Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience Read online

  But it seems to me that the question of whether the Chilbolton ‘messages’ are genuine is a matter of common sense, requiring no special knowledge of physics, astronomy or binary mathematics. The earliest crop circles were often merely that: circles. I could believe that some of these were made by a lot of men from MI5 carrying planks. But the Chilbolton face is a kind of giant newspaper photograph made by flattening corn so as to create shadows, and seems to raise the same problem as the great animal glyphs on the Nazca desert in Peru: how people on the ground could have ‘drawn’ them without the perspective that could be obtained from the air.

  As to the ‘pixel’ reply to the Arecibo transmission, I think that anyone who studies it closely would agree that it would have taken a group of crop hoaxers armed with strings and some ‘corn-flattening’ device many hours of hard work—always with the knowledge that they could easily attract attention or be noticed from the Chilbolton observatory. If SETI wants to convince the world that it is a hoax, then all they have to do is to duplicate the feat in a single night.

  It is the view of the author of Messages from Space, an account of Chilbolton by Jay Goldner, that the crop circles are formed more or less instantaneously, with some kind of energy beam in which the pattern is already encoded.

  Let me at his point make another attempt to reassess the whole UFO phenomenon. The original question was simply a matter of whether these were what they seemed to be, giant discs, or something more ordinary, like weather balloons. It certainly seemed fairly apparent to sensible people that most tales of ‘alien contact’, like those of George Adamski, were inventions.

  Then came a new phase, the ‘abductions’, of which one of the first was the case of police patrolman Herb Schirmer in 1967. ‘Abductees’ mostly seemed to lose all memory of what had happened until, like Schirmer, they underwent hypnosis and remembered being taken on board UFOs. Schirmer was told by the ‘aliens’ that they were conducting some kind of ‘breeding programme’ with human beings.

  This was also the conclusion arrived at by Professor John Mack, of the Harvard Medical School, when the artist Budd Hopkins persuaded him to meet a number of people who had reason to believe they were ‘abductees’. Mack, whose first reaction was that such people must be ‘crazy’, was soon convinced that most of them were as normal as he was. The result was his book Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994), of which I speak in the first chapter of the present book. It almost caused him to lose his job at Harvard, but fortunately sanity prevailed.

  I had learned of the phenomenon of ‘alien abduction’ in the autumn of 1994, at a ‘Fortfest’ in Washington D.C., organised by Phyllis Benjamin, when I attended a lecture by David Jacobs, a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, called ‘Abduction and the Paranormal’. My wife and I had shared lunch with Jacobs, and I had asked him: ‘What do you think this UFO thing is all about?’ He then told me that he was at present writing a book on the subject, which he hoped would provide the explanation I was seeking.

  This finally came out in 1998, and I hastened to buy it. The title was The Threat, and it expressed the conviction that the aim of the abductions was to slowly replace the human race with a race of hybrids—a combination of humans and aliens.

  Now this conclusion was not all that strange to me, since Herb Schirmer had said as much in 1967. All that came as a surprise was that a person as balanced and sober as I knew Jacobs to be should utter such prophesies of doom (even though it seems his publisher thought up the title).

  But it was not quite as alarming as it might have been. To begin with, John Mack had already raised the same speculation at the end of Abducted. There he says (p. 399):

  My own impression, gained from what abductees have told me, is that consciousness expansion and personal transformation is a basic aspect of the abduction phenomenon. I have come to this conclusion from noting in case after case the extent to which the information communicated by alien beings to experiencers is fundamentally about the need for a change in human consciousness and our relationship to the earth and one another. Even the helplessness and loss or surrender of control which are, at least initially, forced upon the abductees by the aliens—one of the most traumatic aspects of the experiences—seem to be in some way ‘designed’ to bring about a kind of ego death from which spiritual growth and the expansion of consciousness may follow.

