Colonel Philip J. Corso's book, The Day After Roswell, should finally have officially dispelled the deception, disinformation and lies that have shrouded this event for half a century.  Predictably, the media have virtually ignored his astonishing admissions, ignoring Sherlock Holmes' dictum that 'When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.' 1  Time magazine, for instance, that mindless Mecca of all debunkers, did not bother to debate whether a man of Corso's eminence would have been crass enough to destroy his reputation and antagonise his friends and former colleagues, both in the services and the Senate, by blatantly lying to the public.  Instead, with irresponsibility and frivolity, it dismissed the book in a single, jeering paragraph before getting down to the serious business of sneering at all other researchers into the Roswell crash except for those who, like Time, dismissed it as a 'Myth', with 'religious-like elements' for the delectation of 'true believers' 2.  Still, what can one expect of a tabloid which, after correctly depicting a Roswell alien without genitalia, is fatuous enough to give it a navel? 3  As the Greeks used to say when confronted with similarly conceited blockheads: 'Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain.'  For 'gods' substitute 'aliens' and an old saying takes on an unexpectedly ironic tinge.

It should be obvious, even to the most foolishly opinionated, that Colonel Corso's credentials for discussing this hitherto controversial event are impeccable, precluding any debunker's glib dismissal of his astonishing revelations as disinformation, let alone a hoax.  This brilliant Army Intelligence officer, decorated nineteen times for services to his country, was responsible for enabling ten thousand displaced Jews to leave Rome for Palestine at the end of the second world war.  Later he became, among other things, a member of President Eisenhower's National Security Council and, eventually Head of the Foreign Technology Desk at the Pentagon.  On his retirement, he served on the staff of two US senators as a national security specialist.  One of these senators, the respected Strom Thurmond, has written the Foreword to Corso's book, commending his 'credibility and expertise' and praising him as 'a valued source of bountiful information that was insightful and, most importantly, accurate.' 4

Given such credentials, we must surely take Corso's disclosures very seriously.  Indeed, we should be justified in assuming that he would never have written this book without the covert instigation of his former superiors, since an officer of his standing would never have disclosed such jealously guarded information – hitherto classified, as he admits 'Above Top Secret' 5 – without proper authorisation from the highest quarters.
Corso's book, which is currently creating a minor furore in the USA, though almost unnoticed in this country,6 states the following as incontrovertible facts:7

An alien space-craft crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947.  Alien bodies were recovered and autopsied.

Corso himself examined one of these bodies at Fort Riley and later had access to the autopsy reports.  He devotes many pages to describing the aliens' anatomical features in some detail, noting that their huge heart, lungs and brain were much larger than their human counterparts, while – bafflingly – they lacked any system of digestion, excretion or reproduction.  Their bones were thinner, but stronger and more resilient and flexible than ours, and their inner skin was completely permeable, "as though it were constantly exchanging chemicals...with the combination blood/lymphatic system." (p.96)  The medical examiners concluded that they were perhaps dealing with a creature of very low metabolism, specially engineered to withstand the shocks and physical traumas of space travel, aided by their space-suits of a super-tenacity fibre so strong that it could not be cut with any metal instrument.  Corso speculates that they may indeed have been androids – cloned, humanoid automatons who, according to witnesses at the crash site who found two of them still alive, communicated their suffering and sadness to them telepathically.  Tragically, one of the survivors was riddled with bullets by trigger-happy soldiers as it tried to escape or we should have been able to learn a great deal more about these creatures.  Perhaps they expected no less of homo sapiens, a species that is arguably far more dangerous than the aliens it fears.  Corso later remarks that other alien craft have been recovered, notably one brought down by a missile in Ramenstein, Germany, in May 19748, and are now in the possession of the United States, but makes no mention of the fate of their occupants.  Let us hope that some of them survived our ministrations.

The truth about the Roswell crash was concealed from the public for security reasons, as well as for fear of causing mass panic and the collapse of our society.

Instead, a government within a government, (the so-called MJ 12?)9 was established to deal with the situation.  In the words of Lieutenant General Nathan Twining, who formulated this policy:
"There had to be a way of maintaining full deniability of the flying disk phenomenon while actually preparing the public for a disclosure by gradually desensitising them to the potential terror of confronting a more powerful biological entity from another world."  This policy "would have to be at the same time both the greatest cover-up and the greatest public relations programme ever undertaken." 10
I might add that Twining's plan worked splendidly.  The long UFO cover-up was a sort of gigantic intelligence test which almost everybody ignominiously failed.  Only a handful of Ufologists were clever enough and determined enough to reach the correct conclusions, in the teeth of decades of governmental denial and threats, coupled with derision and ridicule from the media (the 'little green men syndrome' or 'giggle factor').  Still, those who laugh last, laugh best.  The sceptics and debunkers who have fought such a stubbornly dishonest rearguard action against the truth, using ridicule and defamation as weapons, should now do the decent thing and apologise for their frequent infamous behavior.11
'The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
These scoundrels never deviate into sense.' 12
Not that they will apologise, of course, since they are never wrong.  Judging from past experience, their reaction to Corso's book will be to jeer at it, distort it and denigrate the author's character.
This is not to say that all the debunkers were scoundrels.  Some were simply naïve, like that indefatigable researcher Kent Jeffrey, whose Web site, Roswell – Anatomy of a Myth13, is a mine of information on Roswell, intended to reinforce the mistaken belief that what crashed there was only a 'Mogul' balloon array, carrying three ML 307 radar reflectors, made of bakelite, balsa and foil, prosaic materials which Major Jesse Marcel, Intelligence officer of the 509th Bomb Group, not only inexplicably failed to recognise but found so extraordinary that he woke up his family in the small hours so they might view these objects 'from another world.' 14
Jeffrey goes on to quote from the recently declassified Minutes of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board Conference, held at the Pentagon on March 17th and 18th 1948.  The minutes record Colonel Howard McCoy, Chief Intelligence Officer of the AMC, as saying: "I can't even tell you how much we would give to have one of those [alien craft] crash in an area so that we could recover whatever they are."  Jeffrey concludes from this statement, made before a large group of civilian scientists and high-ranking officers, that the Roswell crash never took place.  As further proof, he mentions the well-known letter of September 23rd 1947 from Lieutenant General Nathan Twining to Brigadier George Schulgen, stating that there was no physical evidence for a saucer crash.  Finally, he cites a 'Top Secret' memorandum, Analysis of Flying Saucer Incidents in the US, sent to the Chief of Air Intelligence Division by a Colonel Brooke Allen on October 11th 1948, which reveals no knowledge of the Roswell crash.  He concludes: "The 1947 and 1948 documents are definitive...They are evidence.  They state definitively that there was no crashed saucer." 15
Later, in the course of his unflaggingly zealous investigation, Jeffrey went so far as to interview three former colonels who had served with the Foreign Technology Division (FTD).  One of them, George Weinbrenner, was Commander of the FTD from 1968 to 1974, Jeffrey informs us triumphantly, and Weinbrenner told Jeffrey that he knew nothing about any Roswell material.  Since both the other informants, Walter Klinikowski and Walter Vatunac, denied all knowledge of alien artefacts, Jeffrey concludes that this is "the incontrovertible, irrefutable truth, the final confirmation – no alien bodies, no secret hanger and no UFO crash at Roswell.  Case closed." 16

While there is no gainsaying Jeffrey's good intentions and thoroughness as a researcher, one is left surprised by his naïvety.  It obviously never occurred to him:
•  That the officers he quoted, whether back in the forties or today, may have been deliberately concealing matters classified 'Above Top Secret'.  Corso makes it clear that Twining was lying to Schulgen, since Twining knew the truth and Schulgen was not cleared to know it.17
•  That these officers might not have known the truth, since the artefacts were so secret that no one in the FTD was ever allowed to learn of them, except for Corso, the trusted friend of Lieutenant General Arthur G. Trudeau, Commander of the AMC in 1961, when Corso was ordered to take charge of the objects from the crash.  Colonel Howard McCoy may well not have been given clearance to know of the Roswell crash.  Even if he did know, he was certainly not going to disclose it to a large conference at the Pentagon!  Similarly, Weinbrenner may well have been genuinely mistaken, rather than merely bluffing a nosy civilian, when he told Jeffrey that if "something like that had happened" he would have known about it.
In short, Jeffrey seems woefully ignorant of the fact that, as Corso makes clear, only a handful of people knew about the Roswell crash, on a need-to-know basis.  Those few who did know would never reveal this secret unless authorised from above to do so.  (This may well include Colonel Jesse Marcel himself, even as late as 1978).  It seems clear that those who even attempted to hint at the truth, in the early days at least, were silenced forever.  Corso himself admits that one Roswell witness, who could not keep his mouth shut, was murdered.  After all, as Sarbacher said, this was a secret classified several degrees above the hydrogen bomb.  It was guarded appropriately. 18
The sad case of Kent Jeffrey, an honest, well-meaning but naïvely overconfident researcher, demonstrates perfectly why the truth about Roswell had finally to be revealed from inside, since it could never be fully uncovered from without, so cunningly had it been hidden.  Corso is the first insider to break cover.  And, as I said earlier, he could have done this only because he was authorised to make these revelations.

The military's greatest fear was that the alien technology recovered from Roswell (and presumably from other craft, though Corso mentions only the Roswell artefacts) would fall into the hands of the Communists.

