THE EIGHTH TOWER: On Ultraterrestrials and the Superspectrum

by Keel, John A.

  Many UFO contactees also develop the glow of the super-religious who have “seen the light”—that inner radiance and outward placidity that are common traits among clergymen, nuns, and mystics. Many of the “Jesus freaks” of the 1960s also acquired this special look. When you carefully examine these people, you find they have surrendered their consciousness voluntarily to an outside force and have, in a real sense, become total robots serving that force. Countless religious sects make this kind of surrender the central purpose of their ceremonies. They invite the spirit of God (or the devil) to invade their physical bodies, and when it occurs (and it does occur constantly on a large scale), they slip into ecstatic trances and babble in unknown tongues. This robotizing process is universally regarded as the highest and most welcome of all religious experiences. All rites, from the frenetic dances of the whirling dervishes and “holy rollers” and the black Sabbath of witchcraft to the monotonous brain-numbing chants of the Oriental religions and the hymn-singing of the Christian churches, are variations on this theme. Some are consciously trying to attain Godhead—unity with the superspectrum—while others are practicing ancient traditions, not consciously aware of the real purposes behind them.

  Earlier cultures built their entire lifestyle around their religious ceremonies, and this search for Godhead. Various kinds of drugs were used by the Indians to speed up the process. The most important buildings in the Pueblo cultures of the Southwest were the circular kivas where the men gathered (the Indians were male chauvinists) for their secret rituals. American Indians, like their counterparts in Africa and parts of the Orient, also believed that the gods attended their rituals disguised in grotesque masks and costumes that made them indistinguishable from the tribe’s medicine men.

  For many centuries the most widely practiced shortcut to unity with the superspectrum was a grisly operation called trephination. This involved cutting a hole in the top of the skull to expose part of the brain. Thousands of trephined skulls have been unearthed in South America and Europe. It was a very delicate operation, and we can only marvel at the skill of the ancient surgeons, who must have performed it with the crudest of instruments. Since many of the skulls show signs of having partially healed, a majority of the patients must have lived long lives after the operation. Trephination is still practiced by cults in Europe, and they claim that it works, that a hole in the head does admit the powerful radiations of the superspectrum and greatly increases psychic ability.

  Unfortunately, however, many of the rites performed by modern seekers of truth merely tap the static in the lower reaches of the superspectrum and create a backlash of possession and insanity. Sirhan Sirhan practiced self-hypnosis and other mind-tampering rites and ended up in a hotel kitchen, eyes dazed and unseeing, a smoking revolver in his hand and Robert Kennedy stretched out at his feet. The first book Sirhan requested in jail was The Secret Doctrine, Madame Blavatsky’s treatise on controlling the superspectrum.

  Persons without latent psychic abilities can study metaphysics for years and practice the rites daily without ever hoping to pass beyond the possession stage. Many of the UFO investigators of the past 25 years have gone this same sad route and suffered nervous breakdowns, forms of possession, and suicide.

  Psychic ability seems to be inherited, not learned. If your Aunt Tilly was a trance medium, or your great grandfather was known for his prophetic dreams and visions, there is a chance that you—or one of your brothers or sisters—will have the same abilities. Various polls and studies have indicated that 10 to 15 percent of the population have some degree of psychic ability. Another 15 percent probably have latent abilities that may manifest themselves only a few times during their lives. The rest of the population is cut off from any direct communication with the superspectrum, so they try to establish an open line through religion or through some other frame of reference. This overpowering urge—or need—to get in touch with supernatural forces is an odd psychosociological phenomenon in itself. And the urge has dominated the affairs of men throughout history.

  We are not only biochemical robots responding to signals from the Eighth Tower, but we are strangely eager to be even more subservient to a force that has always done as much harm as good. Some of us submit to such rites as baptism over and over again and attend religious rallies in the hope of having a real religious experience. We are not satisfied until our eyes turn blank, our heads loll, and our tongues babble. We wish for—and look forward to—the day when Christ will return on a cloud and yank our souls from our tortured bodies like some cosmic dentist.

