CONTENTS

Editor......................................................................Morley Legg
A Concise History of the Future.................................John Frodsham
Unquenchable Fire...................................................Michael Jordan
Australia' s International UFO Symposium..................Morley Legg
Close Encounters and Consciousness .......................Simon Harvey-Wilson
Journey to Sai Baba.................................................Marianne Batenburg
Testing the Magic Mountain......................................Morley Legg
A Lie in A'lie'ns, Perhaps..........................................Brian Richards
Synchronicity..........................................................Humphrey Plumstead
Fertility Futility.........................................................Brian Richards
Unconventional Flying Object.....................................Simon Harvey-Wilson

ASPR/UFORUM PO Box 626 Applecross, Western Australia, 6153
ASPR/UFORUM Internet home-page: http//www.ozemail.com.au/~amilani/ufo.html
Copyright: ASPR/UFORUM November 1996, Perth, Western Australia

EDITORIAL

Australia's International UFO Symposium was held in Brisbane in October 1996 and drew in over 500 people, seven of whom were ASPR members. The impact of such lectures over three days proved both highly stimulating and emotionally taxing, but there were lighter moments to restore balance. Those interested in the tapes of the Symposium, or the 194 page $20 book of the papers submitted by speakers, should contact: QUFON, PO Box 2183 Mansfield, Brisbane Queensland Australia 4122.
In previous Journals Mike Jordan has focussed on some of the major UFOs cases that have recently come to fruition, like Linda Cortile's. Mike became interested in the Travis Walton abduction claim of 1975 to the extent of writing to a US author about it 15 years ago. He now reviews Walton's literary achievement, Fire in the Sky which clears away many doubts, and informs us about the misleading scenes in the film of the same name.

Testing the Magic Mountain was written in August and draws on writers' different perceptions of UFOs. It proved to be an aid in categorising different speakers in Brisbane.

In his article on the research required to gain an understanding of close encounters Simon Harvey-Wilson assembled every clue available and followed threads that led into the central core of nature, thus proving a window into NDEs, UFOs and the lens-changing capacity of consciousness to gain access to the existence and workings of these other dimensions. Scientists are usually only interested in proof of nuts and bolts ufology - his book review reveals that the man-made versions must be well advanced by now - but perhaps it is timely for open-minded scientists to be attracted to the vision provided by this informative article.

ASPR/UFORUM Publications

ASPR was formed in 1979. In the early days newsletters of four or more pages were being produced once a month by various editors. About 1990 a rule was made to restrict it to one page, and then early in 1993 the idea of a producing a magazine came about. This current Journal is our second for 1996, making it our sixth main publication. The first two were called PSI Magazine, ('93, '94) and then it was changed to The Journal of Alternative Realities (JAR): ('94, '95, March '96).

Although these earlier publications have sold out, they are available for viewing in the Alexander Library. This also applies to PSI Newsletters which now must number about 300, forming a picture of our history and development. Andrew Milani has opened an ASPR/UFORUM home-page on the Internet on which our last two Journals are available.
ASPR/UFORUM Internet home-page: http//www.ozemail.com.au/~amilani/ufo.html
For those interested: MUFONÆs World Wide Web address is:
http://www.rutgers.edu/~mcgrew/MUFON

A CONCISE HISTORY OF THE FUTURE

by J. D. Frodsham

Long-range precognition, especially when it deals with events of national or international importance- wars, revolutions, natural disasters, epidemics and political upheavals - is notoriously inaccurate. Plainly worded, precisely-dated prophecies have suffered the most, as the passage of time has revealed their falsity. We may instance the prediction of Fra Giorgio Maria da Terni, who prophecied, in 1971, to the consternation of many devout Italians, that between 1973 and 1975 "Naples and a number of other coastal cities will be completely destroyed by tremendous naval bombardments. Beginning with Rome, pillaged and sacked, scourged with pestilence and fire, numberless savage hordes will pour into it one after the other ... thirty million Italians will be massacred and eliminated by appalling atrocities." (Woldben, 1973)1

This prophet of doom is excelled by an astrologer, A. Barhault, who in 1956 predicted the outbreak of the Third World War in 1972, followed by a Fourth World War, which "will mainly concern Asia", in 1980, when India and China would be the principal combatants. (Barhault, 1956)2 Gordon Michael ScallionÆs precisely dated forecasts of massive earthquakes and other earth changes have also proved erroneous.

Prophecies as precisely dated as these are clearly much more impressive than the more common type of prophecy which couches itself in vague terms and does not specify the date of the impending catastrophe. However, when disproved by the passage of time, these precise forecasts serve only to discredit their authors - for who could take Fra Giorgio and Monsieur Barhault seriously after such a fiasco? - and so are generally avoided. Even Nostradamus generally avoided dating his prophecies exactly, especially when they were likely to occur within his own lifetime.

Such is not the case, however, with the anonymous author of a number of prophecies recorded in a pamphlet published in Leipzig in 1790. The copy I consulted bears a seal indicating that it came into the possession of the Library of the Imperial and Royal Police Office in 1792, presumably for scrutiny as a subversive document, since the author appeared to have had knowledge in advance of the assassination of Gustavus III of Sweden, which occurred in that very year. In 1805 the book was handed over to the Imperial and Royal University of Vienna Library, whose seal it now bears.

That indefatigable journalist, Cornelius Tabori, came across it in the University Library in 1936 and noted its prediction of a World War in 1938. (Tabori, 1951)3

Alan Vaughan included a rather inaccurate translation of part of its concluding pages in his work on prophecy. (Vaughan, 1974)4 Apart from these brief references, however, no serious attempt seems to have been made to check the accuracy of these long-range forecasts, covering a span of two hundred and ten years. Actually, as the anonymous author of the pamphlet tells us, the old Polish monk supposed to have made these prophecies had begun them before 1720.5 Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that this is true. If we could prove that the book had, in fact, been in existence since around 1720 its importance would be greatly enhanced. A precisely detailed account of the outbreak and course of the French Revolution made in the opening years of the eighteenth century would certainly rank as the greatest prophetic feat in recorded history.

The translation from German that follows adheres strictly to the original text, apart from the fact that I have numbered the prophecies and appended a commentary after each of them.

Notes

1. A. Woldben, After Nostradamus, (London, 1974), p. 197.
2. A. Barhault, ("Rumelius"), Ce que sera l'avenir du monde, (Paris, 1956).
3. Cornelius Tabori, My Occult Diary, (London, 1951), pp. 228-131.
4. Alan Vaughan, Patterns of Prophecy, (London, 1974) pp. 204-205. Vaughan appears to have consulted only the 1848 Leipzig edition, which is inferior to the original as a source.
5. The prophecies up to 1790 were not included in the pamphlet, presumably because its readers were interested in the future, not the past.

Highly amazing PROPHECIES of an old monk in Poland from the year 1790 to the end of the world in the year 2000, which have accurately come true to this very day. Found and extracted from an old monastery chronicle by Franz Lima, Leipzig, 1790.

It was during the autumn of 1790 when I commenced my journey from Riga to Salen. Since it was late in the year the roads were in a rather bad condition; and as I had never been to that country it was quite on the cards that I should get lost in a big forest one day. I was alone with my horse when night fell and caught me in the forest. There were neither moon nor stars to point the way and I drifted more and more from the correct path. As I wandered about, I discerned a light in the distance and directed my horse towards it. I came upon a huge building which I took to be a monastery. As I had discovered on several previous journeys, there are gentle and upright people among Catholics and it is therefore unjust if one forms hatred against such people who do not practice religion our way. I therefore knocked at the gate, which was shortly afterwards opened by a monk whose face bore an expression of righteousness and charity. Bidding me a hearty welcome he took a step towards me, saying: "You are a traveller who has lost his way. Come and enjoy the hospitality of our monastery until you feel fit to travel again."

My clerical host served me food and drink and then pointed the way to the bedchamber. I went to sleep and did not waken until the monk summoned me to breakfast. When scrutinising my lodging and the man who had received me so warmly, I realised it was the abbot himself, to whom all the other monks turned with great love and respect.

During breakfast we had the opportunity to get to know each other. The present war with the French, a people who no longer wished to respect all law and God's commandments, was our first topic. During the conversation the Father spoke in such a prophetic manner that he reminded me of the prophets of the Old Testament. I was quite astonished, and on several occasions professed to disagree with him only to be silenced by his forceful and convincing argumentation. He spoke of the future consequences of the French war as if God himself had revealed them to him.

"My gracious friend," I said, "how is it possible that you can speak with such authority on matters to come which are only known to God alone?"

"You are right in some respects," he responded. "However, do we not have the same God whom the prophets and patriarchs of the Old Testament had? And should it therefore not be possible for that God to reveal himself as he has done before?"

"No," I retorted. "God does not do such things any more!" "I too thought this way in my younger years," he said, "but sixty years have taught me to think differently. I arrived at this monastery at the age of ten in order to dedicate my life to God. An eighty-year-old monk was abbot then, and whenever I saw him or spoke to him I felt such respect that he too noticed it and came to like me. On his deathbed he handed me a manuscript, which he had drafted for me only. With great surprise, I have since found that since then everything has happened in the year mentioned in the book."

Greatly astonished at this revelation, I begged the monk to allow me to copy it and thus I am able to give a short extract from the book here. The book contains a history of the world from Adam to the year 2000 A.D. As the world since Adam had existed some two thousand years until the time of Moses' Ten Commandments and since a further two thousand years had passed between then and the birth of Jesus Christ, the ninety-year-old Father had come to the conclusion that the world would not exist beyond the year 2000. Everything that had passed in the world prior to the writing of the said book had been recounted, partly from the Bible and partly from history books.

From that time onward, however, the prophecies commenced, prophecies which my host had found to be accurate for the past sixty years. To my great astonishment. I found that the present war with the French had been predicted by the Father long ago. As past events are already known to us I will briefly list only the prophecies which relate to the future.

(I have starred* those prophecies which proved accurate. J.F.)

PROPHECY 1:* During the year 1790 and 1791 the French people will continue their revolution and royalty will become but a shadow.

COMMENTARY: True. The French Revolution, which had begun in July 1789, continued its momentum throughout 1790 and 1791. By 1791 Louis XVI was a virtual prisoner and the power of the Jacobins and other extremists was growing steadily.

PROPHECY 2:* The people will elect persons from among their midst whose laws and orders will be followed.

COMMENTARY: True. The Constituent Assembly dissolved itself in September 1791, being replaced by the newly elected Legislative Assembly.

PROPHECY 3: The war between Prussia, Austria, Turkey and Sweden will come to an end when the German head dies.

COMMENTARY: False. Presumably the manuscript had predicted a war between these countries. The statement may be partly true in that Frederick II of Prussia had died in 1786.

PROPHECY 4:* The French King will try to escape but will thus worsen his fate.

COMMENTARY: True. Louis attempted to flee from France in June 1791 but was turned back at Varennes, as prophesied in a famous quatrain of Nostradamus. Since it was learnt that he had meant to re-enter the country with an Austrian army and restore the ancien regime, his attempted escape boded ill for him.

PROPHECY 5:* In the year 1792 one of the kings will be assassinated (the King of Sweden).

COMMENTARY: True. Gustavus III of Sweden was assassinated on 29 March 1792, during a masked ball held in his palace.

PROPHECY 6:* Austria and Prussia will throw their full might against France.

COMMENTARY: True. February 1792 saw the formation of the Austro-Prussian alliance against France.

PROPHECY 7:* However, the French will move into Germany and cause great havoc and devastation.

COMMENTARY: True. In October 1792 the French crossed the Rhine after capturing Mayence. In March 1793 the Rhenish-German National Convention voted for annexation to France.

PROPHECY 8: The residence of a spiritual ruler will suffer most.

COMMENTARY: Unclear.

PROPHECY 9:* 1793. This year will see blemishes that cannot be removed; the King will terminate his life like a common criminal.

COMMENTARY: True. Louis XVI was executed on January 21, 1793.

PROPHECY 10:* Man's ingenuity will invent a device by which both King and Queen and many thousands will lose their lives.

COMMENTARY:True. A reference to the guillotine, invented in 1789. Note that the execution of Marie-Antoinette (October, 1793) is also prophesied.

PROPHECY 11:* Many cities will again be taken from the French, who will cause great devastation to many areas.

COMMENTARY: True. The formation of the First Coalition against France in February 1793, coupled with the declaration of war against France by the Holy Roman Empire in March 1793, led to the loss of considerable French territory, e.g. Corsica and the French settlements in India, as well as the re-capture of the Rhineland and Belgium. There was widespread devastation.

PROPHECY 12:* Prussia and Russia will divide Poland between themselves.

COMMENTARY: True. Russia and Prussia effected the second partition of Poland on January 23, 1793.

PROPHECY 13:* A German trading city will come under the Prussian eagle.

COMMENTARY: True. Danzig, Thorn, Posen, Gresen and Kalisch were taken by Prussia in May 1793. The reference in our text may well be to Danzig, the most prominent of these cities.

PROPHECY 14:* The year 1794 will be most fertile.

COMMENTARY: True.

PROPHECY 15:* The fields will be covered with fruits of all kind, but the war with France will cause great price rises in many regions none the less.

COMMENTARY: True. Inflation was rampant in many parts of Europe in 1794 as a result of the war.

PROPHECY 16: Great battles will ensue and the blood of the slain will flow like water and drench the earth.

COMMENTARY: Partly true. Though there was much fighting in 1794 the great battles came later.

PROPHECY 17:* Despite all this the French will not accept peace or lawful order.

COMMENTARY: True. The French Revolution continued on its course, the Great Terror of June and July 1794 culminating in the execution of Robespierre.

PROPHECY 18: In 1795 all European rulers will unite against this vermin.

COMMENTARY: Partly true. The First Coalition of European rulers had taken place in 1793. The Second Coalition was not formed until 1799.

PROPHECY 19:* The war will take many years and spread over all the earth.

COMMENTARY: True. Europe was not pacified until 1815, by which time all of Europe and many European possessions (e.g. India, Ceylon, West Indies and Cape of Good Hope) had changed hands.

PROPHECY 20: 1796 will see many earth tremors even in regions previously unaffected. These will cause severe devastation in many places

COMMENTARY: Unverified.

PROPHECY 21: - as will be the case in Calabria in 1883.

COMMENTARY: False. The great earthquake in Calabria did not occur until 1908. But our prophet was not too far out.

PROPHECY 22:* In 1797 and 1798 the citizens of free towns will rise against their authorities and the rulers will unite and divide them among themselves.

COMMENTARY: True, though somewhat unclear in expression. This refers both to the overthrow of the Helvetic Confederation (1798) and to the proclamation of the Cisalpine Republic (1797). In each case formerly independent states broke loose from their former rulers only to fall under control of France. A similar fate befell Genoa, which became the Ligurian Republic (1797) and Venice (1797), which was handed over to Austria. In the case of the Cisalpine Republic, risings in Milan, Bologna, Ferrara, Ravenna and Reggio, which were normally 'free towns' but actually districts loosely attached to the Papal States, led to their incorporation into a new Republic.

PROPHECY 23: There will be a few years peace on Earth.

COMMENTARY: False. The war increased in intensity after 1798 with the formation of the Second Coalition in 1799, the year in which Britain and Austria rejected Napoleon's offer of peace.

PROPHECY 24: The year 1800 will see terrible floods, particularly in Holland.

COMMENTARY: Unverified.

PROPHECY 25: East Friesland too will suffer, but will benefit by a rich crop in the following year.

COMMENTARY: Unverified.

PROPHECY 26: Whilst Holland will have to import its grain at great expense from neighbouring countries.

COMMENTARY: Unverified.

PROPHECY 27: In 1804 new upheavals will occur in Poland.

COMMENTARY: False.

PROPHECY 28: The richest landlords and citizens will look for peace and security under Prussia and settle in Lithuania.

COMMENTARY: False.

PROPHECY 29:* The year 1805 will see a war between France and Austria and if the latter does not sue for peace it will lose all.

COMMENTARY: True. Napoleon defeated the Russo-Austrian forces at Austerlitz.

PROPHECY 30:* 1806 will bring war between Prussia and France.

COMMENTARY: True. Prussia declared war on France in October 1806.

PROPHECY 31:* In 1807 the same war will spread across the whole of Prussia.

COMMENTARY: True, in that the Treaty of Tilsit (July, 1807) cost Prussia all Polish Territories and all territories west of the Elbe.

PROPHECY 32: 1814 and 1815 will see two great battles, the second one between Alsace and Lorraine.

COMMENTARY: Partly true. October 1813 witnessed Napoleon's defeat in the battle of Leipzig in which the French alone lost 50,000 men. 1815, of course, was the year of Waterloo. Alsace and Lorraine were not involved in any battles.

PROPHECY 33: Should peace come about however, then a new war will break out.

COMMENTARY: False.

PROPHECY 34: A battle will ensue and France will be partitioned in four.

COMMENTARY: False.

PROPHECY 35: From 1815 the teachings of Christianity will decline.

COMMENTARY: False. 1815 marked the beginning of a broad revival of religious faith throughout Europe.

PROPHECY 36: Prussia will use its power to enforce the true religion of the reformation.

COMMENTARY: False. After 1815 even Prussia was prepared to support the revival of papal power in Europe.