He alleges that Stalin flew into a towering rage after learning of the Roswell crash from his agents in New Mexico shortly after it occurred, and that from then on the Soviets spared no effort to lay their hands on the material.  In this they were aided by the Army's sworn enemies, the CIA, whose cordial relations with the KGB, according to Corso, were so close that any information that came into CIA hands would very quickly find its way to Moscow.19  This fear delayed the reverse engineering of much of the alien technology until 1961, when, as mentioned above, Corso was put in charge of it by Trudeau, to whose memory Corso dedicates his book.  Indeed, his loyalty to and admiration for Trudeau, a general of extraordinary courage and intelligence, is evident throughout.20  It is unthinkable, therefore, that Corso would have ever dishonoured the memory of his old friend by dedicating to him a book which was anything but substantially the truth from start to finish.
Faced with a problem that had defied solution for fourteen years, Corso solved it by personally feeding the Roswell artefacts out to trusted defence contractors and scientists (some of them former Nazis!) and inviting them to reverse engineer this 'foreign technology', without giving them any indication of its alien origin.  The outcome of this policy was a long list of 'inventions', ranging from molecular alignment metallic alloys to super-tenacity fibres, the patents of which were duly assigned to the firms that ostensibly discovered them.  Perhaps the most impressive of these were the 'Third Brain' guidance systems, developed from the EBE headbands which integrated the alien pilot with the craft, so that, as Corso puts it, 'the pilot was the craft'.

The USA used the Cold War as a cover for its battle against the aliens, who were from the start regarded as hostile.

In the fifties, the military feared that the EBEs might form an alliance with the USSR.  After all, as Corso points out with dry humour, there was no guarantee that the aliens were dedicated anti-Communists!  Eventually, with the reverse engineering of alien particle-beam weapons, (anticipated by that genius, Nikola Tesla), Reagan's Strategic Defence Initiative was forced through a sullenly reluctant congress.  Corso alleges that the Soviets were well aware that 'Star Wars' was not directed against them.  As Corso puts it:
"Whatever we [ie, the USA and the USSR] were fighting over became minimally important in the face of a threat from these creatures, who were so superior to us in technology that we were their farm animals, to be harvested as they pleased. (p.268)21

This last astonishing admission clearly refers to the alien abduction and mutilation of human beings (openly referred to elsewhere in the book) as well as to the mutilation of thousands of farm animals, which Corso admits the governments of the world are still quite powerless to stop – a confession that sits oddly with his repeated assertions that the military have fearlessly protected us all.  Readers will recall that Professor John Mack was hauled before a Star Chamber court at Harvard and almost dismissed from his post simply for having told the truth about alien abductions.22  One wonders how the world is going to react to the US government's belated disclosure that, like other governments, it is powerless to protect its citizens against abductions, should this book obtain general credence, which I suspect it will not.  A recent (June 1997) telephone poll conducted by Time and CNN showed that only 22% of Americans believe that aliens have had contact with us, while only 17% believe aliens have abducted human beings.23  The percentages are surely much lower outside the United States.  It will take far more than Corso's book to awaken so many brainwashed zombies from their uneasy slumbers.  As T.S. Eliot remarked, 'Mankind cannot bear much reality' particularly when it is as horrific as this.  Cognitive dissonance, as psychologists style it, will surely prevent many of us from facing the truth.  Furthermore, even a belief in the existence of aliens does not imply an understanding of their nature and origin.  Already, in the USA, fundamentalist preachers are telling their flocks that the aliens are fallen angels come reeking from the fiery pit and that prayer will protect them against alien depredations.  Once their Muslim counterparts become aware of the aliens' existence, they are certain to begin chanting the same inane pieties.  They may even declare a jihad (Holy war) against the intruders, with possibly disastrous consequences for themselves and others.

To sum up:  Corso's testimony is nothing less than an official admission, initiated by the US Army, that the US government, along with other 'democratic' governments, has been lying to its people and the world for fifty years.  If Corso's revelations do eventually stir enough Congressmen and Senators to demand an official investigation, this should raise a political outcry on the part of the militant Right, who can then expect to see their numbers swell with disillusioned Americans, inaugurating a revolt against the Establishment which may well lead to even further disclosures.  It is significant that so far there has been no official repudiation of Corso's testimony.  I should be surprised if either the Army or the Administration would ever dare to deny it, for fear of further repercussions.  Now that the Army has finally broken half a century of silence, we may reasonably expect that the other services, including the Air Force, which is still stupidly continuing to prevaricate, will eventually do likewise.  The Office of Naval Intelligence, which has played a key role in this drama, may soon follow suit.  With luck, some of the thicker heads may roll.  In an interview last week, Corso was asked about the Air Force's latest official and imbecilic statement to the effect that the Roswell craft was just a Project Mogul balloon and the alien bodies merely parachuted dummies.  He replied that he "could not comprehend the Air Force's behaviour.  Even children were laughing at it." 24  Really?  Some of us have been laughing sardonically at such asinine explanations ('Just swamp-gas' or 'merely the planet Venus') for fifty years.

I began this review with a reference to NASA, another dishonest agency that has played its expected part in the cover-up, steadfastly refusing to admit that the 'Face' in the Cydonia region of Mars could possibly be anything but a natural geological formation, even though there is a respected body of scientific opinion which is convinced, on the strength of years of careful analysis, that there is a possibility that the 'Face' and the surrounding features, especially the pyramids, could be the product of ancient, alien intelligence.  Let us hope that Corso's revelations – which, incidentally, include not a single expression of remorse for the sufferings caused to thousands of hapless abductees and contactees by his government's deceptions – will induce NASA to release untouched (ie, un-airbrushed) photographs of the Cydonia region when the Mars Surveyor passes over it in September.  Apparently, according to Corso, NASA has never released the 122 photographs which showed alien bases on the moon!  Presumably, these came from the 250,000 photographs taken by the Clementine 1 probe in 1995, many of which, so Richard Hoagland alleges, showed enormous, ruined structures on the moon, as well as the bases mentioned above.  Dare we hope that the skilled deceivers in NASA will be more forthcoming about Cydonia?
One writer, Gore Adachi, believes they will.  In a shrewdly perceptive monograph, entitled, Life on Mars – Why Now?25 Adachi argues cogently that "NASA had strong circumstantial evidence of ET life well before its recent announcement", since there is already such evidence to support the belief that both Mars and the Moon are the home of artificial structures.  He cites the McDaniel Report of Professor Stanley V. McDaniel, who has charged NASA with unscientific behaviour in regard to the landforms discerned in the Cydonia region.  Adachi goes on to advance the thesis that NASA's sudden enthusiasm for the prospects of the existence of life on Mars, as evidenced by its extraordinary announcement of August 6th 1996 concerning possible organic molecules in a meteorite from that planet, ('the biggest discovery in the history of science!') constitutes the prelude to the 'discovery' of life on Europa, followed by the sensational announcement that a high civilisation once existed on Mars, as evidenced by the 'Face' and other artefacts in the Cydonia region.  He believes that the Mars Observer was not lost in 1993, but secretly continued sending coded laser images of Cydonia to the Hubble Space telescope at a time when the latter was supposed to have broken down.  "The high-speed photometer could detect a flickering, coded laser beam blinking at 100,000 times a second (100,000 bits per second).  The only telescope on earth (sic!) that would be able to see Mars, or this kind of signal, would have been one orbiting Earth...The Hubble Space telescope would have been the only possible receiver for the laser signal from the Mars Observer because of the Sun/Mars/Earth geometry at that time." 26

Adachi concludes that NASA is well aware that Mars was once the home of an alien civilisation which clearly has connections with ancient Egypt.  "The difference is that NASA and the government has entered into a new phase of dealing with the extraterrestrial issue.  The focus seems to have shifted from secrecy to a tightly controlled release of information concerning ET life.  Why, it is hard to say, but three possibilities come to mind:
1.They want to tell the truth, but carefully.
2.They are forced to reveal the existence of ETs, for some reason.
3.They are using the information as a tool to control the masses." 27
Adachi then points out that the Mars Pathfinder landed precisely at 19.5 degrees North latitude, the exact latitude which Richard Hoagland has repeatedly alleged to be the area where the most dramatic planetary activities take place, being physical manifestations of the tetrahedral energy grid.28  Therefore, Adachi concludes, we may expect an announcement in 1998 or 1999 to the effect that the anomalous structures in Cydonia are artificial, to be followed shortly afterwards by news of "an official contact between the two races".29
It is just possible that Adachi may be right, though I have less faith in those that govern us than he appears to possess.  In my opinion, it may be another fifty years before we are allowed to know the whole truth about alien contact.  In any case, I would modify his last sentence to read "an official contact between us and at least one group of the aliens whose presence the governments of the world (including our own) have been concealing for the last fifty years."  If  Adachi is correct in his prediction, then The Day After Roswell, like the Mars mission, may be part of a carefully-timed plan, culminating perhaps on the very eve of the new millennium, to make the public aware of the aliens to whose presence they have gradually been desensitised, while still maintaining tight control.  As always, the governmental ferrets will maintain their sharp-toothed grip on us befuddled rabbits.30

Colonel Corso's book, for all its high-handed assumption that the military is always right and that the tax-paying public does not count at all in this world of espionage, secrets, treachery and inter-service rivalries, is nevertheless a work we should all be deeply grateful for.  However, anyone familiar with UFO research must conclude that he has undoubtedly given us only a small fraction of the whole story, fascinating and disquieting as it is.  His superiors must certainly have run a blue pencil through much of what he would perhaps have liked to tell us.31

