Saturday, February 9, 2013

UFO Mysteries and Human Evolution

UFO Mysteries and Human Evolution


Ever since I started listening to the Binnall of America podcast I have found that my interest in UFOs has found itself reignited.  In fact I have noticed that interest in this phenomena comes in waves and we are on the crest of a new wave of UFO encounters about to hit as I see an escalation in reports from around the world steadily increase. 

Ever since I read Jacques Vallee’s monumental Messengers of Deception and John Keel’s wonderful books such as The MothmanI have stood by the perspective that whatever is happening, UFOs are clearly not spacemen visiting Earth in a style similar to that portrayed on Star Trek; clearly something even more spooky is going on.  It seems that the best place to spot UFOs also happens to be the best place to spot ghosts and cryptids such as Bigfoot.  Such as idea seems preposterous but points the way to an exciting avenue of research.



It is difficult for a grown man to sound rational when speaking about fairies.  However it is clear that there is a lot of overlap with Fairy Lore and UFO lore.  Both mysteries involve little green men, time distortions and lost time, similar hill/spaceship symbolism and often (perhaps most importantly) UFO landing sites are often sites where people have had fairy encounters, such as within Rendlesham Forest.  

 This is suggestive that we are looking at a common phenomena but viewed through different cultural lenses, in this case that of a medieval agrarian community and a modern technological one.
The phenomena is bigger than just aliens or fairies however.  In the past there are certainly records that we have encountered these beings and given them various names through history such as witches (African tribes referred to flying lights as witches), Faerie, Djinns etc.  At the very least, the following features are found in all forms of the phenomena:

  • Appearance: Often we have accounts of UFO occupants appearing similar to the descriptions given by people encountering fairies. We could perhaps ask does the term “little green men” refer to aliens or leprechauns. Similarly it has often been remarked how similar our friend Lam (as channelled by Aleister Crowley) looks is to the iconic grey alien.
  • Time distortion – Often people encountering either will experience some sort of time distortion
  •  An interest in babies and fertility. In fairy lore we have the concept of a changeling. In UFO lore we have accounts of breeding-programs etc
  • Accounts of flying lights. These are one of the most common parts of the phenomena and seem to be universal.
  • The experience of going into the hill or going into the saucer.
  • Ability to drastically harm – elfshot or strange cancers developing.  In medieval fairy-lore branches of magic developed with regards to protecting from these beings and healing some of the damage they can do, which charms and anti-fairy talismans (such as iron) being developed.


On the other hand however there are also a number of accounts of UFO's being witnessed by trained astronauts in outer space.  Does this blow the idea that UFO's may be some earth related phenomena such as what we would have called fairies a death-blow?

One of the most fascinating witnesses is Dr Ed Mitchell. He was one of the original Apollo astronauts. flying to and landing on the Moon with Apollo 14. Among other things he holds the record for the longest Moonwalk (9h17m). He is also noted to have an interest in psychic phenomena being the astronaut who conducted ESP experiments with his associates on Earth whilst in flight. His background was as a pilot in the Navy before joining NASA and he holds several degrees including a number of doctorates, some being honorary but at least one being research based. As such I think we can say he is a highly intelligent man, a trained observer and a reliable witness.

In recent interviews he has gone on to express a belief in UFOs (as spacemen) and shocked the scientific world with some views. For example


If it was just one astronaut we might be forgiven in thinking that there could be other factors involved. However other astronauts and NASA staff have seen UFO's and ET's including Neil Armstrong and Dr Buzz Aldrin.  There are in fact many testimonies from astronauts regarding UFOs they have encountered as detailed here.  There are also very interesting albeit slightly ambiguous records of the dialogue between Neil Armstrong and Mission Control whilst he was on the moon.  The moon itself is very interesting and I shall be returning to the moon in a future post, discussing some of its many mysteries.

I could equally well have dug into the thousands of testimonies of people who have reported UFO's and other encounters throughout history.  However I have started with astronauts because these are a class of people who are very intelligent, highly trained both in terms of observation skills and also scientifically (although perhaps not as blinkered by a political scientific perspective as we might find in academia). Also and I think this is important astronauts encountering "aliens" and "UFOs" seems to suggest a "nuts and bolts" "Star Trek" view of the phenomena - a view which I do not share so am interested in looking to see if all is not as it appears.