  He goes on to admit:

  But my focus upon growth and transformation might reflect a bias of mine. The people who choose to come to see me may know of my interest in such aspects of human psychology, and may be aware that I consider my work with abductees to be a co-creative process. In some cases Arthur, for example, the commitment to environmental sustainability and human transformation antedated contact with me.

  In other words, the fact that David Jacobs and John Mack can both be aware of the ‘threatening’ implications of the ‘hybridisation’ programme, but take opposing views of it, obviously offers us a choice. In this present book, as will be seen, I am inclined to accept Mack’s views.

  In fact, the reason will become clear to any reader of Mack’s second book, Passport to the Cosmos (1999). He emphasises that for many native peoples, like the Dagara of West Africa, the supernatural is a part of their everyday lives; and he quotes an American Sequoyah Indian, saying that his people are spirit, and live in a world of spirit and meaning, while whites live in a world of science and facts. The implication is that such a person as Credo Mutwa, spiritual leader of the Sangomas of South Africa (to whom Mack devotes a chapter), naturally inhabits a realm between physical and spiritual and is not troubled by the dichotomy.

  I had known John Mack before he became involved in abductee research, for he was the author of one of the best books on T. E. Lawrence, of whom I write in The Outsider, and in 2003 I would attend a UFO conference with him in Italy. Passport to the Cosmos makes it clear that he was becoming interested in the mystery of whether human beings survive death, which I had also come to accept as factual after writing a book called Afterlife. Another friend, Montague Keen, one of the world’s foremost psychical researchers, had also come to know Mack. Monty died of a heart attack in 2004 at the age of 80, and in no time at all, his widow, Veronica, was receiving ‘messages’ from him.

  One day in September 2004, my wife and I were invited to a séance at Veronica’s home in Totteridge, north London. John Mack was also due like us, he was going to stay overnight. John had been in central London having lunch with another mutual friend, the biologist Rupert Sheldrake.

  He never arrived. Emerging from Totteridge underground station late at night, he was knocked down and killed by a car driven by a man who had a record for careless driving.

  Yet typically, the next time I heard from Veronica Keen on the phone, she read me aloud an extract from an account of a séance in Berlin, in which both John Mack and Monty Keen manifested via the medium, and John said how strange he found it to be speaking to a sympathetic audience so soon after his death . . .

  Readers who are disinclined to accept the reality of ‘survival’ will also be inclined to dismiss this. But I think it makes clear why I prefer to accept John Mack’s conclusions to those of David Jacobs.

  1

  A PROBLEM WITH

  TOO MANY SOLUTIONS?

  In March 1995, I spent a few days in a small town called Marion, near Boston, at a conference on Consciousness Evolution; my fellow speakers were Rhea White, Peter Russell, and Stanislav Grof. Marion is one of those old fashioned New England towns that looks as if it is still in the middle of the nineteenth century.

  I had met Grof in California in the 1980s, and admired his work. As a young man in communist Czechoslovakia, Grof had read Freud, and been deeply impressed by the clarity of the style, and Freud’s ability to ‘decode the obscure language of the unconscious mind’. Grof decided to become a psychologist, and went to medical school. He later trained in psychoanalysis under the president of the Czech Psychoanalytic Association. But, when it a
ctually came to applying Freud’s ideas to real people, he became thoroughly frustrated. They either didn’t seem to work, or, if they worked, took a very long time. Freud himself had often spent years over a case, with minimal success.

  One day, a package arrived from the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Laboratories in Basle. It was a new drug called LSD, and the Sandoz Laboratories were sending it to psychologists all over the world and asking them to test it.

  Grof himself tried it, and it changed his life. ‘I was treated to a fantastic display of colourful visions, some abstract and geometrical, others filled with symbolic meaning. I felt an array of emotions of an intensity I had never dreamed possible’.

  And when lights were flashed in his eyes,

  I was hit by a radiance that seemed comparable to the light at the epicentre of an atomic explosion . . . This thunderbolt of light catapulted me from my body . . . My consciousness seemed to explode into cosmic dimensions.

