by John A. Keel
Noonan quickly agreed to this role. Then he was told, “You may die in the hands of your fellowmen. Their sin shall remain with you until the Mother Comforter comes to deliver them.”
The next thing he knew, he was back in his body working on the signboard. In later experiences, he allegedly visited various planets such as Venus, and he frequently received telepathic messages and instructions from our old friend Ashtar. In this case, he knew it as “the Ashtar Command and the United Planets Organization.”
When Noonan was interviewed by Lloyd Mallan for True magazine, he revealed, “I believe that I am the Cosmic Master as well as the New Messiah. I believe that a million years ago when this planet was young I was chosen to come to the earth and bring with me a Space Command.
“The Space Command flies in and out of the earth. The earth is hollow and the Higher Command, the Galactic Command, already has bases inside the earth. There are great openings at each pole of the earth, and what we call the northern lights is only the Great Central Sun shining out of these openings. Many people coming from the polar regions have reported seeing flying saucers there which disappeared into the ocean.”
The hollow-earth theory is a very old one. In fact, it is one of the oldest and most widely believed UFO explanations around. A great many books were published about it in the nineteenth century, including a strange little novel called The Smoky God which was supposed to be the true experiences of two Scandinavian fishermen who accidentally sailed through the hole at the North Pole and spent a year living among the gentle giants who inhabited the beautiful inside of our planet.
During his interview with Mallan, Mr. Noonan demonstrated his abilities by causing two peculiar UFO-shaped “clouds” to materialize outside his window. Mallan photographed the phenomenon and was hard pressed to explain it. We might point out that many other contactee claimants were able to provide equally convincing demonstrations. Brilliantly glowing UFOs frequently appeared and maneuvered directly over the auditoriums where they were lecturing, waltzing around the skies in front of dozens and even hundreds of fascinated witnesses.
Allen Noonan is not the only Space Age messiah appointed by the Ashtar command. Dozens of humble, ordinary people suddenly turn into UFO evangelists after a flying saucer enters their lives. Dino Kraspedon did a lot of preaching and wrote a “new Bible” before he finally turned terrorist. Lifelong atheists have become religious fanatics almost overnight after their UFO encounters. Such people are now becoming regulars on radio and TV talk shows all across the country.
One night in November 1958, an Arkansas truck driver was unexpectedly introduced into the shadowy half world of the ultraterrestrials. R. D. Smallridge was making a routine trip to deliver a truckload of eggs from Hardy, Arkansas, to Memphis, Tennessee. He stopped for a cup of coffee, as was his habit, at an all-night truck stop near Black Rock, Arkansas. When he left the eatery, he checked his watch with the wall clock. It was exactly 2 A.M. After looking over his tires and truck routinely, he started his engine and headed for the highway again. The next lap of the trip covered 60 miles to Trumann, Arkansas, where he usually stopped for another cup of coffee.
But, according to his story, he never remembers reaching the highway. The next thing he knew he was pulling up in front of the luncheonette in Trumann. When he walked into the restaurant and looked at its clock, he was astounded. It was 2:15 A.M. “I had traveled sixty miles in eight minutes,” he declared.
This trip normally required changing highways (from Route 63 to Route 67) and passing over a state weight scale near Jonesboro. He could not remember doing any of this. Somehow he had traveled 450 miles per hour between Black Rock and Trumann!
A wide variety of strange, inexplicable events engulfed Mr. Smallridge after this. Eventually he gave up truck driving and became a minister, traveling about the country and preaching. December 1967 found him in California. Late one night he put aside the book he was reading and strolled over to the clock on the mantel in the home where he was staying. It was exactly 12:05 A.M. Suddenly, he swears, a bright blue light materialized and drifted toward him. Just as it touched him, the room faded away, and he discovered himself standing in another room surrounded by a group of strange humanlike beings. He claims that these people were conversing in an odd language he had never heard before—yet he was able to understand every word and could communicate with them. They told him, among other things, that Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy would die suddenly in 1968 and that there would be widespread rioting and civil unrest. After about two hours of this, Smallridge was instantly transferred back to the California living room. He was still standing in front of the clock. It was still 12:05 A.M.!
Here, once again, we have a case that can be easily dismissed as too absurd for consideration. But, believe it or not, there is nothing exceptional about Mr. Smallridge’s claims. Similar incidents are being reported from all over the world. Because they are so outlandish, they are rarely well publicized.
