In late August, 1976, I attended a Parascience Conference organised by Peter Maddock at London’s City University. There were reports by Dr Ted Bastin on his experiments with Uri Geller, by Professor Douglas Dean on his experiments in precognition and psychic healing, and by Professor John Taylor on his lack of success with Kirlian photography. There was also a great deal of highly technical talk about electromagnetic fields, thermal radio frequencies, and organisationally closed biological systems.
The weather was oppressively hot that weekend; for the past few months, England had been suffering from its worst drought in two centuries. Stifled yawns suggested that some of the audience would have been grateful for less abstruse entertainment. It came in the middle of the afternoon from a big, broad-shouldered American who looked as if he were dressed for a camping holiday. His name was Ted Owens, and he was introduced as the ‘the PK man’. He spoke in a booming voice that carried easily to every part of the room without the use of a microphone, and within minutes he had us all wide awake.
What he claimed, briefly, was that he was in touch with flying saucers, and that through them, he was able to control the weather and cause storms.
As a child, he explained, he had noticed that he often had the ability to read people’s minds; but, in the manner of children, he had taken this faculty for granted. As an adult, he had been through fifty or so professions, including jazz drummer, boxer, private eye, lifeguard, knife-thrower and magician. He was now inclined, he said, to believe that he had been somehow prompted to take all these jobs, to prepare him for his future work.
One night in 1965, when he was forty-five, he had been driving along a road near Fort Worth, Texas; suddenly, he and his daughter saw a great cigarshaped object approaching over the next field, flashing coloured lights. Then, as it came close to the car, it vanished, as if all the lights had suddenly been turned off. He suspected that what he had seen was a UFO.
From that day on, his life began to change. Not long after, there was a violent thunderstorm, and he proceeded to amuse his daughter by pretending that he could make the lightning strike wherever he liked. This was not entirely a joke; he believed—in theory at least—that it ought to be possible to control the weather by psychokinesis. To his mild surprise, it seemed to work. During the following weeks, there were several thunderstorms, and he had the opportunity to repeat the experiment. And he soon became convinced that the lightning really did seem to obey his suggestions.
When the family moved to Phoenix, Arizona, and found the place in the middle of a drought, it suddenly struck him that his curious abilities might be of some practical use. He told his family that he intended to make it rain, then tried willing it to happen. The storm that followed alarmed everyone with its violence. It also finally convinced him that this was not a case of wishful thinking or self-deception. Like H. G. Wells’s Man Who Could Work Miracles, Ted Owens apparently possessed some strange latent powers. The next step was to make a public demonstration. So he wrote to the local newspapers, and explained that he intended to cause storms over the next week or so. And he did—eight of them.
Since he had copies of his original letters to the newspapers and the news items describing the storms, he felt it should be fairly easy to convince government agencies of his powers and persuade them to make use of him for the public good. But all his approaches were ignored. It gradually dawned on him that there is no place in the world-view of civil servants for men who can work miracles.
His own view of his powers was that they were some sort of interaction between his own mind and ‘the intelligence behind Nature’. One day, a telepathic message seemed to float into his head, telling him that remarkable magnetic phenomena would appear over the North and South Poles. Shortly afterwards—on January 8, 1965—a huge, disc-shaped craft was seen over the South Pole and was reported in many newspapers. It suddenly dawned on Ted Owens that the intelligence he had contacted was not that of mother nature, but of beings from outer space.
By this point in his narrative, the audience didn’t really care whether Owens was insane or not. His manner, of course, lacked the kind of nervous modesty that British audiences take to be a guarantee of honesty; but the newspaper reports, which he passed around the audience, looked authentic enough. Unless they were elaborate forgeries, produced on a number of different printing presses, they showed conclusively that he had frequently written to newspapers, predicting heavy storms, and that the storms had occurred on schedule. At the end of his lecture, he received loud cheers. He concluded by adding, as an afterthought, that he was going to demonstrate his powers by ending our British drought.
My wife and I wandered out into the stifling air of late afternoon, our minds now occupied with the question of what time the pubs would open. The sky had clouded over. Ten minutes later, as we walked in the direction of Holborn, the first large drop of rain splashed on the hot pavement.
Ted Owens proved to be right. Not only was the drought over; it proved to be the beginning of one of the wettest winters on record.
What is any rational person to make of all this? The obvious explanation, I suppose, is coincidence. But if you keep on applying it to case after case in the Ted Owens dossier, it begins to look a little thin. In May, 1971, Mount Etna erupted, and a river of lava half a mile wide and eighteen feet deep destroyed vineyards and orchards. By May 20, it was heading directly for the little town of Sant’Alfio. Ted Owens proceeded to exert his powers, through the agency of his ‘space intelligences’ (or SI’s, as he calls them); the lava missed Sant’Alfio, turning aside shortly before it arrived at the town. On October 23, 1973, Owens notified Dr Max Fogel, director of Mensa in New York, that he would ask a UFO to appear within a hundred miles of Cape Charles, Virginia, and show itself to the police; on October 25, a UFO appeared over the head of a policeman in Chase City, within the specified hundred miles, and hovered for fifteen minutes; an affidavit by Dr Fogel attests this. In October 1970, Owens approached a post office employee named W. Ramos at Norfolk, Virginia, and told him that he had learned telepathically that someone intended to bomb the post office. One week later, a bomb was thrown at the West 20th Street post office, fortunately causing little damage. On August 10, 1972, Owens told a friend in the State Liquor Store at Cape Charles that robbers were planning to rob either a bank or liquor store in the area and to be on his guard. Later the same day, four men held up a bank at the nearby town of Keller, taking $52,000. Ted Owens’ file includes press cuttings about the bombing and bank robbery and signed affidavits from the two people concerned, confirming that he predicted these events in advance.
All this, admittedly, suggests another hypothesis: that Owens may simply have highly developed powers of precognition. In that case, his space intelligences would be what another psychic, Susanne Padfield (Mrs Ted Bastin) calls ‘psychic support figures’. She argues that the majority of people who claim psychic powers believe that some outside agency or force is behind their manifestation. When she herself discovered that she possessed powers of psychokinesis—which have been tested in the laboratory—she found it necessary to believe that she was obtaining the power from some kind of cosmic entity or space intelligence. She had to imagine that she was invoking these intelligences in order to make her powers work; other psychics, she discovered, had to imagine they were directing a laser beam of atomic power, or a vortex of rushing water. She decided to see if her powers still worked if she abandoned her belief in cosmic entities and tried to ‘do it herself’. They worked as well as ever. She concluded, naturally, that the cosmic entities were basically a means of focusing her imagination, and counter-acting her negative expectations.
All this could certainly apply to Ted Owens. He explains that when he wishes to contact his space intelligences, he summons up an image of a small chamber, with two tiny, grasshopper-like creatures, who are looking down into some kind of oval machine with a television screen. They can see him on the screen, and the machine translates his words into high frequency sound waves. But psychic support figures or no, he can sometimes be wrong. Among the papers he sent me, I find a prediction of ‘worldwide demonstrations of UFO power’ during the summer of 1970 and an unprecedented number of UFO sightings—‘the greatest show ever put on’. As far as I know, this did not occur. Neither did the widespread wars that he prophesised for 1974 and 1975, ‘loss of life and bloodshed that will be incredible in modern times’. There were, admittedly, plenty of localised conflicts, like the one that reduced Beirut to a pile of rubble; but hardly anything ‘incredible in modern times’. (Owens is honest enough to leave this prediction in his file.)
Ted Owens is a good example of the problems that arise when we venture into the field of space intelligences and cosmic entities. Anyone who has ever taken the trouble to look into the matter will agree that something seems to be going on. Of course, a large number of the reported sightings are either imagination or downright lies. Regrettably, it is probably necessary to rule out every case of a sighting in which there were no independent witnesses, since we have no means of knowing what motives might prompt an individual to invent a story. But that still leaves a large residue of cases that have been witnessed by many people.