Let’s now take a look at another perspective.  For years, a number of researchers such as Vallee have been suggesting that UFO's and entity experiences are something other than spacemen visiting from another world. There argument suggests that Aliens/UFOs have always been here and originate from elsewhere, what might popularly be labelled another dimension.

I am always a bit coy about bandying words like dimension around so let us define what I mean. Rather than say dimension perhaps we can say from a parallel reality existing and mingling with our reality as we know it. If you imagine our reality as slides from a filmstrip and the other reality as another filmstrip held next to ours I hope this illustrates what I am saying.  Certainly there is nothing that I am aware of in physics to suggest such a view is impossible.

Some UFO accounts emphasis strongly the trickster aspect commonly entangled with fairy experiences and some accounts are blatantly absurd (although not necessarily fictional)!  One of my favourites is the pancake giving alien. The only witness here was one Joe Simonton who was in his house making breakfast one April morning. He heard a sound like tires on a wet pavement and went outside to investigate. On doing so he saw a round disk about 12 ft high and 30 ft in diameter. From this a hatch opened when three men came out and telepathically asked Joe to fill a jug with water. He did so and was then given three pancakes before the UFO closed up and flew off. The pancakes were genuine and I believe tested and shown to be totally unremarkable.  As absurd as this account is there is no evidence to suggest that Simonton was lying or mad except that this encounter is totally bonkers to our consensus sense of reality; something which may itself be an illusion.


With cases like this one the mind begins to boggle. It certainly breaks the "nuts and bolts" mould simply by being so absurd.  Yet there was clearly a technologically gloss to this instance. We have a spaceship and the "aliens" were described as wearing tight fitting uniforms so beloved of 1950s/60s era B movie science fiction. But the event itself is more suggestive of a trickster entity such as faeries are reputed to me. I can imagine them in their mushroom/spaceship after this literally killing themselves with laughter over this and seen in this light it is hilarious.
 
Other accounts are more sinister and fairies have been known to turn nasty. There is a similar aspect to this with UFOs where phenomena such as Cattle Mutilations and Men in Black rear their ugly heads.  Many examples of Men in Black seem to suggest an inhuman quality to the visitors as if there are something not quite human and doing an imperfect job as masking themselves as such.  More interesting we could also examine this inhumanity and wonder if the inhuman sense is itself deliberate in order to create even more disquiet – if you can create illusions, why create almost perfect ones?

I suppose we could ask the question as to which is the truer picture. Are alien spacemen being seen though an olde-worlde earth perspective and encountered as fairies or are we seeing fairies through a scientific gloss perceiving them as spacemen?

Actually I rather think that to categorise them as one or the other would be naive. Throughout history they have shown many forms. However the Pancake incident does seem to reinforce the idea that there is a cultural filter over what we humans are perceiving. Our minds work by symbols and once a symbol is used to associate with a manifesting energy then it seems that the mind likes to keep it that way. In other words if one tends to perceive an energy as a spaceman one probably always will.

One of the most common aspects of these phenomena is that of the flying lights. These are described variously as spacecraft, fairies, flying witches etc. It is even possible that the Will-o-the-wisp phenomena is more complex that simply marsh gas as suggested in some cases, although just as some UFO's can be Venus, presumably some will-o'-the-wisps will be marsh gas. Some researchers such as Michael Deveraux have suggested that flying lights are linked to places of high electro-magnetism on the earth’s crust and this does seem to be a variable in the phenomena. Michael Persinger’s work in Canada has also suggested that electromagnetic fields can distort human perception, activate transcendent states and give one the sense of being abducted and/or out of one’s body.

I think that this research is incredibly important and in no way invalidates the paranormal aspect of these phenomena. Rather it is saying that the brain is capable of these states (which is interesting and wondrous in itself) and that these states can be triggered by electromagnetism. It points to electromagnetism as being a component in the phenomena but does not make this a necessity.

For example, I can create an illusion of heat and burning in my mouth by eating "hot" chillies. The capsaicin in the chillies stimulates the same nerves in my mouth that get stimulated when I eat hot (as in heated) food. This shows that senses and experiences can be fooled and stimulated by other means and just as chillies are not really hot (in the heated sense) phenomena may not be really electromagnetic, rather the electromagnetism is stimulating the same parts of the being that gets stimulated by phenomena. We don’t know of course and it would be hasty to assume anything here other than that much more research is needed.