The strange language mentioned by Smallridge turns up again and again in these stories. It seems to be directly related to the well-known religious phenomenon of speaking in tongues. Sometimes whole congregations enter a trancelike state and begin to babble in this language which is part baby talk, part Greek, part Indian, and part unknown. Many mediums have laboriously copied down whole vocabularies for this unknown tongue. In the 1890s, one Helene Smith in Geneva, Switzerland, a psychic who had UFO-type experiences, produced a veritable dictionary of a “Martian” language. In my first visits with a West Virginia contactee, Woodrow Derenberger, he rattled off the language of UFO entity Indrid Cold, speaking the strange jargon as easily as he spoke English. (It did not seem to be a made-up language or a hoax. It had structure and grammar.) Numerous cases already cited in this book have mentioned how the UFO occupants spoke in a language that the witnesses couldn’t understand. But some contactees claim that they were able to understand this language instantly, as if it were a second tongue lying dormant in some recess of their brains. Brazil’s Aladino Felix often spoke in what he called “the universal language,” described by reporters as “a hodgepodge of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.” This could also describe the language I have heard the other contactees speak. Greek is frequently employed by entities in UFO contacts. A large section of the “inspired” book Oahspe is devoted to a complete explanation of a supposedly ancient language known as Panic (language of Pan, a lost continent), complete with vocabulary and written symbols. It appears to be a combination of Hebrew, Greek, Latin, American Indian, and Chinese. To compose such a language as a hoax, Dr. Newbrough, the medium who wrote Oahspe, would have had to have been a brilliant linguist, and it would have taken many years for one man to assemble such a complex vocabulary. Buried within the fine print of Oahspe, there are many words which I have heard UFO contactees use! Not many people have the patience and scholarship to read Oahspe, and I’ve yet to meet a contactee who had even heard of it!
So here we have another piece of neglected evidence: the actual language of the ufonauts. It is not a secret. It is known and spoken by many.
Time Distortion and Distention
Smallridge’s sudden transfer across sixty miles of earthly space might have been caused by a phenomenon known as apporting in occult lore and teleportation in science fiction. There are many documented instances in which objects and human beings have been transported instantaneously over great distances by some unnatural force that defies explanation. This force seems to operate outside the man-made boundaries of time and space. In theory, such events could be caused by converting the energy of atoms into a transmissible beam, projecting that beam to a distant point with the speed of light, and then reconstructing the original atoms. Some scientists think this may eventually be a feasible process for our advancing technology.
But somebody else has been doing it for centuries.
Early in May 1968, Dr. Gerardo Vidal and his wife got into their car, a Peugeot 403, at Chascomüs, Argentina, to drive to the town
of Maipu some 150 kilometers to the south. They traveled along National Route 2, following a car carrying two friends who were heading for Maipu to visit relatives. When they reached Maipu, they found the Vidals were not behind them. They turned around and retraced their route, expecting to find the Vidals changing a tire or laboring over the motor. But Dr. and Mrs. Vidal were gone.
Two days later the Rapallini family in Maipu received a phone call from the Argentine consulate in Mexico City—6,400 kilometers away. It was Dr. Vidal, and his incredible story later made headlines in the newspapers in Buenos Aires and Cordoba.
He and his wife had just left the suburbs of Chascomus, he reported later, when a dense fog suddenly appeared in front of them and enveloped their car. The next forty-eight hours were a total blank. They woke up, still in the car, parked on an unfamiliar side road. Both had a pain at the back of their heads but were otherwise unhurt. Dr. Vidal got out of his car and inspected it, finding that it was badly scorched, as if a blowtorch had been applied to its surface. He started driving through the strange scenery, searching for a sign or landmark. When they saw people by the road, they stopped and asked for directions and were dumbfounded to learn that they were in Mexico! Their watches had stopped, but they quickly learned that two days had somehow passed since they first started out from Chascomus.
They drove to the Argentine consulate in Mexico City and told their story to amazed officials. Consul Señor Rafael Lopez Pellegrini advised them to keep quiet while an investigation was held. Their car was shipped off to the United States for examination (no information on whom it was sent to), and later they were given a replacement of the same make.
Dr. and Señora Vidal flew back to Argentina and went into seclusion, hiding from the press. The lid came down on the whole story. But reporters discovered that on the same night they vanished a man had checked into the Maipu Hospital for medical treatment, claiming that he, too, had encountered a strange fog which had left him badly shaken and nauseated.
All these incidents took place in the vicinity of Bahia Blanca, where an Argentine businessman had undergone a similar experience in 1959.
Several of the better UFO books of the 1950s recount other cases in which human beings were suddenly transported through space and time involuntarily. Time lapses and inexplicable periods of total amnesia are a key aspect in the UFO phenomenon, I have now received well over 100 reports in which witnesses have lost from five minutes to several hours immediately after sighting an unidentified flying object. In nearly every case, these people were riding in vehicles at the time. Almost all contactee claimants experience blackouts. Some suffer one or more such blackouts or fainting spells months or even years before they finally seem to undergo direct contact with a grounded UFO. There does not appear to be a verifiable medical cause for this unusual effect, nor does it seem to have a psychological foundation.
In Noonan and Smallridge we have astral projection or classic examples of “instantaneous experience.” The body remains apparently in a fixed position (in front of the billboard or the California clock) while the mind takes a trip of sorts. Based upon what we now know of the phenomenon, it is possible that these two men were actually experiencing the reliving of a hidden memory. In other words, we must consider the possibility that Smallridge had held his two-hour conversation with the entities weeks, months, or even years before he finally remembered it. The memory of this conversation was then suppressed in the same way that the Hills were made to forget their experiences. Then, at a time chosen by the entities, a ray of some sort was directed at Smallridge (the blue light), and his memory was triggered. He was made to remember the earlier conversation as if it had just happened.