One of the first of these occurred long before the Second World War and was witnessed by a party that included the Russian painter Nicholas Roerich, who designed Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring ballet. From 1925 to 1927, Roerich and his party travelled from Mongolia to India, and in his book Altai-Himalaya1 he describes how, on August 5, 1926, the whole party observed a big and shiny disc moving at great speed across the sky; like so many modern UFOs, this one abruptly changed direction above their camp. There was an even earlier outbreak of UFO sightings in Thanksgiving week of 1896 in the San Francisco area, with witnesses reporting multi-coloured lights and egg-shaped airships.
But what is the purpose of UFOs? The theories extend from Professor Fred Hoyle’s belief that they have been around ‘since the beginning of time’ and that alien intelligences have ‘probably controlled our complete evolution’2 to the altogether more alarmist view (expressed in books with titles like The Flying Saucer Menace) that UFOs are the advance guard of an armada of alien space crafts that will take over the earth. The dean of modern ufologists, Brinsley Le Poer Trench, takes a midway view in Operation Earth, in which he suggests that there are two lots of space people, ‘the real Sky People, who have been around since time immemorial’, and some more sinister aliens, who live somewhere near (or inside?) this planet; these two factions, he suggests, are engaged in a war to control the minds of men.
Most of the writers on UFOs direct a certain amount of indignation—or sad reproach—at the millions of sceptics who persist in believing that the whole phenomenon can be explained in terms of hysteria or hallucination. But this attitude is in itself unrealistic. Before anyone can be justly blamed for refusing to ‘face facts’, it must be shown that the facts are there to be faced. And the most baffling and frustrating thing about the UFO phenomenon is that the ‘facts’ point in a dozen different directions. If, as ufologists believe, these craft are controlled by extra-terrestrial intelligences, then it seems to be their deliberate policy to provide evidence that will confuse even the believers.
Perhaps the easiest way to illustrate this point is to speak of the remarkable career of Dr Andrija Puharich, one of the most single-minded psychical investigators since the late Harry Price.
Puharich’s first major case is described in his book The Sacred Mushroom, which so impressed Aldous Huxley that he described Puharich as ‘one of the most brilliant minds in parapsychology’. It concerned a young Dutch sculptor named Harry Stone who, when examining an ancient Egyptian pendant, fell into a trance and began drawing hieroglyphics on a sheet of paper; he also began to speak about the upbringing in ancient Egypt. An expert verified that the hieroglyphics were genuine, and belonged to the period of the pharaoh Snofru. They appeared to identify the writer as Ra Ho Tep, a high priest of Snofru, and also mentioned his wife Nefert (or Nofret); both identifications proved to be historically correct. In a number of subsequent trances—supervised by Puharich—Stone wrote out many more messages in ancient Egyptian, and also spoke of a forgotten cult of a ‘sacred mushroom’, of which historians had never heard.
One day when Puharich was hypnotising Harry Stone, another acquaintance, Alice Bouverie, also fell into a trance, and identified herself as someone who had been born in Syria. She stated that the sacred mushroom was the type now known as amanita muscaria, and told Puharich that a specimen could be found not far from the house in Maine where the séance was taking place. Against all expectation, she proved to be correct.
Puharich became convinced that Harry Stone had no knowledge of ancient Egyptian language, and that one of the main purposes of the communication was to reveal the long-lost knowledge of the sacred cult of the mushroom. Stone asserted that the mushroom could ‘take a man out of his body’—i.e., cause out-of-the-body experiences; coincidentally, Puharich had his one and only such experience during this investigation. In one of his trances, ‘Ra Ho Tep’ demanded a mushroom, and then, in the presence of Puharich and Aldous Huxley, applied it ritualistically to his tongue and the top of his head. When Stone woke up five minutes later, he was able to perform an ESP test with a hundred per cent score and describe accurately what lay in the other side of a brick wall.
This story has no ending. Stone got bored and left; Puharich was never able to check his historical data satisfactorily because so little is known about the period. It is worth mentioning, though, that his assertions about the cult of the mushroom are supported by a piece of research published in 1970, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross by John M. Allegro. Allegro, who appears to be unaware of Puharich’s work, also argues that there was a universal fertility cult based on sacred mushrooms in the Middle East in Biblical times; he claims that the mushroom was regarded as sacred to the god of fertility because of its phallic shape, and because it could thrust itself out of the ground so quickly. He goes on to make the controversial assertion that original Christianity was a mystery religion based on the sacred mushroom. Though his arguments came under severe attack (and not only from Christians) his examination of Greek, Sumerian and Egyptian sources certainly seems to offer surprisingly detailed support for the words of Ra Ho Tep as relayed through Harry Stone.
Puharich’s chief contribution to parapsychology can be found in his next book Beyond Telepathy (1962), a balanced account of experiments in telepathy conducted with well-known psychics like Peter Hurkos and Eileen Garrett. It is also an attempt to create a ‘physics’ of paranormal experience based upon a concept of ‘psi plasma’, a kind of mental substance that sounds like Kilner’s ‘human aura’. Puharich suggests that we become good telepathic senders when we are in states of anger, fear and aggression, and good receivers when we are in states of relaxation and serenity. The first state is called adrenergia because it occurs when the inappropriately-named sympathetic nervous system is activated by adrenalin. When the para-sympathetic nervous system, which is concerned with sleep, relaxation and digestion, is activated by acetylcholine, the state is known as cholinergia. Puharich argues that in cholinergic states the psi-plasma expands, while in adrenergic states, it contracts. The sender doesn’t really transmit telepathic messages to the receiver; he somehow sucks or attracts the expanded psi-plasma of the receiver by reason of his superior force of concentration, rather as a high-density comet, passing too close to the earth, might suck away part of its atmosphere. The theory aroused considerable discussion, and Beyond Telepathy quickly became a classic in its field.
If Beyond Telepathy buttressed Puharich’s reputation, his next book came close to destroying it. It was called Uri: A Journal of the Mystery of Uri Geller (1974). This is a straightforward narrative of Puharich’s three-year investigation of Geller; yet it ends by producing total confusion and bewilderment.
The book begins in 1952, long before the two men met; it tells how, when Puharich was studying a Hindu psychic named Dr Vinod, the latter began to speak in a strange voice with a perfect English accent. The voice explained that it was a member of the ‘Nine Principles and Forces’, superhuman intelligences whose purpose is to aid human evolution.
Three years later, travelling in Mexico, Puharich met an American doctor and his wife, who also passed on lengthy messages from ‘space intelligences’; the remarkable thing was that these messages were a continuation of the communications that had come through Dr Vinod. It began to look as if ‘the Nine’ might really exist.
In 1963, Puharich made the acquaintance of the Brazilian ‘psychic surgeon’ Arigó, who performed his operations with a kitchen knife which he wiped on his shirt after dealing with each case. Arigó believed he was possessed by a the spirit of a dead German surgeon; according to his biographer, he had an unbroken record of successes over many years.3 Puharich was informed of Arigó’s death in a car crash, in January 1971; he afterwards became convinced that he must have received the telephone message a quarter of an hour before Arigó died.
All this is a prelude to Puharich’s meeting with Geller, which occurred in a Jaffa discotheque in August 1971. Geller’s feats of telepathy and precognition impressed Puharich; and if the book was restricted to describing these feats, it would undoubtedly impress most open-minded readers. But at this point, the ‘extra-terrestrials’ re-enter the story, and it turns into a chronicle of marvels and improbabilities. Placed in a trance, Geller described how, at the age of three, he had fallen asleep in a garden opposite his home, and awakened to see a huge, shining figure standing over him and a bright, bowl-shaped object floating in the sky overhead. And while Geller was still hypnotised, a mechanical voice began to speak from the air above his head, explaining that ‘they’ (the ‘space intelligences’) had found Geller in the garden, and had been ‘programming’ him ever since. Puharich, the voice said, had been selected to take care of Uri. The world was in danger of plunging into war, because Egypt was planning to attack Israel, and somehow Geller and Puharich had been given the task of averting the conflict.