PROPHECY 37: In 1824 the Turkish Grand Vizier will start a war against the Emperors of Austria and Russia and threaten the whole of Europe until Prussia, Sweden and England join in and bring this war to an end in 1835.

COMMENTARY: False

PROPHECY 38:* In 1830 another revolution will sweep France. COMMENTARY: True, the revolution of July 1830 installed Louis Phillippe on the throne of France as a constitutional monarch.

PROPHECY 39: - which will see a new government of short duration.

COMMENTARY: False, the government was stable until 1848.

PROPHECY 40: The Turks and Persians will be subdued. COMMENTARY: False.

PROPHECY 41: Constantinople will become the residence of the Roman Emperor.

COMMENTARY: False.

PROPHECY 42: Persia however will be seized by Russia for all time.

COMMENTARY: False.

PROPHECY 43: In 1840 the House of Orange will die out and Holland will be ceded to Prussia.

COMMENTARY: False.

PROPHECY 44: The years 1846, 1847 and 1848 will be blessed with rich harvests.

COMMENTARY: False.

PROPHECY 45:* In 1848 a terrible revolution will spread across Europe and topple kings and emperors.

COMMENTARY: True. A brilliantly accurate prediction! 1848 was the Year of Revolutions. Two Emperors (France and Austria) were forced to abdicate.

PROPHECY 46:* This Revolution will culminate in France.

COMMENTARY: True. Louis Phillippe abdicated and France was the only country whose governmental structure underwent marked change as a result of the revolution.

PROPHECY 47: The French Emperor will endure the same fate as in 1793.

COMMENTARY: False.

PROPHECY 48:* A better time will come for France.

COMMENTARY: True, if this refers to the Second Empire.

PROPHECY 49:* France will not be able to treasure its freedom, will abuse it, fall apart and destroy itself.

COMMENTARY: True, if this refers to the events of 1870-71.

PROPHECY 50:* In 1849 even divided Germany will see better times.

COMMENTARY: True, if this refers to the convocation of the National Parliament (May-December, 1848) and its subsequent Declaration of the Fundamental Rights of the German People.

PROPHECY 51: The people, armed with good spirits and sound minds, will demand their rights and obtain their freedom by force if need be.

COMMENTARY: False. The National Parliament failed and the democratic risings were suppressed.

PROPHECY 52: As for Germany and neighbouring countries, 1849, 1850 will also be blessed years for England and Ireland.

COMMENTARY: False. Ireland was still suffering from the terrible famine and depopulation caused by the second failure of the potato crop in 1846. And although England, as Macaulay put it, had "order in the midst of anarchy", 1849 and 1850 were years of economic instability and high unemployment.

PROPHECY 53: In religion brother will feud with brother, professing to have the right belief.

COMMENTARY: Unclear.

PROPHECY 54: A split commencing in 1850 will climax in 1858 with the complete expulsion of the Jesuits.

COMMENTARY: False.

PROPHECY 55: In 1854 Venice will perish in one night and none will escape death for all will drown.

COMMENTARY: False.

PROPHECY 56:1860-65 will see major earthquakes in Italy and ports will sink into the Mediterranean.

COMMENTARY: False.

PROPHECY 57: 1866 will see a revolution in England.COMMENTARY: False.

PROPHECY 58:* 1870 will see a new discord between the Pope and the House of Austria.

COMMENTARY: True. In July, Austria revoked the concordat with the Papacy after the decree of Papal Infallibility.

PROPHECY 59: The Pope will be subdued after bloody battles and become a paid priest of the Emperor.

COMMENTARY: False.

PROPHECY 60: In 1870 the whole of Italy will be subject to the Emperor.

COMMENTARY: False.

PROPHECY 61: In 1882 Poland will ask the German King to take over the country so that Germany's protection and laws may be enjoyed.

COMMENTARY: False

PROPHECY 62:* A big fleet will be constructed enabling Germany to fight on sea as well as on land.

COMMENTARY: True, though the expansion of German naval power did not begin until later in the century.

PROPHECY 63:* In 1889 a pestilence will sweep across Europe claiming some 100,000 lives.

COMMENTARY: True. A major epidemic of influenza decimated Europe in 1889, claiming thousands of lives. This appears to have been the first outbreak of this new viral strain.

PROPHECY 64: People will flee all over the world and Europe will become depopulated.

COMMENTARY: False, in this context, though emigration from Europe reached new heights in the 80's.

PROPHECY 65: New countries will rise in South America which will surpass Europe in law, religion and everything else.

COMMENTARY: False.

PROPHECY 66: In the year 1890 an earthquake will destroy many German cities as well.

COMMENTARY: False.

PROPHECY 67:* So strange as many a century has been, the twentieth century will be the one where all the most terrible things will befall mankind.

COMMENTARY: True, at least in this commentator's estimation.

PROPHECY 68:* 1900. At the beginning of the century many princes will turn on their fathers, citizens against their governments, children against their parents and nations against nations.

COMMENTARY: True.

PROPHECY 69:* This will go on until 1938, when a general world war will threaten the whole of creation.

COMMENTARY: True, though World War II did not actually begin until 1939. An astonishing hit!

PROPHECY 70:* Whole countries will be destroyed by the ravages of war and many of the big cities will be destroyed and emptied of their population.

COMMENTARY: True. And equally astonishing in its accuracy!

PROPHECY 71: Only the year 1986 will finally see peace.

COMMENTARY: False, unfortunately.

PROPHECY 72:* Only a few years later many will carry on religion in a different way. There will only be a few who will remain true to the Bible and the true teachings of Jesus.

COMMENTARY: True, as far as much of Europe is concerned.

PROPHECY 73: In the year 1987 a great darkness will spread across the earth, but it will last only a few days.

COMMENTARY: False.

PROPHECY 74: In 1988 a sizeable comet will appear in the heavens which will assert such gravitational pull that the oceans will overflow and drown whole countries.

COMMENTARY: False.

PROPHECY 75: In 1996 an earthquake will shake the whole world and devour Italy, Naples, Sicily, Portugal and Spain.

COMMENTARY: False as of November 1996.

PROPHECY 76: 2000. Finally the Day of the Lord will come when He judges the living and the dead. Stars and comets will fall from the heavens and set fire to the earth and thus this earth, which has existed for six thousand years since its creation, will perish. The judgement will commence, a joy to the righteous and a terror to the sinner. Judge of the world have mercy on all!

COMMENTARY: Apocalyptic milleniarism.

This is what I wanted to report of the strange book which is now over seventy years old and which has seen many a prophecy come true, so one may gather that the other prophecies too will come true.

When you read the foregoing, be thankful to the Lord that he did not let you be born at a time when you would have to see and feel all these horrors.

Treasure God's word at all times, love your neighbours and you will not need to cry out; "Oh you mountains, fall upon us, you hills cover us?", but rather; "Praise, honour and glory be to God, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen."

(Seal of the Imperial and Royal University Library, Vienna, 1805).

CONCLUSIONS:

There is an obvious correlation in this work between the number of successful predictions and the contiguity of the event to the prophet's own time. In general, the accuracy of the prophecies decreases as they advance into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1 The most dramatic achievement is undoubtedly the forecasting of developments in the French Revolution and the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Equally impressive is the prediction of the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, both of which are assigned to their precise year. The long-range forecasting of World War II, accurate to within a year, is nothing short of astonishing. One can only hope that the other prophecies of destruction for the closing years of the twentieth century stem from traditional theology rather than clairvoyant vision.

The distortions and omissions, however, are almost as noteworthy as the successes. Our clairvoyant. failed to see the ascent to power of Napoleon and the subsequent protracted war that culminated in Waterloo (1815). He also overlooked the rise of Germany and the United States and completely missed World War I. Nor did he forecast the October Revolution, the emergence of Bolshevism and the spread of Communism across half the globe. Above all, there is no mention of the development of modern technology, though one could have thought that the very ubiquitousness of the motor-car would have forced itself on the prophet's attention, to say nothing of atomic fission and fusion, the Damocles' sword of our age. In compensation, he lists many disasters - earthquakes, wars and other catastrophes - which mercifully never occurred, among them the destruction of Venice in a single night in 1854, with all its inhabitants. One is almost tempted to adopt the hypothesis of an alternative future, developing along another world-line in a parallel universe, in which history unfolded itself as our prophet had predicted.

This disturbing work convincingly disproves the contention, advanced by some parapsychologists, that precognition involves perception, not of some future event, but rather of some future individual experience on the part of the percipient or of some other person. It also completely disproves the so-called "active hypothesis", first put forward by Angelos Tanagras and later amplified and reformulated by Jules Eisenbud, which asserts that the clairvoyant is himself the cause of the event precognised.2 We are therefore thrown back on physical theories such as those which attempt to link precognition with quantum mechanics and probability functions.3

All in all, in spite of its divagations from actuality, this is a startling and depressing document. Startling, because of its large number of successful, precisely dated predictions. Depressing, because it shows how little of the future is actually revealed to even the most psychically gifted. Truly, we see "through a glass darkly". The document also raises the old question of freedom of will. If Louis XVI had read this pamphlet would he have been forewarned and thus escaped his fate? If World War II was destined to begin place around 1938-39 then of what avail were all the forces that tried to avert war during the twenties and thirties? In the light of these considerations we should rejoice that our prophet was so often wrong. For surely all of us would prefer an open universe based on freedom to a closed, determinist universe in which we were moved like programmed robots towards our inevitable ends.4

Notes 1. This effect has also been noticed with the prophecies of Nostradamus. See J.E. Orme, "A Note on the Nostradamus Prophecies," JSPR, Vol. 55, No. 781, September 1979, and Liberte le Vert, The Prophecies and Enigmas of Nostradamus (New Jersey, 1980). Le Vert asserts that Nostradamus "was nearly always wrong" when trying to prophesy the distant future.

2. See A. Tanagras, Psychological Elements in Parapsychological Tradition (N.Y. 1967) and J. Eisenbud, Paranormal Foreknowledge (N.Y. 1982).

3. Benjamin Fal-Or has argued that time is not necessarily irreversible. D.F. Louden has postulated that there are two types of time, namely physical and psychical.

4. A useful discussion of the complex philosophical and scientific issues involved in precognition may be found in Danah Zohar, Through the Time Barrier (London, 1982), pp. 115-164. Zohar observes (p.161) that "the only future to which a faculty such as precognition could possibly have access is an indeterminate probabilistic future consisting of all the 'might-be's' packed into the Schrodinger wave-equations. Thus the inaccuracy noted in reported cases of precognition would simply be mirroring the fact that in reality itself there is ample scope for any number of alternatives in the direction future events might take." If so then we would appear to have some minimal degree of freedom to alter our future, though some events would come very close to being inevitable. We can only hope that the numerous forecasts of planet-wide dectruction during the early years of the twenty-first century will prove erroneous. In particular, let us hope that Psi-TechÆs forecasts of mass epidemics and destructive hurricanes, achieved through Technical Remote Viewing which claims one hundred per cent accuracy, turn out to be false alarms.

UNQUENCHABLE FIRE

Fire in the Sky: The Travis Walton Story
Book Review by Michael Jordan

We take for granted that as each day passes, the sum of knowledge about ourselves and the universe that we inhabit is increased enormously. In this learning process we tend not to acknowledge too loudly the reality that we frequently get things wrong. We have made, and continue to make, grave errors about the timing of historical events and we continue to grope blindly in search for clues about such fundamental issues as the origin and spiritual purpose of humanity.

Often random assumptions made by scientists tend to be taken as gospel by the public. Knowledge may be exploding in all directions but that doesn't seem to deter us from placing immovable boundaries around our version of consensus reality and ferociously attacking those who claim that these limits don't encompass the big picture.

Just imagine what limitations this must impose on our attempts to come to terms with our place in the universe. Since time immemorial humans have observed and undergone experiences that don't conform to the accepted version of reality. Why should people refrain from telling others about their experiences, for fear of disbelief and ridicule? It's very easy for a sceptic to come up with a theory, no matter how contrived, in order to explain away something that deviates markedly from the norm. Since people feel more secure with the predictable, most will readily accept such explanations.

Most readers will be familiar with the Travis Walton incident, the subject of at least three books, countless articles in newspapers and magazines and more recently the film Fire in the Sky. As far as UFO encounters are concerned, this is one of the most unique and hotly debated of them all. On November 5, 1975, near Snowflake, Arizona, a logger named Travis Walton went missing for a period of five days after standing beneath, and being struck by, a beam of blue-green light from an overhead UFO. Six other loggers were with Walton at the time and all came forward to testify to the truth of the event. Five days later, on November 10, Walton reappeared just outside the small town of Heber, near Snowflake.

Travis Walton told his story in his book The Walton Experience, published in 1978. The book was so well received that it soon was in short supply in most parts of the world. It detailed the events prior to the groupÆs sighting of the craft, his memory of what happened on board and his subsequent return. Why then, following the film version of the incident Fire in the Sky, did Travis Walton feel the need to re-tell his story in a book of the same name, published in 1996?

The short answer to this question is that the book had to be written in order to set the record straight. Quite apart from the normal, expected and welcome investigation from anyone having trouble coming to terms with this bizarre experience, a well-orchestrated campaign was mounted by sceptics with their own specific motives, aimed at discrediting Walton and his six co-workers at all costs. Much of the criticism was the result of distortions, baseless assertions and sloppy research. This material appeared in sceptics' magazines, UFO publications and newspaper articles on the case.

A typical approach would be to structure a protest built around something supposedly heard, usually at third hand, by someone who purported to know Walton or a member of his family. In a short time something that had started out as speculative would become a truism. Anyone who has ever played the game of Chinese Whispers, knows this process well. The conclusion was always that Walton and his six co-workers had fabricated the whole event, either for profit or because their timber contract was running into troubles (the logic of accusing anybody of inventing such a story to divert attention from an unfulfilled timber-felling quota, tells us something about these people).

One of the main figures responsible for attempting to discredit the story was the sceptic, Phillip Klass, known to researchers of UFOs and the paranormal generally, for the manner in which he appears to allow his personal bias to influence his analysis. There are many who believe that the intensity of Klass' attacks on the participants in the Walton affair, is directly proportionate to the strength of the case and thus the importance of suppression of the facts. So to repeat, the book had to be written before the events became distorted beyond recognition.

My initial interest in the story was further stimulated following a reading of Bill Barry's well researched book covering the case, Ultimate Encounter. In fact curiosity prompted me to write to Barry in 1981, some years after his book's publication to see whether his perspective on the case had changed with the passage of time. He replied ô...the witnesses are strong and so is much of the test evidence and I simply cannot accept the counter claim that the UFO in the woods was rigged. If Walton rigged it, he should immediately be hired to run our space programö.

Like heavy drapes being slowly drawn to allow natural sunlight to enter a murky room, Fire in the Sky systematically and methodically dispels a number of misconceptions about the original events and their aftermath. To begin with, Travis Walton had been consistently portrayed as a small town lumberjack, with limited schooling, coming from an imaginative-prone family disposed to sighting UFOs, confused and bewildered in his dealings with interrogators and contrary and evasive in his statements. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Examples of his ôquiet truthfulness and deep introspective thinkingö, to use the words of Tracy Torme, producer of the film Fire in the Sky, in his foreword to the book, emerge clearly from each page.

Following graduation from high school, Walton obtained grants to attend all three universities to which he applied, eventually choosing to attend Northern Arizona University, alternating majors between electronic engineering, law, psychology, medicine and liberal studies. To satisfy a strongly inquiring mind, he read books on a wide variety of subjects such as religion, philosophy, art, language, music, science and literature, much of his material coming together in his personal library of well over a thousand volumes. So what happens when such a person is the subject, accidentally or otherwise, of such a bizarre set of events? Should you maintain silence and thus avoid the inevitable consequences or should you tell what happened and subject yourself and your family to cruel persecution? What a dilemma!

This is one of a handful of cases in the UFO literature, dealing with abduction and relocation. What makes Fire in the Sky unique is that it is the authorÆs true account of an event, the beginning of which was witnessed by six other men whose accounts were consistent and have not wavered in the last twenty one years. What really stands out in the readerÆs mind is the extreme attention paid to every minute detail in the re-telling of the events leading up to the abduction of Walton, his conscious memory of events aboard the craft and above all the aftermath, where claims and counter claims are recorded with specificity and clarity.

The fascinating details of individuals and groups thwarted because their own agendas are not given priority, and the detailed evolution from truth to degrees of distortion to total untruth, simply emphasises some of the recognisable facets of human behaviour. What Walton does is to present the evidence in detail. We become engrossed by the minutia of polygraph testing, medical test (which showed that Walton had lost over ten lbs in five days), EKGs, EEGs, X rays and blood tests. Dr. Jean Rosenbaum (who has testified in court as an expert witness on the polygraph), stated in a press release to ABC-TV News 3 of Phoenix, our conclusion - which is absolute - is that this young man is not lying - that there is no collusion involved, no attempt to hoax ... or collusion of the family or anyone else. (Walton, 1996, p. 86)

Quite simply, anyone who is unwilling to examine all of the relevant evidence, is not justified in forming theories and opinions about the case. Of course this did not stop people from doing so and while this was going on; ...the Aerial Phenomena Research Organisation (APRO) went quietly about its business of assessing the validity of the case from a scientific standpoint. APRO performed an extensive battery of medical, psychiatric, hypnotic and polygraph examinations which, with other evidence and the physical facts of the case, expose all the accusations as unjustified. (Walton, 1996, p. 107)

Fire in the Sky includes an appendix of eighty-two pages in length which examines, under a powerful microscope the means, basis and conclusions arrived at by Phillip Klass and CSIOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal). Do not be tempted to skip this section, lengthy as it is. This is the best possible way Walton could have answered his critics. Shine the spotlight of fact on all the events, omitting nothing. In this way the truth is illuminated and those skulking in the shadows can only creep further into darkness.