  Flying saucers have given the pragmatists among us a substitute for the old-time religion. The new cultists speak of “the evacuation,” when the great fleets of interplanetary spaceships will sweep down to gather up the chosen ones from the mountaintops and hustle them off to another planet just before earth explodes. We are reverting back to the age of the gods once again. We may not be drilling holes in our heads, but several colleges and even some high schools are now offering courses in witchcraft, demonology, and flying saucers. While UFOs do terrify many witnesses, there are others who find confrontation with a glowing aerial mass to be an ecstatic, almost sexual experience. One woman recently told me about something that had happened to her when she was a child. She and her parents had come across a great luminous sphere in a farm field and had watched in awe as it rose swiftly into the sky. For days afterwards her mother sat contentedly in a rocking chair on the from porch reliving the brief sighting and mumbling over and over, “God loves me. God loves me.”

  23

  You stand in a circle of blinding light, staring into the darkness at a red glow while your heart pounds and your body feels numb and paralyzed. The red glow is a lamp mounted on a television camera, and you are a contestant on a popular quiz show.

  “Now, for the final question,” the leering quizmaster addresses you. “If you get this right, you will win the jackpot.” The audience roars with excitement and greed. “Ready? Here it is. Who invented the printing press?”

  A wave of relief sweeps over you. Any idiot knows the answer to this one, you think.

  “The printing press was invented by—” You pause dramatically, just as they coached you during the run-throughs. “By… Johann Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany.”

  “Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” the MC snickers. “That’s not the right answer.”

  Two smiling girls in scanty costumes glide onstage and grip you by the arms to haul you off, while other girls prepare to propel the next hapless contestant into the limelight. Once again your education has failed you. Like so many of the facts in your old schoolbooks, the story of Gutenberg is a convenient explanation for a baffling mystery. Aside from a single piece of paper—a business receipt—there is no evidence that Gutenberg existed at all. We are asked to believe that he invented the printing press in the fifteenth century and then immediately set to work printing the entire Bible. This is the same as if the Wright brothers had built a 747 jet as their first airplane. It took more than moveable type to print the first Bible. There were literally dozens of other gadgets and techniques that had to be invented first. An efficient method for setting type, for example, had to be developed. People had to be trained in the new art. Apparatus had to be designed and built. The whole project had to be financed—and it took years.

  All we really know is that the printing press appeared rather suddenly in Europe in the mid-1400s. And it changed the world. It brought the dreary Dark Age to a close. Some historians have speculated that printing was imported from the Orient and suppressed for years by the god-king system.

  Actually, the 1400s was a very interesting century. The horrible plague had swept the world the century before, killing three-fourths of Europe’s population. The weird dancing disease followed, with thousands of people dancing in the streets of the Mediterranean cities until they fell dead from exhaustion. Earthquakes and “unusual atmospheric phenomena” took place. In France, a young girl heard voices in her head and led the F
rench armies against the English. Millions were tortured to death in the religious inquisitions, which were supposed to suppress the widespread practice of witchcraft and magic but actually became a political movement. The influence of the Eighth Tower on the human condition was obvious throughout the Dark Age, and although men became pious to the point of insanity, things only got worse. They would not get better until the introduction of the printing press freed men’s minds.

  The earth organism cleansed itself in the 1300s, reducing the human population dramatically, preparing for the Renaissance and men such as Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) and Christopher Columbus (1451-1506). Four hundred years of exploration and change would follow, leading to the pivotal year of 1848 and the Industrial Age. Once the severe restrictions of the religious fanaticism of the Dark Age were loosened, progress was made at an ever-quickening pace, until in the 1900s we were advancing on all fronts in a single decade faster than we had moved in all of known history. We split the atom, designed thinking machines, set up whole new systems of transportation and living, reached the moon, and then somehow managed to exhaust our energy. Now in the 1970s we show signs of lapsing back into a new Dark Age. The earth organism is trembling from our onslaught and is attempting to readjust its many ecosystems to protect itself. We are beginning to turn away from technology. The omniscient CIA is feeding money into psychical research projects. Our space program is being phased out, and our scientists and engineers are turning away from the skies to explore so-called inner space. Some think we are facing the final stage of evolution. Man is about to cross the space-time barrier to unite with the energy field called God.