There is another type of experience, which I call time compression. Here the witness undergoes a sequence of events that seem to consume a specific period of time. Later he or she discovers that only a few minutes had actually passed, even though the whole sequence seemed to consume hours. Time compression is common among contactees who think they have been taken on visits to other planets.
I do not believe that any of these people are suffering directly from clinical insanity. Rather, the evidence seems to indicate that their minds are manipulated by an exterior influence and that sometimes their intellects are unable to digest the information they are given, and their emotional structure is unable to retain its stability in the face of these experiences. So some of these people crack up under the strain, or at best, they greatly misinterpret these events. Induced confabulation produces memories of experiences that are convincingly real, and a chain reaction of emotional responses creates irrational fanaticism. These people abandon their jobs and devote all of their time and thought to spreading the gospel of the space people. Their family relationships disintegrate because all of their energies are channeled into one direction. They become martyrs to their cause, be it the eminent arrival of the Big Brothers or the Second Coming of Christ; or, as in the case of the run-of-the-mill hard-core UFO enthusiasts, trying to convince the world that flying saucers are real and are extraterrestrial.
What all this really means is that someone or something actually has the power to completely possess and control the human mind. Human beings can be manipulated through this power and used for both good and evil purposes.
We have no way of knowing how many human beings throughout the world may have been processed in this manner, because they would have absolutely no memory of undergoing the experience, and so we have no way of determining who among us has strange and sinister “programs” lying dormant in the dark corners of his mind.
Suppose the plan is to process millions of people and then at some future date trigger all of those minds at one time? Would we suddenly have a world of saints? Or would we have a world of armed maniacs shooting at one another from bell towers?
15
You Can’t Tell the Players Without a Scorecard
Now perhaps we can better understand RAF Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard’s remarks: “The astral world of illusion, which is greatly inhabited by illusion-prone spirits, is well known for its multifarious imaginative activities and exhortations. Seemingly some of its denizens are eager to exemplify principalities and powers. Others pronounce upon morality, spirituality, Deity, etc. All of these astral exponents who invoke human consciousness may be sincere, but many of their theses may be framed to propagate some special phantasm… or simply to astonish and disturb the gullible for the devil of it.”
These “illusion-prone spirits” are responsible for nearly all of the UFO appearances and manipulations. The flying saucers do not come from some Buck Rogers-type civilization on some distant planet. They are our next-door neighbors, part of another space-time continuum where life, matter, and energy are radically different from ours. Ancient man knew this and recognized it. The original Biblical texts employed the word sheol, which meant invisible world. Somehow, the translators turned this into “hell” and gave it an entirely different meaning.
After spending more than a decade investigating and researching the UFO phenomenon, an engineer named Bryant Reeve published this statement in 1965: “…We began to see that vehicles in outer space were not really the important thing. They were merely an indication of something vastly greater, of earthman’s awakening to a tremendous new awareness.”
It had taken Mr. Reeve many years to arrive at a conclusion that had apparently been reached in the halls of Washington long before. In January 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency collected together a group of leading scientists to review the flying saucer evidence compiled by Captain Edward Ruppelt and his Air Force Project Blue Book teams. The final report of this blue-ribbon panel was kept in the classified files for thirteen years and was not released to the press until 1966. In that report, these scientists, some of whom later became recipients of the Nobel Prize, declared:
…The Panel noted that the cost in technical manpower effort required to follow up and explain every one of the thousand or more reports received through
channels each year could not be justified. It was felt that there will always be sightings, for which complete data is lacking, that can only be explained with disproportionate effort and with a long time delay, if at all. The long delay in explaining a sighting tends to eliminate any intelligence value… The result is the mass receipt of low-grade reports which tend to overload channels of communication with material quite irrelevant to hostile objects that might someday appear. The panel agreed generally that this mass of poor-quality reports containing little, if any, scientific data was of no value. Quite the opposite, it was possibly dangerous in having a military service foster public concern in “nocturnal meandering lights.” The implication being, since the interested agency was military, that these objects were or might be potential direct threats to national security. Accordingly, the need for deemphasization made itself apparent…
The panel suggested a program for “debunking” UFOs and systematically destroying the mystique that had grown up around the subject. “Such a program,” the report stated, “should tend to reduce the current gullibility of the public and consequently their susceptibility to clever hostile propaganda.”
As part of a plan for deemphasizing the sightings, the Air Force files were closed to newsmen and researchers for several years, and military personnel were forbidden to discuss UFO material with outsiders. This move inspired the cries of “Censorship!” that are still bandied about in the cultist circles. The phenomenon was much bigger than the U.S. Air Force, and it proved to be impossible to play down or explain all the sightings. Air Force public relations were ineptly handled, and some Air Force officers made incredible tactical blunders, such as telling reporters that airline pilots who saw flying saucers were drunk at the time and trying to explain some sightings as stars that were not even visible in the sighting areas. The UFO enthusiasts were quick to pounce on such careless explanations and used them to reinforce their allegations of official censorship.