When Geller recovered from the trance, he grabbed the cassette on which Puharich had been recording the proceedings, and Puharich swears he saw it vanish in Geller’s hand. It was never recovered. This was to be a recurring pattern whenever ‘the Nine’ communicated; they would either cause the tape to vanish, or wipe the recordings from it.
It would serve no purpose to detail the marvels that fill the rest of the book. Objects are always disappearing and then reappearing. UFOs are sighted. The car engine stops and starts again for no reason. Puharich’s camera bag is miraculously ‘teleported’ three thousand miles from New York to Tel Aviv. The war between Egypt and Israel is somehow averted, although without Puharich’s intervention. This relentless succession of miracles leaves the reader bewildered and exhausted and curiosity finally turns to a kind of punch-drunk indifference.
Understandably, the book did Geller no good at all with the general public. Instead of making converts, it turned believers into sceptics. There was something comic in the assertion that Geller was the ambassador of superhuman intelligences, and that the proof lay in his ability to bend spoons. Puharich was simply pitching Geller’s claim too high, and his obvious sincerity did nothing to improve the situation. The opposition could be divided into two factions: those who believed Puharich had been hoodwinked by Geller, and those who believed that Geller and Puharich were trying to hoodwink the rest of the world. Not long after the book’s publication, Geller and Puharich decided to go their separate ways.
At this point, one might be forgiven for assuming that the more extreme phenomena would cease. In fact—as Stuart Holroyd reveals in a book called Prelude to the Landing on Planet Earth—‘the Nine’ have continued to manifest themselves as bewilderingly as ever. His story begins in 1974, when Puharich went to Florida to investigate a half-Indian psychic healer, Bobby Horne (this is not his real name). In a hypnotic trance, Horne began to speak in a strange voice, and introduced himself as an extra-terrestrial intelligence named Ancore. His purpose, he said, was to inform the human race that the space intelligences would be arriving on earth en masse during the next year or so, and to try to prepare mankind for that traumatic event. Since the voices that had spoken through Geller had made the same claim, Puharich was understandably impressed.
Further tests took place at Ossining. Others present were the author Lyall Watson, an Englishman named Sir John Whitmore, and Phyllis Schlemmer, a ‘psychic’ who had introduced Puharich to Bobby Horne. They were told, through ‘Ancore’, that Bobby Horne had been specially prepared for his healing tasks by having invisible wires inserted into his neck by the space intelligences. Equally startling information came through an ‘extra-terrestrial’ called Tom, who spoke through Phyllis Schlemmer, and who offered a potted history of the human race. The first civilisation was founded 32,000 years ago, in the Tarim Basin of China, by beings from space. At this time, according to ‘Tom’, there were ‘three cultures, three divisions, from three areas of the universe’. A more advanced civilisation was begun, then destroyed through a massacre.
This was to be the pattern of the communications for some time to come. ‘Ancore’ spoke (through Bobby Horne) about the projected landing of UFOs, and how the space intelligences were trying to devise methods of interfering with television transmissions, so as to be able to speak directly to mankind. And Tom, speaking through Phyllis Schlemmer, went into considerable detail about earlier civilisations, and the purpose of man on earth. The earth, says Tom, is unique in the universe; every soul must pass through it sooner or later. ‘It is the love of this planet that generates the energy that becomes God.’ The earth is a kind of school, designed to teach the balance between the spiritual and the physical. But mankind has become too negative, and has created a force of active evil. It has become a kind of bottleneck in the universe, blocking its evolution. Unless man evolves a new type of consciousness, or unless he receives help from outside, the earth will enter a new ice age within two centuries, due to pollution of the atmosphere.
Eventually, Bobby Horne began to find all this talk about space intelligences too oppressive, and went back to his wife in Florida. Lyall Watson also declined to become a permanent part of the team, on the grounds that he had to get back to writing books. This left Puharich, Phyllis Schlemmer and Sir John Whitmore, whose fortune was to finance some of the hectic activity of the next two years.
The remainder of Holroyd’s long book is too confusing for me to attempt a detailed summary. What happened, basically, was that Puharich, Whitmore and Phyllis Schlemmer spent a great deal of time rushing around the world—often suspected of being spies—and sitting in hotel rooms listening to instructions from ‘Tom’ and praying for world peace. Periodically, Tom congratulates them, and explains that they have just averted some international catastrophe, such as the assassination of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. The book ends, as all good books should, with a dramatic climax in which the three musketeers avert a Middle Eastern war by driving around Israel holding meditation sessions and otherwise ‘diffusing a vapour trail of love and peace’. At the end of this agitated pilgrimage, ‘Tom’ assures them that their efforts have been successful and that the Middle East will cease to be a flashpoint for some time to come. With a sound sense of literary structure, he even advises Puharich to use these events as the climax of the book he intends to write. (In fact, Puharich passed on the job to Stuart Holroyd.) We are told in a postscript that equally weird things have been taking place since the successful peace mission in March 1975, but that these must wait for a future instalment.
In the bibliography of Prelude to the Landing on Planet Earth, Holroyd cites a nineteenth-century classic of psychical investigation, From India to the Planet Mars, by Theodore Flournoy, and readers of Holroyd may find the parallel instructive. In 1894, Flournoy, a well-known psychologist, investigated the mediumship of an attractive girl named Catherine Muller (whom he called Hélène Smith). He was soon convinced of the genuineness of her powers; she was able to tell him about events that occurred in his family before he was born. In later séances, Catherine went into deeper trances, and began to describe her ‘past incarnations’—as the wife of a Hindu prince of the fifteenth century, as Marie Antoinette, and as an observer of life on Mars. Flournoy remains sceptical. The Hindu incarnation is often convincing; she seemed to have considerable knowledge of the language and customs of fifteenth-century India, and even named a prince, Sivrouka Näkaya, who was later found to have been a historical personage. By contrast, the descriptions of Mars are absurd, with yellow sky, red hills, bug-eyed monsters, and buildings that look like Arab mosques. The people, according to Catherine, look just like human beings; their language, as transcribed by her, is suspiciously like French.
If any charitable spiritualists felt inclined to give Catherine the benefit of the doubt, their justification for doing so vanished in September 1976, when the Viking landing on Mars revealed the planet to be an arid desert with no sign of life—even minute organisms.
Yet Catherine Muller cannot be dismissed as a fraud, even of the unconscious variety. Her knowledge of Flournoy’s past showed that she possessed genuine powers of telepathy. While she was in trance, Flournoy witnessed ‘apports’ of Chinese shells and coins, and even roses and violets in midwinter. Paranormal forces undoubtedly were at work, but Flournoy declined to allow this to persuade him that Catherine had really been a Hindu princess or had visited Mars.
Flournoy would certainly have been equally sceptical about the narrative in Prelude to a Landing on Planet Earth. He would see no reason for rejecting the explanation that he applied to the mediumship of ‘Hélène Smith’: that the answers should be sought in the unconscious minds of the participants. And it must be admitted that Hélène’s identification of herself with a Hindu princess and Marie Antionette is, if anything, rather more believable than ‘Tom’s’ revelation that Puharich had once been the god Horus (and later, Pythagoras), while Whitmore had been Thoth and Phyllis Schlemmer Isis …
Still, in all fairness, one has to admit that anyone who experienced the events described in The Sacred Mushroom, Uri and Prelude to the Landing on Planet Earth would end up convinced of the existence of space intelligences. If the whole thing is some kind of trick of the unconscious, how does it work? And whose unconscious? My own conviction, formed at the time when I was studying Geller at close quarters, was that Puharich himself is the key to the enigma. Uri’s powers of telepathy and metal bending struck me as remarkable, and almost certainly genuine; but I never witnessed anything as spectacular as the events that occur on every other page of Puharich’s book. My suspicion, quite simply, was that Puharich is himself a gifted ‘psychic’, and that when he and Geller met, the combination of their subconscious powers, a kind of mutual interaction and prompting, was explosive. Since Puharich was already convinced of the existence of the Nine, it was logical—and almost inevitable—that Geller’s trance messages should come from these non-human intelligences. In short, Geller and Puharich somehow united to form a kind of firework display of poltergeist effects. The main question in my mind was simply whether Puharich aided and abetted these effects through wishful thinking and general dottiness.