  I found myself thrust into the middle of a cosmic drama that previously had been far beyond even my wildest imaginings. I experienced the Big Bang, raced through black holes and white holes in the universe, my consciousness becoming what could have been exploding supernovas, pulsars, quasars, and other cosmic events.

  (The Holotropic Mind, 1993)

  What impressed him so much was the sense of the reality of what he was seeing. Like Aldous Huxley, and so many others who have experimented with ‘psychedelics’, he felt that this was far more than a mere drug trip.

  Shaken to the core by what he recognised as a ‘mystical’ experience, Grof realised that ‘this drug could heal the gap between the theoretical brilliance of psychoanalysis and its lack of effectiveness as a therapeutic tool’. People suffering from mental illness are trapped in a kind of subjective hell; Grof saw that LSD might be used to restore contact with reality—not just ordinary ‘objective reality’, but a far wider reality.

  He began a research programme, administering doses of LSD to patients. The effect of small doses, he found, was to bring back all kinds of childhood memories—just as in orthodox Freudianism. But larger doses brought on mystical experiences that sounded like those described in the classic texts of Eastern mysticism—even though few of the patients knew anything about Eastern philosophy. It looked as if the LSD had established communication with the Jungian collective unconscious.

  In due course, Grof moved to America, continued his experiments with LSD and other forms of ‘consciousness expansion’ (such as hyperventilation), and became known as one of the minds at the ‘cutting edge’ of a new psychology.

  Stan Grof is a huge man, with mild brown eyes, and a manner so serene and gentle that it is impossible to imagine him losing his temper. When I went across to say hello on that first morning, he introduced me to the man he was talking to, Prof. John Mack of Harvard. In fact, I already knew John—I had met him at some conference such as this, and had told him then how much I admired his biography of Lawrence of Arabia, which seemed to me the best book on Lawrence ever written. I had just reread it, in preparation for a television programme on Lawrence that I was scripting. Now we exchanged a few polite words, and I left them to their interrupted conversation.

  In fact, I saw very little of John Mack during the next few days; conferences of this sort demand a high level of social interaction with people who have paid for tickets. We occasionally nodded to each other in the distance or passed the salt at meals. It did not occur to me to ask him what he was doing nowadays.

  There was plenty to absorb during the three-day conference. Rhea White talked about ‘exceptional human experience’, and described how she had become interested in the subject in her teens, when the car she was driving was sideswiped by a skidding coal truck in a snowstorm. She suddenly found herself floating above the car, so high that she thought she could see the eastern seaboard. Then the thought struck her: ‘So this is what it’s like to die’. She experienced a sense of total peace—and suddenly found herself lying on the bonnet of her car in the snow. She had been hurled through the windscreen and had thirteen fractures. Her companion, she found later, had been killed outright.

  The experience led to her reading books on religion and philosophy, and finally becoming an assistant to J. B. Rhine at his Institute of Parapsychology at Duke University.

  But what impressed me most at that conference was an anecdote that surfaced by chance. The four of us—Rhea, Peter Russell, Stan Grof, and I—were engaged in a symposium, when Stan mentioned that he thought he had once had contact with an active force of evil. When I asked him to elaborate, he said the story was too long. Backed up by the others—and the audience—I asked him to tell it all the same.

  When he had first been in America, he said, he had attended a psychiatric conference. One of the psychiatrists was presenting the case of a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Flora, a depressive with violent suicidal tendencies. At the age of sixteen, Flora had taken part in a robbery in which a night watchman had been killed, and she was sentenced to prison. Released on parole after four years, she became a drug addict and an alcoholic. She had to fight impulses to drive her car over a cliff or collide with another car. Then she got into further trouble after wounding her girlfriend with a gun she was cleaning while on heroin.