Walton's disciplined, objective approach to writing the appendix is admirable. His claim is that the facts of the incident can only be evaluated on the merits of data and logical reasoning. Character assassination and personal comment is no substitute for this and he firmly makes the point that unlike Klass, he will have none of it. In writing of the latter's attempts to discredit the case, Walton shows examples of personal abuse, lack of consistency, ignoring the physical evidence and being, ôneither thorough nor accurate ... dealing not in hard facts but in distortion, supposition, innuendo and assumption, reaching one unjustified conclusion after another.ö (Walton, 1996, p. 292) What a great pity the directors of the film of the same name chose to practice such wild artistic licence in the latter part of its story, and that Walton could not exercise greater control of content. The book is a knockout, beautifully written and researched and entertaining to read. I'll let Travis Walton have the final say, by way of quick review: Seven men witnessed the event. Every one of them has stood by his story for over two decades. All passed polygraph tests concerning what they saw. There were simultaneous electrical outages in the nearest communities and various physical traces at the site, all measured independently by persons hostile to the report. The principle witness has undergone not only positive lie-detector tests, but also voice-stress analysis, regressive hypnosis and a battery of medical and psychological tests. The polygraph examiners have stood by their truthful verdicts to this day. And sceptics have been scratching around for all these years, keenly desirous of digging up anything that might remotely support their case and essentially coming up with nothing but the garbage refuted here. (Walton, 1996, p.116)

References
WALTON, T., (1996) Fire in the Sky Marlowe & Company. NY

The Australian International UFO Symposium Brisbane Queensland October 1996

by Morley Legg

THURSDAY OCTOBER 10

It wasn't until we had walked into Brisbane's Mecure Hotel restaurant at 9pm that we saw signs that a Symposium was really under way. Seeing thirty to forty people seated around tables, we instinctively sorted out those we had met from those we had only seen in photographs. Glennys Mackay greeted us warmly and then began introducing us as the Perth couple who joined her at the 1995 MUFON Symposium in Seattle.

At that time Glennys was canvassing hard to attract speakers to a UFO symposium in Queensland, a task many thought to be unachievable, but here it was all set to unfold. Some moments later Simon Harvey-Wilson, WA's MUFON Representative, arrived to join us in meeting MUFON International Director Walt Andrus, Whitley Strieber, Peter Davenport, George Wingfield (UK) and people from Mexico, Brazil and Chile. The highlight to us was getting to know these scientists and authors on a personal basis before we heard them as unfamiliar speakers on a platform. We settled in and gradually the small talk led into their telling of the latest exciting stories, heightening our interest as to how such disclosures would be received in the days ahead.

FRIDAY

Walt Andrus.
After opening speeches and a welcoming ceremony by an Aboriginal dance group, MUFON's International Director spoke on The Story of Linda Cortile. which has been described as the UFO case of the century. He covered the material presented in Budd HopkinsÆ new book Witnessed, in which Linda was abducted out of her New York apartment building into a UFO while being observed by occupants in cars stalled on the Brooklyn Bridge. Budd Hopkins had been researching the case which involved tracking down security staff and a major international figure, prompting the amusing suggestion that perhaps the aliens have made their communion with someone more appropriate than a president who looks down on the White House lawn. In this case someone high in the United Nations. The talk was aided by slides and film of Hopkins and the people involved.

Keith Basterfield,
MUFON's Continental Coordinator for Australia and New Zealand was the next speaker. Keith has lectured in the US and his research work and papers have been published in many countries. To illustrate his talk titled The Side Effects of UFO Abduction Experience, he chose four famous cases and spoke on three types of after-effects. 1) The psychophysical. 2) A change in belief and values. 3) Physical. Although cautious in his summing up, his thorough analysis gave a strong indication that a phenomenon is intruding into our reality and that: it leaves a trail of its passage.

Dr. Pat Bailey.
Understanding the True Reasons and Objectives Behind UFOs. Dr. Bailey has impressive science degrees and, being a founder in Toastmasters, knew how to entertain as well to impart revolutionary knowledge, putting on wigs to stress the attitudes behind viewpoints, even patronising sceptics with ôThe truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.ö Being President of the Institute for New Energy, his talk also dealt with new energy possibilities and the resistance against new findings, and new thinking in this area. His slides showed experimental saucer-shaped craft in the US, and in Germany in WW11.

Peter Davenport
UFO Reporting Centre. Cases and Sightings across USA. Peter is Director of the National UFO Reporting Centre and has degrees in Russian and Biology. He mentioned that the numbers of sightings was rising steeply and would increase with the new technology of tracking meteors - skipping radio signals off the ionised trails generated behind meteors - and UFOs. He mentioned several cases recorded from multiple phone-ins as to the behaviour of UFOs - whether they formed clusters or moved in certain ways across states.

Peter had assembled much data on these well-documented sightings but they were played down or ignored by the press. He even had recordings of pilots discussing the mysterious objects and offered to bring the proof to the press. He sent a letter to the FBI requesting,' Please look at our data'. No reply. His data to the Down Town press who buy their ink in barrel lots was returned with 'We can't see any point in your contacting our office again.' One of his comments after a spirited question time: The closer we ufologists get to the truth the more disinformation we'll have to wade through.

Alex Newald
Contactee Profile. Missing Time. Alec is a New Zealand car salesman now writing a book about his abduction experience in 1989. He began by saying that whenever the subject came up he usually found he was fighting hard for credibility. One can understand his plight because his experience does seem more 'fantasy' prone than the current standard abduction sequence, being more in line with the experiences of Rael, Andreassen and Desmarke's as he described long dream-like sequences about crystals, and being conducted around the ship by blue-skinned aliens with 'cat's eyes.' He was told he was being taken to the moon though in a different time dimension, and he met other humans who had been on board for 50 years. He was missing for 10 days. Any proof of this? someone asked. He said his car quickly disintegrated on his return and he has a drawer full of watches that run down and stop. He came across as a genuine person when we talked to him during a break.

Ademar Gevaerd,
Capture of ETs in Brazil. Ademar is a director of a Brazilian UFO group with 3300 members. He was a professor of chemistry until he devoted himself fulltime to the study of UFOs. His talk was about the two aliens allegedly captured by the army in Varginha, Brazil on January 20, 1996.

The first creature, apparently wounded in a crash, was discovered by three young girls who quickly fled, thinking it was the devil. The proportions of the creature corresponded to the standard short 'grey', except that it had greasy brown skin, red eyes and protuberances taken to be horns.

Adamar, a colourful and emphatic speaker, settled in to describe the long sequence of events from the report by the girls, to the fire emergency team arriving to corner the creature, to the military then arriving to assist in its capture with nets until its confinement to a wooden box; the arguments between the fire brigade and the military about ownership, and then its rough passage to first one hospital and then another during which it was observed by more than a dozen doctors.

Researchers had located other witnesses whose stories matched with leaks from army personnel. This included the army's order to onlookers not to talk about the matter. With the aid of slides Ademar also went into the details of a second similar creature found near the Zoo. A lawyer witnessed its capture by the military and claimed it died soon after. Ademar described the case as more important than Roswell because it was recent and witnesses abounded.

Moira Mcghee
Less Known Australian Cases. Moira is a member of BUFORA (UK) but since settling in Australia in the Sydney area she became a member of INUFOR and is editor of the INUFOR Digest. Her talk ranged over the lesser known Australian UFO reports from earlier years which appear more significant today in the light of knowledge accumulated. She told of an encounter similar to the KnowlesÆ experience on the Nullabor when a farmer Jack Ulster was driving home one night in 1988. A UFO flooded his car with light and lifted him off the road, and he realised he was looking out at tree tops on either side of his car. A neighbour witnessed his friendÆs plight but they kept it to themselves for years.

Another sighting outside a restaurant in the Blue Mountains became unique because of circumstances. A waitress saw a disc through the windows and told the guests. A man from a table of ten patrons said he was from the RAAF and asked to use the phone for an urgent call. ôAfter he finished his telephone conversation, all the men from the table left in a hurry saying they had to go back on duty urgently. They left their meals half eaten on the table, and their wives and girlfriends were deserted at the restaurant to pay the bill and find their own way home.ö

Glennys Mackay was to speak on Sightings and Contacts in Queensland in 1996, but it had become so late she gracefully cancelled her talk and rounded off with apologies and announcements. There was full applause and we trailed out. It had been a long, exhausting day and yet our minds were agitated and abuzz. Hearing so many close accounts of UFO intrigue from all countries was of some concern, but what really nagged was that governments did not want to know about it and preferred to keep their citizens in ignorance. Questions multiplied. It was difficult to drop off to sleep.

SATURDAY

Dr Joe Lewels
Over the Rainbow: Quantum Physics Discovers the Holographic Universe. Dr. Lewels resides in El Paso, Texas. He has a Ph D in Communications and Journalism. He began his talk with the understatement: 'Anyone going to their first UFO Symposium will emerge a changed person'. Much of his talk focussed on the idea of a holographic universe in which all subatomic particles are interconnected, suggesting human consciousness is non-local and exists outside our bodies in another reality - a notion that could lead to a better understanding of aliens intervening in our physical world.

Joe is a Christian and a scholar of ancient texts. He feels that ufology's growing knowledge of the man-alien relationship will help us to gain a deeper understanding of the creation stories in the Bible and a new sense of place in a universe that is holographic. Joe's insights suggest we could cope better with the spiritual and religious implications of encounters with aliens if we were less reliant on consensus thinking in religion and science.

Kelly Cahill
Lecture on her Abduction Experience. Kelly described the details of her encounter in the Dandenongs in 1993 and the complex aftermath of realisations. Since her talk in Perth in September the witness from the third car has come forward (a professional preferring to remain anonymous) thus making it one of the worldÆs important multi (six) witness cases. Kelly will tell her story in Amsterdam in November.

John Carpenter
Angels, Aliens and Folk Law. A psychologist with 30 years experience, John Carpenter has used hypnotic regression in over a hundred multi-participant abductions. Being a master of the relaxed approach with added touches of humour, he was always reassuring and easy to listen to. He ranged back to the sightings of flying objects in medieval times, even to the more distant Indian Rukma Vimana, Sumer and the book of Enoch. All of these served as a basis to cover the several different types of aliens involved and most importantly his selection of recent abduction cases, histories of children and adults.

Jaime Maussan
Evidence of a Reality Jaime is a Mexican journalist with a weekly radio programme on UFOs which reaches two million people. In July this year many Mexicans used video cameras to record the eclipse of the sun, and in so doing thousands recorded pictures of UFOs, some changing shape, including some entering and leaving mother ships. These sightings were witnessed by millions of people. (Mexico City has 20 million inhabitants) Jaime showed slides and films of these events, which also included shots of the extreme degeneration of foliage of plants. This occurred where a UFO landed and where a strange creature was seen with a æglowing headÆ. The university could not explain the mysterious change in the foliage.

Jaime said that the 5000 videos now amount to the largest collection of UFO evidence in the world. Interesting too that these sightings never made it to the US press. When I sent the Nexus article on Mexican sightings to Peter Robbins (an assistant of Budd Hopkins) three years ago he wrote back thanking me as this was the first they had heard of it.

Warren Aston.
Finding Answers to Earth's Greatest Mystery Within a Scientific Paradigm. Warren was born in NZ but has lived in Brisbane since 1994. He began by saying something is going on that orthodox science cannot explain, and that there is a huge gap between UFO research and what the public knows, and that if the public knew what was going on they would be up in arms. Warren has spent the last three years researching a daylight landing and contact case that took place in Montana in 1940. He believes it will be one of the most significant and revealing ever recorded when he releases details - involving MJ12 and alien technology - early next year. Warren was one of the most lucid and compelling speakers in his analysis of the UFO mystery. He writes: 'Regardless of whether we see alien contact from scientific, metaphysical, conspiracy, religious or philosophical viewpoints - all of them valid and useful windows for viewing ultimate truth - one thing is clear: our society faces great changes in the next decade or so as the dominant consensus world view catches up with reality.'

Stanton Friedman
Top Secret Majic This ex nuclear physicist and prominent author-UFO lecturer, received a generous grant to pursue what he enjoys most: penetrating the secret files in government libraries for evidence of UFO coverups. He has certainly unearthed volumes, and all of it flows off the tip of his tongue. He is well practiced and entertaining as he tells us about Government dishonesty, and that its black budget is $34 billion a year. The batch of papers released from NSA under the Freedom of Information Act was 75% blocked out. Much of his talk dealt with topics from his new book, Top Secret Majic. I was astonished to hear, however, that he clearly dismissed Bob Lazar as a fraud.

The Dinner.
Social interactions are an important part of a UFO symposium. A different consciousness comes into play in sharing views and queries with others which aids in the digestion of controversial material, particularly after so much sitting and listening. The expansive heights of this came into play in the Grand Foyer during the cocktail hour when everyone was talking and it was easy to mix and get feedback from top researchers. I asked John Mack if he knew of Barbara Brennan's work, and he said he had sent some of his more traumatised abduction patients to her. He also said he was coming to WA next year.

I asked Whitley Strieber if he had ever seen Quatermass and the Pit (the film mentioned in the September flyer announcing Kelly Cahill's talk) as I knew he had been studying in London in the late 50's when I first saw it there. His jaw dropped and he exclaimed, 'That was an astounding film. I saw it six months ago.' Later I realised he may not have been referring to the old black and white original, but to the remake of Quatermass that was due to be completed sometime this year. ASPR should watch for it.

It was good to meet Peter Khoury in person after exchanging letters. Peter was on the ABC's Compass with Kelly Cahill, and is President of the UFO Experience Support Association in NSW.

Glennys Mackay sat at our table and mentioned some of the hassles in bringing such a symposium to fruition, reminding me of Peter Davenport's advice on the need for cooperation between UFO groups. Her perseverance in the face of so many setbacks deserves praise indeed. And it was a pleasure to see some of the speakers on the dance floor, where an identity that could have been overlooked began to appear.

SUNDAY

Bill Chalker
The Oz Files Bill is an industrial chemist and coordinator of the NSW UFO investigation Centre (UFOIC). He is author of the recent book The OZ Files. He told how his perseverance with the RAAF paid off and they finally became cooperative. He was allowed to check their files and take notes of the unexplained UFO cases. We are fortunate that Bill Chalker is getting our UFO history out into the open at last.

George Wingfield
Mysterious Flying Triangles. George has worked as an astronomer at the Royal Greenwich observatory. In his talk on Unidentified Flying Triangles or UFTs, he showed the Belgium film of interviews with military officials discussing the huge triangle that at one time dropped from 10,000 feet to 500 feet in 5 seconds, flew in curves at 30 to 40 mph, and at times just vanished or flew away at 1.5 times the speed of sound. Excellent slides distinguished UFTs from shapes of other top secret aircraft.

David Summers
UFOs - The Political, Economic, Religious and Social Implications. The editor of Exposure Magazine is a dynamic young man with his mind made up on some matters of conspiracy and control by big government, dropping the line that 'NASA is a white organisation funded by black money.' Some interesting film of the moon landing showed the American flag clearly flapping in the breeze - evidence perhaps that the moon landing was hoaxed. Surely though, this would be a film of trial landings on earth. He suggested that aliens were less of a threat to us than to the political, economical and religious institutions that have always controlled us. He concluded by saying that there would be a UFO convention in Amsterdam in November where he and Kelly Cahill would be speakers.

The Vendors Room filled whenever a break occurred. The stalls of NEXUS and EXPOSURE sold magazines. Others had tables laid out with books, UFO videos, tee shirts which featured the Symposium, or aliens etc, alien jewellery, CD ROM and paintings in adjoining rooms, sections for speakers to autograph their books or papers, and an impressive selection of alien masks and busts by WA sculptors Richard Birkett and Chris Ryding - ASPR members. (Their work is on display at the Subiaco Railway Markets).

Whitley Strieber
Speaking about his book Breakthrough he said it contained possible clues to the 'visitors' invisibility. When the technology that keeps them invisible breaks down it gives off heat and a smell like burning cardboard. He explained how several witnesses in his home experienced this. Implants are now taken seriously by many researchers, and the latest findings are that they are formed from a crystal and sulphur compound which is covered by layers of the abductee's outer skin so it will not be rejected when it is inserted into the abductee's body. Much research is being done on this. Whitley said he has one in his ear and it was interesting to hear why he is content to leave it there. His talk led into remote viewing, a proven activity denied by security agencies, which he covers in his forthcoming book, The Secret School.

