THE EIGHTH TOWER: On Ultraterrestrials and the Superspectrum

by Keel, John A.

  Nikola Tesla, one of the greatest inventors of all time, once told a reporter, ‘”We cannot even with positive assurance assert that some of them [ultraterrestrials] might not be present here in this our world in the very midst of us, for their constitution and life manifestations may be such that we are unable to perceive them.”

  During his boyhood Tesla recalled: “I suffered from a particular affliction due to the appearances of images, which were often accompanied by strong flashes of light. When a word was spoken, the image of the object designated would present itself so vividly to my vision that I could not tell whether what I saw was real or not… Even though I reached out and passed my hand through the image, it would remain fixed in space.”

  The biographies of many great men contain surprising references to supernatural experiences and brushes with the cosmic consciousness. Caesar, Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln Thomas Edison, and so many more all had brief contacts with the supermind of the universe. Mediocre men have been transformed into great men overnight. Honoré de Balzac was a pathetic hack writer until he reached the age of 32 and suddenly began to create his classic novels. Military leaders, too, have heard the ages whispering in the cosmos and been transmogrified not by events but by some force.

  Since energy is the key constituent of the universe, it should not be surprising that the supermind is a mass of energy rather than a thing. This supermind has the ability to see well past the limitations of our space-time continuum into a future so distant and so bizarre we might never understand it. It controls present events, sometimes with a heavy hand, so that the future will somehow be served. Like a great phonograph in the sky, it tirelessly repeats the sane information to us, generation after generation, while it guides our philosophies and fosters our pitiful beliefs in ourselves, and our worth. (We will do almost anything to conceal from ourselves the sad fact that we are mere gnats buzzing around a cosmic dung heap.) Often its machinations seem senseless, even insane, because we are obliged to measure it by its manifestations and judge it by human standards, which is like trying to compare King Kong with Donald Duck from Flipper the dolphin’s point of view.

  The phenomenon of cosmic consciousness has belonged almost exclusively to religionists and mystics. Few scientists have bothered to notice it at all. It is more profitable, and perhaps more entertaining, to spend years tediously testing psychics with decks of cards. A parapsychologist will travel halfway around the world to investigate a poltergeist case, but if his next-door neighbor is bathed in a beam of light on a lonely back road, the scientist will regard it as nothing more than a dinner table anecdote. Harvard psychologist William James should have started a stampede with his Varieties of Religious Experience in 1900. But he didn’t. The religious experience has been kept gingerly separated from the general field of ghoulies and ghosties. Author Brad Steiger was exploring virgin country when he wrote Revelation: The Divine Fire in 1973. Steiger spent years interviewing people who claimed encounters with spirits, angels, ufonauts, and other members of the earthbound ultraterrestrial band. He discovered, not unexpectedly, that the entities—no matter what form they took or what source of origin they professed—followed the same patterns in every case and recited the same cosmic jabberwocky. The angel Gabriel and Indrid Cold of Ganymede are brothers.

  All of the “endless genealogies” and pretenders representing “powers and principalities” share a common origin with the stately Indians who materialize at séances and the little people who perch upon a blade of grass. Katie, the entity who patiently allowed Sir William Crookes to poke her ethereal ribs and stare into her ectoplasmic ear in the séance room was kissin’ kin to Orthon of Venus and Ashtar of Jupiter. All found part of their being in the static-filled channels of biological energy that girdle this planet, life being breathed into them by the collective unconsciousness (which has populated an alternate universe with the fearful demons of the human psyche), just as all evil created the invisible monster of The Forbidden Planet of motion picture fame.

  In the closing years of this century, which may also be the closing years of the millennium, man and paraman are drawing closer together. Separate realities are overlapping into a single super-reality—a land of Oz, a new Dreamtime, or a new Dark Age when technology, the magic of our time, will be driven underground. Superstition and the age-old fear of the things in the dark may reign again, with new gods patching together our frayed faith.

  We may even begin a new pyramid-building culture, our hordes seeking outlets for their energy as they look starward for their salvation. Nor long ago Maj. Donald Keyhoe seriously proposed an “Operation Lure,” the construction of dummy flying saucers to try to lure the saintly ufonauts down from the skies.”[25] This was nothing but a new version of the “Cargo Cult” idea which sprang up in Micronesia after the Second World War, when the natives on remote islands built flimsy replicas of airplanes in an effort to lure American cargo planes back with their wondrous loads of chocolate bars and canned beans.

  In his 1953 novel Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke envisioned a future in which all human children would possess psychic abilities, and at a given point in time our planet would be evacuated—deserted by consciousness—as all human souls rose from their fragile physical bodies and joined the supermind. It seemed like a science-fiction writer’s pipe dream 20 years ago, but now we are suddenly very close to that magical time, the long-promised Harvest of the Hopi Indians. We are becoming collectively aware of the electromagnetic fence that seals us from those other realities. A whole generation has now assaulted the gates, using everything from the hallucinogenic drugs to Tarot cards in their search for Godhead and unity with the supermind. Scores of new religions have sprung up overnight, led by new prophets answering the voices in their heads and promising true religious experiences to their followers. City street corners have become crowded with young people handing out the promise of salvation with fixed smiles on their eyeless faces. They have sacrificed their free will for the mental orgasms of the superspectrum. Their numbers are increasing steadily in all lands—an army of robots marching to the summit of the pyramid to have their hearts extracted by the high priests.