In particular, Corso should not be allowed to remain unchallenged in his unproven assertion that though several alien races are encroaching on our planet, all are equally hostile.  Common sense alone should tell us that had such technologically vastly superior cultures wished to invade us, they would have done so, effortlessly, years ago.  One could argue rather that all the evidence points to the aliens regarding us as a failed experiment, a species too greedy and aggressive for its own or any other species' good.  In that case their intrusion upon us would be last minute damage control, an attempt to save the planet from our insane depredations before it is too late.32  It was no coincidence that they chose to show their hand in 1947, two years after the dropping of the atom bomb, and to show it on the doorstep of the only atom bomber base in the world.33  As it is, Corso's contention that the world has, since 1947, been saved by the USA smacks too much of a bad B-grade movie (Independence Day?) for anyone to take it seriously.  Perhaps he should have given to his book the pessimistic title I have affixed to this review.
As for his stated belief that, technologically, we are roughly on equal terms with the aliens, one can only ascribe it to either wishful thinking or self-deluding ignorance.  Quite apart from our failure to duplicate even the fuelless propulsion system of the alien craft, which converts an electro-magnetic field into anti-gravity waves and is controlled by the thoughts of the pilot and navigator, we cannot even begin to understand the other achievements of their science, which some scientists, like Dr Hermann Oberth, (who worked on the propulsion system), believe include time-travel.34  Their civilisation may well be a million years or more ahead of our own.  Quite simply, I believe that in this instance Corso is attempting to boost his own and his readers' morale, at the cost of his credibility, like a nineteenth century African witchdoctor assuring his frightened tribe that his jujus made them all bullet-proof against the Gatling gun.35

The time has surely come for us to be told the whole truth about the most important event in all of human history – contact with other technologically superior life forms.  It is depressing to realise that Corso's admissions, which should have made headline news around the world, seem so far to have passed almost unnoticed.  Perhaps, like a child hiding under the bedclothes, we believe that if we pay them no attention, the aliens will simply go away. To adapt an old rhyme:
An alien craft streaked through the air,
The government swore it wasn't there.
It wasn't there again today –
I wish to God it'd go away!

Corso's book could hardly have been better timed.  It marks a shocking and momentous close to the ending of this millennium, while at the same time heralding the opening of a new one, which is surely as fraught with the promise of contact with alien races as it is with the dangers which the colonel is at so much pains to emphasise.  Yet so far, the response to Corso's admissions, both in the media and on the Intenet, has been deeply disappointing.  If the finding of possible traces of primitive life on a Martian meteorite could be labelled 'the greatest scientific discovery of all time' then with what unsurpassed superlatives could one even begin to describe Corso's revelations?  Yet, dismayingly, the media have either ignored this 'discovery' or yawned at it!  And the public, along with our so-called 'intelligentsia', the sour cream of our finest universities, have for the most part followed suit! Do we dream or wake? Are we so besotted with the ephemeral trivia that passes for news, so dazzled by the jugglers, whores and clowns who entertain us that we can no longer recognise what is of crucial importance to our survival even when it is thrust into our dazed faces?  Are we so steeped in lies that we no longer wish to see the truth even when a spotlight is shone on it?  I am afraid we are, and in my darker moments sometimes believe that since we are thus, there is little hope for us.  Yet, whether we like it or not, Corso has changed history, even though there are but few who can as yet understand this.  From now on, as Yeats put it, the world we knew "is changed, changed utterly" and even the most astute of us – and God knows, they are few enough – do not know "what rough beast / its hour come round at last / slouches towards Bethlehem to be born." 36  �

Endnotes
1  Arthur Conan Doyle, 1894, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes; The Sign of Four.
2  Time, June 23rd 1997.
3  Time, June 23rd, 1997. pp.58-59.  Time's attitude to the whole UFO phenomenon has been one of unrelenting hostility since 1947.  This is of a piece with its equally stubborn refusal to admit the existence of anything savouring of psi. (The occult!)  The origin of this intransigent, know-nothing stupidity can be traced to Time's owners, the Luce family, whose staunchly Christian beliefs, which run very close to fundamentalism, would not permit them to embrace anything which ran counter to scientific positivism of a respectable nineteenth century kind.  I would guess that if Time's staff members want to keep their jobs, they know what they must write.
4  Much has been made of the fact that Strom Thurmond, under pressure from his staff, who were fearful of the political backlash the book would cause, later withdrew this Foreword.  Simon & Schuster, Corso's publishers, were, so William Birnes avers, subjected to political blackmail.  In fact, in an interview with Michael Lindemann of CNI News, Corso pointed out that he possesses a letter from Thurmond authorising him to use the Foreword expressly for The Day After Roswell, which Thurmond had read before publication.  See CNI News, July 10th 1997.
5  A classification, be it noted, which several debunkers, like Klass, have assured us does not exist.
6  The Australian carried a brief review of the book before its publication, though the writer, on his own admission, had been given access to only a couple of chapters.
7  Unfashionably, I follow Sir Issaiah Berlin in distinguishing carefully between facts and theories, as well as between theories and mere speculation.
8  I find this story unlikely.  Craft that can easily evade particle-beams – we have film taken from a shuttle of one doing so over Australia – are, to say the least, most unlikely to have fallen prey to the type of primitive missiles stationed in Europe in the early seventies.  I believe the Ramenstein craft may have been another deliberate sacrifice, like one at Roswell, for I cannot share Corso's conviction that the latter was struck by lightning!  See note 33 below.
9  Corso nowhere refers to this group as MJ 12.  But the list of its members given on p.74 is identical with the list of MJ 12 members with which many of us are familiar.
10  Corso, The Day After Roswell, p.75
11  Naturally, I exempt from these strictures those who were perfectly well aware of the true state of affairs and simply lied for the money.  Intellectual whores, like the poor, are always with us.  Most Ufologists know who they are.  Unfortunately, the laws of libel forbid my naming them, though some of them are a really class act.
12  Dryden, Absolom and Achitophel, (adapted slightly).
13  At http://www.roswell.org/myth-06.htm
14  Jeffrey argues that these materials would have been unfamiliar to Marcel and his family!  Yet bakelite was commonplace, as was foil, and Marcel's son made model airplanes from balsa.
15  The 1948 Military Documents, at http://www.roswell.org/myth-06.htm
16  The Guardians of the Hanger, at http://www.roswell.org/myth-15.htm
17  Phillip Klasss recently cited this letter, triumphantly, as a document that no UFO researcher dared to cite in full.  As always, he was ludicrously wrong, since the passage in question has been cited several times.
18  When one recalls how many people were murdered (around 300?) to cover up the truth about John Kennedy's assassination, a matter of comparative unimportance compared with the Roswell crash, one realises that many careless talkers must have been 'terminated with extreme prejudice', as they used to say at Langley, over the past half century.
19  Given the number of traitors the CIA has produced in the last few years alone, one should have no difficulty in believing this.  Perhaps this is why the hero and heroine of The X Files were assigned to work for the FBI, though the NSA would have been a far sounder choice.  But few viewers could respect a CIA agent, even if she looked like Scully.
20  Trudeau had distinguished himself during the Korean war at the battle of Pork Chop Hill.  Faced with a desperate position, he saved the day by donning a sergeant's helmet and leading his men in a victorious charge uphill – a feat worthy of Patton.
21  My emphasis.  Corso is remarkably coy about the implications of abductions.  What does one say about a military establishment incapable of protecting its own wives and daughters from sexual violation?
22  The kangaroo 'court' held twenty-nine sessions, so determined was the Harvard establishment to rid themselves of this importunate don.  Had Mack not been able to afford the $100,000 it cost him to defend himself, it seems certain that he would not have survived this vicious onslaught.
23  Time, June 23rd 1997.
24  Interview with Michael Lindemann, CNI News, July 10th 1997.
25  See the Internet site Prophetic Insights.  Adachi can be contacted at Adachi@cris.com
26  Adachi, Life on Mars, p.5
27  Ibid. p.7
28  See http://www.waldonet.net.mt/~mufor/plananom.htm.  Hoagland's resurrection of 'hyperdimensional physics' involves a theory that argues that the geometry of the Cydonia complex encodes a message explaining how hyperdimensional energy interacts with our dimensions.  He points out, among other interesting facts, that Olympus Mons, the huge Martian volcano, lies at 19.3 North latitude; the Great Red Spot on Jupiter lies at approximately 19.5 degrees South, as does the Great dark spot on Neptune.
29  Ibid, pp.10-11.
30  As they do in popular myths like The X-Files, Dark Skies etc.  Dimly, we sense and fear what is happening, but prefer to encounter it as fiction.
31  Including details of direct negotiations or at least contact between the US government and the aliens; alien bases on earth and in the oceans; government participation in abductions (frequently alleged by abductees); the abduction of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, as alleged by Bud Hopkins in Witnessed (l996); classic disappearances of aircraft (like that of Frederick Valentich); alien activity around American bases in Puerto Rico; cattle mutilations (which Corso learned about from Hoover in the early 1960s, long before ufologists had spotted them; the development of mind-control weapons; the Varginhas affair (a Brazilian Roswell) and much more. It is interesting that Corso was allowed to hint at the CIA's involvement in the assassination of Kennedy: "By the end of 1962, the President would learn from his own brother, who would learn from me, (my emphasis) just how deliberately flawed the information coming out of the CIA was.  And I would also learn, when I worked for Senator Russell on the Warren Commission in 1964, how that had sealed his fate." (p.206. My emphasis)  The implications of this statement are momentous.  If the Warren Commission knew that the CIA had killed Kennedy, there is no hint of it in their report.  Yet another cover-up!
32  I am not arguing, like so many fuddle-headed New Age believers in 'our space brothers' that the aliens are attempting to save us.  But they do appear to be interested in our sperm and our ova.  This makes sense.  If they did genetically engineer us – my own belief – then they may have some interest in interbreeding with us before we disappear, to save what little is worth while in SOME of us.  Why engineer us, you may ask?  Zechariah Sitchin suggests they wanted us for a disposable labour force.  Very dubious!  Why not use robots?  We may simply have been an interesting experiment.  If they did engineer us, they did it in a way that suggests they had no great regard for our welfare.  For instance. we have a relatively poor immune system (are subject to over 70,000 diseases); lack the ability to manufacture our own Vitamin C, (scurvy is a pre-mortal syndrome and we spent most of our history surrounded by ice!); are prone to dental decay, resulting in generalised septicaemia as the major cause of death in many medieval populations; have to waste one third of our short lives in sleeping; are notoriously lethally aggressive towards those outside our own small group, as well as to those within it; use speech to lie and confuse others; and until comparatively recently had an average life span of twenty-three years.  As for the construction of our generally mediocre brains, with the limbic system tagged onto the meso-cortex and the whole contraption then grafted onto the neocortex, the less said the better.  Ask any intelligent psychiatrist (they do exist) what he or she thinks of that arrangement.  Surely the alien geneticists could have bothered to construct us as least as well as their own clones, the Greys?  But their interest may end with that ominous interbreeding (Conserve their genes! They haven't got long to go!) that figures so largely in abductees' reports.  I cannot see the aliens as champions of lost causes.  In fact, they may well have a desire to stop us from wiping out virtually every species on the planet before we finally destroy ourselves; and the most effective way to do that would be to help us commit suicide.  After all, planets as richly diverse as this one may not be so common that they can idly stand by and watch us trash it.  And it is much easier to replace one species than several million.
33  And Corso expects us to believe that the aliens crashed just outside the base by accident?  He is either naïve or concealing something we are not allowed to know.
34  Oberth is not alone in this conjecture.  Some, perhaps all, of these craft are certainly inter-dimensional.  If so, then they are well aware of the possible as well as the most probable futures that await us, which may account for their disclosure of themselves during the last half-century.  Whatever this betokens, it surely cannot augur well for us.
35  Corso says nothing about alien mind-control, with which we are familiar from hundreds of abductees' reports.  If indeed the aliens do have such control over our minds, and I can see no good reason for doubting that they do, then clearly they have always been in full command of the situation, and may indeed be setting the pace for disclosure.  Who is to say, for example, that Corso and his superiors were not compelled to write this book, in obedience to unconsciously registered alien instructions?  This and other cogent considerations such as the aliens' apparent ability to treat matter as though it were as penetrable as water, as well as to use light to combat gravity, clearly render ridiculous any attempt to represent us as being able to engage them successfully in combat, or even thwart their intentions in any significant way.
36  Lines taken from Easter 1916 and The Second Coming respectively.

