Zachariah were having some odd experiences of their own further west. (According to the descriptions in the Bible, both of these gentlemen saw UFO-type phenomena.)
Buddha’s monotheism swept the Far East but didn’t make much headway in the West where the Greeks, Romans, and all the peoples they conquered continued to worship their multitudes of mountain-dwelling deities.
We can’t say for certain that Christ introduced monotheism, but he was at least given credit for doing so. Characteristically, however, many of the earlier beliefs in elementals, Druidic-style magic, and the Osiris theology spilled over into, and were absorbed by, the emerging Christian cults. The concept of a cosmic consciousness must have been incomprehensible to the Mediterranean people, and they quickly perverted it. God became a giant humanoid sitting on an aerial throne rather than a more carefully defined energy force as expounded by Buddha. The Catholics were later to split Him into the Trinity. The messengers or angels who continued to appear with regularity were swallowed up in myth and given wings and halos by religious artists. Actually, angels were always described as resembling normal human beings, though they were sometimes surrounded by luminous glows. Like our modern ufonauts, they were often described as being dressed in glittering one-piece garments, and their faces were often obscured, either by some kind of covering or by a glow. And—like our hairy monsters, dinosaurs, and other animated phantasms—they had the uncanny ability to vanish into thin air. Daniel, Saul, and other biblical personages fell flat on theft faces, fainted, or lapsed into trances when the apparitions appeared.
A small band of scholars known as aretalogists still quietly study cases of contact between humans and parahumans, sifting the messages and noting comparisons. The less precise angelologists try to catalog the “endless genealogies” of the parahumans who claim divine origin, a task as frustrating as trying to list the names of all the planets described by the flying-saucer entities. Demonologists have drawn up massive directories of the names of the demons and demigods who have marched in Fort’s ignoble procession of the damned. We never seriously heeded the biblical warning to beware of those who pretended to represent “principalities and powers.”
It would be more productive to join all these futile pursuits into one single broad study stripped of belief, a study that would be aptly named chimeralogy.
These chimeras and parahumans usually seem to be engaged in pointless exercises, but beneath the layer of nonsense there has always been a strain of propaganda and tactics identical to the tactics we now call psychological warfare—the repetition of half-truths until they are accepted as whole truths by much of the human population. The modern belief in extraterrestrial visitors springs not from the presentation of concrete evidence but from the repetition of the extraterrestrial “line” through thousands of contactees over the past thirty years or so. All of our religious beliefs have a similar basis—prophets who have allegedly talked with supernatural beings have spread the beliefs to masses of people who have had no direct experience with the phenomenon but are willing to accept the word of those who have.
All over the world today there are lonely people laboriously writing massive books which no one will ever read. They are inspired by their contacts with parahumans and have taken part in long conversations about everything from the building of the pyramids and lost Atlantis to the great cataclysms we can expect at the end of this century. These people—and I have been directly in touch with many of them—sincerely believe that they, and they alone, have enjoyed a very special privilege: contact with God or Gabriel or Ashtar or Orthon. Who can say how many of the histories of the past were constructed in the very same way? How many important ideas were assimilated by the human race through this process?
Let’s examine just one such idea: the concept of life after death, and resurrection. This is really a rather complex belief and led to the development of elaborate funerary practices to protect the body until the great day arrived. The legendary resurrection of Osiris, four thousand years before Christ, convinced the Egyptians that all men would one day be lifted from their graves and granted new life. Interestingly, this was not original with the Egyptians. Thirty-thousand-year-old graves in the Soviet Union have yielded bodies that were buried with their worldly goods, apparently as preparation for a future resurrection. Similar practices were universal in ancient times. The question is: How did the idea of resurrection get started?
Even thirty thousand years ago men required some confirmation of their beliefs. There had to be some demonstration. The Christian world accepts resurrection because the Christ story graphically describes how his body was removed from its tomb. Perhaps a similar demonstration was staged in 40,000 BC or 4,000,000 BC.
Chimeralogically, the biblical account of Christ’s ascension can be viewed in a new and different light. Christ was placed in a cave, and a large rock was rolled in front of the opening, sealing it. Two Roman guards were stationed outside to keep his followers away. Late that night the guards heard a strange noise in the sky, and a luminous object descended. The two Romans found themselves paralyzed, unable to move a muscle. While they watched helplessly, the boulder rolled away from the mouth of the cave by itself, and three beings in white garments came out of the luminous object, entered the cave, and carried Christ’s body out. One of the beings remained behind in the cave and waited for Christ’s followers the next morning. After announcing that Christ had been taken, the being vanished.
That is how the New Testament summarizes the event.