  Two recent studies have found the once-unique experience of Illumination has now become commonplace. Millions of minds have been reprogrammed, perhaps in preparation for the horrors that lie ahead in the next 20 years. A sampling of two thousand people, drawn from a larger group of forty thousand, revealed that 57 percent felt they were in harmony with the universe and 63 percent claimed they had been in contact with some supernatural or holy force.[26] In another survey of fifteen hundred people, six hundred admitted having had a feeling “of being very close to a powerful spiritual force that seemed to lift them out of themselves.”[27] About three hundred said they had had such a feeling several times, and seventy-five said they had it often.

  Who are all these nuts? The poll conducted at the National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago, found they were “disproportionately male, disproportionately black, disproportionately college-educated, disproportionately above the $10,000-a-year income level, and disproportionately Protestant.”

  In my own investigations I have found that Jewish percipients are rare, although statistically they should number about five percent of the total sample. The majority of those who had seen “the light” were male, Protestant, or former Catholic, and had some Indian or Gypsy blood in theft background. Obviously the phenomenon is extremely selective.

  Paradoxically, those who most actively seek an experience with the phenomenon either never succeed or they fall prey to the lesser manifestations of demonomania, possession, and schizophrenia. Among so-called ufologists, those with the strongest belief in extraterrestrial visitants have never seen a UFO themselves. These seekers apparently lack the necessary psychic or perceptive equipment. In the 1960s many of them found LSD and other drugs enabled them to join the crowd through pseudoreligious experiences. The rapid growth of mind-expansion and consciousness-raising e
xercises is bringing about many psychological and sociological changes in our society. The recurrent UFO waves are accelerating the process, subjecting millions of minds to the manipulative powers of the energy beams during each new “flap.” So changes are being wrought both without and within. In fact, a very complicated and very old system is at work here. The human race has always been aware that it was serving as a pawn in some cosmic game. Men used to believe that earthly events, wars, and disasters were merely duplications of the events taking place in an alternate universe populated by gods. But now it seems more likely that we are actually component parts of some larger system and that we are manipulated to serve the needs of that system. We may never be able to clearly understand those needs, let alone understand the system itself.

  Are we in any real danger? Is the phenomenon a threat to us as individuals? The answer to that is a simple yes. When you study the history of this whole peculiar business, it becomes evident that the phenomenon is dispassionate, even ruthless. Humans have often willingly surrendered years of their lives to its service, perhaps expecting to be rewarded. Usually, however, they are snuffed out like irritating fleas the moment their usefulness has ended. Dr. Bucke’s stupid but fatal slip on the ice soon after completing Cosmic Consciousness is a minor example, as is Christ’s tortured cry on the cross when he asked why he had been forsaken. Key figures in the metaphysical history of this planet have ended their lives in prison or died on the stake or at the hands of evil torturers and executioners. Ironically, those who have come out of the mess with wealth, position, and a comfortable death in old age were those who seemingly served the forces of evil. The devil is apparently more generous than God.

  Charles Fort said it all when he observed, “We are property.” We cannot rebel. We cannot change the system. We can only try to understand it and deal with it on our own level as best we can. The puppets cannot possibly rebel against the puppet master. Things are better now than they once were. For thousands of years we were overtly controlled by the psychic forces, by the gods, by apparitions and reflections of the human psyche, by whatever you may choose to call It. We used to haul gigantic blocks of stone hundreds of miles through deserts and swamps to erect pyramids and stonehenges to honor It. We melted out gold—often our life’s savings—to build chairs and utensils for It, and then we turned over our daughters to assuage Its lust, and we sacrificed our sons. We even rewrote our own history to protect ourselves from Its vanity.

  In the 14th century three-fourths of Europe’s human population was killed off within a few years by the plague. Millions of those who survived were slaughtered in the superstitious witch-hunts that followed. Perhaps history is about to repeat itself. Perhaps an atomic war will reduce our swelling tanks, or maybe a chunk of debris from outer space will collide with our little planet, crush a continent, and cause the seas to rise up like an overfilled bathtub. The survivors may blame technology, and the men with slide rules in their pockets will have to flee underground and form new priesthoods in an effort to preserve whatever has been learned. Perhaps only the believers in extraterrestrial visitants will remain, and they will sit on the mountaintops and watch the lights cavorting in the midnight sky, crying out, “Why don’t they contact us?”