The method involved in training someone to develop and control an ability to redirect their awareness during normal consciousness, has undergone considerable refinement since its inception and, in addition, the protocols for eliciting this function have been investigated under laboratory conditions for a number of years.
For many years the Russians and Czechoslovakians used all the means at their disposal to experiment with and develop the latent psi abilities of selected 'volunteers'.  An early form of remote viewing was used with phenomenal success by the latter in their 1919 campaign against Hungary, in order to locate exact strategic positions and missing soldiers.  Later on in the 1930s, Eric Hamussen, a famous German clairvoyant who, under Hitler, gained both wealth and power as a psychic and astrologer, was assassinated because of his ability to see clairvoyantly certain Nazis secret projects.

Military involvement in parapsychology on the part of the Soviet Union was confirmed in the 1950s, beginning with the application of telepathy to indoctrinate and re-educate 'anti-social' elements within society.  At that time the Durov Institute housed fifty scientists studying telepathy and the Soviets were learning more about the illusory nature of boundaries, and rapidly concluding that the world that we normally perceive is only a single component of a much greater whole.  At this stage it was estimated that the United States was as much as forty years behind the Russians in the field of psychic research.  Interestingly Turan Rifat in his recent article Remote Viewing – The ESP of ESPionage comments: "There is reason to believe that [Russian] research in the biophysical domain became so advanced that they opened doorways to other continuums and they themselves fell prey to malevolent forces." (Rifat, 1996)
Remote viewers seem to be able to cross the boundaries of space and time and sometimes make contact with precognitive information with a high degree of accuracy.  It is as though there exists a vast connecting network of roads in the unconscious, linking everything together.  How does one learn to drive on this system?

Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ of the Stanford Research Institute in California found that the majority of people tested had the necessary capacity to remote view and describe what a distant test subject was seeing.  The viewers task is to relax and, through a special type of visualisation, activate the process of searching in some type of vast reality field.  From the information received via this extrasensory connectedness he/she can construct reality.  It would seem that a type of resonance is established between the objects being viewed remotely and the viewer.  In describing this resonance transferred from object to mind, physicist David Bohm writes: "when harmony or resonance of 'meanings' is established, the action works both ways, so that the 'meanings' of the distant system could act in the viewer to produce a kind of inverse psychokinesis that would in effect, transfer an image of that system to him." (Bohm, 1990, p.32)
In their Stanford experiments with remote viewing, Puthoff and Targ found that, apart from the ability to psychically perceive and describe a remote location that experimenters had chosen in the present, they were also able to describe future locations before they had been chosen as a target. (Talbot, 1995)  It would appear that at this level of perception, time is not divided into past, present and future.

Lyn Buchanan, one of the established authorities and an instructor in the technique of remote viewing, believes that something absolutely remarkable is happening to the collective unconscious.  Whereas teaching the substantive elements of the process a few years ago took a minimum of three years, students are now learning to integrate the essentials in a matter of days.  Perhaps Rupert Sheldrake's concept of Morphic Resonance, the acceleration in learning time that takes place in relation to communication with the unconscious, once repeated contact has been established, is at work here.

Australian aboriginals describe the process of contacting the infinite as 'seeing with the heart', a type of internal vision resulting from entering the dreamtime, for them a malleable reality.  Some of their myths teach that, at one time in the distant past, before spirit manifested materially, the entire world was in dreamtime.  To the Urambal and Ungaringin tribes, cave drawings represent more than anthropomorphic images and the spiritual centres of the beings which they represent.  They are also catalysts for reactivating their contact with the collective unconscious.

Importantly, perhaps there is another agenda at work here, a pressing need for man to rediscover the latent abilities that he possesses, and apparently were applied naturally in the past of some cultures; a need for us to properly access our relationship to the cosmos and to understand the total interconnectedness of all things.  �

References
Bohm, D. 1986, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, p.32.
Buchanan, L. 'A Wonderful Thing', Articles and Papers on CRV, Internet Reference.
Eliade, M. 1973,  Australian Religions, an Introduction, Cornell University Press, London.
Ostrander, S. & Schroeder, L. 1973, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, Sphere Books, London.
Rifat, T. 1996, 'Remote Viewing – The ESP of ESPionage', in Nexus, October, 1996.
Talbot, M. 1991, The Holographic Universe, Harper Collins, London.

INVISIBILITY. Science fiction writers frequently toy with the notion of invisibility, and modern military researchers are also interested in the subject. Not that long ago soldiers used to march into battle dressed in splendidly coloured uniforms which, unfortunately, made them excellent targets.
More recently they have instead started to wear camouflage in an attempt to blend in with their environment. Current research by the military seeks to make soldiers of the future even less visible by having them wear a special coat covered with miniature sensors that would transmit a picture of what was behind each soldier to a matrix of screen-like material on the front of the coat.
This helps camouflage them by giving the impression that they are transparent.
However there is a subtle difference between being invisible and being transparent.
Western air forces have, in recent years, spent heavily on stealth technology, a form of radar invisibility for aircraft. Primarily by its shape, a stealth plane attempts to reduce its reflectivity to the microwave radiation used in radar to such a degree that an enemy is fooled into thinking it isn't there.
Stealth aircraft normally try to make themselves less detectable in the visible part of the electro-magnetic spectrum by being painted black and only operating at night. The US Air Force is currently experimenting with various daylight stealth techniques such as applying an electromagnetic coating to the outside of aircraft that changes colour to match their background. (Douglass & Sweetman, 1997)
However these methods cannot be completely effective unless the noise of the plane's engines can also be masked, which might be achieved by some form of destructive interference.
Dr Richard Boylan (1997) claims that the US Department of Energy is working on "high-energy invisibility 'cloaking' technology", however proof of this claim would obviously be hard to obtain. Although some UFOs are detected by radar, this may only be when they want to be detected.
At other times they may use advanced stealth technology, because, apart from often flying completely silently, UFOs have sometimes disappeared without being seen to fly away. In these cases what we, and probably the US Air Force, would like to know is whether they were just making themselves transparent, or actually dematerialising and/or perhaps entering other dimensions.

In his book UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union, veteran ufologist Jacques Vallee describes a UFO landing in a park in the Soviet city of Voronezh in full view of children playing soccer there, as well as about forty adults.
After the craft had landed, a very tall three-eyed being and a robotic entity emerged and started moving around. When a nearby boy cried out in fear, and other people started shouting, the beings and the UFO vanished on the spot. As Vallee writes: "Five minutes later the sphere and the three-eyed being appeared again, just as strangely as they had disappeared. The being now had at his side a tube about four feet in length. A sixteen-year-old boy was close to the scene. The alien pointed his 'rifle' toward the teenager, and the boy instantly disappeared. The alien entered the sphere and the sphere flew away, gradually increasing its speed. At the same instant the vanished teenager reappeared." (p.43)
It would be interesting to know whether the boy was physically there, yet invisible, during this experience or whether he was somehow not there, in which case, where was he, how did he get back, and what did the experience feel like to him? Additional questions would relate to the physics of the UFO's invisibility, and the alien's tube. Nevertheless, we can be sure that, while public science cannot at present explain this phenomenon, the military would be extremely interested in it, and there are probably numerous parents the world over who at times would love to own one of the alien's invisible-making tubes.
A fascinating article in The Anomalist (1995) by Donna Higbee describes her research into what she terms 'Involuntary Spontaneous Human Invisibility', a condition whereby otherwise normal, healthy people find that they have suddenly become invisible to those around them. After placing an inquiry about the phenomenon on several Internet bulletin boards, she says "the letters began pouring in." (p.156) Many people claimed to have had several of these experiences. "Often it takes several such occurrences before they realise that they are truly invisible during certain times to other people. They attempt to interact with those around them and simply can't be seen or heard." (p.157)
These people report instances of invisibility in places such as airports, libraries, clothing stores, restaurants, parties, and at home. Luckily the effect seem to wear off spontaneously, otherwise we might never hear from them again. As invisibility is sometimes reported as a component of the UFO abduction phenomenon, Higbee at first thought that the people contacting her might all be abductees, but, as her data-base expanded, this appeared not to be the case. She does claim however that they seem to have higher than average psychic abilities.