Religionists have always assumed that the three beings were of divine origin. Von Däniken might identify them as astronauts from some far-off planet. But the point remains: someone wanted us to believe in resurrection. We will never know if this really happened or if it was merely described to an entranced prophet standing in a beam of light on the desert. Nor does it matter. What does matter is that the story has moved millions of people for two thousand years and convinced them that at least one man was physically removed from this planet by a glowing aerial object.
The source for the story could only be the two guards. But they were paralyzed, just as many modern witnesses experience paralysis. Since UFO-induced paralysis is a symptom of trance, we cannot rely on any of the descriptions of the entranced witnesses. What they thought they saw and what really happened can be two different things.
In our ego-motivated ignorance we assume that this was a solitary event and was never repeated. But how can we be sure that similar resurrections have not been staged many times in many places throughout history? A contactee named Lee Childers claimed he was shot to death by strangers on a city street in the 1950s. He woke up to find his wounds healed and strange new memories in his mind. He became Prince Neosam of the planet Saturn. Some thought he was nuts. Others believed that Prince Neosam had died on Saturn and been resurrected in Childers’s body on this planet.
You may scoff at Mr. Childers’s story as silly and impossible, but every Easter you probably participate in the religious ceremonies that pay tribute to Christ’s trip in an unidentified flying object. Perhaps the body of Osiris was removed from his pyramid in front of witnesses in much the same manner. Or, at least, some entity from that shadowy half world described his removal to a soft-eyed prophet.
More rubbish has been written about the Great Pyramid than any other construction on this planet. I have lived in Egypt, and I have spent many hours inside the pyramid. The biggest puzzle about the mammoth stone artifact is the fact that it was apparently never used as a tomb. There isn’t the slightest bit of evidence that a Pharaoh was ever placed in it. I have crept through its low passageways and walked the steep incline in its Great Hall now diml
y lit with naked electric bulbs and, like all those before me, I have marveled and wondered. In the King’s Chamber in the center of the pyramid I have performed the tourist’s ritual of striking the side of the crude stone tub there to hear the stone ring like metal. Napoleon once stood alone in that same chamber, and when he emerged, he looked pale and shaken. His officers gathered anxiously about him, and he muttered, “Never speak to me again of this place and never ask me what happened here.”
Suppose the evidence is merely missing, eaten by the ages. And suppose the pyramid was actually used to entomb a great Pharaoh and all his trappings, and all his followers and slaves were gathered outside on a holy day to pay tribute. Suddenly a high-pitched whine rent the air and a wave of heat swept over the excited crowd as a huge object slowly descended. The cleverly concealed entrance to the tomb swung open by itself, and the deceased god-king came striding out, his mummy wrappings dropping off. While the crowd prostrated and genuflected, the god-king climbed a ladder or stairway into the object and then disappeared into the sky. An event like that would make a believer out of anybody, and a description of the event would be passed on for many generations.
When the followers regained their senses and stormed into the pyramid they found it completely empty—except for the sickening odor of sulfur. All of the gold artifacts that had been placed with the body were gone. A priest, seizing that moment, would mount the steps and announce that resurrection was a truth, that it worked not just for god-kings but for every man.
Then he would pass the hat.
From the thousands of tombs that have been found on the Egyptian desert we know that resurrection did not work. Osiris never came back to collect forty centuries worth of musty bones.
The central problems of chimeralogy are more philosophical and theological than scientific. While the effects of many of these events are medical, the only reliable investigative approach is sociological and psychological. The Eighth Tower manipulates a few of us through its manifestations, but it manipulates great masses of us through our belief in those manifestations and our interpretations of their meanings.
During the 1960s I wandered dazedly through old cemeteries, garbage dumps, and gravel pits, haunted by the strange, seemingly intelligent lights prancing in the skies, often asking myself, “What does the phenomenon want? What is it trying to teach me and all of us?” These same questions plagued the men of 5000 BC, and they plagued Charles Fort. The ancient answer was that the gods owned the earth and that mankind was placed here to serve them. Fort simplified this.
We are property.
22
You and I are biochemical robots controlled by the powerful radiations being broadcast from the Eighth Tower. Our brains are programmed like computers, and many of us are suddenly and completely reprogrammed at some point in our adult life. At birth our entire lives are planned for us, and as we weave and totter through our allotted three score and ten, we find ourselves manipulated by “luck,” by strange coincidences, and by sudden changes in ourselves and our environment.
Visualize a mad scientist who needs someone to clean out his secret laboratory in his castle on a forbidding mountaintop. He constructs a mechanical robot for the job and programs it so it can move freely within the lab, but if it should open the door and try to move out of the laboratory, it is programmed to self-destruct.
The robot calls it slavery. We call it free will. We are free to pursue our life in our own way so long as we conform to the hidden master plan. If we try to circumvent that plan by zigging instead of zagging, we self-destruct.