  Today many scientific disciplines are moving in the same direction, not realizing they are mapping a very old country. In a few years, perhaps even in our own lifetime, all sciences will suddenly converge at a single point, and the mysteries of the superspectrum will unravel in our hands. We will finally understand—truly understand—the forces that have directed our destinies throughout history. But it will be a costly discovery. Organized religion will crumble in the face of the new knowledge. Many of the religious and political fictions that have nourished us during the long night will collapse. The beams of energy that now stride our landscape like a giant on stilts may fade away when the entire population has been programmed and reprogrammed. Folklorists, mythologists, and historians will have to throw away all of their learned interpretations when they realize that man has substituted myth for history and history for myth.

  The dramatic social and economic changes of the past 150 years were merely the prelude to the period we are now entering. Several generations have made enormous sacrifices and spent many millions of lives to bring us to this point, and several more generations may pass before our collective destiny can be understood. And it will be a collective destiny. Whatever happens to one man will happen to all. And whatever happens to all of us will also affect the earth itself. We are no longer small, solitary figures standing on hilltops shaking our fists at the sky.

  We have been so diverted by the major conflicts of our time that we have hardly noticed the lonely battles of men like Moses Shapira, Wilhelm Reich, and Immanuel Velikovsky. Hundreds of others have added their small voices as they labored like the underground alchemists of old, shivering in the cold light of Loch Ness beside their hopeful cameras or fighting their way through the underbrush of swamps in Florida and bayous in Mississippi. Their long, muted search is coming to an end, although few of them realize it.

  The gods of the ancients have kept their promise. They have returned. But they do not come to us from across the chasm of interstellar space. They come somehow from within us. They have always been faceless, because their faces are our faces reflected in the superspectrum.

  Recently a group in Canada decided to create a ghost. They met weekly to invent a history for him and to try to communicate with him. At the end of the year “Philip” was tilting tables and offering advice, as real as any of the spirits who have materialized since the Fox sisters first began hearing rappings in 1848. The experiment proved that the spirit world is malleable and that the ghosts who haunt us are nothing more than mirror images of ourselves. The dead do not necessarily come back. They just never go away.

  Dinosaurs stomp across Iowa cornfields and penguins fifteen feet tall waddle along riverbanks in Florida while we all trudge along the dusty trail to Damascus. Some things remain unchanged since Saul’s time. Men knew then that they were property, that some hidden puppet master somehow worked the strings of history. But they muttered about some truth that would eventually set them free. We no longer seek that special freedom. We know we are as free as we are ever going to be. Madmen have always been chosen to run our affairs, because we know instinctively that the gods themselves are mad. The beams of energy that control us, change us, and frequently even destroy us come into our reality through a black hole,[28] a tunnel in the sky leading to another time.

  The Watchers, sometimes called the Guardians, may be stationed not only in our world but in every world. If life exists out there somewhere one thousand light years from us, it—or they— are probably also watching strange lights in the sky and staggering entranced from the bright beams that control their consciousness. The delusion of reality is universal. Some of our astronauts claimed religious experiences on the moon and abandoned technology after they returned to earth. The superspectrum reaches far beyond the moon, however, because it is the totality, the everything of reality. The rest, like Phillip the ghost, is something we have manufactured in our own madness and our lonely, painful search for meaning.

  [1]The author is dispensing with the tradition of using the upper case in reference to his, him, etc.]

  [2]F.A. Wallis Budge, The Egyptian Book of the Dead (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1895).

  [3]Degna Marconi, My Father Marconi (New York McGraw Hill 7962). Among the many other sources for this chapter is Albert Zarca, Mussolini sans Masque (Paris: Fayard, 1973). Technical information was derived from a great many sources.

  [4]Frank Scully, Behind the Flying Saucers (New York; Henry Holt and Company, 1950), p. 175.

  [5]Berthold Eric Schwarz, “Possible UFO-induced Temporary Paralysis,” Flying Saucer Review, March-April 1971.

  [6] The Ark of the Covenant was made of wood, a nonconductor, overlaid with gold and silver. A forerunner of the modern transistor, developed by Ju
lius Lilienfeld in 1925, consisted of two thin strips of gold mounted on a nonconductor and separated by a very thin piece of metal. The Bible’s description of the ark sounds very similar.

  [7] John Michell, The View Over Atlantis (New York; Ballantine Books, 1972). Despite the misleading title, this is a study of the British leys supported with many maps and charts.

  [8]F. W. Holiday, The Dragon and the Disc (London: Sidgwick & Jackson 1973). Holiday has found interesting historical evidence indicating that ancient Britishers linked dragons with flying saucers and may have had a religion based upon such phenomena.

  [9]For detailed case histories of this phenomenon see John A. Keel, The Mothman Prophecies (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975).

  [10]John Cunningham Lilly, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer (Portola Institute, 1967).

  [11]The Momo case was one of the most heavily publicized stories of 1972. The best account was Richard Crow, “Missouri Monster,” Fate, December 1972.

  [12]John A. Keel, Strange Creatures from Time and Space (Greenwich, Conn.: Gold Medal Books, 1970). See chapter 10.