Higbee also points out that Western occultism and Eastern yoga traditions refer to the possibility of making oneself invisible. For example, in the Indian tradition, one of Patanjali's yoga-sutras states that after suitable training, "the contact between the eye (of the observer) and light (from the body) is broken and the body becomes invisible." (Taimini, 1975, p.319)
This does not sound like dematerialisation, and does not refer to the suspension of sound effects as in Higbee's reports, but does seem to claim that there is a link between consciousness and this form of invisibility. In the occult tradition, the ancients apparently believed that the gemstone heliotrope conferred invisibility, and also gave the power of divination. (Tondriau, 1972, p.181)
Heliotrope, otherwise known as bloodstone, is a dark green variety of the silica mineral chalcedony that is spotted with red nodules of jasper, which look like drops of blood. Heliotrope was therefore prized during the Middle Ages for its suitability in religious sculptures representing flagellation or martyrdom. Chalcedony is a cryptocrystalline variety of quartz which can occur in several other forms such as agate, chrysoprase, carnelian, or onyx. Quartz, or natural crystalline silica, is the most common mineral in the Earth's crust. Its chemical name is silicon dioxide, SiO2, a combination of the elements silicon and oxygen, which are respectively the seventh and third most common elements in our solar system. Silica has a high melting point, is hard, and is used in the manufacture of glass and ceramics.
So why the variety of quartz called heliotrope might confer invisibility is somewhat of a puzzle. There is another version of the connection between the word heliotrope and invisibility. Heliotrope also refers to a light purple colour, which derives it seems from one of the 250 plants of the genus Helitropium (the genus name originally referred to the plant's ability to turn its flowers to the sun) from the family Boragaceae. The best known of these, garden or Peruvian heliotrope (Heliotropum arborescens), has a fragrant five lobed purple flower. In this version, it is the heliotrope plant which confers invisibility and powers of divination.
A third version of this legend, which states that a magical ritual in which one covered the heliotrope stone with the heliotrope plant to produce invisibility, simply sounds like someone trying to have a bet each way. I n a possible connection to the purple colour of heliotrope, it is noted that legends apparently claim that the grimoires, or books which contain the secrets of witchcraft, have pages of "violent purple and that the characters on the page are invisible to the profane." (Trondriau & Villenuve, 1972, p.176)
Exactly what sort of people are regarded as profane by practitioners of witchcraft is unclear. Explanations for the invisibility of writing on purple pages are not given, but it is noted that purple is the last colour of the visible spectrum before the frequency of electromagnetic radiation becomes too high to be detected by the human eye, and therefore becomes invisible. It may also be relevant that purple is the colour traditionally reserved for royalty.

The connection between invisibility and consciousness seems the obvious place to look for further explanations. In his excellent book The Holographic Universe, science writer Michael Talbot describes an incident in which a man is hypnotised in a room full of people including his teenage daughter, and is given the post-hypnotic suggestion that, upon awakening, his daughter will be invisible to him.
When bought out of his trance, not only could he apparently not see the giggling girl standing in front of him, but, when the hypnotist stood behind her and held a watch against her back, he was able to read the inscription on it as if he was looking right through her body. (p.141)
Talbot, who actually spoke to the man, was unable to explain the incident, but suggested that perhaps he was obtaining the information via telepathy. In discussing what she calls 'Virtual-Reality Scenarios' Dr Karla Turner describes a UFO Close Encounter case where the experiencer, Amelia, claims to have been lying in bed at night when she heard a helicopter over the house. Looking up she discovered that she could see through the ceiling and roof as if they had disappeared, or become completely transparent. This enabled her to see a strange looking craft above the house containing two entities who subsequently appeared at the foot of her bed. The other person sleeping in the room had not heard the noise of the 'helicopters', nor seen the entities. While Amelia, who seemed enveloped in a ball of bluish light, spoke with these entities, two witnesses in the room found that, not only could they not communicate with her, but that they could hardly hear each other, even when they shouted. English UFO researcher Jenny Randles (1990) has coined the term the 'Oz Factor' to describe a feature of some UFO cases in which the witnesses find themselves entering a strange dreamlike state where, among other things, everything around them goes silent. This may apply to insect noises for example, or they may find they are unable to hear their car engine, or the noise of the tyres on the road. (Harpur,1994, p.183)
While an explanation for this may turn out to be quite simple, it is interesting to wonder what could cause people, who suddenly find themselves invisible, to be unable to make themselves heard as well, when there is no anomalous device, such as a UFO, in sight. Light and sound propagate at vastly different speeds. Sound travels at about a thousand kilometres per hour, while the speed of light is about one billion kilometres per hour.

An article in New Scientist on something called 'Electromagnetically Induced Transparency' (Buchanan, 1997), describes research being done in quantum optics in various universities whereby "opaque solids can be made transparent simply by shining laser light on them." Working originally with "low density clouds of gas", and then moving on to "a piece of solid frozen hydrogen", the researchers have found that the light from two carefully tuned laser beams can be made to interfere with each other in such a way that the light from one of lasers will cease to interact with the atoms in the material, and therefore be able to pass through that material unimpeded. In other words, from that laser beam's perspective the material has now become transparent. It is too early yet to conclude that this research may lead to an understanding of human invisibility. As the article says: "Any hope, for instance, that eyesores can be made to vanish with a few strategically placed coloured lamps should be abandoned. Making a material transparent at all the many visible frequencies at which it can absorb light is probably impossible."
Some reports on invisibility suggest that a few people can make themselves selectively invisible to others. This sounds a bit like Michael Talbot's hypnosis case without the hypnotist: as if a person with this ability can affect someone else's perceptual system using something like telepathic mind-control. An example of this is the case of the Spanish monk Saint Vincent Ferrier (1350-1419) who was highly regarded at the court of Aragon because of his wisdom and supposed miraculous abilities. The story goes that Queen Yolande once requested to see his living quarters, and when the monk refused permission, had the door forced, and entered with her attendants. There she discovered that, while everyone else in the room could see him quite clearly, the Queen could not see Ferrier at all.
When questioned about this invisibility, the monk explained that this was God's punishment for the Queen's intrusion, and her partial blindness would recover when she left, which apparently it did.
There are other similar reports of selective invisibility in the Middle Ages, all of which seem to relate to holy men, who may have gained this ability as a result of prolonged prayer or contemplation.
However it is not suggested that in these cases the person concerned had actually dematerialised.

MATERIALISATION and dematerialisation are opposite sides of the same coin, and sometimes would be indistinguishable from invisibility. But, if someone simply disappears from a witness' sight, later reappears, and could not be touched while invisible, we can assume that something other than an inhibition in the witness' perceptual system has occurred. In the annals of the paranormal there are probably more instances of things materialising than dematerialising. In seances for example, objects have frequently been known to appear, seemingly out of thin air.
Called apports, it is generally assumed that a disembodied spirit has either created them out of 'nothing', or teleported them from elsewhere. There are too many of these instances to document here, but an example might be a fragrant rose, still covered in dew, that suddenly falls out of the air onto a seance table. If such an apport was somehow picked off someone's rose bush by a spirit, one wonders what the owner of that bush might have seen if they were looking out the window at the time.
Would the rose suddenly become invisible, leaving behind a snapped-off stem, while the spirit 'flew' invisibly back to the seance to deposit the now visible rose on the table? If something like this is possible, then we certainly have a lot more to learn about the nature of reality, let alone invisibility.

Objects do not only materialise during seances, and when they do, it may be hard to tell if they were teleported from elsewhere or not. The English healer Mathew Manning, who experienced a lot of poltergeist activity during his teenage years, gives several examples in his book The Link: "I was collecting material for a Guy Fawkes fire at the bottom of our garden.
Finding myself short of rubbish, except for half a dozen cardboard boxes, I went to the house and asked my mother what I could use. There was no one else at home and she had no idea or suggestion. I returned to the bottom of the garden, and to my utter amazement I found a stack of large logs and wood placed next to the cardboard boxes. At that time there was nobody who could have done this, let alone in the short space of time I had been in the house. In all, there were several hundredweight of wood and logs. .. Other such apports included several gramophone records, a bag of sugar, a bank note, a pair of black lace gloves and postage stamps." (p.98)
In another incident, "a pint bottle of beer and an apple pie" appeared in his bag while he was on a train. Manning also describes apports that seem to have come from somewhere else. "A long-playing record of which I had a copy appeared one day in the house; it seemed to have come from another owner as it bore obvious marks of wear. There seemed no reason for this to materialise as I owned a copy of it already." (p.98) Manning seems surprised when uninvited objects materialise around him, despite the occasional link between what he is doing or thinking and what later appears. On the other hand, the Indian spiritual leader Sathya Sai Baba is well known for deliberately materialising solid objects which he gives to visitors and devotees. (Haraldsson, 1987)
These are normally small trinkets, and, when questioned about this, Sai Baba insists that he does not teleport them from a jeweller's shop elsewhere. (Karanjia, 1994, p.29)
This leaves us with the baffling question of how someone can produce matter from 'nowhere'.