When I finally met Puharich, and his friend Mrs Joyce Petschek, in June 1976, it was almost an anti-climax. Throughout the whole of a long evening, he neither did nor said anything to suggest mental unbalance, or even the slightest eccentricity. He is a short, grey-haired man with a bushy moustache and rather vague manner. Although in his mid-fifties, he has the kind of innocence and enthusiasm that I associate with American students. He is casual, good-natured and unpretentious. When I explained my theory that he was himself a psychic, and had been partly responsible for the Geller effects, he brooded in it for a few seconds, then said: ‘You could be right, but I’m inclined to doubt it.’
It soon became clear that Puharich has had so many strange experiences that he has come almost to take them for granted. He would spend ten minutes describing with great precision a laboratory experiment in which he had tested Peter Hurkos, then tell me of some utterly weird event involving Geller that sounded like science fiction. He told me, for example, of the teleportation of a unique chunk of stone from Ossining to the hotel bedroom of a couple who were making love more than a hundred miles away. A figure identical with Geller knocked on their door and handed them the stone; and afterwards, the stone was there to prove it. But at the time, Geller was in Ossining with Puharich, and knew nothing about it. Puharich told me he had deliberately left many such stories out of his book because it was already overloaded with incredible material.
Mrs Petschek told me an equally strange story. She had been driving from Oxford to London in an attempt to catch a plane, but realised that her chances were minimal; she should have set out at least half an hour earlier. Then, quite suddenly, she found herself close to London, with plenty of time to spare. What had happened, she thinks, is that the car dematerialised at a certain point and simply reappeared fifty miles further on. Both she and a friend who was in the car thought they knew just where it had happened, and where they had ‘reappeared’. I should add that Mrs Petschek struck me as being as sane and normal as Puharich, and I had no suspicion that I was witnessing a folie à deux. Marvels like this occasionally dropped into the conversation, but always in a rather casual way; clearly, they both accepted them in the way that I have come to accept dowsing.
Puharich obviously found my theorising about subconscious poltergeist activity unnecessary. He had long ago reached the conclusion that the Nine are a reality, and that our earth has been observed by space men for thousands of years. He believes that the earth has reached a point in its history where the Nine feel that slightly more intervention is necessary. But public miracles, like a mass landing of UFOs, are probably undesirable. Human beings have to evolve and learn to use their freedom. Too much ‘help’ from outside would be disastrous because it would make us lazy and dependent, like some primitive tribe suddenly invaded by twentieth-century technology. Instead, Puharich believes, the extra-terrestrials are concentrating on individuals, particularly children, so that the race is changed from within, so to speak. He claims he has studied a large number of children of astonishing psychic gifts, not simply the ability to bend spoons, like the protegés of Professor John Taylor, but telepathy and other unusual powers. The great mathematical prodigies of the past, he thinks, are a foreshadowing of what is to come.
I found all this convincing, up to a point. Nothing is more obvious than that Puharich and Mrs Petschek are totally sincere in everything that they say. Does this mean that I am convinced by the existence of the Nine? Obviously not. It is not simply a question of whether I can accept Puharich, Sir John Whitmore and Phyllis Schlemmer as honest, but whether there is now sufficient evidence to convince any logical person of the real existence of space beings. In matters of the paranormal, it is facts not faith that are relevant. There is a certain area within which even the most reasonable people might differ. I would personally argue that there is now an abundance of evidence for the existence of telepathy and poltergeists, but I would not quarrel unduly with scientists who felt that it was still insufficient. I would be willing to admit that there is rather less evidence for the existence of ley lines; nevertheless I am inclined to be convinced by what there is because I am influenced by my personal experience of dowsing. For the same reason, President Jimmy Carter believes in the existence of UFOs. But there are certain matters on which there is not sufficient evidence to convince anybody; for example, whether there is life on Venus, or whether the Virgin Mary ascended to heaven in her physical body. Anybody is entitled to his belief in these matters, provided he will admit that it is a matter of personal conviction (i.e., religion) rather than of science. In the same perfectly objective sense, there is no solid evidence for any kind of extra-terrestrial beings. UFO sightings may persuade us that something is going on, but there is no reason to suppose that this something comes from beyond the earth. The Nine may have convinced Puharich and his associates of their existence; but on the present showing, they have no reason to complain if the rest of us decline to commit ourselves.
The Catherine Muller case reminds us that there is one more basic similarity between Puharich’s experiences and some of the famous cases of psychical research: the boring inconclusiveness of the whole thing. Anyone who has heard of psychical research only at second hand might be forgiven for expecting tremendous revelations from ‘adventures with the dead’. Actual study of ‘spirit communications’ is always a disappointment, because the dead—or whoever is responsible—seem so staggeringly trivial minded. Even the spirits of the great composers, who communicate through the London housewife Rosemary Brown, seem capable of nothing but feeble echoes of the music they wrote when alive.
Which brings me to a phenomenon which I have observed ever since I began to take an interest in ‘the occult’, and which might be labelled ‘ambiguity’. Again and again in cases of the paranormal there is a strange insufficiency of evidence. To which a believer in UFOs or ghosts might reply: ‘Does that matter when there are so many hundreds of reported instances?’ The answer is: Yes, if all the instances are inconclusive. Because when you put a hundred such instances end to end, the result is not to command conviction, but to leave the reader a hundred times more baffled. If any conclusion begins to emerge at the end, it is that the answer lies in a completely different direction from what we had supposed.
A case in point is described by a leading American investigator of UFOs, John Keel, in his book The Mothman Prophesies. Keel differs from Puharich in believing that the UFOs are basically malevolent. He describes his own investigations into various UFO sightings in West Virginia in 1966–67, usually accompanied by another journalist, Mrs Mary Hyre. He reports numerous sightings of a huge figure—about seven feet tall—with red eyes and gigantic wings folded on its back. It was able to keep up with fast cars without even flapping its wings. It was seen by two young couples near an old ammunition dump on November 15, 1966, and again by Mary Hyre’s niece, Connie Carpenter, twelve days later. Connie Carpenter’s eyes became red and swollen, as if from some kind of radiation, after she had seen the creature’s red eyes at close quarters. In the spring of the following year, a young couple, making love naked in the back of a car, saw a large ball of bluish fire hovering near the car; the next morning, both were heavily ‘sunburned’ and had red, swollen eyes. Keel’s book is full of the same electronic oddities as Puharich’s. Calls come through on disconnected telephones; police messages are picked up on switched-off radios; films and tape recordings turn out to be blank; cameras refuse to work when pointed at UFOs. Olive-skinned men dressed in black make a habit of calling on UFO witnesses, warning them to say nothing about what they have seen. Cows and sheep are found with their throats neatly slit and their bodies drained of blood. Pet dogs and cats disappear in large numbers. Keel finds that his movements are actually anticipated by the opposition; for example, when he casually chooses a motel to stay at, he finds a sheaf of incomprehensible messages waiting for him at the desk.