Glennys Mackay
First Hand Encounters Glennys, an ordained Spiritual Minister, has a background in many branches of clairvoyance and healing. She founded QUFON 15 years ago and is the Queensland State Director for MUFON. Glennys said she had always been able to see spirits as a child and in 1964 in New Zealand she was followed by a UFO and through the years developed contactee experiences with tall beings. She told of some interesting cases that had been reported to her, and of the movement of implants and 'scoop marks' on a man's leg. Glennys stressed the spiritual aspect of life on earth.

John Mack
Abductions. Human Encounters with Aliens. Dr. Mack is a Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and author of Abduction. He said he worked differently from conventional psychiatrists, and was gathering the stories of indigenous people to see if or how they experienced alien abductions. He raised the profound question of societies being attached to a particular world view which they clung to desperately when it was being challenged by new emerging realities from the 'subtle realm of nature.'

He showed a film he recently made in Africa, firstly of an African Shaman telling of his three day abduction by aliens in 1958, and another of the delightful expressiveness of children, each in turn telling John Mack of their confrontation by a strange being standing near its 'space ship'. He said society was being challenged to make enormous adjustments to cope with this emerging reality, but once we transcended our separation from the subtle realm of nature we could experience the essential unity and sacredness of creation.

The Panel. Twenty three speakers sat in a line on the stage as microphones were hurried to those who wanted to ask questions such as Who really Controls this planet? Questions about the computer game the aliens taught Alex Newal, about the photon belt and doomsday predictions, and which were the good and bad aliens? No one liked being abducted by reptilians someone said. But Whitley said 'I have met people who had enjoyed the experience. They were bikies.'

The questions could have gone on for hours but it was brought to a close by announcements of Workshops on the following three nights. Then came the drone of the didgeridoo as the figures moved out to perform the farewell dance. The Symposium was wildly applauded, setting the certainty that they are important in the dissemination of new knowledge about our place in the universe, and a challenge, perhaps a warning, to all governments that news of the exploration of this new phenomenon should not be withheld from its citizens.

SUMMING UP
The overall message of the Symposium stood out starkly because of the cultural background in which it took place. Startling disclosures were being made that Western Science - on which our society was based - had been led into false assumptions about reality, yet the world outside was choosing to remain oblivious. At times it was amusing to wonder what some unsuspecting citizen would have thought if they had wandered in from the street to listen. Each day I looked for reports on the Symposium in the Brisbane papers. Not a word. Morning and night I listened for news of it on the radio. Nothing. A week later in Cairns, however, I did catch Stanton Friedman being introduced to talk about his book on a midday TV Show. They gave him 'two minutes!' The riddle of the silent press bothered me to the extent that I awoke one night with an attempt at an answer, if not the main answer:

Western society, or Western Scientific Materialism (WSM) is already under dangerous pressure because of planetary mismanagement, but it would be given a death sentence if the alien presence was proved to be a reality because the whole success of WSM depended on there being no such thing as the paranormal or aliens. Mainstream religions, or rather the political-control aspect of them, would be nervous too. Consider that when an individual is told they have a terminal illness they go through a sequence of emotional states like shock, fear, anger, denial, arguing, depression, resignation. Perhaps our science-based society is working through these procrastinations. The ridicule heaped on ufology, the collective denial of its worth, could be a reaction against the enormous fear of losing our accustomed sense of place and the long held illusion that we are alone, in control and can do what we like.

Well, perhaps the outcome is threatening for all. But those of us already enjoying the challenge of adjusting to this new emerging reality will surely cope better with any dramas and arrive at a new sense of well-being again. This has always been the goal and the pattern of adaptable life. The Symposium was an outstanding success but comments were made about communication troubles. Solutions were being sought to lessen the strain on organisers.

Part of the problem lies in the fact that different values are placed on different sorts of evidence. There is hard evidence like implants or scars, and photographic evidence, but there are also the controversial negative abduction memories. Again some people only claim memories of sweetness and light from visiting angelic beings, and frequent visits at that. Add to this the New Age interpretations of channelling and meetings with aliens, and arguments arising about accuracy and confabulation. Hopefully we can learn to deal with these wide differences of preference and perception and not let any areas of contention get out of hand. Perhaps we should have the Symposium in a different state capital each year.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS & CONSCIOUSNESS

By Simon Harvey-Wilson

The study of consciousness, otherwise known as neuroscience, is intimately involved with the UFO Close Encounter phenomenon, and obviously needs further research.

Some neuroscientists believe that consciousness is no more than a product of the brainÆs nerve cells, called neurones. On the other hand Professor David Chalmers (1995), at the University of California, writes that consciousness '... might be explained by a new kind of theoryö that ô... will probably involve new fundamental laws, and the concept of information may play a central role. These faint glimmerings suggest that a theory of consciousness may have startling consequences for our view of the universe and of ourselves.'

This brings us to what I see as the major issue of neuroscience which is: can consciousness somehow leave the body, as for example during Out-of-Body Experiences (OBEs)? If OBEs are shown to be genuine, a whole host of further questions arise with enormous implications, not just for Ufology, but for religion, medicine and society in general. Some of these questions are: what is the medium of consciousness both within and outside the body, what is the nature of the interface between consciousness and the brain, and where might consciousness go beyond the body? This final question can be split, because the average Near-Death-Experience (NDE) seems to have two stages.

During part one you may find yourself floating above your body, as during an OBE, able to see the landscape around you, but seemingly invisible to anyone else still in their body. From a scientific perspective this is baffling, because, in order to see, the human eye needs to interact with light, and anything that interacts with light ought to be visible to others. This implies that anyone who is invisible should be blind.

During part two of a NDE the person may find themselves in a completely different realm, or landscape, sometimes after passing through a dark tunnel. This realm, wherever and whatever it is, is the main topic of this article, because UFOs may also access it.

Physicist Paul Davies seems to think that further research into consciousness is important, and includes an interesting chapter on the subject in his book Are We Alone? Implications of the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life (1995). In the last chapter of his earlier book The Matter Myth, Davies disputes the notion of the 'ghost in the machine.' The '... image of the human mind as a sort of nebulous substance that exists independently of the body.' (Davies & Gribbin, 1991:302) His reason is that research into the nature of matter shows that the deeper one looks into the atomic realm, the more 'solid' matter stops being solid, and instead appears to be made of little more than interacting, possibly multidimensional, energy fields. Baffling though it may be, solid, indivisible building blocks of matter do not seem to exist. Davies therefore rejects dualistic 'ghost in the machine' thinking '... not because there is no ghost, but because there is no machine.' (ibid.303)

While this is clever, and illustrates that most people's understanding of what matter is made of lags a long way behind that of the average quantum physicist, what does it actually mean? One suggestion (which is probably not subscribed to by Paul Davies) is that it means that, at some fundamental level, consciousness, matter and perhaps even space, are 'made' of the same substance, but are formatted differently at the scale of the human body. If so, then there may be no reason why consciousness needs to be limited to the confines of the body. Consciousness and the body may simply be two phenomena that tend to remain superimposed, or connected, for the duration of one's life, but which under special circumstances, such as during a UFO 'abduction', or a NDE, may operate separately.

An increasing number of Close Encounter experiencers report feeling as if they were somehow out of their bodies during their experiences. Research into OBEs or NDEs would surely be of great interest to neuroscientists, yet in a recent New Scientist report on the second biennial Tucson (USA) Neuroscience Conference entitled 'Towards a Science of Consciousness' NDEs were not even mentioned! This seems puzzling, or even perhaps suspicious.

Late in 1995, an episode of the TV science show Towards 2000 featured the Dutch cardiologist Dr Pim Van Lommel explaining that his research into Near-Death-Experiences in 10 separate hospitals had revealed that NDEs are genuine examples of consciousness leaving the physical body and entering what appears to be an extra-dimensional after-death realm coexisting with normal four dimensional spacetime. He further claimed that his research had shown that NDEs are not hallucinations, or the result of a lack of oxygen to the brain. Neither medical drugs, nor anaesthetics, had any bearing on the NDE, and length of clinical death did not affect the depth, or detail of the experience.

Likewise, a leading English neuropsychiatrist, Dr Peter Fenwick and his wife Elizabeth have published The Truth in the Light: An Investigation of Over 300 Near-Death-Experiences in which they conclude that the mind and brain can function separately. To try to explain how this might be possible they refer to an old, but largely ignored, theory of mind called the Transmission Theory:

'In its simplest form, a transmission theory states that mind and brain are different and are linked together in some way. Sense data is transformed by the brain for transmission to an external mind. Mind in its turn can will an action which is transmitted to brain and so is able to initiate brain processes and thus actions.' (Fenwick & Fenwick, 1995: 260)

The existence of other realms or dimensions accessible by consciousness is frequently referred to in writings on shamanism, spiritualism, and mysticism, as well as in the UFO literature. Any religion with a transcendental god must surely also believe in such a realm. Do such realms exist, or are they perhaps all different aspects of the same multi-functional realm? Can UFOs and/or aliens access this realm and, if so, how do we set about researching the subject? Proof of such a realm, especially if it were populated with sentient beings, would be one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science, quite apart from possibly facilitating contact with some form of extraterrestrial intelligence. Let us look at a brief historical review of theories about the existence such realms.

In ancient Greece, the philosopher Plato expounded his Doctrine of Forms which claimed that everything on earth had its spiritual equivalent, or Form, in a higher, changeless realm which, while invisible to the senses, was apprehensible by the mind, or soul, which, like the Forms, are immortal. Physicist Paul Davies often echoes this idea when he points out that the laws of physics and mathematics appear to exist independently of spacetime. Since Plato's time, descriptions of this realm have varied, but it has remained steadfastly invisible and apparently only accessible to the majority of humans under special circumstances such as while in a trance, during NDEs, at death, or during a Close Encounter.

For example, the seventeenth century Swedish scientist, scholar and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg reported that such a realm existed and was accessible via consciousness. At times he remained in a trance for more than 24 hours, claiming that he was communicating with his friends in this spirit world. Well before UFOs were the subject of the popular press, Swedenborg insisted that within this realm one could also interact with beings from other worlds.

Earlier this century the influential Jesuit theologian, philosopher and palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1955) put forward several controversial ideas which were not well received by the Catholic hierarchy. He invented the term ænoosphereÆ which was the consciousness equivalent of the biosphere, the realm of all living things on the surface of the planet. Chardin suggested that all living things were connected both physically and psychically and that consciousness would evolve to become increasingly dominant.

More recently, the biologist Dr Rupert Sheldrake (1981) proposed the hypothesis of Formative Causation, which suggested '... that self-organising systems at all levels of complexity are organised by morphic fields, which ... contain an inherent memory, transmitted from similar past organisms by the process of morphic resonance. In what was seen as an attack on Darwinism, Sheldrake proposed that morphic fields contained behavioural, social, cultural, and mental fields and '... involved the transmission of formative influences through or across time and space without a decrease due to distance or lapse of time.'

This gives morphic resonance an other-dimensional flavour. Sheldrake's ideas so outraged the scientific community that it was proposed that his books be publicly burned, which no doubt only served to further publicise them. Nevertheless Sheldrake is highly qualified and his ideas are timely and impeccably argued. He and sympathetic colleagues speak of Neoplatonism which postulates a transcendent realm of changeless archetypes or Forms and also emphasises that just as all living beings are animated by immanent souls, so the entire cosmos is animated by the world soul. (ibid:166)

In his book UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union (1992:90) ufologist Jacques Vallee quotes Professor Alexis Zolotov who proposes the existence of an informational field with a complexity beyond that of electromagnetic and biological fields. He seems to believe that UFOs may somehow access this realm.

In his popular series of anthropological books American writer Carlos Castaneda has his mentor Don Jun Matus dividing reality into two realms: the world of our everyday experience, which he terms the 'tonal', and an extraordinary paranormal realm called the world of 'the second attention' or the 'nagual'. (Coincidentally, it is interesting to note that the Irish have traditionally referred to clairvoyants as possessing 'the second sight'.) As an accomplished seer, and therefore a powerful personification of this realm, the term 'nagual' is also used to refer to Don Juan himself.

Castaneda claims that mastery of this realm enables the 'nagual' to teleport, or visit other worlds, and interact with conscious inorganic beings that are to be found there. Castaneda's most recent book The Art of Dreaming (1993) details the lengthy training that enabled him to enter this extraordinary realm. The obvious implication of this is that humans who cannot enter the world of 'the second attention' are only perceiving a limited, subordinate part of reality.

One of the most imaginative and provocative speakers in this field, is Terence McKenna, a colleague of Rupert Sheldrake's, whose book The Archaic Revival (1991) is recommended to all UFO researchers. McKenna too believes that some sort of informational realm is accessible by human consciousness. 'The Oversoul is some kind of field that is generated by human beings but that is not under the control of any institution, any government, or any religion. It is actually the most intelligent lifeform on the planet, and it regulates human culture through the release of ideas out of eternity and into the continuum of history.' (p.61)

While suggesting that the entities seen during Close Encounters may not actually be extraterrestrials, McKenna does not rule out this possibility. Nevertheless he considers that, like the shamans of old, we have a responsibility to get to know this information rich realm. 'The imagination is the true ground of being. There is a dimension parallel to time, outside of time, that is accessible only to the degree that one can decondition oneself from the history-bound cognitive systems that have carried one to this point.' (ibid.64)

In his important article Alien Abductions: A Shamanic Perspective on UFOs (1990) Australian UFO researcher Bill Chalker took his readers on a guided tour of otherworldly shamanistic realms, especially the 'Imaginal realm', a term coined by the French Islamic scholar Henry Corbin. This realm has all sorts of inhabitants that may interact with humans, either invited, or uninvited. Chalker notes the similarities between Close Encounters and shamanic initiations, both of which may result in their participants developing paranormal abilities.

It is important to realise that what is being suggested is that some of the inhabitants of this other realm, while not normally visible, unless one is in an altered state of consciousness, do under certain circumstances seem to have the ability to materialise within spacetime and act as physical beings with paranormal powers. It is this dual role that makes them so bizarre and interesting.

Likewise, in his book Daimonic Reality: A Fieldguide to the Otherworld (1994) Patrick Harpur writes that, throughout history, myths and folklore have described entities that, as creatures of both the Otherworld and Earth have the capacity to be invisible or solid. They have been called sprites, nymphs, elves, genii, gnomes, spirits, fauns, leprechauns, satyrs, dwarves, giants, hobgoblins or, as the ancient Greeks preferred, daimons. Harpur writes '... never quite divine nor quite human, the daimons ... were neither spiritual nor physical, but both ... They were paradoxical beings, both good and bad, benign and frightening, guiding and warning, protecting and maddening.' (Harpur, 1994)

One thing that most daimons have in common, apart from the ability to materialise and dematerialise, is their glowing red eyes. Such eyes are frequently reported during UFO Close Encounters. This suggests that many so called aliens may be merely daimons using space-age props.

In his classic UFO book Passport to Magonia (1969) Jacques Vallee also equates otherworldly beings with UFO aliens. For example, Celtic fairies were thought to use their fairy rings to abduct people into a strange magical realm where time was distorted. For over a thousand years European folklore has been full of tales of this nature.

The suggestion that is emerging is that the known laws of physics only apply while one remains within spacetime, but can be overridden by any being, human, alien, or otherwise, who can 'enter', or move his or her consciousness, into the other realm that so many of these writers refer to. But how does one enter this other realm? Perhaps this is what mystics and yogis are learning to do when the venture deep within their consciousness during meditation. It has long been noted that these are the very people who most frequently develop paranormal abilities.

This transcendental realm seems to be many things to many people. The shaman uses it for healing, clairvoyance, and communication with spirits of the dead, while the mystic generally sees these accomplishments as distractions on his, or her, path to the Absolute. That this Otherworld may contain aliens, spirits of the dead, daimons, and even gods, hardly makes things less confusing. What we need is some sort of road-map to help us discover the topology, or 'landscape', of this other dimension or realm.

In his book The Visionary Human: Mystical Consciousness & Paranormal Perspectives (1991) Nevill Drury writes: 'Historically, transpersonal maps of altered states have derived either from the psychedelic research undertaken during the late 1960s and early 1970s, or from frameworks based substantially on eastern religious traditions. While I would certainly not dispute the very considerable contributions that Hindu and Buddhist concepts have made to transpersonal thought, it seems to me that ultimately the most complete frameworks of mystical and visionary consciousness will be those which transcend specific belief systems altogether.' (p.98)

Further on Drury writes: 'In short, we are beginning to accumulate a real body of data on dissociative and 'peak' states of consciousness which in turn have a direct bearing on the authenticity of religious beliefs. We may well be entering a new phase where religious and mystical experiences can be demystified and subjected to some sort of testing and validation. Without doubt, a new pragmatism has appeared on the horizon.' (p.99)

What might such a 'new pragmatism' reveal? In Raymond Fowler's book The Watchers II (1995) he writes that abductions and NDEs are: '... different sides of the same paraphysical cause!' and that, '... UFOs and their entities come from behind death's Great Door.' Some UFO researchers have suspected this for years, but it does not make our work any easier. Rather than just UFOs, we now seem to be researching the fundamental nature of reality itself. In this context it is interesting to note that according to Professor John Mack, the primary reason that Harvard University set up a committee to investigate him was because he had had the temerity to claim that his research with UFO abductees had led him to believe that, not only were they sane, but that science's current view of reality might be inadequate or incomplete.