In the literature on shamanism there are instances where objects, or even living insects, are materialised. In his book Gifts of Unknown Things, Lyall Watson describes an incident in the Amazon where he witnessed a local healer first remove an infected tooth from a patient, and then announce that he had to make the pain of the infected gum go away. To do this, he somehow materialised over a hundred black army ants which marched in an ordered column out of the patient's mouth, down his arm and away into the grass at the edge of the clearing.
This caused great mirth among the watching natives because, as Watson later discovered, the local word for pain was the same as that for army ant. As Watson put it: "The healer had promised that the pain would leave, and so it did in the form of an elaborate and extraordinary pun. It walked out." (p.142) The military too is interested in learning how to make things materialise.
In early 1997 scientist Dr Gary Wood, at the US Army Research Laboratory in Maryland, claimed that his team's research into non-linear optics might in future enable the army to project three-dimensional holographic images of tanks, planes and soldiers onto a battlefield to confuse the enemy. As well as reducing casualties to real soldiers, such technology would be of great use in training battlefield commanders. (The West Australian, 13/5/1997)
UFO close encounter reports frequently describe aliens as ghostly or see-through in appearance. Perhaps this is because some of them are holographic projections coupled with some form of sophisticated artificial intelligence.

TELEPORTATION refers to the invisible movement of an object, or person, from one place to another by an, as yet, unknown means. Teleportation frequently occurs during outbreaks of poltergeist activity. Colin Wilson (1981, p.156) gives an example in which an egg, apparently from the kitchen refrigerator, floated in through the lounge room door of a poltergeist affected house, and dropped onto the floor. One of the house occupants then put all the refrigerator eggs into a box and sat on the lid. As if provoked by this defiance, eggs continued to smash all over the floor until the box was empty, despite its remaining closed throughout the event. It has been traditional to regard poltergeist activity as the pranks of invisible spirits from other dimensions. More recently it has been suggested that the phenomenon may be linked to unresolved conflicts in the mind of a teenager living in such a house: a form of unconscious psychokinesis working through hyperspace. This theory makes several radical assumptions about the nature of consciousness: for example, that it can affect matter at a distance. Poltergeist-like events also occur after UFO abduction cases. (Cahill, 1996, p.95)
What this suggests is even more speculative. Just calling aliens space-age poltergeists does not help. A more detailed suggestion is that some UFOs may be able to teleport through hyperspace, which is in turn somehow connected to consciousness, so that being pulled into this 'realm' affects abductees' minds deeply enough to cause poltergeist activity around them afterwards. I dries Shah, an expert on Sufism, which is the mystical branch of Islam, claims that the Qutub, the chief of the Sufi system, is always someone who has attained the degree of Wasl (Union with the Infinite). Such men "are able to transport themselves anywhere instantaneously, in physical form, by a process of decorporealization." (Shah, 1973, p.77)
This sounds like teleportation, and reinforces the claim that such abilities are linked with altered states of consciousness. The parapsychologist D. Scott Rogo (1991, p.107) points out that teleportation overlaps the phenomenon of bilocation, whereby a person is seen in two places at once. The Italian monk Padre Pio apparently appeared physically in two places simultaneously on several occasions. Rogo (p.109) also quotes the 1951 case of the adolescent boy Cornelio Closa in Milan, Italy, who claimed that his repeated teleportation was the result of being touched by the apparition of a teenage girl all dressed in white. He would reappear later, sometimes miles from home, even after being locked in his room by his parents. The disappearances stopped after he was exorcised by an American missionary. John Michell gives an example of apparent teleportation in his book The Flying Saucer Vision.
On 25th October 1593, a Spanish soldier was arrested in the main square of Mexico City because he was unable to account for his presence there, and because he was wearing the uniform of a regiment that was at that time stationed in the Philippine Islands, nearly a year's travel away by ship. The befuddled soldier nevertheless gave precise details of his life in Manila up to the moment he had found himself instantaneously and inexplicably transported to Mexico. He was even able to tell his interrogators of the recent death of the Spanish governor of the Philippines; news that did not arrive in Mexico City for many months. (p.98)
It is interesting to wonder what could have caused this event. Did the soldier possess unknown psychic abilities, was he unusually devout, or was he perhaps in the wrong place at the wrong time when some delinquent spirits or aliens decided to have some fun at his expense?

The parapsychologist Professor Erlendur Haraldsson (1987, p.103) quotes various witnesses who, with other devotees, in the late nineteen-forties, used to go for afternoon walks with the Indian religious leader Sathya Sai Baba towards the river in his home village of Puttaparti, in Southern India.
On several occasions Sai Baba would disappear from among the devotees and reappear at the top of a nearby hill. Sometimes he would then shout that he was coming down and would instantly reappear among the devotees. Later, in 1995, there were anecdotal reports that in full view of a group of Australian devotees, who had been granted an interview with him at his ashram at Whitefield on the outskirts of Bangalore, Sai Baba teleported an elderly man back to his home in Australia to be with his ailing wife. His friends saw the man disappear from the interview room, and when, just after the interview, they went and phoned his home in Australia, it is claimed that it was he who answered the phone. If true, this report suggests that someone with powerful paranormal powers can teleport another person.
A brief article in New Dawn (July-Aug 1997) claims that a US Defence Intelligence Agency translation of an article in a 1983 Chinese journal described successful experiments on the teleportation of small objects such as fruit flies, a watch, a match and a nail using "extraordinary children" as test subjects. The researchers concluded that: "Transference is not a simple process of mechanical movement in three dimensional space." (p.12)
If such reports are true, we might suspect that the original Chinese article prompted the US military to sponsor similar research. Dr Richard Boylan (1997) claims that researchers at the Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories in the US have conducted "successful teleportation experiments." Not surprisingly details do not seem to have been published in any science journals, so it is hard to know what to make of such claims.

DISCUSSION.
How could something dematerialise and/or teleport from one place to another? A common explanation is that these objects enter other dimensions invisible to normal human perception. Unfortunately this is not a very satisfactory explanation because it simply replaces one mystery with another. Nevertheless, the possible existence of higher dimensions, otherwise known as hyperspace, is frequently mentioned by physicists these days. The advantage of hyperspace is that, being beyond the three physical dimensions of spacetime, it may facilitate shortcuts from one part of spacetime to another.
Topologists, who study other dimensions from a mathematical perspective, point out that three dimensional physical barriers, such as the sides of a box, cease to be obstacles in higher dimensional space. In 1985 the US physicist Kip Thorne suggested that inter-dimensional shortcuts called 'wormholes' might one day facilitate space travel. Astronomer Carl Sagan used this idea in his book Contact (which has now been made into a film), about human contact with extraterrestrials. However, physicists claim that to create a wormhole would require vast amounts of energy. It is even suggested that black holes are versions of such rips in the fabric of spacetime. (Couper & Henbest, 1996)
On a much smaller, but no less dramatic, scale, perhaps consciousness itself is somehow able to create the equivalent of a wormhole to facilitate teleportation. If so, then perhaps an advanced extraterrestrial civilisation has researched this aspect of the 'physics' of consciousness enough to use the results in the UFO and abduction phenomena.

In his book Hyperspace Professor Michio Kaku describes how Superstring theory postulates that numerous other dimensions exist beneath the sub-atomic scale, and that electromagnetism and the other three fundamental forces in the universe are united in this realm. Perhaps the matter produced from the energy of the Big Bang, and that produced by anyone that materialises objects, originates within hyperspace to which consciousness also has access. In fact, within hyperspace, matter, energy, the fabric of spacetime, and consciousness itself, may derive from the same source.
Another explanation for teleportation is that the object concerned dematerialises, somehow travels to its destination, and then becomes solid again. In his book The Physics of Star Trek, the US physicist Professor Lawrence Krauss discusses the scientific validity of the science fiction ideas in that popular TV series. Krauss points out that, from a physicist's perspective, to teleport a human body, as in 'Beam me up Scottie', requires several steps.
Firstly you have to record the exact configuration of all the atoms in the body, and to store that much information would require an astronomically tall heap of 10-gigabyte hard drives.
Secondly, you would need to somehow dematerialise the person, which he claims requires vast amounts of energy.
Thirdly, you transmit to the new location either the body's sub-atomic particles, called quarks, or perhaps just the atomic information about them.
Finally, either with the original quarks or some new ones, you use the information about the person's body to rematerialise it at the other end. Krauss is wise enough to add the disclaimer that if humans have souls, as many people believe, his whole plan falls to pieces. Nevertheless, given these and several others obstacles, Krauss is of the opinion that science won't be teleporting anyone anywhere for some time to come.