Perhaps the real point of the parallel between Keel’s experiences and Puharich’s is how easy it is to be drawn into some weird sequence of events and to become totally convinced that they have an enormous, universal significance. According to himself, Keel was finally subjected to a kind of non-stop persecution by the space men, with mysterious phone calls, people impersonating him or claiming to be his secretary, and strange warning messages. He was convinced that the space men were genuine because they were able to make accurate predictions of the future. When he hypnotised a contractee in 1967, a space man named Apol began to speak through her and made exact predictions about a number of plane crashes. He aslo predicted that the Pope would be knifed to death in the Middle East, and that this would be preceded by a great earthquake. He mentioned that Robert Kennedy was in great danger. Kennedy was, of course, assassinated in the following year. The plane crashes, says Keel, occurred exactly as predicted. In July 1967, the Vatican announced that the Pope would be visiting Turkey, and an earthquake killed a thousand people there. But the Pope was not knifed to death at Istanbul airport. It was three years later, when he landed at Manila airport, that a madman tried to kill him with a long knife; fortunately, the man was overpowered by guards. Keel believes that the entities simply misread the future or got the date wrong. Similarly, he was told that Martin Luther King would be shot in the throat while standing on his balcony in Memphis; the date given was February 4, 1968. That day passed without incident; but the assassination took place, exactly as described, two months later.
In long telephone conversations with Keel, ‘Apol’ made another prophecy: there would be a massive power failure that would affect a large part of the United States on December 15. It would happen when President Johnson turned on the lights of the Christmas tree on the White House lawn. Keel watched the event on television; there was no power failure. But immediately after the President had thrown the switch, the programme was interrupted for an announcement—a bridge on the Ohio River had collapsed, with great loss of life. Keel knew that the only bridge along the stretch mentioned was the Silver Bridge at Point Pleasant, the town near which all the strange occurrences noted by Keel and Mary Hyre had been taking place. The space men had even warned him that a major disaster would take place along the Ohio River, but implied that it would be a factory that would blow up. Keel believes that they told him the blackout story, rather than the truth, so that he would have no opportunity to warn people.
As with Puharich, it is difficult to take Keel’s story seriously. No doubt most of the phenomena occurred more or less as he described them. But it is hard to believe that large numbers of hostile creatures from other worlds are trying to infiltrate the human race. To begin with, they seem curiously incompetent. One of the men in black tries to drag a girl into his car, but she succeeds in escaping. Another one actually persuades a female contactee to get into his car and go for a drive; you would expect her to be whisked off in a space ship to Mars (or Lanulos, as their world seems to be called). Instead, she is driven to a remote spot, interrogated, taken back to the place where she was picked up, and allowed to go.
In the face of all so much exasperating ambiguity, it is tempting to blame Keel himself for his muddle-headedness and gullibility. His answer is to point to all the other UFO experts who have had the same experiences and the same problems. Practically every serious book in support of UFOs gives the same over-all impression of confusion, and many of them mention the attempts by mysterious strangers to silence witnesses. There are even a number of well-authenticated cases in which witnesses have lost all memory of what happened, as if the UFOs themselves had a device for inducing amnesia. The best known is that of Mr and Mrs Barney Hill, who were driving home from Canada in September 1961, when they saw a UFO; two hours later, they ‘woke up’ in their car several miles away, with no memory of the time after they saw the UFO. Under hypnosis, they were able to recall being abducted by aliens and taken aboard the UFO, where they were cross-examined, then released. Hypnosis also restored the memory of police patrolman Herb Schirmer, who was (he claimed) taken aboard a UFO in December 1967 and questioned. Schirmer said that the aliens were wearing some type of overall with an emblem of a winged serpent.
This seems to suggest that UFOs are controlled by beings from other worlds who, for reasons best known to themselves, wish to keep humanity as ignorant as possible. Yet writers who have made an extensive study of the subject admit that this hypothesis fails to fit the facts. For example, in the cases cited above, why did the aliens not realise that human memory can be restored under hypnosis? Dr Jacques Vallee, one of the leading UFO experts, writes: ‘In every instance of the UFO phenomenon I have been able to study in depth, I have found as many rational elements as I have absurd ones, and many that I could interpret as friendly and many that seemed hostile. No matter what approach I take, I can never explain more than half of the facts.’4
As we read through Keel’s book The Mothman Prophecies, certain interesting points emerge. There is, for example, the curious episode of the ‘fear zone’. In December 1966, Keel accompanied Connie Carpenter to the place where she had seen the huge winged man. They entered a ruined building on the old ammunition dump, when suddenly she saw its red eyes watching her. The others saw nothing, but Keel was convinced that Connie’s hysterics were real. Later that evening, Keel drove around on his own for several hours, hoping for more UFO sightings. He saw nothing, but he came across an area (in the woods) ‘where I was suddenly engulfed in fear’. ‘I stepped on the gas, and after a few yards, my fear vanished as quickly as it came.’ He got out of the car and walked back towards the ‘zone of fear’. ‘I was perfectly calm until I took one step too many, and was back in the zone. I almost panicked and ran … After I had gone about fifteen feet I stepped outside the zone and everything was normal again.’
Keel’s guess is that he was walking through a zone of ‘ultrasonic waves’, presumably sprayed out by a UFO. Tom Lethbridge would have had a different suggestion to make. He would have instantly recognised the ‘zone of fear’ as what he called a ghoul, like the one he encountered on Ladram beach. Lethbridge had also noted that such zones begin and end abruptly, as if surrounded by an invisible wall.
The interesting thing is that Keel himself has a strong suspicion that he is dealing with something closer to the paranormal than to UFO phenomena. But, unlike Lethbridge, he has no general frame of reference, no basic theory of the supernatural. So his occasional comments on such matters only make confusion worse confounded. He speaks of a house in Greenwich Village that was reported to be haunted by a figure who wore a black cape and a wide-brimmed slouch hat. No person of that description had lived—or died—in the house; but a writer named Walter Gibson had lived there in the thirties; and his best known creation was a character called The Shadow, who wore a black cape and wide-brimmed slouch hat. ‘Could this,’ asks Keel, ‘be some kind of residue from Walter Gibson’s very powerful mind?’ Could it be what the Tibetans call a tulpa, a mind-creature, brought into being by a magical act of imagination? He goes on to ask why so much UFO activity is concentrated around old archaeological sites in the Mississippi valley and around the Indian snake mounds of Ohio. He points out that these mounds are ‘laid out and constructed with the same kind of mathematical precision found in the pyramids of Egypt’, and that ‘to plan and build such mountains of shaped earth required technical skills beyond the simple nomadic wood Indians’. And he completes the reader’s bewilderment by asking whether UFOs could be tulpas ‘created by a long forgotten people and doomed forever to senseless manoeuvres in the night skies’.
Considering that Keel knows nothing of Lethbridge’s theory of tape recordings and has apparently never heard of leys, this is little short of inspiration. We are able to supply the missing links in the chain of his argument: that the mind of man can, under certain conditions, create phantoms, and that these phantoms can continue to exist indefinitely at certain places on the earth’s surface, places that were chosen by ancient man as his ‘sacred sites’. (It is also worth noting that these Indians were nomadic; like the Australian aborigines described by Charles Mountford, they probably moved from sacred site to sacred site at different times of the year.)
But is it remotely likely that UFOs themselves could be phantoms? Oddly enough, the idea had occurred independently to an English naturalist named F. W. Holiday, who arrived at the notion in a peculiarly roundabout manner. In August 1962, as he was standing beside Loch Ness at six o’clock in the morning, he suddenly sighted the famous monster, a black, glistening object looking like a vast overturned boat. He spend the next five years studying the phenomenon and marshalled all his evidence in a book called The Great Orm of Loch Ness (1968). He came to the conclusion that the monster was some kind of giant slug and even suggested the precise species: a Carboniferous creature called Tullimonstrum gregarium, an odd-looking thing like a submarine with a broad tail and long neck. He also noted the enormous number of ‘worm’ legends in British mythology, and how often the monster seemed to be associated with evil.
In the second half of the 1960s, there were many sightings of monsters in smaller lakes, not only in Scotland, but also in Wales and Ireland. Holiday went to investigate a particularly circumstantial report from Lough Fadda in Connemara; the monster had been seen at close quarters by the local librarian and three other witnesses. What puzzled Holiday was that Lough Fadda seemed too small to house a ‘monster’; a creature of the size described would soon eat all the fish and die of starvation. The same was true of nearby Lough Nahooin, where Holiday and his team tried to trap the resident ‘peiste’ with nets. Something disturbed their nets, but there was no evidence that it was a monster.