What do researchers outside the UFO field have to say? An article in The Quest magazine reports on the 3rd 'Annual Conference of the Institute of Noetic Sciences' in the United States, which had the theme: 'The Sacred Source: Life, Death, and the Survival of Consciousness'. One of the speakers, Jeffrey Mishlove, while discussing 'Human Survival and the theory of Hyperspace', suggested that other dimension may facilitate the survival of human consciousness after death. (Rosen & Fowler, 1994)

Similarly, in his latest book Breakthrough: The Next Step (1995), Whitley Strieber writes of people seeing what they thought were dead relatives during Close Encounters. Were these clinically dead people that an alien intelligence is able to furnish with temporary, or virtual, bodies for their return from an after-death realm? In the book Strieber strongly advocates meditation as a method of attuning one's consciousness to that of the alien intelligence.

In the book Dialogues with a Modern Mystic (1994) by Andrew Harvey & Mark Matousek, the highly articulate Harvey says: 'Unless we know what death is while we are in the body, we're going to go into a darkness we don't understand. What the mystic does is to remain alive while dead and dead while alive, to burn steadfastly in the fire beyond what we call 'life' and what we call 'death'. ' I assume that this means that by learning to take one's consciousness into the after-death realm while still alive, one can remain conscious and lucid within that realm after bodily death. Andrew Harvey, an Oxford University graduate, gained his Illumination, or personal experience of this realm, from the young Indian mystic Mother Meera, who now works in Germany. (Harvey, 1992)

Perhaps we reveal the limited nature of our spiritual awareness by seeking the 'technical, nuts and bolts' nature of UFOs. It seems that the intelligence behind the Close Encounter phenomena has long since discovered, and is using, or perhaps actually lives in, the realm that we have been discussing. A realm that most humans only enter at death, or during NDEs, but which mysticism has been describing for eons.

Furthermore it seems that conscious access to this realm may facilitate what we could term a 'physics of the paranormal' whereby solid objects and sentient beings can materialise from that realm into spacetime, and vice versa. If this is the case, then arguments about whether UFOs are real, or all in the mind, are absurd, and do little more than delay constructive research. It also suggests that the average physicist's or neuroscientist's understanding of the link between consciousness and matter is woefully inadequate.

In this respect it is interesting to note that in his book Miracles Are My Visiting Cards (1987) the parapsychologist Professor Erlendur Haraldsson writes that his extensive research had uncovered no sign of fraud by the modern Indian mystic Sathya Sai Baba, who for over forty years has been materialising small solid objects such as rings and pendants for his followers. Startling though it might be, this research appears to show that consciousness is not only able to affect matter, but can somehow also produce it. Let us not fool ourselves into thinking that the Pentagon would not be interested in such research.
Veteran UFO researcher Jacques Vallee also believes that Close Encounters demonstrate a connection between consciousness and physical reality. As he says: 'The UFO Phenomenon exists. It has been with us throughout history. It is physical in nature and it remains unexplained in terms of contemporary science. It represents a level of consciousness that we have not yet recognised, and which is able to manipulate dimensions beyond time and space as we understand them.' (Vallee, 1996)

So how do we continue to study this realm? It would help if researchers in such fields as quantum physics, topology, neuroscience, parapsychology, transpersonal psychology, ufology, mysticism, and shamanism actually started talking to each other. New research methods may be needed, but the history of 20th century science is full of examples of scientific creativity in the face of baffling problems. The fact that we can investigate black holes, the ozone layer and the origins of the universe demonstrate that one does not have to take something to a laboratory to study it.

But how does one grasp the idea that an entity, let along a UFO, can æexist' in a realm or dimension that does not seem to have any visible physical location within spacetime? It might help to imagine what it would be like to be conscious, but not to have a physical body, as in our dreams, where we make do with imaginary bodies. Mystics have always taught that one must abandon one's ego if one wishes to enter transcendental realms, or merge with the Absolute.

Research into Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality may also help us comprehend this problem. Jacques Vallee (1988: 288) calls this other realm a multiverse, and believes that information theory may help us understand it. For example, one of mankind's most sophisticated inventions is the Internet, which, while requiring a vast web of computer hardware to run, is nevertheless an artificially created informational realm in which one can cavort without one's body.

The notion of downloading one's consciousness into Cyberspace has been around for several years now. Indeed many parents bemoan the fact that that is precisely what has happened to their teenaged offspring. It is ironical that we have gone to so much trouble and expense to create Cyberspace, which is already beginning to resemble a massive traffic jam, while it appears that, with suitable training, consciousness itself may be able to leave the body and interact with other beings within a fantastic, nonlocal, informational realm that requires no prior programming, and whose limits appear to be beyond normal human conception. Some futurists have even suggested that this may be the next step in human evolution.

As Terence McKenna writes in his book The Archaic Revival (1991:64) '... we have bootstrapped ourselves to the point that we can leave the planet, leave the monkey shell, leave all earthbound conceptions of ourselves behind, and push off into pure imagination.'

There are hundreds of other thinkers who have speculated on the mind-body connection, and on the existence of other realms. Such speculations are as old as religion, shamanism and mythology, and any metaphors used tend to represent the technology of the times. For example, following the computing theme, one could perhaps describe the brain as a read/write or input/output device that links the body, within the confines of spacetime, to consciousness that exists within some sort of hyperspatial realm that is able to sustain information, but whose ultimate nature we have yet to discover.

This means that if those neuroscientists, who insist that consciousness is just a product of the brain's cells, don't soon start publishing some meaningful research, the public in general, and ufologists in particular, may begin to wonder whether they are either incompetent, and/or are perhaps working to some hidden agenda. The connection between consciousness and the hyperspatial, or paranormal, behaviour of some UFO and their occupants could not have escaped the attention of military researchers. One reason that some neuroscientists may be prevaricating in their published research might be that they know that behind the scenes classified research is being conducted to discover what military or national security potential might lie in this field.

References

ABRAHAM, R., McKENNA, T., & SHELDRAKE, R., (1992)
Trialogues at the Edge of the West.
ANDERSON, A., HOLMES, B., & ELSE, E., (1996)
Zombies, Dolphins, & Blindsight, New Scientist, 4 May 1996: 20-27
CASTANEDA, C., (1993) The Art of Dreaming.
CHALKER, B., (1990) Alien Abductions:
A Shamanic Perspective, Nature & Health, Autumn 1990,
Vol II, no 1: 20-26.
CHALMERS, D. J., (1995)
The Puzzle of Conscious Experience,
Scientific American, December 1995: 62-68.
DAVIES, P., (1995) Are We Alone?
DAVIES, P.& GRIBBIN, J., (1991) The Matter Myth.
DRURY, N., (1991) The Visionary Human.
FENWICK, P., & FENWICK, E., (1995) The Truth in the Light.
FOWLER, R., (1995) The Watchers II.
HARALDSSON, E., (1987) Miracles Are My Visiting Cards.
HARPUR, P., (1994) Daimonic Reality: A Fieldguide to the Otherworld.
HARVEY, A., (1992) Hidden Journey: A Spiritual Awakening.
HARVEY, A., & MATOUSEK, M., (1994) Dialogues with a Modern Mystic.
McKENNA, T., (1991) The Archaic Revival.
ROSEN, B., & FOWLER, R., (1994)
On the Survival of Consciousness, The Quest, Winter 1994: 12-13.
SHELDRAKE, R., (1982) A New Science of Life.
STRIEBER, W., (1995) Breakthrough: The Next Step.
TEILHARD DE CHARDIN , P., (1995) 6. The Phenomenon of Man.
VALLEE, J., (1969) Passport to Magonia.
VALLEE, J., (1992) UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union: A Cosmic Samizdat.
VALLEE, J.,(1992) Interview in New Dawn, Jan-Feb 1996, no 34:29-35

"There are no steps to self-realisation. There is nothing gradual about it. It happens suddenly and is irreversable. You rotate into a new dimension, seen from which the previous ones are mere abstractions."
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj: I Am That

JOURNEY TO SAI BABA

by Marianne Batenburg

"Where are you staying whilst in India, Ma'am?' 'Puttaparthi, Sir, for 3 weeks.' The smile that spread across the Immigration officer's dark brown face, baring sparkling white teeth, immediately melted away the annoyance which had been building up slowly but steadily inside of me over the last hour, whilst I had been waiting in the queue at Bangalore International Airport.

'Ah, you are visiting Sai Baba?' The smiling face beamed on. 'Yes, can you tell me where Sai Baba is at the moment?' 'Oh, He is at the ashram in Puttaparthi; He was in Whitefield in March before going to Kodaikanal for a few weeks in April, to get away from the heat. But you will certainly find Sai Baba at Puttaparthi now, in September. Wait for your luggage, and then you will find a taxi outside the airport which will take you to the ashram.' What a wonderful welcome, and I also knew where I could find Sai Baba. I had been told that I would receive that information at Bangalore Airport. All of a sudden my tiredness left me and I felt confident again that the next leg of my journey would go as well as the first.

The flight from Perth to Singapore had been very smooth and uneventful. I had had a choice between flying Qantas, Singapore Airlines, or British Airways, but the latter provided the best connection with the direct flight to Bangalore with Air India. Only an hour; which had been just enough time to check in at the Transfer desk. Thank goodness my luggage had been booked through from Perth straight to Bangalore. The connections for the return journey were not as perfect; 9 hours in Singapore, but I wasn't worrying about that now. Singapore Airport had enough diversions to pass a day or so quite comfortably I had been told.

It was now 2am, a very awkward time to arrive in any foreign country, let alone India. However, I had been advised to send a fax to the most reliable taxi company (Babu's Taxi Service) requesting a taxi for that hour of the morning. The taxi drivers don't like taking to the road before around 3.30am. The roads are apparently not very safe in the middle of the night. After waiting for the Immigration formalities to take place, and the luggage to come from the plane, I still had time to queue up at the bank, which was actually open, to change some of my Australian dollars into Rupees.

To my amazement, when I walked out of the airport, I spotted a driver holding a sign in his hands which read 'Batenburg'. The fax I had sent had indeed arrived. It was the first of thousands of times that I would experience nothing short of a miracle in this amazing country. I was constantly confronted with the strong contrasts between poverty and affluence, primitive equipment and modern day technology, human kindness and utter indifference. All my senses were being tested continually.

Most of the time the electricity didnÆt seem to work, but a fax machine in Australia reached a fax machine in India, and a taxi driver was waiting to take me on a three hour journey to a village called Puttaparthi, situated north east of Bangalore, but not to be found on any map inside or outside India! And, according to my instructions, I did not need to negotiate or bargain about the price because BabuÆs taxi service charges 750/800 Rupees from the airport to the ashram. (It is known for people to pay prices ranging from 850 to 1500 with other taxi companies.)

The taxi ride was quite an adventure, to put in mildly. The traffic rules in India seem to be very different from what we are used to in Western countries. I believe the Indians drive with their intuition, or genetically inherited psychic abilities, as their main tool.

By one method or the other, they seem to know which side of the road to drive on at which moment, and who or what will cross the road when. After clinging onto the edge of the back seat for the first hour, I realised that the only sane thing to do was to have faith in the fact that I was meant to arrive in Puttaparthi in one piece and alive! So I sat back, crossed my arms, breathed in and out three times, and actually started to enjoy this adventure! Thought it was so early in the morning, there was movement everywhere. If it wasn't dogs running along the streets looking for something to eat, or cows lying wherever they felt most comfortable, it was people in tiny little shops, lit up with one candle, boiling pans of sugared coffee and tea, waiting for their first customers. I had a very friendly driver. He didn't speak much but left me to enjoy my journey. We stopped for a cup of coffee after a bit over an hour. A very welcome cup of coffee I might add. I have had my coffee sugarless for the last 30 years, but Indian coffee, boiled with coffee, water, milk and sugar together, must be the nicest I have ever tasted!

We arrived at Puttaparthi just after 6.30am. I had watched the sun come up during the trip and marvelled at the landscape, which seemed to change all the time. We drove past the Super Speciality Hospital and I saw the pictures I had watched on the video of it come to life. What a magnificent sight it was. The pinks and greys of the building blended with the colours that the rising sun was creating around the landscape.

It had taken only ten month from the moment the WHO (World Health Organisation) had given its permission for this hospital to be built until the first actual open heart surgery operation had been performed on November 21, 1993. Sai Baba officially inaugurated the hospital on November 23rd of that year. I had watched a video called 'Miracle of Puttaparthi' from which I had learnt many interesting details about this hospital. I was to visit it in the next week to donate blood, and was in awe of the feeling of tranquillity and security that seemed to permeate the magnificent building. There were many people patiently waiting for their turn in the outpatient clinics; there seemed to be no rushing, no urgency and, most surprising of all, no misery at all. A true place of healing.

We drove past many buildings under construction. I had been told that Puttaparthi was not a village any more but was quickly turning into a city. I saw the proof of this statement whilst driving to the ashram. The gates were open for the taxi, and the driver advised me to get out of the car, to leave my shoes behind, and to go and join the darshan line immediately. He would wait with my luggage until after darshan.

I had become quite familiar with the 'jargon' after many hours of listening to my friends talking about their experiences and so could understand what he meant. 'Darshan' happens twice a day and literally means 'Viewing of the lord'. At approximately 7am and then at 3pm Sai Baba will 'give darshan' which means that He walks from his home through to the Temple yard (Mendhir). Although sitting under the same big roof, the men and women are segregated. Firstly He walks around the women's area. He will occasionally talk to some women, take letters from others, and manifest vibhuti (holy ash) for those who need it. Sometimes He will invite a group for an interview in His room. When this happens there is usually quite a commotion. Why, I only found out many days later.

There I was, sitting on the black marble floor (I had had no time to buy my cushion!) with approximately 7,500 other women. I looked around and saw, what I believed to be a true representation of the world population of women! (I couldn't see the men from where I was sitting, I am sure they would have shown a true representation as well) There were all possible skin colours, all possible hair colours, all possible facial expressions, and everybody was dressed in colourful, comfortable clothing. No bare arms or legs are allowed, so there was no lack of variety as far as colours and Punjabi suit designs are concerned.

All of a sudden there was a wave of shuffling sounds through the whole Mendhir; people sat up straight and all turned towards the large building just outside the surrounding low wall. That is where Sai BabaÆs actual residence is. Music started playing over the loud speakers, and I understood that this meant that the moment that I, and everyone else, was waiting for had arrived.

Sai Baba walked down the middle path at a leisurely, unhurried pace, almost as if he was gliding. He is even smaller than I had imagined him to be. His hair, which surrounds his head like a halo, is thinning but still is very remarkable. He smiled at people in the audience and waved his hands a very distinct way. It is said that he communicates with other realms in this manner, but this could be just a rumour. The feeling amongst these thousands of people changed instantly. The energy this amazing Being emanates is impossible to put into words. I knew immediately I had come to the right place, and that my stay here in Puttaparthi would prove to be the experience of a lifetime.

The Darshan only took about 30 minutes. We were able to watch Sai Baba walk amongst the men as well, though from a fair distance away. After the morning Darshan there is a break of an hour and a half for those who wish to have breakfast before Bhajans starts. Bhajans are devotional songs, and are also held in the Mendhir. Some people choose to stay; some meditate, some chat with their neighbours, and others sit and contemplate. I learnt quickly that you find what suits you best. There seems to be so many different rules and regulations which can often contradict each other as well. There are many people who like to remind you of all the 'have-tos' and 'don'ts', but I realised that when something felt right for me to do, it was possible to do it without opposition. It actually became an interesting process in building my confidence.

In the afternoon there is a second Darshan and also Bhajans. The lining up for the afternoon starts at around 2pm and the Bhajans ends at 5.30pm. There is an hour before Darshan and Bhajans. Many people will go and have their afternoon tea then, while some stay in the Mendhir, as happens during the morning.

I chose to go back to the taxi driver. Indeed he was still there waiting patiently. Time in India takes on a totally different meaning! I was directed towards the so-called Public Relations Office where I had to register. My passport was taken from me, and I was told to collect it again the next morning, at the introductory talk. It felt a bit strange handing over my passport, but I had been persuaded it was really a very safe thing to do, inside the Ashram. (I did get it back the next morning!) With my registration slip in hand I was then directed into the 'Accommodation Office'. This was where I was allocated a room. Because I was travelling alone, without a family or a group, I was given a place in a room with three other women. The rooms are shared by up to four people and it cost me 100 Rupees for ten days, which is the equivalent of 50 Australian cents per night! (There is no need to make a booking in advance, it is not even possible).

A porter was waiting to take my luggage out of the taxi and he showed me the way. The room had the basic necessities like a bathroom with (western) toilet and a shower and even a fan to cool it off a bit. I knew I could buy a cotton mattress in the village and could hire a bed if I chose not to sleep on the floor. I did indeed choose the bed (at 5 Rupees per night) because it gave me a bit more storage space in the room.

Later in the afternoon I met my room-mates: we were a true 'United Nation' room with one Venezuelan, one Dutch, one South African and myself as the Australian! The Venezuelan lady had been to the ashram many times before and was to be a really great help to me in the coming days. A very rich source of information! It seemed that every 'first timer' I had spoken to had met somebody experienced to learn the ways of the ashram from!