  Evolution may be just another devil theory, however. Can we really believe that our ancestors were slimy lizards crawling out of the primordial ooze? Many of the plants and animals on this planet seem to be the product of design rather than evolutionary chance. In recent years, digs in the Middle East and Africa have uncovered evidence that Neanderthal men, Cro-Magnon men, and modern men were contemporaries, not just steps on some evolutionary scale. The clock has been pushed back five million years but manufactured objects, such as bits of gold chain and finely crafted vases, have been found in coal mines and quarries and dated as far back as ten million years. Was there a technological civilization ten million years ago? Have we all been this way before? Are we plodding along an old and familiar road, caught in some bizarre time vortex?

  What we are now and whatever we will be in the future is not the result of evolution but of metaprogramming. As a biochemical machine you are programmed in a variety of ways from birth. The genetic code and a substance called DNA are like computer cards and program your basic characteristics—whether you will be tall or short, blond or red-haired, dumb or smart, ugly or beautiful, psychic or not. Then during your earliest years the circuits of your brain are programmed by your socioenvironmental conditions. Your childhood traumas shape your personality. If the traumas are severe, you may eventually spend thousands of dollars to have a psychiatrist examine them and reshape your brain circuits to free you from the neuroses and hang-ups—short circuits—that have accumulated. As you grow, you continue to be shaped and reprogrammed by your social and economic circumstances. If your parents are religious, you are probably thrust into their religion at a very young age before your logic circuits are fully formed, and you are taught religious verities by rote, mindlessly accepting theological explanations for the unknown. You are brainwashed by religion, by television, by the conversations of the adults around you, and you pick up ill-founded prejudices and devil theories.

  Most of us lose our independence, our free will, at an early age and spend our lives trying to conform to the standards and needs of our society. We develop certain fictions to make our lives more bearable and meaningful. Even our nobler instincts can be debased by these fictions. Violence and war can become logical acts to us within the framework of these fictions, as can our racial and religious prejudices. In our modern world, support of an ideological fiction can provide even stronger motivation than economic need.

  There is another kind of programming that theologians call predestination. This asserts that our individual and collective lives follow a predetermined course. We enjoy a certain amount of free will while we are pursuing that course, but we cannot evade our ultimate destiny, Like the mad scientist’s robot, we can wander all over the laboratory, but if we try to substitute a slide rule for our broom, or if we try to leave our programmed area, we self-destruct. We go crazy, or we slip in the bathtub and break our neck. Most of us have a very small niche to fill. We spend our lives growing radishes or tightening bolts on an assembly line. We supply the bodies for the battlefields or act as hosts for the germs of the plague. We remain servants to those few on the top, our roles unchanged since the time of the god-kings.

  Life can seem like a cruel and pointless joke to those locked into a seemingly empty existence. So the Eighth Tower has given us all kinds of beliefs to sustain us. People in Asia and Africa starve to death in a posture of prayer. Lonely, frustrated people shuffle from one cult to another in the search for a belief that will miraculously give them an identity. Thousands trapped in the technological skepticism of the age are turning to the belief in space people from another world, cosmic Brothers who will save us from ourselves, just as the people of another time looked to Osiris, Zoroaster, and Christ. We sense that we somehow are part of something larger, but it is something unseen, and we try to fit ourselves into a broader cosmic view like ants trying to relate to an elephant.