Holiday’s extensive reading in worm mythology led him to conclude that worms were ancient religious symbols, probably associated with evil. He also noticed that there seemed to be another symbol, often found in association with the worm or serpent: a disc. And the disc seemed to be a symbol of goodness. Bronze-Age tombs are full of disc artifacts, which archaeologists have always assumed to be images of the sun. Bronze-Age burial mounds are often shaped like discs and are known as disc barrows or saucer barrows. Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough has gone on record as doubting whether the disc artifacts are objects of sun worship so much as symbols of purification, or protection against evil: the ancient equivalent of the Christian cross. (In fact, the post-Christian Celts combined the two symbols into the ‘Celtic cross’, which can still be found in hedgerows all over Cornwall.) Holiday made another interesting observation. From the air, disc barrows look exactly look UFOs, with their raised mound in the middle and an ‘eye’ in the centre of the mound. And the other type of Bronze-Age barrow, the long barrow, looks very like the cigarshaped UFO from which smaller ones have often been seen emerging.5 Many of the disc artifacts look more like UFOs than sun discs.
It was his totally frustrating experiences with many Irish loughs that finally led Holiday to the conclusion that the monsters are not solid creatures of flesh and blood but some kind of ghost. At least, they had two of the main characteristics of ghosts; they struck witnesses as perfectly real and solid, yet could vanish without leaving a trace. Moreover, the closest examination of the loughs failed to reveal the slightest ecological trace of their existence.
When he also noted the frequency of UFO sightings above lakes where there are reports of monsters, he came to the conclusion that he was not dealing with real dragons and discs, but with some kind of archetypal symbol of good and evil.. He argues this theory with considerable skill and conviction in his book The Dragon and the Disc. One of his main arguments is one that has also been advanced by Keel: the frequency with which UFOs and ghosts have been associated. Holiday mentions the case of a girl called Annabelle Randall who, on October 7, 1965, was approaching a bridge near Warminster in her car when she and her fiancé saw a figure sprawled in the road; when they looked again, it had vanished. Many fatal accidents had occurred near the bridge. On the way home near the same spot, she saw a UFO-like object soaring away into the sky and two strange-looking men in ‘space suits’ approaching the bridge; she drove off at top speed. A month later, a retired group captain and his wife saw a blood-soaked figure stagger out of the hedge near the bridge, and another ‘space man’. By the time the group captain had stopped the car and reversed, both had vanished.
Unlike Keel, Holiday knows something about the significance of ley lines. But he seems to be unaware that all kinds of strange phenomena have been observed over leys—particularly at the nodal points: ghosts, ghouls and poltergeists, as well as UFOs. (Loch Ness itself has a major ley line running down the middle.)6 So he is not aware that the ghosts and the UFOs could be unconnected: in other words, that they could be totally different types of phenomenon. If, as Lethbridge was inclined to believe, UFOs come from another dimension, then ley intersections may be the ideal crossing points between the two worlds. If an accident black spot happened to be at a ley intersection, one might expect the tape recording phenomenon to occur there. (If Stephen Jenkins is right about the disorientation that can occur at nodal points, then the ley may be responsible for the high accident rate.) But there need be no more connection between the two sets of phenomena than between a car and a train that happen to use the same level crossing. Moreover, the evidence seems to suggest that the serpent symbol is associated with the earth force rather than with evil.
However, Holiday had a number of experiences during the investigations that convinced him that there were hostile forces at work. To begin with, he became convinced of the existence of a ‘neuralgia syndrome’. At Lough Nahooin, he experienced toothache throughout the investigation, and his companion also suffered neuralgic pains. The toothache stopped as soon as the investigation was called off. Later, two marine biologists told him of a similar experience when they had been investigating a lake monster; one of the two was told by a local dentist that he had an impacted wisdom tooth that had triggered off St Vincent’s disease, but the Glasgow Dental Hospital could find absolutely nothing wrong. Holiday thought he might have found a solution when he discovered a quotation in Sir Wallis Budge’s book on Babylonian Life and History about a ‘worm’ that drinks among the teeth, destroying the strength of the gums.
Holiday went to Loch Ness to investigate a UFO sighting reported by Jan-Ove Sundberg, a Swedish journalist, who claimed to have seen the aliens and their craft in a clearing in the woods above Foyers, where he had become ‘unaccountably lost’. After reporting the sighting, Sundberg said he had been persecuted by a man in black; he ended by having a nervous breakdown. Holiday located three other people who had seen UFOs in the same area at about the same time as Sundberg’s experience. As he sat talking to Mrs Winifred Cary, wife of Wing Commander Basil Cary, about UFO sightings, he mentioned that he meant to go and examine the place where Sundberg had seen the UFO; Mrs Cary advised him against it. At that moment, there was a tremendous rushing sound like a tornado outside the window, followed by several loud thumps. Holiday heard the noises, which went on for about a quarter of a minute; oddly enough, Wing Commander Cary heard nothing. Mrs Cary not only heard the noises, but, as she testified in a signed account, also saw something: ‘Looking over my shoulder I got an impression that there was something at the window although I couldn’t see exactly what it was. And then, looking at Ted [Holiday], I saw a beam of white light that shot across the room from the window on my left. I saw a white circle of light on Ted Holiday’s forehead …’ Wing Commander Cary searched the garden, but found no sign of disturbance.
The next morning, as Holiday left his caravan, he saw a man in black, who stood with his back to the loch, staring fixedly at him. ‘Simultaneously I felt a strong sensation of malevolence, very cold and quite passionless.’ The man wore a helmet, mask and gloves. Holiday walked past the man, tempted to lurch against him to see if he was real. As he passed him, he heard a ‘whispering or whistling sound’, and turned to find that the man had vanished, although there was nowhere for him to vanish to. This episode made him decide to take Mrs Cary’s advice and avoid the place where Sundberg had seen the UFO.
The following year, when Holiday returned to continue his investigations at the loch, he suffered a heart attack at precisely the place where he had seen the man in black.
Can these observations bring us any closer to an understanding of this bewildering subject? Let us briefly review the evidence presented in this chapter.
According to Ted Owens, UFOs are controlled by a race of super-beings from another galaxy, whose intentions towards the earth are, on the whole, benevolent. Sceptics will object that there is no objective proof of the existence of these benevolent super-beings; they could just as easily be some unexplored power of the human mind, if indeed they have any existence or reality at all.
Puharich shares Owens’ view about the super-beings, whom he identifies as the Nine, but adds that there are also hostile forces, which emanate from the human mind, but which have somehow taken on an independent existence. Puharich’s ‘communicators’ also allege that there are many human ‘souls’ who are trapped in a kind of limbo, unaware that they are dead, and capable of exercising negative influences. But Puharich’s super-beings are, to put it mildly, less than convincing, and could well be no more than a product of his own mind—a kind of poltergeist effect, emanating from somewhere else on the ladder of selves.
For there seems little doubt that the human mind can create elaborate fantasies, which then defy all the laws of nature by coming to life. In recent years. Dr George Owen and his wife Iris have underlined the point by devising one of the most dazzling experiments in the history of psychical research. In the early 1970s, members of the Toronto Society for Psychical Research decided to attempt to create a ghost. Their method was to invent a historical personage, work out his life-story and background in some detail, then try to bring him into existence through séances. They invented a character called Philip, a contemporary of Oliver Cromwell, who fell in love with a beautiful gypsy named Margo and made her his mistress. Philip’s wife Dorothea found out about the affair and had Margo accused of witchcraft. Margo was tried and burned at the stake; Philip committed suicide by throwing himself from the battlements of his house, Diddington Manor. (The house actually existed, and photographs of it were placed around the séance room.)