Let us deal with Krauss' objections to teleportation first. Krauss says that the volume of atomic data about the human body is unmanageable. However, the mathematics of Fractal Geometry, apart from producing beautiful psychedelic patterns, enables redundant data to be removed from, for example, a high resolution spy satellite image, to facilitate its transmission back to earth, where, using the same mathematics in reverse, the image can be decompressed.
The final product is of high quality, and such techniques are rapidly increasing in sophistication. Fractal Geometry can also produce patterns that are similar to many of those found in nature. As the human body is made of trillions of almost identical sub atomic particles, data compression would assist in transmitting such information. So Krauss' information overload objection is probably irrelevant. Krauss claims that to vaporise the body into pure energy in preparation for teleportation would take the equivalent of a thousand 100-megaton bombs. Yet paranormal reports of teleportation do not mention such energies. We could suggest therefore that modern physics is investigating the nature of matter the hard way - from the outside. Paranormal evidence suggests that the subtlety of consciousness can affect matter from the 'inside' in a very energy efficient manner.
A simple example of this is paranormal spoon bending, where the mind seems able to affect the molecular structure of metal from within. At present we don't know how this works, but we will never find out unless we do the relevant research. One place to look is the relationship between matter, energy, consciousness, and the domain in which they operate, called spacetime, which is increasingly being seen by physicists and others, not as the emptiness in which things happen, but rather as a 'substance' that can expand, contract, bend or reverberate.
This suggests that spacetime may have an 'outside' or 'beyond' (Matthews, 1997), which might just be an alternative description for hyperspace. Attempts to grapple with a definition of this 'beyond' have referred to altered states of consciousness, other wavelengths, vibrations, or, more esoterically, some sort of transcendental consciousness or universal mind. I prefer to use a computing analogy and refer to this unknown 'beyond' as a 'realm' that seems to have astonishingly sophisticated, multi-dimensional, or nonlocal, informational processing abilities, and which can use spacetime as a four dimensional 'screen' on, or in, which to display the results of such information processing. Krauss' suggestion, that in teleportation we may only need to transmit atomic information rather than atomic particles, echoes this idea; that information theory may provide the best model for the fundamental nature of reality. In other words, the basic units of matter, if such things exist, may be units of information rather than anything solid. A s an example of seeing beyond spacetime, physicists claim that no-one needed to show the energy produced during the Big Bang how to coalesce into matter. Sub-atomic particles and atoms seemed to know how to assemble themselves, as if the rules of physics were already there. If this is so, how was this information stored, and where did the energy of the Big Bang actually come from?
Some researchers speak of the energy of the vacuum, or Zero Point Energy, which suggests that 'behind' the fabric of spacetime there may exist an almost infinite amount of energy. For example: "According to quantum theory, empty space is not as empty as it seems: if we could examine a vacuum at the 'Plank scale' - a resolution of 10-35 metres - we would see a seething mass of virtual particles, including photons, flitting in and out of existence." (Watson, 1996)

If the entire universe popped up from nowhere, it does seem rather churlish for physicists to claim that it is impossible for someone with powerful paranormal ability, such as Sai Baba, to produce an object containing less than one kilogram of matter from that same 'nowhere'. What we'd like to know is how he does it. Perhaps consciousness can somehow address the energy of the Plank scale, and persuade it to create permanent atomic particles rather than just virtual ones. But how would these particles know what object to make? To answer this we need to refer back to Krauss' earlier disclaimer that, if humans have souls, his teleportation theories are probably wrong. However, the existence of souls might make teleportation easier to explain rather than harder. There is evidence from events such as Near-Death-Experiences that at least some humans do have invisible forms of consciousness that could perhaps be called souls. It has also long been claimed that all living things have something resembling a subtle version of their genetic code that exists beyond the body. Plato referred to the Realm of Forms, and in modern times Rupert Sheldrake speaks of Morphic Fields. He suggests that as things grow they obtain developmental information from both their genetic codes and Morphic Resonance. These two informational sources may even overlap, with one able to substitute for the other. A long these lines, a brief, poorly referenced article in Nexus (Kanzhen, 1995) claims that a Chinese scientist working in Russia has perfected a bio-electromagnetic field process whereby he can change the genetic structure of some plants and animals. If true, such a discovery would be of enormous importance. This might mean that the information needed to reassemble the human body after teleportation is obtainable from an informational realm like Morphic Resonance.
Sheldrake has suggested that Morphic fields may transcend time and space, which might mean that, provided the body was disassembled correctly, the information to reassemble it would not need to be transmitted anywhere, but instead might be stored non-locally and therefore be accessible from anywhere. After several landmark experiments, modern physics has accepted that non-locality does exist at the sub-atomic level. Otherwise known as the Holographic Paradigm, this research shows that within the quantum realm, something that occurs in region A can have an instantaneous physical effect in region B, regardless of the distance or conditions between A and B. (Talbot, 1991)
Further research in this field may yet lead to significant advances in our understanding of both the paranormal and the nature of consciousness.

For example, some years ago, Professor Roger Penrose (1989) at Oxford University put forward the controversial suggestion that consciousness may have something to do with the quantum realm. Obviously more research is needed, but if he and other theorists in this subject are correct, then perhaps consciousness has the capacity to reach beyond the dimensional limitations of spacetime, to an astonishingly creative nonlocal informational realm which holds something like the 'blueprints' for the structure of matter. Once accessed, willpower alone may be able to 'flesh out', or 'solidify' such information to produce, within spacetime, something that the inhabitants of that realm normally regard as 'solid'. These suggestions imply that scientists are going to have to take a harder look at the evidence for paranormal anomalies such as teleportation, materialisation, invisibility, and the UFO phenomenon if they are ever going to discover the fundamental nature of reality that they claim to seek. ?

References

Boylan, Richard J. (May-June, 1997).  'The shadow government: its identification and analysis.'  New Dawn, No 42, p.21.
Buchanan, Mark. (15/2/97).  'Now you see it, now you don't…'  New Scientist, No 2069, p.19.
Cahill, Kelly.  (1996).  Encounter.
Couper, H. & Henbest, N.  (1996).  Black Holes.
Douglass, S. & Sweetman, B.  (May, 1997).  'Hiding in plane sight.'  Popular Science, pp.54-59.
Haraldson, E.  (1987). Miracles Are My Visiting Cards.
Harpur, Patrick.  (1994).  Daimonic Reality.
Higbee, Donna.  (Winter, 1995-1996).  The Anomalist.
Kanzhen, Chiang.  (Dec, 1995-Jan, 1996).  'Experiments with auras.'  Nexus, Vol 3, No 1.
Kaku, Michio.  (1994).  Hyperspace.
Karanjia, R. K.  (1994).  God Lives in India.
Krauss, Lawrence.  (1996).  The Physics of Star Trek.
Manning, Mathew.  (1974).  The Link.
Matthews, Robert.  (17/5/97)  'Beyond space and time.'
New Scientist, No 2082, pp.38-42.
Michell, John.  (1974).  The Flying Saucer Vision.
'Psychokinetics in China',  New Dawn, July-August 1997, No 43, p.12.
Penrose, Roger.  (1989)  The Emperor's New Mind.
Randles, Jenny.  (1990)  Alien Abductions.
Sagan, Carl.  (1986).  Contact.
Scott Rogo, D.  (1991).  Miracles.
Shah, Idries.  (1973).  Oriental Magic.
Taimini, I. K.  (1975).  The Science of Yoga.
Talbot, Michael.  (1991).  The Holographic Universe.
Tondriau, Julien.  (1972).  Occultism.
Trondriau, J. & Villenuve, R.  (1972).  A Dictionary of Devils & Demons.
Turner, Karla.  (1994).  Expanding the parameters of the alien-human abduction agenda.  MUFON Symposium Proceedings.
'US Army Plans Phoney War'.  The West Australian.  13th May, 1997.
Vallee, J. (1992).  UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union.
Watson, Andrew.  (4/5/96).  'Flashes of light from the quantum world.'  New Scientist, No 2028, p.13.
Watson, Lyall.  (1976).  Gifts of Unknown Things.
Wilson, Colin.  (1981).  Poltergeist.
 

The holy grail of Ufology, conclusive physical proof that mankind is being contacted by beings of unknown origin, remains as elusive as ever.  Despite the seemingly never ending procession of sightings, witnessed contacts, photographs, ground and radar traces, the sceptics' bleatings for proof on their own terms, are difficult to silence.

The fervent hope of most ufologists was that removal and laboratory testing of so-called implants would result in unequivocal evidence of their alien origin.  Alas! Life is seldom so accommodating or simple.  During the last decade a number of close encounter witnesses have expressed their belief that some type of foreign object was lodged in their bodies as a direct result of their encounter.  Some of these people have sought official confirmation of an undesired intrusion, while others like Whitley Strieber, author of Communion, preferring to wait for further developments.

At the present time a number of implants, detected as a result of x-rays and MRI scans, are being studied at various scientific laboratories.  To add a layer of complexity to an already perplexing matter, some of these hosts to intrusions-from-beyond, seem to recall that the actual implanting was done by human beings.  Conspiratorial theorists have even conjectured that claims of an alien agenda have been carefully engineered by government and military agents, intent on establishing herd control in the establishment of a New World Order.

Be that as it may, the fact is that it has been known for some years that researchers have been manufacturing and perfecting implants to be used in human recipients with a view to monitoring movement, for ease of identification, behaviour control, and perhaps for reasons that are much more sinister.  Interestingly, transcripts of a recent radio broadcast on short-wave WWCR from the USA, refer to a supposedly confidential report put through the 'Security Division of IBM Corporation' in October 1995, dealing with the use of a 20/20 Neural Chip.  The report discusses the use of implant technology in prisons, specifically in California, Texas and Massachusetts and in privately owned sanatoriums.
If this report is to be taken at face value, then it means that implants have been used on selective groups of prisoners (those posing the greatest security risk), sometimes serving as surveillance monitoring devices.  In addition, when set to a frequency of 116 megahertz, the implanted chip provides a method of disabling subjects by minimising aggression and promoting lethargy and sleep for an average of eighteen to twenty-four hours per day.

It would appear that subjects were heavily sedated before insertion of a chip, as they had no knowledge of the procedure.  Minor bleeding from the nose and ears, for a period of up to forty-eight hours, occurred after insertion in some cases.  Intriguingly, a number of so-called 'abductees' have suffered nosebleeds following their reported experience.  The report went on to claim that, "there are only five intelligence officers and the Commissioner of Corrections, who actually know the full scope of the implant testing." (CNT – IBM Implant Experiments)  It goes without saying that the use of implant technology, outside of strict control settings, is not in compliance with the law, and that unauthorised use involves the risk of considerable public liability.

During the last three years a number of implants have been removed from various subjects.  Some of these people have described events in their lives which suggest that they have been participants, without choice, in a life history of close encounter experiences.  These implants, and others, have been subject to exhaustive examination in scientific laboratories, and some of the published results can, in all honesty, be described as astonishing.