And so I learnt about the canteen in the ashram which provided all three meals, with separate kitchens for Indians and Westerners. The food was always tasty and wholesome, and it cost me about $1.50 Australian per meal. There was a fairly large shopping complex in the ashram, which was apparently very new, where you could buy fresh bread, vegetables, fruit and basic toiletry needs, and even some 'souvenirs' like pens, cassettes and videos. I could see that it was possible to remain in the ashram without having to go into the village.

After I had organised myself in my room, I ventured out to the village and knew I would spend quite some time rummaging in the shops there as well! There were a few coffee shops where I always seemed to meet someone to talk to and to learn from. I quickly learned which places felt safe and which I avoided. My shopping sprees were a real experience in keeping my sense of humour and learning the art of bargaining, a true necessity in the village. Always noisy, always colourful, wherever I seemed to go. There were 'sights' like the Wishfulfilling Tree, The Meditation Tree, Sai Baba's birthplace which has been turned into a shrine honouring Shiva, and the grand Museum on top of the hill, which is home to displays of every possible world religion.

As I mentioned before, I had done much listening and reading in the months before going to Puttaparthi, but whilst I was there I always was able to gain information on whatever subject I was concerned about or interested in.

I stayed in Puttaparthi for three weeks which felt like a period of at least three months. To describe what I saw, what I experienced, what I learned, and to talk about the wonderful people I met, I would need at least 900 pages! It was a very personal and unforgettable Journey which has really not ended since I started it at Perth Airport in that particular month of September.

If anyone would like more practical information on how to get to Puttaparti to see Sai Baba please feel free to contact me

TESTING THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

A Brief Analysis Of Core Samples

by Morley Legg

Gathering clues and insights into ufology has become like a gold rush. Those who know of the veins of reality know that jealousies and infightings can arise as people stake their claims on new findings before the scientific community wakes up. People feel that the knowledge gleaned from a new sighting or encounter could fuel a paradigm wobble that could threaten or revolutionise our concept of religion and science; could even re-stir the old struggle between the conservatives in religion and science, each fighting for the highest ground and the last word.

There are two main players in this prospecting, (actually three if you include the sceptics, but weÆll handle our own scepticism). There are the UFO researchers, the majority of whom believe that science can gradually begin to understand pieces of the mystery of UFOs, and strike gold as a result. The largest and widest group, however, are those orientated in the New Age, which, with their emphasis on intuitive and transcendental development, prefer to believe that their own minds can be used as a tool to tune into and explore, mainly optimistically, other dimensions, other teachings, and the very source of the paranormal.

The efforts of New Agers has resulted in the mushrooming growth of an industry of alternatives - of channelling, astrology, past lives, prophecies, automatic writing, clairvoyance, crystals, tarot, etc. - all areas shunned by mainstream science. Yet it has risen into a mountain. Many ufologists see it as the slag heap on the fringe of the gold mine and a blight on their integrity. (MUFON bars New Age stalls at its Symposiums.) Conventional scientists, if they bother to notice, are contemptuous of it or remain smug that fuzzy reasoning and superstition only confirm the superiority of conventional science.

Certainty is an attitude often flaunted by those investing in their favourite aspect of the New Age. They like to be positive, take many claims as gospel, though their opponents seem equally certain that they are investing in a mountain of delusion.

Paradoxically, through sheer worldwide acceptance, the mountain has become something of a reality and it seems only right that a few core samples should be taken to ascertain what percentage of gold there is in it. Most of the books mentioned in this article/review are those I would not normally bother reading - some were pressed on me. However, the lesson became obvious, that if we only read what we think we will agree with, we fall into the trap of the sceptics: confining themselves to what they prefer, not looking at the evidence for UFOs because they don't believe there is any. I am not saying we should believe this following material, only that we should become familiar with some of the content in order to better judge the mystery as a whole.

If within the next few months you find the sky darkening and temperatures plummeting and electricity no longer works then it means the predictions about us entering the photon belt have come true. You are Becoming a Galactic Human, by Virginia Essene and Sheldon Nidle (1994) is a book about channelled information from Washta, a counsellor of the Sirian star group speaking through the lips of Sheldon Nidle, a fifty year old American. Nidle has been receiving messages from the Sirians since he was nine.

Virginia Essene, a channeller herself, writes a long forward about the Sirian group who say they are intervening to help us - unlike the greys who exploit us. The book has interesting maps about the so-called 'lost' knowledge: how humanity has long been invaded and drained of energy by the Dinoids and the Reptoids, the war between Atlantis and Lemuria, the more recent news of earth rolling into the photon belt, and the manner in which the Sirian

Galactic Federation will help us move from the third dimension to the fifth, which, after the initial cold spell, will raise our spirituality. (There is a parallel to this in a recent report received by Alton from the Ashtar Command that earthlings will undergo a change to higher consciousness, and that landings are imminent) Such are the messages from Nidle when Essene puts questions to Washta. Currently it seems as wise to doubt it all as it is to acknowledge it, but matching it against claims from other sources could help us get any trend in perspective.

Channelling, still an unsolved mystery that has persisted through history, now pours out an at an exponential rate. Because much of the material is dubious and still believed by some people in search of security, true scientific study of it has been neglected. In any case psychiatry still classes it as a personality disorder.

Professor Jon Klimo has made a helpful update on the subject in his book Channelling, Investigations on Receiving Information from Paranormal Sources (1987, Tarcher LA). Klimo covers the theories of about a hundred researchers for and against the idea of it being a deep wish for the irrational to triumph, or whether some minds can actually tune into messages from a hierarchy of intelligences. He admits to æmessages of deception': '... the original messages of openness and love runs dry and replaced by something manipulative and sour.'

His study ranges from those who only 'channel' from their sub personalities to gifted channellers drawing data from unknown entities, to 'open channelling': individuals unknowingly acting as vehicles for artistic/religious/ scientific creativity or genius from an unidentified source. He raises the notion that, if vast uncharted seas of consciousness have an influence on us, more research on channelling is urgently required.

Channelled information is one aspect, consciously remembered UFO abductions seems quite another, yet it draws the speculation as to whether they stem from a separate or a common origin.

In The Message Given to Me by Extra-Terrestrials - They Took Me to Their Planet, the French journalist Claude Vorilhon claims that in December 1973 he met an alien in a UFO who instructed him to take notes over six days to write a book. The first half of the book explains how Elohim scientists seeded the Earth with life over vast stretches of time, created Adam and Eve and gave us religious teachers, Jesus etc.

The Bible is heavily adhered to and our misinterpretations of it are pointed out. The last half is about the alienÆs return two years later to take Vorilhon, who they renamed Rael, to their planet. His account, via their gift of automatic writing seems cloying and idealistic at times. But who knows for sure whether he is genuine or not? The aliens instruct Rael to attract a following in order to establish an embassy in Israel in preparation for a landing. The Elohim said they will try to save humanity once the Raelian Movement gets underway. It has centres in many countries.

Abduction to the 9th Planet by Michel Desmarquete (1993), (ex-French, now Australian, landscape architect living in Cairns) reveals similarities to Rael. Desmarquet claims to have been called outside his home one night in June 1987 and taken physically, by a giant alien female, via a parallel universe to another planet, from which he was returned to earth nine days later. Believable?

When he was interviewed by Phillip Adams on ABC Radio it sounded as if Phillip's quips (insults) were added after the recording was made. Desmarquet was also told about ETs seeding Earth with life and mankind, and adding religious figures like Christ.

The warnings issued about the current behaviour of mankind seems typical of much of the literature. We need to bear in mind that Billy Meier came up with vaguely similar stories and also photographs of space craft. But researcher Karl Korff shadowed Billy Meier and in Spaceships from the Pleiades he claims to prove that Meier concocted long standing hoaxes to prey on the gullible.

Like much of New Age material these are the sorts of books you read and put in the æwait and seeÆ box. We know that there are hoaxes, and that wishful thinking and gullibility are complicating factors. However, it is the sheer volume of claims of alien intervention from different sources that makes one suspect a percentage of it could be true, and that it would be bad science indeed to claim that if some cases are proven fraudulent the entire subject should be shunned.

Important questions are posed by such issues. Where does this channelled material come from? Has the channelled voice/writing/ hallucination/experience some common source? Can an original message be deflected by the culture and expectations of novice channellers?

Dr. Karla Turner, an author respected by ufologists, touches on the less credible aspect of ufology in Masquerade of Angels (1994). Her two previous books Taken (1994), and Into the Fringe (1992), detail her ongoing UFO abduction experiences, firstly with so called aliens and then her suspicion that sections of the US Military, in their efforts to study/copy alien techniques, had probably included her in their abduction experiments.

Both types of her abduction accounts, one lot with aliens and then another with humans in uniform, seemed to run at such frequencies that it surely reduced the chances of her being taken seriously. Yet she has a Ph D and at all times in her writing her humanity and integrity seemed paramount. Her last book (recently she died of cancer) details the true story of Ted Rice, in which she writes in the third person and mentions her interactions with Ted in the closing chapters.

Ted proves to be a gifted psychic though mostly a reluctant one. He seemed guided through life by chance meetings (channelled one could say) to move to different parts of the US as if manipulated to fit into a set plan. Amidst the good fortunes he was often plagued by disappointments and intense anxieties, and visits from aliens at night. The abductions began in his childhood, and the revelations that they were quite other than benign are left to the last chapters.

Ted's reactions in the light of Randall Baer's in the following Inside the New Age Nightmare are interesting. Both have similar New Age backgrounds, and both react in similar ways when they realise they had been deceived by these 'angels of deception', though Ted, through Karla Turner's eyes anyway, seems more worldly and open minded and uses humour as a defence against trauma.

The book offers some interesting theories as to humanityÆs place in existence. It suggests, too, that nuts and bolts ufology may need to go further back on the shelf and that the New Age needs to become a bit more safety conscious.

The aliens once told Ted that space is filled with positive and negative charges providing separate dimensions which give rise to intelligent entities. Ted surmises that we humans are a energy source for these different entities and they may have designed us with positive and negative aspects so both can use us. The polarities in this adjoining dimension to ours are what we generally sense as good and evil, both poles of which may have created and used mankind. It is the oneness of this force which we believe to be God. His story challenges everything we think we know about the universe.

Although badly shaken by reliving the original abduction experience (hidden behind the screen memory) he recovers and adjusts to a more mature religious philosophy. He turns to Jesus and lauds his grandmother's Christian faith and bravery against evil. He also says: 'If humanity is involved in a battle then knowledge and our honesty is our only weapon.'

An initial browse through Inside the New Age Nightmare (Huntington, 1989) by Randall Baer reveals the author to be a fundamentalist Christian from the US Bible Belt relentlessly attacking the enemy. A little perseverance makes one realise it would be wrong to dismiss glibly something that deserves a closer look. His warnings are issued from experience.

Randall Baer came from a strong Christian family and in his youth he rebelled and became increasingly entranced with every aspect of the New Age. In the seventies he rose to prominence and spent 15 years lecturing in many states at communes and seminars. He wrote books on crystals etc, went increasingly into meditations, and into long spells in what he calls the 'Ascension Chamber'. In this device he had the most horrific experience which left him shaken and in terror for weeks.

In desperation he worked hard to be reborn as a Christian which seems to have restored his sense of well-being, thus accounting for his repeated warnings about the dangers of the entire New Age movement. Apart from this, he writes passionately and with convictions, however exasperated one feels about repetitive references to Satan as if Satan is a person we all know well. Is he just a disturbed man on a regressive guilt trip? Is he reverting to religious indoctrination, flipping from one superstition to another? How one reacts to his views is a personal matter.

He says some awful things about UFOs, and of course in ASPR/UFORUM we have been aware of those possible dangers over the years. The world and the universe has always been a dangerous place if one is naive, misinformed or unlucky. Heed Professor David Jacobs' warning about the frightening aspects of UFOs. Heed Kelly Cahill's instinctive warning 'They've got no souls', and Jon Klimo's 'Which channels can we trust, and for how long?' Those who have invested full trust in the New Age as a means of healing, hope and enlightenment will not like his book at all, but it might be wise to acquaint yourself with his views and for your own peace of mind make sure they can be rebutted.

We humans are easily indoctrinated. We automatically copy the culture we are born into, adhere to traditions, wise or unwise, and generally adhere to the local socio/religious maps of right and wrong. We take note of the prescribed areas of dangers and safety that society maps out for us. Baer upsets us because he says our maps are wrong, that only his narrow Christian map is right and all others at variance have been tricked by the worst nightmare imaginable.

When one remembers David Jacobs' pessimism in studying the experiences of abductees in Secret Life, (1992), and Linda Moulten Howe's announcement at the 1995 MUFON Symposium that aliens are 'neither benign, nor neutral ...' we suspect Baer might have had a brush with something similar in his ascension chamber. A pity he didn't risk undergoing hypnotic regression to probe anything not remembered consciously.

He writes: 'From the perspective of past, personal, first-hand involvement in the UFO phenomenon, now viewing it with the eyes of a Christian, I believe that this subject merits the most serious investigation, for it could hold a very real threat to the entire world in both expected and highly unexpected ways.' Sensible enough, but the following is the dominant tone of the book:

'Most people involved in the New Age movement today are so deceived by Satan's lies that they have absolutely no idea of the underlying sinister dangers' .... 'Little did I know that I had fallen for one of Satan's oldest tricks - the use of guru figures as demonic puppets through which to transmit blissful forces that seduce even as they veil the consuming face of darkness behind it all.'.... ' What I thought were Ascended Masters, extraterrestrials, and angels were actually demons in cunning, glowing disguises.'

Such views could provide clues to fundamentalist behaviour in religion or politics generally. In the short sense it is a code adopted to take and maintain total control. But is the compulsion to follow and impose narrow rules imposed on them by some other intelligence, or is it a human coping mechanism to ward off the fear of disobeying channelled commandments? It would be premature to reach conclusions at this point, however, as we have little idea of humanity's standing and vulnerability in the unmapped hierarchies and ecologies of other dimensions.

Baer's book may be depressing and confusing to some of us, but as ASPR/UFORUM is studying and refining maps of what is true and what is delusional we need to acquaint ourselves with such views and explore the motives behind them. In the meantime perhaps a look in the mirror to weigh up any signs of New Age naivety might not be such a bad thing.

One can understand ufologists who are eager for scientific respectability avoiding the murky uncertainties in these books and aiming exclusively for nuts and bolts ufology in our physical world. Be reminded that anyone wanting to either discredit or explain away any darker ingredients in this mountain of assortments will have to come up with answers to chapter five in Kelly Cahill's book Encounter (1996) - the incubus, the dark figure that sucks energy and steals flesh, and interferes with her body and health. And to bring in another side mystery: those into debating the gulf between the pros and cons of repressed memory should study this area which will be completely new to them, because if aliens can remove memory, can they also tamper with it, or implant false memory?

Speaking personally I have long wavered in my opinion of the New Age and, out of ignorance and caution, prefer to keep one foot in scepticism. I once thumbed through Barbara Brennan's books and decided against them because of the mention of past lives, crystals and channelling - because such subjects seemed based on belief and could not be proved. But when I started to read her books I realised there was at least one nugget in the mountain when I was quite moved by the quality of her text, well supported by her scientific qualifications.

The average street-wise 20th century mind remains cynical about much of this material and sees channelling and crystal readings as an age-old ruse to enslave the gullible (which in some hands it is) but unless we make periodic checks on the consistency of the mountain we will never know what has value and what needs to be discarded, and what holds clues to making further progress.

We must also consider the possibility that the optimistic viewpoints of Essene, Nidle, Demarquete and Rael could stem from what psychologists term dissociation. Like erecting a screen memory to seal off a nightmare, you dissociate to impair or censure your perception of something threatening in order to dampen consuming fear or terror. How much of the rosy New Age view of meeting wise aliens or spirit guides is just that? It is a question we need to bear in mind if we want more awareness of who, what and where we are.

The questions raised by these authors are both fascinating and disturbing. They leave us at a cross roads where it seems urgent that we wake up to assemble some more appropriate knowledge to choose the wisest course of action. We currently seem lost in a world that is changing before our eyes, partly because we are seeing it differently, and it is no less painful or difficult to understand. But let's hope the honesty of exploring and meeting the good and the bad head on will at least bring the fullfillment that life is exciting, and also meaningful.

References:
BAER, R., (1989) Inside the New Age Nightmare. Huntington.
CAHILL, K., (1996) Encounter.
DESMARQUETE, M., (1993) Abduction to the 9th Planet. Arafura.
ESSENE, V., & NIDLE, S., (1994)
You are Becoming a Galactic Human. SEE Publishing.
JACOBS, D., (1992) Secret Life. Simon & Schuster, NY.
KLIMO, J., (1987) Channelling, Investigations on Receiving
Information from Paranormal Sources. Tarcher LA.
KORFF, K., Spaceships from the Pleiades.
TURNER, K., (1992) Into the Fringe. Berkley.
TURNER, K., (1994) Taken. Kelt Works.
TURNER, K., (1994) Masquerade of Angels.
VORILHON, C., (RAEL) The Message Given to Me
by Extra-Terrestrials - They Took Me to Their Planet.