  The course of actual events often displeases us, so we rewrite our history as we go along. History is not only being rewritten in the Soviet Union and China today. German history books give a line or two to Adolf Hitler. We credit pitiful misfits as the sole assassins of presidents. The history of the Vietnam War of the 1960s has now been rewritten so often that no one is sure of its causes. We lie to ourselves and to each other until truth itself seems vulgar and false. Then we dare suppose that we are the end product of evolution and that we will become like gods.

  We assume that if intelligent life did exist here millions of years ago, it must have been human like us. If there was a technology, it had to be like ours. But it is quite possible that a nonhuman culture of giants once populated earth and, unlike our industrial civilization, worked to understand and employ the forces of the superspectrum directly. Since matter is energy, and since the superspectrum is able to manipulate energy into matter, those super-earthlings may have eventually mastered the superphysics of what we call magic. They did not work with metal tools and machines. Instead, they called upon the superspectrum and converted energy to matter. They even designed biochemical machines for their own amusement, just as warlocks summon up bats and dragons. As their race grew old, fat, and lazy, they felt a need for slaves to do their laundry and tend their crops. So their mad scientists whipped up biological robots—tiny versions of themselves.

  Catastrophe finally overtook their world, destroyed most of their cities and works, and wiped out most of the giants. But their little biochemical slaves were able to flee to caves, revert to an animal-like state, and wait out the Ice Age, fondly remembering another age when they served the giants. Their gods. Not superior beings from another planet but the Elder race from our own world.

  This sounds very far-fetched until you realize that our scientists have been working for years to develop artificial life—biochemical machines like ourselves bred in vats of chemicals instead of living wombs. We are, in fact, very close to perfecting cyborgs (part chemical and part machine) and androids (machine-like humans). We have been attacking the problem backward, first perfecting a mechanical technology and then trying to construct living beings the same way we construct automobiles. The Titans, being masters of the superspectrum, would manipulate energy instead of physical matter.

  Since history, particularly ancient history, is more a matter of conjecture than of record, we can let our imaginations run wild. Any theory or presumption w
ill be as legitimate as any other. So let’s assume that the Titans created an energy transmitter to broadcast to their biochemical slaves on biological frequencies. Their civilization perished, but their well-protected transmitter somehow survived. It retained its control over the slaves and is still functioning today. Instead of being a shapeless energy field in the sky, the Eighth Tower could be a specific device in a specific location on this planet. It has endured because it has the basic instinct for self-preservation and is able to conceal itself from us by laying out false trails, by populating our forests with hairy red-eyed monsters and our skies with luminous objects.

  We are now nearing the end of a cosmic cycle, however, and our ultimate fate is becoming more and more obvious. We have been programmed well, but the Eighth Tower is dying of old age. The manifestations around us are not the work of the gods but of a senile machine playing out the end game.

  24

  Thirty years ago the first real computer, called ENIAC (electronic numerical integrator and computer), filled a building at the University of Pennsylvania. It contained eighteen thousand vacuum tubes and was vastly inferior to the tiny computers that helped guide our Apollo command modules to the moon. Computer technology is advancing faster than any other science in history. Transistors and miniaturization have enabled us to construct machines that can actually think on the level of the human brain. Considering the progress being made, it is entirely possible that we will have tiny computers superior to the human brain within the next thirty years.

  The science-fiction nightmare of a world run entirely by computers is fast becoming a reality. The inevitable disintegration of the world monetary system and the abandonment of the antiquated gold standard will lead to the introduction of a global computerized credit-card system. By the end of this century such a system will be in use. The biblical prophecy “And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name” (Rev. 13: 16-17) will become a fact. A research firm in Great Britain has already developed a system using magnetized credit cards, and it has been quietly tested in small cities in New York State. Workers’ pay goes directly to banks, and the workers’ cards are magnetized in a code for the right amount. When they make a purchase in a store, the card is inserted in a machine that deducts the correct amount by altering the magnetic code. One day in the not-too-distant future you will be issued such a card, and paper currency will become a thing of the past. Your card will be good anywhere in the world, because the system will be universal.