  At the end of the conference, Grof was asked by her psychiatrist if he would give her LSD treatment. It was a difficult decision, because there was already considerable hysteria about psychedelic drugs, and, if Flora murdered somebody after the LSD treatment, it would be blamed on the drug. But, since Flora had no other prospects, Grof decided to take the risk. He began to treat Flora back at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, where he was working.

  Her first two sessions with high doses of LSD were not unusual. She relived struggles in the birth canal, and came to recognise that many of her conflicts and suicidal tendencies were due to birth trauma. Yet, although she discharged large amounts of tension, her progress seemed minimal.

  Two hours into the third session, the facial cramps from which she normally suffered became stronger and more painful. Suddenly, her face froze into what Grof describes as ‘a mask of evil’. She began to speak in a deep male voice, and she seemed to undergo a total change of personality.

  The male voice introduced itself as the Devil. He ordered Grof to stay away from her, saying she belonged to him, and that he would punish anyone who tried to take her from him. Then he began to utter threats: what would happen to Grof, his colleagues in the room, and the research programme, if Grof persisted in treating her. Grof says they could all feel the ‘tangible presence of something alien’ in the room. The threats showed an amazing insight into Grof’s own personal life and those of his assistants. Flora herself could not possibly have acquired such detailed knowledge—she was not even a patient in the hospital.

  Grof’s mixture of fear and aggression seemed somehow to feed the entity. He even thought of using a crucifix to try to drive it away. Instead, he placed himself in a meditative state, and tried to envisage a capsule of light around them both.

  The next two hours were the longest he had ever spent. Gradually, her hand—which had become clawlike when the ‘Devil’ took over—relaxed in his own, and the ‘mask of evil’ vanished.

  After the session, she remembered nothing of the ‘possession’ state—only what had led up to it, and what had followed later.

  Quite suddenly, Flora improved dramatically. She gave up alcohol and drugs and began to attend religious meetings. The facial spasms ceased. She even experimented with heterosexuality and was married for three months, but found heterosexual intercourse painful. She returned to lesbianism—this time without the guilt that had tormented her—and took a job as a taxi driver.

  We all listened, fascinated; there could be no doubt that the story was the highlight of the symposium.

  Grof was disinclined to accept the ‘possession’ hypothesis, preferring to regard it as the manifestation of some ‘Jungian archetype’—in other words, as some m
anifestation from the distant human past. But I, who had written a great deal about multiple personality, felt that there was no particular advantage in the Jungian explanation. After all, if Rhea White could leave her body, then there seemed to be no obvious reason why someone—or something—else should not take up temporary residence in Grof’s patient.

  The following day, my wife and I were driven to Boston, where we had to spend the day before catching our night plane. At that time, I was gathering material for a book on the world’s religious sites, and I asked our driver whether there was a large bookshop in Boston. He recommended Waterstones. So the next morning we made our way there.

  I not only found some useful books on religious sites, but also saw a copy of Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, by John Mack, which I was not aware he had written. And since it was a paperback, and easy to carry, I bought it to read on the plane.

  I must admit that it was not a subject in which I felt any compelling interest. In the previous autumn I had attended the Fortfese in Washington, run by Phyllis Benjamin, in which David Jacobs, the author of Secret Life, had given a talk entitled ‘Abduction and the Paranormal’. It left me totally bewildered, because he assumed that the audience knew all about ‘the abduction phenomenon’, and my knowledge of it was almost nonexistent.

  I had come across the case of a police patrolman, Herb Schirmer, who had seen a UFO at a crossroads in Ashland, Nebraska, then saw it take off. Back at the police station, he realised that it was later than he thought—he seemed to have lost a period of about twenty minutes. Regressed by a hypnotist, he recalled being taken on board by aliens, who told him that they were conducting some breeding programme concerning humans. Then he was released—with his memory erased.

  But that was in 1967, almost thirty years before. I was unaware that there had been a mighty wave of abduction reports since the 1970s.