"Thinking yourself to be the body, you know the world as a collection of material things. When you know yourself as a centre of consciousness, the world appears as the ocean of the mind. When you know yourself as you are in reality, you know the world as yourself."
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj: I Am That

"To search for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture bound an assumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant."
Terrance McKenna: The Archaic Revival

"Was it possible, he wondered, that what the mystics had been saying for centuries was true, reality was maya, an illusion, and what was out there was really a vast, resonating symphony of wave forms, a 'frequency domain' that was transformed into the world as we know it only after it entered our senses?"
Michael Talbot: The Holographic Universe

A LIE IN A'LIE'NS, PERHAPS,
BUT WHAT (ON EARTH) IS GOING ON !?

by Brian Richards

Helmeted Space Suits
"Because of the way they were dressed, I could see nothing but their eyes, and only vaguely because these were protected by round glasses. Their eyes seemed much smaller than ours, though I believe these were the effects of the lenses. Above their eyes those helmets looked so tall that they corresponded to double of what a normal head should be. Three tubes extended down from the helmet and blended into the suit." Thus spoke Antonio Villas Boas in describing his 14th October 1957 encounter with aliens on his Francisco de Salles farm in Brazil. Antonio never got a proper look at the three beings, believed to be male. His intimate encounter with a female would have him believe she was human but for her bright red pubic hair, and animal gutturals, which seemed totally alien to him. (Note: Heinonen and Viljo's CE3 alien wore a tall helmet. Finland Jan. 1970).

Russian Giants
On the other side of the world in a Russian park of Voronezh, a UFO landed in front of startled children. On that memorable day of the 27th September 1989, three beings, one apparently a robot, emerged from a hatchway under the craft. Two of the entities were almost four meters tall, dressed in silvery overalls and bronze boots. Between their shoulders where their heads should have been was a bump supporting three eyes, one central, the other two displacing the ears. This account with many other details, was run by the very conservative Pravda newspaper and wired around the world through the major news groups. Although many efforts have been made to discredit the whole account, it remains a truly enigmatic case.

Grotesque Beings
On the night of 21st August 1955 eight adults and three children were besieged for over two hours by beings so grotesque, they defied belief. This is the Kentucky-Hopkinsville encounter that stands out as one of the classic cases in UFO lore. Billy Ray Taylor, one of the adults present had seen a UFO come down and land near a dry creek bed not far from the farm. The creatures involved were glowing dwarf-like beings with huge bulbous yellow eyes and enormous membranous elephantine ears. When the terrified farmers fired at the beings, they merely floated down from the farmhouse roof and made off on all fours. No other entities quite like this have been reported, but on 23rd February 1975, two frightened boys, Masato Kono and Katsuhiro Yamahata from Kofu, Japan had an encounter with an alien 130cm high without eyes or nose, but with huge elephantine ears.

Interestingly, from Sayama City, Japan, on the 3rd October 1978, a Mr Hideichi Amano, a keen radio ham, and his two year old daughter Juri, had driven up a mountain side to make good contact with Amano's brother. Just before their journey back down the mountain, the lights inside Anano's radio van started playing up and other equipment failed. Feeling something pressing against his right temple, Amano turned to find a frightening spectacle staring at him through the open window. Where its mouth should have been was a T-shaped pipe from which a stream of high pitched rapid babble ensued. No nose was evident and the eyes were motionless, glowing bluish white. The oval chinless head sat on neckless shoulders more in the style of a robotic figure. It's lobeless ears were enormous, tapering upwards to sharp points. The creature began to dim out and disappeared.

The Vilvorde Alien
This interesting humanoid was surprised in the small hours by a Mr V who needed to obey a call of nature at his home twelve miles from Brussels. At 2am on the 19th December 1973, Mr V heard a noise. What he saw in his garden could have been pure science fiction, except that it wasn't. A 3-foot humanoid, glowing green, was sweeping the walled garden with something resembling a scanner or metal detector. Its head was encased in a 'goldfish bowl' connected by a tube to a backpack. Attached to the front of a shiny one-piece suit was a bright red box that sparkled. When Mr V flashed his torch in the direction of the thing, it turned bodily and stiffly as if any head movement was impaired. No nose or mouth was visible, but its ears were pointed. Large glowing oval yellow eyes were clearly seen.

When Mr V flashed his torch yet again, the humanoid raised its fingers in a V-sign. perhaps in telling universal rudeness, or acknowledging Mr V's name, or for whatever reason. It then proceeded to walk across the garden and up the wall like a fly and down the other side in a feat of gravity defying agility. A short time later, a small round object rose up into the night sky from behind the wall and disappeared into the inky blackness.

Pascagoula Mississippi 12th October 1973
Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker were enjoying a night's fishing from a pier in the Shaupeter Shipyard, when a craft appeared hovering two or three feet from the ground, not far from the amazed and frightened witnesses. Three beings emerged from the buzzing vehicle and floated towards the men. They were quickly seized and floated back on board.

Under hypnosis, Hickson later described the beings as having '... bizarre facial features, long conical rods where nose and ears would normally be. They had long arms ending in crab-like pincers and ghostly pale wrinkled skin. They were vaguely humanoid in shape but their feet were not like feet, more like a round thing, sort of ...'

Anti-Gravity
What are we to make of aliens or entities 'floating' down to earth, walking up walls, floating into craft or running away from a police cars at over 35 mph (the Jeff Greenhaw case, Falkville Alabama 17th October 1973)? Does this indicate bionic beings with extraordinary abilities, or aliens from worlds with much less gravity than our own? Similar parallels can be found through our own astronauts effortless leaps on the moon, only restricted by their weighted boots and heavy equipment.

Of course it could be argued that the smaller the alien stature, the greater their world's gravity, but how do our own pygmies fit into this theory? On earth there are reports of entities doing amazing things. Jeff Greehaw's alien was over two meters tall and ran in huge strides. Police Chief Greenhaw thought he was dealing with a silver-suited robot.

Greys
When Maurice Masse found two aliens sampling his lavender crop in Valensole, France on the 1st July 1965, he thought he had surprised two boys due to their diminutive size. His thoughts changed when he was immobilised by some sort of ray gun. Their large heads, large dark eyes in faces lacking clear noses and mouths, their shiny one-piece suits and egg-shaped craft made Masse realise he was dealing with something not of this world. He was seeing what are now commonly accepted as the Greys, just as New Mexican policeman Lonnie Zamora had seen a year previously in 1964.

Decades of Diversity
Now of course the general impression put out by scores of abductees, UFO magazines, books and videos is that the Greys are the only aliens to be lurking in our skies and bedrooms. What about the hundreds of reports from France, Spain, Italy, Russia and Europe as a whole throughout the Fifties and Sixties that describe the weirdest little (and not so little and very often hideous) alien types? There are giants from Russia, the Canary Islands and Spain, Nordic types from England, the USA, and many other countries, tiny beings (three to four inches) from Malaysia and Perth, Asiatic types from everywhere, omnipresent Greys and robots, Insectoids and Reptilians. The list is endless.

According to the Nevada Aerial Research Group, (NARG), there are sixteen main groups of aliens interacting in some way with Earth and/or its inhabitants. The diversity of reports would have us believe the figure is much higher, but this could mean 'at any one time'. As there are no UFO 'experts' to give us the answers we must surmise the reality of an alien. Are they time travellers (ourselves) coming back for a closer look at our past? Nuts and bolts ETs warping time and space, inter and/or intra-dimensional visitors, materialisations from a higher plane, holographic projections or materialised remote viewers? Perhaps they are all of these things and much much more.

Apart from the great variety of alien types that have presented themselves over the years, there seems to be the negative and positive, black and white, good and evil aspect to the whole picture. So can we believe what we see when an alien identity reveals itself? We know one of the main methods of communication between aliens and humans is telepathy. Telepathy can be a form of mind control, and hypnotism is bound up with the same string. We may be seeing a blonde Nordic type, but the reality may be an Insectoid or Reptilian. The truth may be too traumatic to be revealed. Screen memories are often implanted into the mind of the abductee to block recall of the real event. Shakespeare advised that it is better '... to be rather than to seem ...' In the alien's case it's probably better '... to seem rather than to be'.

A list of alien types compiled by NARG makes interesting reading. Take it with a pinch of salt - or garlic- if needs must!

TYPES...........................................................PURPOSE .........................CHARACTER

Group 1 (enemies)
Draco (native terrans and ET - planetoid)
Reptilian Humanoid tall.......................................food/control...............................Bad
Draco Reptilian Greys........................................food/control...............................Bad
Deros (detrimental robots)..................................food/control...............................Bad
Nephilim/Baf..................................................... food/control...............................Bad

Orion/Secret Govt Pact
Big Nosed Greys...............................................genetics....................................Bad
Insectoid Greys.................................................experiments/food.......................Bad
Tall Greys.........................................................genetics/food............................Bad
Blond 1 ............................................................deception..................................Bad
Synthetics........................................................deception..................................Bad
Robotoids..........................................................deception..................................Bad

Group 2. Semi-neutrals Zeta Reticulan (Secret Govt. Pact 2)
Reticulan Greys ................................................learning.....................................Neutral
Reticulan Oranges.............................................experiments...............................Bad

Group 3 Allies
Pleiadean Humans.............................................teaching/friendship.....................Good
Sirian Humans...................................................friendship..................................Good
Akartians
Human
Mutated Human ................................................semi-friendship...........................Good
Iargans
Humanoid..........................................................friendship...................................Good
Others
Humanoid hairy..................................................friendship...................................Good

As far back as 1946, Ray Palmer's Amazing Stories magazine ran allegedly true stories from contributors Albert Bender, Gray Barker and Richard S. Shaver. These spoke of sinister beings beneath the earth, the Deros, Dracos, Nephilim, Bafath and Atlanteans, all caught up in a master/slave matrix with alien connections. The forces of good and evil in their eternal struggle for supremacy. Add all this to the updated versions of researchers/informants Bill Cooper, William Moore, Richard Doty, Paul Bennewitz, John Lear, Bob Lazar et al, and we have a veritable smorgasbord of data. A dichotomy of fact and fiction. Some of this food must be tainted, and it's hard to know which when it tastes so good.

On top of all this are the countless reports of weird and wonderful biological creations leaping about the countryside causing turmoil and terror at worst or sceptics fodder and future folklore at best. Often unassociated with UFOs, these 'beasts of the bush' cannot be dismissed so easily. Far too many reports from reliable witnesses world wide are the makings of a huge jig-saw puzzle waiting to be assembled. It has been suggested that some of the aliens are placing various life-forms in selected locations on Earth to:

1) Test their survival potential.

2) Monitor movements/behaviour.

3) Test human (psychological and media) response
to sightings.

4) 'Sacrifice' selected species by letting them
deliberately fall into the hands of the authorities
as part of the conditioning/educating process of
humankind to the alien presence. This final point
may not be as absurd as it sounds. The Roswell
crash (2nd July 1947) is believed by some
researchers to have the makings of a contrived
'sacrificial accident'.

Varginha
What are we to make of the amazing Varginha case which happened so recently? At 3.30pm 20th January 1996 in the small town of Varginha in the state of Minas Gerais (the same state as the Villas Boas encounter) in South America, three girls came across an extraordinary sight.

Squatting at the back of an old garage was a strange creature with slippery brown skin, and what appeared to be three small rounded horns protruding from its head. Liliane Fatima Silva (16), the first to see the creature, screamed in alarm. The terrified girls later described the creature as '... squatting, its long arms between its legs. Its eyes were huge and red. It was not an animal and it certainly wasn't human. It was a horrible thing.' The frightened girls continued their account: 'He seemed stupefied and didn't make any noise'. But when the being made a small movement, the girls ran for their lives.

An elderly couple, Oralina Augusta and Eurico Rodrigues claimed to have seen a submarine-shaped UFO trailing white smoke as it flew silently overhead in the early hours of 20th January. It is claimed that not one but two aliens were captured by the military that fateful January day. Yet no grounded UFO has been reported. Were these two unfortunate beings marooned on Earth for 'conduct unbecoming' or deliberate bait for the authorities?

Chupacabras
Out of Puerto Rico come chilling stories of the nocturnal Chupacabra. (Spanish for 'goatsucker' after one of the first animals to be found drained of blood, with two identical holes in its neck.) According to witnesses' testimony this is the ultimate living gargoyle, the devil personified. But we cannot know if this is an alien lifeform, an interdimensional materialisation, or a figment of many imaginations. What we do know is, it has gained a cult following and runs the risk of being buried in a morass of disinformation and denial, as applied to the crop circle phenomenon.

Bigfoot, Susquash, Yeti, Yowi, call it what you will, too many people have seen them. And the Mothmen, half men, half birdlike creatures, from West Virginia in the Sixties. (Read, John Keel: The Mothman Prophesies.) Too many people have claimed to have been abducted. People have sustained injuries from the so called Greys (Vallensole, S. France), been grabbed by mechanical objects (Livingstone, Scotland) attacked by tiny jelly-like creatures (Domsten, South. Sweden), threatened by Men-in-Black (MIBs), and witnessed brain-like creatures in the road (Dapple Grey Lane, Los Angeles).

All these sightings, and thousands more, do not suggest solely alien origins. We don't even know if what we see is an illusion, an aberration of the truth, the 'lie' in alien emerging from our altered visual stimuli. When the truth is so elusive it's easy to fall into the hidden agenda/conspiracy theory trap, although at times this is justified. What it does suggest is a diversity of life forms, some no doubt extraterrestrial, interacting with the human race, flora and fauna.

This planet is still our home We have every right to check the credentials of our uninvited guests. Unfortunately these are seldom, if ever, presented. For so long now the aliens and their UFOs have remained, not one, but many steps ahead of our efforts to find the truth. That UFOs exist, and aliens have been seen, is beyond doubt. The much needed hard evidence seems always beyond our grasp.

Conspiracy theories aside, whenever something has turned up, that vital linchpin to all research invariably goes astray, gets lost in transit, or mysteriously disappears.

Implants
But things may be about to change. Some remarkable X-rays have surfaced at recent UFO conferences thanks to the work of two dedicated researchers, Derrel Sims (Certified Medical Hypnotherapist and Registered Hypnotic Anaethsesia Therapist), and Dr Roger Leir, Podiatric Surgeon, DPM. Dr Leir has recovered a number of possible alien implants from patients claiming abduction experiences and otherwise.

These tiny objects, only about 4.5mm long, are being subjected to critical testing and analysis in the USA, Italy (Pizza), The Netherlands, Germany and Austria. They are undergoing Isotopic Range Tests and age dating. Two of the objects are believed to have meteoritic origins

If we are being carefully monitored already, who and what are the agencies involved, and what is their ultimate goal? An alien agenda - survival of a species - or a New World Order - the ultimate in power and control? There are many theories but few facts. The problem is, if the facts uncovered are so bizarre and don't fit our 'comfort zones' they're not going to be believed anyway. It's a personal choice.

References
ANTONIO HUNNEUS / MORI.
BROOKSMITH, P., Creatures From Elsewhere.
CLARK, J., The Emergence of a Phenomenon.
CREIGHTON, G., Flying Saucer Review
GOOD, T., Beyond Top Secret.
SPENCER, J., UFOs:The Definitive Casebook.
The UFO Phenomenon. Time Life Books.
Sightings Magazine, Vol 1, Issue 3.
MUFON UFO Journal.
International UFO Reporter.
The WWW Internet.
Alberta UFO Association (AUFORA).
Nevada Aerial Research Group (NARG).

SYNCHRONICITY PERHAPS

by Humphrey Plumstead & Simon Harvey-Wilson

As a clock maker of some 25 years in the business, I was approached by Ascot Race Course to give a quote on restoring a public clock which had been out of action for a very long time. As it later transpired nobody could ever remember it being in situ. Employees who had been there for 16 years could not even remember it being used.

When I arrived to make an inspection it was indeed a public clock, the case alone measuring 4"2' x 4"2' x 12' (1.27m x 1.27m x 0.3m) with a dial diameter of 3" (0.92m). Unfortunately, somebody some years earlier had walked a piece of 4 by 2 through the plate glass dial, leaving virtually nothing of the original glass. As if to compound my dilemma, it turned out that it was not a clock in the true sense of the word, but a weight driven time clock with two fly-back hands. Exactly the same kind of mechanism as on the windup wrist chronographs that have two re-set buttons each side of the winders. I had absolutely no idea how the dial was calibrated, nor really what the clock was supposed to do. Furthermore neither did anyone else.

I made a quote and it was accepted. I felt certain that somewhere along the line I would gain some information. This however was not be. So, having resigned myself to 'perhaps upstairs will prevail', I started renovation on the case and movement.

Early inspection of the old wooden case showed quite extensive damage to the corners. After much thought I decided to have four brass suitcase corners fabricated, this would cover the damaged areas and considerably enhance the look of the case.

Next step - out with Yellow Pages. Looking under the heading of brass, I selected a firm called Tubelok in Cannington. I rang and spoke to a guy called Robert, who readily agreed it was no problem to manufacture what I needed. I then proceeded to enlighten him as to the nature of the clock, and where it had come from. His reply was - wait for it - 'Oh, I know that clock. I was there when it was smashed, not only that, but I also know the architect who was there at the time, and he has all the pieces of glass stored.' Next step - contact the architect. Sure enough, he had all the broken pieces of glass together with - wait for it - a photograph of the clock before the dial was smashed.