After several months of ‘meditation’ séances, the group had achieved no success and decided to try a new approach. They relaxed and talked about Philip and even sang songs. One evening, there was a rap on the table. This was not quite what they had expected; they had hoped to cause Philip to ‘materialise’. However, they questioned the ‘spirit’ in the usual way (one rap for yes, two for no), and soon verified that this was ‘Philip’, who repeated the history they had invented for him. Eventually, Philip caused the table to dance all over the room. He even gave a public exhibition of his powers, making the table dance, unaided, up a flight of steps on to the platform.
Philip’s account of his life was so circumstantial that some members of the group found themselves wondering if such a person had actually existed and by strange coincidence they had invented a true story. On one occasion, when Philip declared he had been in Bohemia, Dr Owen asked him whether he had known Elizabeth, the ‘Winter Queen’; Philip said that he had. Owen reminded him that he had earlier denied knowing Prince Rupert, the Winter Queen’s brother-in-law. (Rupert was commander of the Royal Cavalry during the Civil War, in which Philip had fought on the king’s side). Philip denied Rupert was the Winter Queen’s brother-in-law; and when Owen checked it in a history book, he found that Philip was right. On the other hand, when Philip was asked about his religion, he denied that he was a Catholic or a Protestant, then admitted to being Anglo-Catholic, a label which did not exist in Cromwell’s time.
Here, then, is an example of a group of people inventing a fantasy and endowing it with life, a process that sound analogous to the Tibetan method of creating a tulpa, as described by Alexandra David-Neel. In Magic and Mystery in Tibet, she tells how she succeeded in creating a phantom monk, who looked so solid that a herdsman once took him for a real lama. But eventually, her creation began to escape her control; he became vaguely hostile and malignant, and it took her six months of hard work to ‘dematerialise’ him. In Psychic Self-Defence, Dion Fortune has a similar story of how she involuntarily created an ‘elemental’ in the form of a wolf, which terrorised the household until she ‘re-absorbed’ it.7
Oddly enough, both John Keel and Ted Holiday subscribe to some version of the tulpa theory. Both accept that there are two sets of paranormal forces at work, one benevolent and one hostile. Both seem willing to grant that the benevolent forces may possess a real, objective existence, but that the hostile forces are not real in the same sense. They feel that these forces are tulpas that have escaped the control of the minds that created them or involuntarily conjured them into existence. Holiday seems inclined to identify the ‘good forces’ with UFOs (or discs), and the evil ones with dragons or serpents, although his later observations of hostile forces connected with UFOs appears to contradict this view. Both Keel and Holiday suspect that various paranormal phenomena are connected with the forces of the earth. Their belief that they are dealing with paranormal phenomena seems to be supported by the observation that many of the phenomena are not noticed by everyone—only by those who are ‘tuned in’ to them.
Perhaps the most frighteningly pessimistic view of the whole problem is the one that has been propounded by the scientist and ufologist Thomas E. Bearden.8 Bearden writes:
The personal unconscious can sometimes directly affect the material world; the poltergeist phenomenon and psychokinesis are direct examples. The collective species unconscious is vastly more powerful than the personal unconscious, and under appropriate conditions, it can directly materialise a thought form, which may be of an object, or even of a living being. The emerging thought form (tulpa) starts as an archetype in the collective … unconscious and is progressively altered, shaped and formed by the shallower layers of unconsciousness which it must traverse on its way to materialisation. UFOs, fairies, angels, sasquatches, Loch Ness monsters, etc., are thus tulpa materialisations from the unconscious—i.e., they are ‘dreams’ of the race.
Jung also suggested that UFOs arc psychological projections. What Bearden goes on to propound is rather more alarming, if also more incredible. He points out that Arnold’s first sighting of UFOs corresponded with the beginning of the Cold War and that subsequent waves of sightings have often preceded or accompanied serious tensions: the Cuban missile crisis, the Yom Kippur war, and so on. He seems to take the view that they are not merely projections of anxiety on the part of non-aggressors but may also reflect the hostile intentions of aggressors. He believes that Stalin had every intention of attacking the West before the discovery of the atomic bomb made it impracticable, and that since then, the Soviets have continued to develop secret weaponry and to finance a left-wing terrorist war against the West. The new weapons are ‘psychotronic’—capable of influencing the mind by some form of radiation. (He claims that there is evidence that the Russians have been using weak microwave radiation against the American Embassy in Moscow since 1960.)
He goes on, ‘Now if all this unbelievable scenario has any validity … one ought to see an increase in the tulpoid phenomena of a sharply symbolic nature which can be appropriately psychoanalysed.’ And this manifestation, he believes, is cattle mutilation. (‘The cow is the Western symbol par excellence; Western children nurse on cow’s milk.’) As the Russians prepare to attack NATO, we will be forewarned by a new shock, ‘the tulpoid symbology … raised to the highest degree’, and represented by a wave of mutilations of human females.
Most readers may feel, as I do, that Dr Bearden is seeking a paranormal explanation where a normal one would be more convincing. Sex murders involving mutilation have increased sharply in the United States during the past decade or so, but no one suggests that tulpas are responsible; the same probably applies to cattle mutilations. Overcrowding tends to incubate abnormal sexual impulses, particularly sadistic aggression towards the female. In the past, this expressed itself chiefly in the urban areas; nowadays, when most people own cars, the urban violence and frustration can express itself in remote country areas, where the most accessible victims are cattle.
But before we accuse Dr Bearden of over-reacting to the whole problem, it is important to become aware of the facts he has taken into account. The writer Ed Sanders has published a lengthy account of cattle mutilations,9 and of his own investigations into them, which makes it clear that something very strange is going on. This is no casual slashing with a knife. ‘Tongues, eyes, ears, tails, genitals and udders were removed—all perfectly snipped as with a tailor’s shears. The rears of the animals were sometimes bored as if the perpetrator were using a razor-sharp geologist’s core sampler.’ Some appear to have been killed by chemicals that cause degeneration of the inner organs, and one mutilated heifer found in New Mexico was apparently killed by a nerve gas. Coyotes and buzzards will not touch the carcases, which decay within days. The numbers are large; in one small area around Sterling, Colorado, fifty cattle were mutilated in one year. Sadistic delinquents or the members of weird ‘blood cults’ could be responsible for many of the deaths, but others seem to defy such explanations. Sanders cites witnesses who claim to have observed UFOs in the areas where mutilations took place.
Towards the end of The Mothman Prophecies, Keel seems to reject the tulpa theory. Speaking of lengthy telephone conversations with the ‘alien intelligence’ Apol, he says:
I felt sorry for him. It became apparent that he really did not know who or what he was. He was a prisoner in our time frame. He often confused the past with the future. I gathered that he and all his fellow entities found themselves transported backward and forward in time involuntarily, playing out their little games because they were programmed to do so, living—or existing—only so long as they could feed off the energy and minds of mediums and contactees.
Keel obviously does not realise it—he throws off the comment casually, then goes on—but he has made a suggestion whose implications are breathtaking. The first thing to note is the comment ‘he did not know who or what he was. He was a prisoner of our time frame’. What is immediately striking about this is that it applies to all of us. Philosophers and scientists do their best to investigate the universe; but when we have formulated our theories, we have to come back to the basic recognition that we have no idea of who we are or what we are doing here. We are also trapped in our time frame, and it seems impossible to see beyond it. So these creatures of Keel’s are like human beings, only more so. We also play little games that we are programmed to play.
What Keel has said here suggests that these creatures belong to Lethbridge’s ‘next whorl of the spiral’, or to Monroe’s curious limbo between two worlds. Many ghosts behave in the same irrational manner, as if caught in a kind of nightmare in which they repeat the same action over and over again. Mediums have always insisted that the world is full of bewildered spirits, unaware that they are dead, wandering around helplessly. All this reinforces the suspicion that Keel is not dealing with genuine space men, but with some kind of supernatural phenomenon.
But perhaps the most significant comment in Keel’s description of Apol is the final one: ‘living—or existing—only so long as they could feed off the energy and minds of mediums and contactees’. By mentioning mediums as well as UFO contactees, Keel clearly implies that Apol and his kind are spirits, existing in a kind of limbo; not only this, but that they can only escape their shadow life by vampirising energy from human beings.