Given that astronauts also perceive UFO's not only on the moon but also in the empty stretch between the Earth and the Moon, I would suggest that the electromagnetism in the earth crust is not the only factor in this. Perhaps this phenomenon needs a carrier to transmit it to us. One such carrier may be electromagnetic radiation, another may be marsh gas etc, and another may be orgone energy as postulated by Wilhelm Reich.  Again we are really on the edge of speculation here and are jumping into unknown territory.

Perhaps a form of perichoresis takes place through the transmitting medium whether it be EM radiation, marsh gas and orgone each being relatively simple "building blocks" so any influence from another dimension may find it very easy to impress and emerge in our reality through this media. This is sort of like those pictures we see of flying birds in the work of MC Escher – If one gets caught in the detail one sees the birds but if one steps back and looks at the picture as a whole we see a larger picture emerge.



There is a wonderful example of perichoresis in Salvador Dali's "Destino" animated film. If you do watch it take a look at how Zeus "emerges" from the archway.  The goodies start at 4m and 50s into the piece.

Perichoresis might also be a component towards an explanation for Crop Circles.  Andrew Collins excellent book The Circlemakers suggests that orgone is responsible for the circles, and this may well be correct.   However orgone may suggest the mechanism by which circles are formed but doesn’t necessary address the issue as to the nature of the information coming through and this I believe is where need to look towards perichoresis. Something elsewhere is  impressing these patterns on our reality.

It has been suggested that astronauts are changed by the simple fact of going into space and we do see a lot of returning astronauts being caught up in paranormal projects, getting religion or simply being awed with wonder, something many of us lose as we get older, more cynical and jaded.
Certainly for me I find images such as the opening sequence of Carl Sagan’s "Cosmos" very moving and would love to experience something like space-flight and really see and experience some of the images NASA release. I can imagine that being out there, would really open the mind to wonder and perhaps create an "enflamed with prayer" type of state where magic happens.  There is an updated space flight sequence based upon the one in Cosmos in Jodie Fosters "Contact" based upon Sagan's book

Contact Space Flight

Could this act of wonder have the effect of switching astronauts on, perhaps making them more spiritual and psychic? Is it possible that "reality" is loaded so that the act of a species travelling into space switches them on in a way similar to magic does opening up the larger universe?

In a sense something similar happened a billion or so years ago when life on earth evolved vision. At that point the visual universe opened up and because visible to all. Granted this was actually for our distant very-very-pre-human relatives but the event is rather staggering, nature went from being blind to being able to see. Our very language of spiritual attainment uses this as a metaphor. Words like “Enlightened”, “Illuminated” may in some deep atavistic way still remember this event and carry it on in our being and terminology for extended awareness.

There are some very interesting peculiarities surrounding the evolution of vision. First of all it seems to have developed on several places independently, so all life with vision does not share a common ancestor who was the first creature with sight. Rather there are several possible ancestors. This sort of suggests that the pattern of sight was programmed into evolution (in a very heretical and non-Darwinian way) to emerge perhaps in a similar process to how Sheldrake’s Morphic resonance is presented.

More interesting still is the fact that sight is supposed to have evolved before the brain at least in its current form developed. This is confirmed by looking at the human pineal gland in the centre of the brain. It actually possess some photosensitive properties suggesting that whilst atrophied will have certainly acted as an eye in our ancestors. It seems that the brain grew around the eye, adding abilities to process the new visual data being received. The brain of course does a lot more than think, and it does act as a filter and translator to what we see. For example at its simplest it filters out the blood vessels in our eyes which we do not see. It also tends to take out unexpected anomalies in our vision.  The problem however with the idea that the pineal gland is an eye is that this is not supported by the fossil record.  However if not, why does it have photo-sensitive properties?

Some experiments were done years ago involving a man dressed as a gorilla running onto a baseball game and waving at the audience. The majority of the audience didn’t even notice him because it was so far outside our expected vision that it simply processed the data out. This can work conversely as well and expected objects can appear in our visual matrix.

I think that we are on the verge of a perceptual leap perhaps similar to what was experienced when life evolved the ability to see portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. Changes are taking place both through our personal evolution as magicians and as individuals as a part of the human species going into space which are shifting our perspective and as a result enhancing and mutating our perceptions to see the universe in a more connected magical state where we will be able to see the fairies, UFO's etc in all their myriad forms and maybe not understand but certainly communicate and interact with.