Human history is filled with examples of people who self-destructed when they dared to step beyond the outer limits, when they consciously tried to alter history in ways that did not conform to our hypothetical cosmic plan. Religious and political leaders have frequently been cut down by wild-eyed assassins obeying voices in their heads or following the dictates of the loathsome entities who materialized before them daring cultist rites. Then historians invent a rational lie to replace the irrational facts. Charles Guiteau is remembered as “a disappointed office seeker” who shot President James Garfield. “Serbian nationalists” knocked off Francis Ferdinand and started World War I. Lincoln was murdered by a nutty actor who sympathized with the South. And so on. But if you dig into the original records, you will find some surprising details. John Wilkes Booth, for example, was one of ten co-conspirators, all of whom were religious fanatics (as was Guiteau). Francis Ferdinand had something in common with Mahatma Gandhi. Both men were assassinated by fanatical cultists.
Major changes in the flow of history have often been implemented by so-called fanatics obeying impulses or mental commands, giving devil theorists plenty of ammunition. Self-destruction does not mean suicide or even assassination, however. A minister may resign from his church and be run over by a truck the next day. A scientist may blunder onto a new idea years ahead of its time and be fatally bitten by a poisonous spider in his basement a few days later. Coincidences run amok. Human agencies often intervene, as in the case of poor Dr. Wilhelm Reich who was twenty years ahead of his time. President John F. Kennedy was making serious plans to pull the U.S. out of Vietnam when he was cut down in Dallas by an unknown assassin.[24] His untimely death was followed by the pointless deaths of 55,000 other Americans in a war that contributed directly to the rapid deterioration of the worldwide monetary system, among other things. Some things, devil theorists are quick to point out, just can’t be changed. Even when psychics have a clear view of some impending disaster, they are helpless to prevent it.
A time may be approaching when visions of the future will be experienced en masse by millions of people simultaneously, and then we may be able to act collectively to prevent some catastrophes. But it is also possible that the self-destruct factor exists in large groups of people as well as individuals. We may be heading towards massive genocide instead of liberation.
Every religion teaches that all individuals and all human events are directly controlled by some cosmic force. And each religion also teaches that we are doomed, that one day all human life will face what has been variously defined as a Day of Judgment or Harvest, when our souls will be liberated from their physical shells to join the massive force field in the sky. Theologians have managed to view this destruction of our physical world optimistically as something to be looked forward to, as a desirable condition. The Second Coming of Christ is usually described as the appearance of Christ on a luminous cloud or aerial object and is based on a curious trait of the ufonauts and religious apparitions: They always promise to return.
Our awareness of the cosmic consciousness is partially negated by the static from the lower frequencies of the superspectrum, which constantly produce confusing and contradictory manifestations. In modern UFO contacts the ufonauts claim names adopted from mythology and, occasionally, names manufactured from combinations of terms from several different languages. The “little people” of the Middle Ages played similar name games. In earlier times people who encountered the entities believed they were confronting one of the gods, and so the names adopted by the entities—Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, etc.—became accepted as the name of the God force itself. The reflective factor occurred when the names were repeated aloud by the haunted percipients, and mysterious manifestations took place. So most cultures adopted a simple rule. The name of a god was never to be spoken aloud. Alternate terms were created, usually further enhanced with euphemisms. The gods were “all-knowing, just, great,” granted human-like vanity by their fearful worshippers. And, in fact, the materializations did display human characteristics, since they sprang in part from the Jungian collective unconsciousness. The notion that the gods created man in their image was a twisted version of the real truth—that we had created the gods in our image.
If we are biochemical robots controlled by the anthropomorphic supermind, then the entities who appear are doubly enslaved. They are partially controlled by the superspectrum and partially controlled by us. The phra
se “We are in bondage” has frequently been used by the entities along with, “We are One.” We all are, indeed, one with the superspectrum, and as individual humans we are linked together with the subtle waves of energy. Many of us invite total unity with the superspectrum, usually through religion. Others unwittingly expose themselves to total possession through the practice of witchcraft and black magic. Still others have the state thrust upon them when they are caught in the beams of light from UFOs and, like Saul, they are reprogrammed.
While interviewing hundreds of UFO contactees scattered throughout the country, I was impressed by a curious similarity in their physical appearances. If we could ever assemble all these people together in a single auditorium, it would look like some kind of family reunion. The majority of these percipients, both male and female, are slender, of medium height, and have lean faces with high cheekbones. A surprisingly large number of religious fanatics share these same characteristics. There is clearly an unexplored genetic link which separates these people from the rest of us. Equally fascinating is the fact that a great many UFO contactees are orphans, or their knowledge of their genealogical backgrounds is so vague as to be untraceable. The entities exploit this by assuring them that they are really “hybrids,” or even people who have been transplanted here from another planet. A professional geneticist would find this a rich field for study.
THE EIGHTH TOWER: On Ultraterrestrials and the Superspectrum Page 19