This comment suggests a startling new interpretation, not just of UFO phenomena, but of the whole history of spiritualism. Something is certainly going on, but probably not what has so far been thought. Half the spirits contacted by mediums are not what they profess to be, but are merely the tramps, con-men and petty crooks of the spirit world, doing their best to swindle human beings out of a little vital energy. The suspicion is reinforced by Alan Vaughan’s ‘possession’ by the wife of the Nantucket sea captain; the entity who ‘rescued’ him made him first write out the sentence: ‘Each of us has a spirit while living; do not meddle with the spirits of the dead.’ In view of the history of spiritualism, this seems a curious piece of advice to come from a spirit. Even the phrasing seems odd; should it not be ‘Each of us is a spirit while living?’ Or is he using ‘spirit’ in another sense, the sense in which we speak of the spirit of Beethoven or Goethe, meaning their fundamental creative drive? In that case, what ‘Z’ was saying was: ‘Each of us has an inherent vital purpose while he is alive; do not waste time trying to contact the dead.’ Such contact is likely to waste your time and land you in the hands of unscrupulous entities like the wife of the Nantucket sea captain or Mr Apol.
G. K. Chesterton entertained much the same suspicion, as a result of early experiments with an ouija board. He wrote in his autobiography:
I saw quite enough of the thing to be able to testify, with complete certainty, that something happens which is not in the ordinary sense natural, or produced by the normal and conscious human will. Whether it is produced by some subconscious but still human force, or by some powers, good, bad or indifferent, which are external to humanity, I would not attempt to decide. The only thing I will say with complete confidence, about that mystic and invisible power, is that it tells lies.
Similarly, the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, commenting on the amazing phenomena produced by the Victorian medium Daniel Dunglas Home, wrote in his Notebooks: ‘They are absolutely proved to be sober facts by evidence that would satisfy us of any other alleged realities; and yet I cannot force my mind to take any interest in them.’ Like Chesterton, Hawthorne seems to have felt an instinctive revulsion for ‘spirit phenomena’, as if they were basically a waste of his time.
This theory would also suggest an answer to one of the most puzzling questions to arise from Keel’s book: why the phenomena were on such a scale. After all, ghosts are usually individualists; they content themselves with haunting one place at a time; Keel’s book gives the impression that most of West Virginia and Ohio was haunted by winged monsters and mysterious lights. Similarly, when news of the Hydesville rappings spread across America, then to Europe, spirits were suddenly manifesting themselves all over the place, from New York to Vladivostock. Why? The answer presumably is: because thousands of people were suddenly holding séances and playing with ouija boards, actually offering the spirits their energy and attention. And in West Virginia, newspaper reports of the sightings sent thousands of people out every night looking for UFOs.
‘Waves’ of strange phenomena seem to occur when there is a wide expectation of them. The same thing happened in Europe between 1700 and 1740, when there were suddenly thousands of reports of vampires. The epidemic started in Central Europe, probably Transylvania (the word vampir is of Slovak origin), and within a few years had spread across Europe, from Greece to Scandinavia. Many of the reports sound too circumstantial to be dismissed as hysteria; and, as with UFO sightings, the sheer number is impressive. The answer could be that vast numbers of people, living in lonely villages, began to brood on the reports of vampires, and to look for vampires around every graveyard. Huge quantities of psychic energy suddenly became available to the flotsam and jetsam of the spirit world.
The same explanation could be applied to the Philip case. George and Iris Owen are inclined to assume that they somehow created a tulpa by brooding on Philip, but the phenomena could just as easily be interpreted as some stray spirit deliberately impersonating Philip—a psychic version of the story of the Tichbourne claimant.
All these speculations fail to suggest a definite answer to the problem of UFOs. The point is quite simply that we cannot draw a line between the latent powers of the human mind, and the invisible powers that may exist around us in the universe. All we can do is to point out that, while most of Puharich’s phenomena seem to be genuine, they are as ambiguous as most of the phenomena of spiritualism. And this is, in fact, an important insight. It means that we have recognised an uncertainty principle in paranormal phenomena. They may be ‘genuine’, and yet still not what they seem. Many paranormal phenomena may be simply the antics of psychic exhibitionists and attention-seekers, who had far better be ignored.
Nevertheless there is an interesting body of opinion that holds that UFO phenomena may be of immense significance. This is the conclusion arrived at by Jacques Valleé, in his book The Invisible College. (His ‘invisible college’ is an ‘open conspiracy’ of scientists who recognise the reality of UFO phenomena.) Vallée explains that, after twenty-five years of studying UFO reports, he has come to reject the idea that mankind is being contacted by benevolent intelligences from outer space. He also recognises the psychic component in so much UFO phenomena. Like Lethbridge and Stephen Jenkins, he has become convinced that what we are dealing with is a ‘different level of existence, a reality that seems to cut through our own at right angles’. He goes on: ‘I believe that a powerful force has influenced the human race in the past, and is again influencing it now. Does this force originate entirely within human consciousness, or does it represent alien intervention?’ He is finally unable to reach any definite conclusion, but states: ‘I think we are close, very close, to understanding what UFOs are, and what they do’.
What his theory amounts to is this. The whole nature of the UFO phenomenon is ambiguous; we cannot even determine whether they exist, and if so whether they are friendly or hostile. But the steady build-up of UFO sightings is causing a shift in human consciousness, a new attitude towards the universe. Vallée speaks of what he calls a ‘control system’ like the thermostat that regulates the temperature of a house. The whole point of a thermostat is to keep temperature within certain limits, neither too high nor too low. And in the same way, the UFO phenomenon is a kind of control system. There are sudden rashes of UFO sightings, like the ones in West Virginia in 1966, that cause widespread interest. But before everybody begins to believe in them, the sightings diminish, until once again we feel that it was nonsense after all; and just as credulity has reached its lowest point, the sightings begin again.
Vallée goes on to speak about ‘the reinforcement phenomenon’. When psychologists are trying to train pigeons or laboratory rats to behave in a certain way, they use ‘reinforcement mechanisms’—certain pleasures or fears. If these pleasures or fears are too even and monotonous, development ceases; the animal can even slip back to a lower level. (Rubinstein and Best’s planaria, which became bored with emergencies, are an example.) The best way, apparently, is to combine periodicity with unpredictability. In that way, learning is slow but quite continuous, and it is also irreversible.
It rather looks—Vallée is implying—as if UFO phenomena could be some sort of reinforcement mechanism to raise human beings to a new mental level. After all, the most fundamental characteristic of human consciousness is its narrowness, its tendency to mind its own business. Surrounded by a vast and inexplicable universe, we prefer to plod along in the old routine like blinkered horses. Life is infinitely strange, yet we spend a great deal of it yawning; and many people live in big cities as if they were in a tiny village; they hardly know the next door neighbours and have never bothered to wonder what lies on the other side of that railway embankment.
Our minds are essentially provincial when, ideally, they ought to be cosmopolitan. We are not merely earth-bound; we have our heads buried in the earth. The UFO phenomena, Vallée suggests, are forcing us to look up, to get used to the idea that we are citizens of the universe, not just of this earth.
But Vallée admits that he has no idea of who or what is controlling the learning curve. Could it be from ‘out there’, as the cybernetician David Foster suggests in his book The Intelligent Universe?
The present book, it is hoped, will at least have made the reader aware of the implications of the alternative hypothesis: that the ‘control mechanism’ may operate from ‘in here’. For it has tried to show that man has many levels, many ‘selves’, and that, moreover, the level of everyday existence is, in some strange sense, untrue. The being who looks out of my eyes is not ‘me’ at all. He is an impostor. The real ‘me’ is up there, beyond my present consciousness. He knows things that ‘I’ do not know. Consequently he can plan things that are beyond my understanding.
This recognition could provide the basic hypothesis needed if we are to understand the nature and purpose of UFOs.