The following Sunday, my architect friend, accompanied by his girlfriend, who just happened to work at the Turf Club, duly delivered the pieces of glass along with the photograph.

There is another curious twist to this tale. The clock has two hands, one short and black that count off the minutes, the other long and red that counts off the seconds. The photograph very clearly shows that the black hand is in front of the red one, however, in reality (my reality) this is a mechanical impossibility. Perhaps Lyall Watson author of The Secret Lives of Inanimate Objects could throw some light on the subject. Synchronicity perhaps!

COMMENT BY SIMON HARVEY-WILSON

Synchronicity, a term first used by Carl Jung in 1930, refers to 'meaningful coincidences' that are so unlikely to occur by mere chance that one is compelled to seek a deeper explanation for them. Much has been written on the subject by people from fields such as depth psychology, the paranormal and physics. Most seek a æcause and effect' explanation for synchronicity, but have so far been unsuccessful. A popular approach is to highlight the philosophical differences between Western mechanistic notions of causality, and the Eastern viewpoint, preferred by Jung, which suggest that events can be meaningful related in an acausal manner. While somewhat vague, this idea implies that science's understanding of reality is too superficial. However, this may be changing.

An interesting suggestion come from respected ufologist Jacques Vallee in his book Dimensions (1988). Vallee has a masters degree in astrophysics, a doctorate in computer science, and once worked as Manager of Information Systems at Stanford University, an ideal cross-disciplinary background from which to ponder anomalous events. Information theory is a helpful analytical tool in several fields of research. Quantum physicists use it, neuroscientists use it, and so do researchers designing faster computers.

Vallee theorises that the æstrangenessÆ of the UFO phenomenon, other paranormal events, and synchronicity, may be easier to understand if we view our universe in terms of information processing.

To set the scene for his explanation Vallee contrasts the difference between two types of information storage and retrieval systems: a library and a computer memory. Library books are stored by topic, in a linear fashion. We have all had the experience of being told by a librarian to go up the second aisle and then turn left to find whatever books we were seeking . However, large computer systems store information in a non-linear fashion. Related information is sprinkled throughout the memory system in a non-sequential fashion based on an idexing system that uses probability as one of its criteria. This enables the system to cross reference information in a multi-dimensional fashion, something that is impossible on a book shelf. Vallee's example has someone seeking information relevant to the intersection of two topics, 'microwaves' and 'headaches'. (p.288)

Vallee suggests that we use Information theory to expand our understanding of how the universe might work. He suggests that we live in what he terms a æmultiverse'. 'perhaps it is proper to shake from our theoretical ankles the chains of spacetime. Space and time co-ordinates derive their convenience from graphic considerations. .... If we had invented the digital computer before inventing graph paper, we might have a very different theory of the universe today.' (p.287) Further on he writes : 'If we live in the associative universe of the software scientist rather than the sequential universe of the spacetime physicist, then miracles are no longer irrational events.' (p.288)

But to what extent can the universe be seen in informational terms? Timothy Leary has written that: 'All matter and energy in the universe is just frozen information.' (Drury, 1991:1) Respected US physicist John Wheeler is famous for his 'it from bit' doctrine (Chalmers. 1995), in which 'it' refers to physical matter, while a 'bit' is a basic unit of information. As explained by neuroscientist David Chalmers (1995) '... information is fundamental to the physics of the universe.' Furthermore, the theory of non-locality, which states that 'all (subatomic) information is everywhere' is now accepted by quantum physics. (Talbot, 1991)

Likewise, speaking of the Collective Unconscious or Overmind, Terence McKenna (1991) writes that: '... we are in a symbiotic relationship with an organism made of information ...' If there is a deeper level of reality, as Eastern religions and transpersonal psychology suggest, then it '... maybe organised like a randomised data base (the multiverse) rather than a sequential library ( the four-dimensional universe of conventional physics). (Vallee, 1988:288)

So, what is the nature of the interface between this deeper informational level and ourselves, because it seems to be there that synchronicity occurs? Once again a computing analogy is instructive.

A computer may present information in different formats, such as on screen, by disc, hard copy, or verbally. This emphasises that the way information is stored can be utterly different from the way it is presented to the user. For example, imagine drawing a diagram on your computer screen, then saving it into memory. If you then crawled into your computer's hardware looking for your diagram , all you would find would be a jumble of wires, chips, electric currents and magnetic fields. No diagram anywhere. Yet if you request the picture again, there it is just as you left it.

Perhaps space-time is the 'screen' in which the information that comprises reality is presented for our consumption, but which bears little linear relationship to how that information is stored or cross-referenced at a deeper level. Vallee (1988:287) writes that: ö The theory of space and time is a cultural artefact.ö It may be our individual consciousness that formats the jumble of information that exists at a deeper level to present us with the cultural artefacts of space, time, and even matter. If this is the case, almost anything is possible.

Synchronistic events may be examples of meaningfully related information, packaged as events, rising to the surface of our awareness. It is interesting to note that Hinduism uses the term 'causal' for one of the deepest levels of transpersonal consciousness. (Ross,1993:21O) To seek the 'cause' of synchronicity we should perhaps look at the consciousness of the person involved. What 'wavelength' were they using at that time? Synchronicity may be a type of psychokinesis, and an invitation to seek the unity beyond appearances.

References

CHALMERS, D., (1995) Towards a Theory of Consciousness.
DRURY, N., (1991) The Visionary Human.
McKENNA, T., (1991) The Archaic Revival.
ROSS, G. (1993) The Search for the Pearl.
TALBOT, M. (1991) The Holographic Universe.
VALLEE, J. (1988) Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact

FERTILITY FUTILITY, OR ALIEN-NATION?

by Brian Richards

The Sperm Count was not a nickname for a rampant larrikin lord releasing his unborn progeny onto the subservient sirens of yesteryear. Rather, it is the subject of urgent research and debate, not only amongst medical experts, but also ufologists, whose main concerns are the implications of the so-called abduction experiences, and the medical examinations that seem to go hand in glove with these alien encounters.

Many abductees have claimed, through conscious and hypnotic recall, to have had sperm or ova removed, or to have been inseminated artificially, or impregnated through intercourse with alien beings. It is a sobering fact that researchers world-wide have discovered that the sperm count has almost halved in humans, and many animal species in the last 30 years. Unless this trend is reversed, male infertility will be the cause of humanity's demise.

A chilling documentary, 'Assault on the Male' was aired on ABC TV at 9.30pm 24th October 1996. Research has shown the same results worldwide: alligators with shrinking penises, Scandinavian children with deformed reproductive organs, hermaphrodites in Russia, infertility increasing everywhere, prostate and breast cancers almost out of control, and sperm counts so low as to be totally ineffective. Something is terribly wrong.

Manmade Pollutants
In the Fifties and Sixties the main message coming from Contactees was: ôclean up your act, you're polluting the Earth.ö There has been some positive reaction to this: Ban the Bomb, The Green Movement, The Montreal Protocol, environmentalists, reasoned debate and political reform. If it's not being emitted or dumped, that's good, if it's reclaimed and greened, that's cool. What has been omitted is lack of thought to our everyday man-made products. Billions of food and drink containers, made from an alarming concoction of chemical compounds. Glass, the most stable hygienic substance, is being forsaken for plastic alternatives. On top of all this, the planet is acting like a sponge soaking up billions of tonnes of insecticides, weed killers and fertilisers. Saturation point has long been reached, and the very air we breath is heavily polluted from residual emissions and ongoing spraying.

Dr. Richard Sharpe, an English expert on male/female infertility has linked increased exposure to oestrogen in the womb, and early childhood, to impairment of the immune system and subsequent ailments. The problem is not just the female hormone oestrogen itself, but the chemical compounds that mimic oestrogen. These artificial 'oestrogens' will not dissolve in water. They lodge in the body's fatty tissues as harmful free radicals. Nonyl phenol, a particularly nasty disrupter, can be found in many plastics, detergents, cosmetics, food additives, and most probably drinking water.

Alien Intervention
Is it any wonder then that a group of aliens or a subterranean race (if one exists) is concerned about the state of the planet and humanity? Would it come as any surprise that we are being constantly abducted, examined, sampled, impregnated, implanted and monitored? Even mind-control may rate highly on the alien agenda. Assuming, as Charles Fort once said in The Book of the Damned (1919): 'We are property', we may not be in control of our own destiny.

Cattle mutilations have occurred in great numbers throughout the American mid-west since 1968. Puerto Rico, Canada, Brazil, Mexico and countries in Europe have all lost livestock to these secretive surgeons of the night. The question has to be asked. Why would something, or someone remove, with uncanny precision, mammary glands, sex organs, eyes, tongues, brains, rectums, colons and such, if not to check for bodily contaminants and/or genetic changes? If the animal's food is contaminated, so is the animal. We eat the animal, and we in turn suffer. Our own bodily contamination affects our children and their children. Not only from the food, but also from the containers the food is stored in.

Andre Malan, discussing 'Assault on the Male' (West Australian, 24th October 1996, p.14) in 'The Issues' put it very well in summing up his excellent review. 'It makes you wonder whether the meaning of life is that we are all part of a chemistry experiment in some cosmic laboratory, and that what we are now seeing is a reaction against an excess of testosterone in the beaker"

UNCONVENTIONAL FLYING OBJECTS:
A SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS. By Paul Hill.
1995, Hampton Roads Publishing Co, 429 pages. ISBN 1-57174-027-9

Book Review by Simon Harvey-Wilson

This is an extraordinary UFO book because of its contents, its implications, and its author's impeccable credentials. Paul Hill worked from 1939, until his retirement in 1970, as a respected aeronautical research scientist in increasingly senior positions at NASA's Langley Research Centre in the USA. He thus spent his whole working life at the cutting edge of research into such things as aerospace mechanics, thermodynamics, rocket propulsion, and spacecraft systems and materials. Before his retirement he was awarded NASA's Exceptional Service Medal for 'Outstanding Scientific Leadership.'

In the early 1950s Hill saw a UFO and was fascinated by its sophisticated aeronautics. To quote the book's cover: 'For the next 25 years, Hill acted as an unofficial clearing house at NASA, collecting and analysing sightings' reports for physical properties, propulsion possibilities, dynamics, etc. To refute claims that UFOs defy the laws of physics, he had to make 'technological sense ... of the unconventional object'.' His work was tolerated by NASA, although he was told in no uncertain terms by the then Director that NASA's policy was that UFOs did not exist. Despite this restriction, what is so refreshing about Hill's writing is that he takes UFO sightings at face value, and sets about telling the reader how they seem to work. Be warned though, much of the book is packed with formulae and calculations that were completely beyond my comprehension.

However his conclusions, which are written in breezy, no-nonsense English, are clear and unambiguous. It should also be pointed out that Hill is only describing solid, structured UFOs, not those of an interdimensional nature. Nevertheless, that still gives him a large body of sightings to analyse, something he does with relish and astonishing analytical skill and creativity.

Let us review some of his conclusions. From the volume and weight of some UFOs (calculated from landing-gear ground compaction), he calculates their mass density to be about 96% of that of water (965 kg per cubic metre). This approximates the density of a submarine and is several times denser than modern jet craft.

The dazzling glow around UFOs, Hill says, is ionization of gas particles produced by radiation from the craft, probably from within the X-ray band. Whether this is a product of their propulsion system is unclear, but it seems that, while blue colours suggest high activation energy, and red requires less power, this plasma is not hot yet the radiation producing it can cause severe illness if you get too close.

UFOs have acceleration capabilities way beyond that of human craft and large missiles. They have been seen to accelerate one hundred times the force of gravity (100 g), whereas a passenger jet can only do about 4 g. UFOs obviously do not have jet propulsion, so how do they fly? Hill discounts charged, neutral, or photon particle propulsion mainly because such a system would have too poor a UFO speed to particle speed ratio. Why use particles that travel about the speed of light to propel a craft that only travels at several thousand kilometres per hour? Hill assumes that aliens, like human aeronautical engineers, prefer elegant, cost effective propulsion systems. Having also eliminated electromagnetic propulsion, Hill concludes UFOs must be propelled by some type of invisible force or acceleration field which is 'akin to gravity, but of an opposite nature.' (p.118)

So what are the dynamics of such an anti-gravity system? Hill assert that the typical flying saucer is propelled by a force field which emerges from beneath the craft in a variable focus beam. To hover above the ground the field is splayed out downwards. To move horizontally, the UFO tilts its leading edge downwards slightly in the direction it wishes to go, and narrows its propulsion field beam to produce a cool silent plasma cone beneath it as it exerts a thrust vector force against the ground. Plasma is therefore thickest underneath UFOs, which is the angle from which most people see them, hence the fuzzy outlines reported in many sighting.

To stop, the UFO tilts its trailing edge down, so that the field beneath faces in the direction of travel thus converting its propulsion force into a braking system. To turn corners the UFO simply banks as an aircraft would do. This 'tilt to manoeuvre' system is the heart of UFO aerodynamics, and Hill is so impressed with its elegance that he decided to make a scale model of the system, using compressed air as the propulsive force, so that he could experiment with it. The book contains several photos of him standing in mid-air atop a small 'tilt to manoeuvre' platform to demonstrate the effectiveness of the design.

If UFOs can accelerate at a 100 g why do their occupants not get killed instantly? Hill speculates that a small percentage of their propulsion fields are projected into the cabin to counteract any acceleration load the occupants might otherwise suffer. By suitably indexing both fields it could even be arranged that the occupants felt only 1 g when the craft was doing a 100 g, so that they at least got some sense of movement to avoid having to look at the controls to find out what was going on. This design ensures that occupants never feel the effects of any planetary gravity system while on board the craft.

Acceleration technology also has other valuable benefits. According to Hill, his calculations reveal that UFOs are able to suppress the shock waves that normally build up around man-made vehicles at supersonic speeds. 'The elimination of supersonic shock waves results in a large drag reduction as well as a silent supersonic operation.' (p.323) This occurs no matter what shape the UFO is, and also prevents the craft from overheating at high speeds.

Towards the end of the book Hill discusses perhaps the most baffling aspect of the UFO phenomenon. How might UFOs cover the vast distances of space? Accepting that the speed of light is a limiting factor (remember he is not discussing interdimensional craft), Hill dismisses the sceptics, who use the 'it's too far' argument, as being hopelessly ill informed. A craft that can accelerate at a 100 g can continue to do so as long as it does not actually break the light barrier. So, when setting out on a long journey, a mother-ship (Hill believes most UFOs are short range craft from much larger parent ships) has to calculate how far it wishes to go, because any such journey must be broken into three stages.

Firstly, the craft must accelerate by focussing its propulsion field at a suitable star or planet behind it for about two to three weeks. This enables it to accelerate up to near light speeds. Hill produces calculations based on speeds that vary from 99% to 99.999999% of the speed of light, with the assumption that the faster you go the shorter the trip. Once the UFO is up to speed, it can save fuel by just coasting along without any propulsive power because interstellar space is frictionless. The final stage is deceleration, which at 100 g will take another few weeks. If you do not start slowing down soon enough you may overshoot your destination.

Now comes the tricky bit. We have been mentioning specific lengths of time without saying who was doing the timekeeping. The whole point of Einstein's theory of relativity is that, as the name suggests, time is relative. At near light speeds, time travels at significantly slower speeds for UFO occupants relative to someone on a planet who is not moving so fast. And the faster you move the more time slows down. In fact, if it were possible to travel at the speed of light, time would actually stop.

What this means for very high speed UFO journeys is truly staggering. For example, if you were an alien who wished to travel to a planet that was exactly one light-year away, (one light-year is the distance light travels in one year, which, at about 300,000 km per second comes to about 9,460 billion km) and you travelled at 99.9999% of the speed of light, your on board clock would time the journey at 12 hours and 35 minutes! Meanwhile a clock left at your point of origin would record that the trip took exactly one year. Such is the nature of relativity.

To relate that to human affairs: imagine an astronaut who kissed his just-pregnant wife goodbye before making such a one light-year journey, and who then turned around and came straight back to Earth after reaching his destination. As he emerged from his spacecraft, with no more than one day's growth of beard on his face, his watch would record that he had been away for no more than 26 hours. But his wife, who had remained subject to Earth time, would be standing their holding their child that was now over one year old.

How does this apply to longer journeys? Hill gives an example of an alien craft travelling to Earth from Zeta Reticuli, 37 light-years away. By accelerating and deaccelerating at 100 g, and coasting at 99.99% of light-speed, he asserts that the trip would only take 7 months and 6 days!

The implications of this book are that, since at least WW ll, the US government has had in its possession detailed calculations on the aeronautics of UFOs while publicly claiming that such craft do not even exist. During that time they have probably been researching the physics of anti-gravity propulsion fields. There is no doubt that UFOs use prodigious amounts of energy, even if they do use it highly efficiently. Hill was of the opinion that UFOs may gather some of their energy as they move. Even if it had taken several decades for some of America's brightest, and best funded, physicists to crack the problem, there is today at least an even chance that some UFOs have human pilots.

What we now need is another NASA scientist to publish his or her research on how interdimensional UFOs might work.

'The body exists in time and space, transient and limited, while the dweller is timeless and spaceless, eternal and all-pervading.'
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj: I Am That

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