Much of the work in America can be attributed to the team of researcher and hypno-anesthesia therapist Derrel Sims, self-styled 'alien hunter', and Californian surgeon Dr. Roger Leir.  In 1995 Dr. Leir removed two objects from either side of the big toe of a woman, and another from the back of the left hand of a second patient.  In each case the implants were discovered on x-rays taken for different medical purposes.  Remarkably, there were no signs whatsoever of physical intrusion into the bodies of either subject.
 

The objects were located within the body with the aid of a stud finder and a gauss meter, used in the measurement of electromagnetic fields.  During the removal operations Dr. Leir found that, despite the use of local anaesthetic, both subjects reacted strongly to the surgeon's touch, suggesting that the objects were in some way connected to the nervous system.  All three objects removed from these two patients were coated by a thick, grey, dense membrane which strongly resisted removal.

Following withdrawal of the implants from the body, samples of the surrounding tissue were sent to a pathologist.  The report from the latter indicated that for some reason, the human body's normal reaction to the intrusion of any foreign object, was not present in this tissue.  In other words, the pathologist reported the total absence of inflamed cells.

Meanwhile, examination of the actual implants by Dr. Leir, following the eventual removal of their coating, revealed a metallic, strongly magnetic, black substance.  The coating itself turned out to be of considerable interest, prompting Dr. Leir to suggest that, if current medical science could possibly duplicate its composition, the problems of transplant rejection would be overcome.  Separated from this coating, one of the implants taken from the woman, revealed two separate, shiny black pieces joined in a 'T' shape.  Whilst awaiting further outcomes from these tests, analysis of two of six implants removed by Dr. Leir, turned out to be extremely complex in both structure and content, and composed of a wide variety of minerals surrounding a magnetised, hard iron or iron-alloy core.  A letter of opinion accompanying the study suggests that, "the characteristics of the specimens are similar to certain meteorite-type materials".

To complicate attempts to find some kind of common origin or purpose for these objects, a specimen, expelled from the nose of one of Dr. John Mack's PEER group members, was found by a radiologist to be radiolucent and not metallic, composed of some type of organic, plastic-type fibre.  Needless to say, its origin and function remains unknown.

What, if anything, does current collective information contribute towards answering the obvious questions about the origin of these implants?  In attempting to address this matter, Derrel Sims in an interview recorded in April of this year, had this to say:
"We have no definite proof of either position at this point.  The objects are alien to the human organism.  If they are 'implants' and a US Black Ops. is responsible, the medical/scientific ability necessary to install the devices without leaving a scar, entry point, non-inflammatory tissue, and not allow the persons to remember the slightest thing concerning the 'Military Operation', is indeed a mystery to me …. The 'meteoric origin' of the objects tells us that whoever did this uses extraterrestrial metals to do their work." (An Interview with Derrel Sims, 9/4/97)

Although we cannot say for certain how implants came to be lodged in certain human subjects, based on some of the information gained from their scientific examination, we can make some assumptions about their possible purpose.  For example, a 1mm implant removed from close encounter witness Betty Dagenais in 1989, was found, amongst many other metals, to contain titanium and silicon.  A technician from Matsushita Electric of Canada, totally unaware of its origin, concluded that a device consisting primarily of those elements would act as a transducer and could be used to transmit signals.

Other unusual qualities have also been discovered.  Not only were these objects magnetised, but the tissue around each implant was replete with nerve endings that should not have been there.  Such devices attached to the human nervous system could serve to monitor a variety of responses.

If, at this stage, I'm allowed to indulge in some imaginative speculation, and assuming that the implants are of alien origin, I would hazard a guess that monitoring of movement and bodily functions is of little consequence to our visitors after all these years of contact.  However, most detailed abduction accounts, from various parts of our planet, suggest that the visitors show an extraordinary, almost compulsive interest in ordinary human emotions.  It is as if they are either totally devoid of these qualities themselves, or else are able to store and use the energy transmitted by such strong emotions such as love, hate and anger.  Is it conceivable that some implants are used specifically for
this purpose ?
 
References
Internet, UFO Folklore Centre.  An interview with Derrel Sims.
CNI News.  Surgeon Tells First Results of lmplamt Analysis.
CNI News.  Report claims IBM has Tested Brain Implants.
Implant Study.  www. Strieber.

The day after the main incident, all personnel involved were debriefed by Colonel Williams, who made admissions about alien craft visiting our planet from time to time, and that some were, "a permanent presence here."  All were ordered not to discuss what they had seen.  "Bullets are cheap", they were warned.  Larry Warren, nineteen years, took the naïve precaution of going to the phone box outside the gates, and began to tell his mother in New York about the UFO landing.  The line went dead.
He was charged and fined for this breach of security, and taken to an underground facility.
He  returned with an impaired memory of the two days he spent there.  His duties returned to normal, but five months later he realised the Air Force was not for him.  After being assured he could rejoin later if he wished, he gained an honourable discharge and returned to the US.
Larry reveals that what he had witnessed affected him deeply, as it did other witnesses, and for years his life was disrupted. His wife Cindy could not cope with his growing obsession with the Bentwaters mystery, and the marriage disintegrated.  He was also hounded by agents, suspected to be from the NSA, who warned him of reprisals and to forget the matter.  Despite such threats, he contacted UFO groups and even spoke out at MUFON Conventions.  At one of these he heard Peter Robbins lecturing, and felt he was the man to help him write about the Bentwaters incident.

The central theme of Left at East Gate is the human story of Larry's fall from grace after his experiences, and then, with the special abilities of Peter Robbins, the progress in contacting other witnesses and further confirmation of an alien landing.
As Peter's story entwines with Larry's a third of the way through, we learn much of the history of ufology plus the detective work of following leads, dealing with leaked documents, with finding their phones bugged, and how informed and skilled researchers need to become to cope with the powerhouse rhetoric, deception and intimidating tactics of those involved in the coverup.  Much of their research is backed up with letters, diary notes, appendix pages, news reports, sixteen pages of photographs, and transcripts of taped interviews.
The transcripts inject immediacy into the flow of the story and indicate the personal courage involved in confronting Colonel Halt, the deputy Base Commander at Bentwaters, either on the phone, or at meetings with him under the shadow of the Pentagon.  Halt readily admits to being a witness to the anomaly of the ball of light appearing, but remains adept at denigrating Warren's version of events.
Preceding one transcript, Peter writes, "I do remember making an almost immediate mental note that I would not like to play poker with this man.  Halt's expression remained fixed for the next hour and twenty minutes.  He made very little eye contact and was unrelentingly serious."
In being cross examined, Halt proved consistently engaging in his admissions and denials, but on occasions, to say things off the record, he would order the tape to be switched off.  It is only at the end of the book that one hopes to find clues as to what he and the others had discussed.
 Were US nuclear bombs being held on the base without the official knowledge of Her Majesty's government?  Was Warren right in saying the Base Commander Colonel Williams was present at the landing when Colonel Halt flatly insisted that he wasn't?  We realise of course that Halt was officially present to dispel any notion that aliens are in control in the deep tunnels beneath Bentwaters, and the claim that UFOs fired laser-like beams of light through the hardened bunkers to where the bombs were stored?

In contrast to the dogged research undertaken in the US, the authors often struck luck during their six visits to Britain.  We appreciate their desperate humour, captured on tape, when at night they trespassed beyond warning signs – fearful of landmines – and found the place in Rendlesham Forest where the craft landed.  The mark remains after sixteen years.  One family they chanced to board with in the vicinity of Bentwaters had seen UFOs themselves, knew much of the gossip and were eager to drive them to key points, contacts and witnesses.
It so happened that I began reading Budd Hopkins' Witnessed – The Story of the Brooklyn Bridge UFO Abductions at the same time as Left at East Gate.  Although they focus on different incidents, they share a revelation worthy of comment.  Firstly, Hopkins founded The Intruders Foundation (a New York based research group) where Peter Robbins is Executive Assistant.  Where Witnessed reveals the invasive inroads alien intelligence has made into a family – Linda Cortile's, and several other people (a case of proof that seems impossible to fault) – Left at East Gate unearths the details of a contact between an alien intelligence and the military at a NATO base.

We have been corresponding since 1989, and during that period he has written about his collaboration with Larry Warren.  Whereas I forwarded to him our Journal of Alternative Realities, newsletters, and reports on abductees that the UFORUM committee had interviewed, he forwarded photocopied material and a tape of a convention talk he gave on Bentwaters.  The tape displays the unhurried qualities, the thoroughness and integrity with which he tackles a subject.  One can sense why Larry Warren chose him.
My wife and I had the pleasure of meeting Peter in New York on two occasions in 1991.  On the last day, to add a personal note, Budd Hopkins was to join us for lunch, but he had to cancel because of some urgent matter.  I wish now that I had taken more note of the reason Peter had given, as I have just seen by the dates in Witnessed, that it was the time Linda Cortile's life was threatened, a time when Budd was often cancelling engagements.
It has been suggested that the UFO incident at Bentwaters could have been a military test to confront troops with a hologram, perhaps in the hope of attributing all sightings to such technology.  Peter arranged for Hopkins to regress Larry Warren to the time he was taken underground, and the transcript does suggest attempts at mind control.  Colonel Halt made several allusions to mind control and Remote Viewing.  But of course UFO encounters have long been reported all over the world, where there is no military presence at all.  And if aliens can abduct ordinary people – Linda Cortile, her son and others – along with a United Nations executive and his body guards in New York, they could also penetrate the highest military security at Bentwaters, and the Air Force would be loathe to admit it.
In any case Warren and Robbins have employed their own scepticism throughout, wondering at times when luck seems to be running their way, if they are being stage managed, or set up for disinformation.

There is a refreshing triumph at the end of the book.  It emerges in the depth of humanity, the caring, trust, and fair play in the summing up.  Just when we are softened by this, the awesome questions arise concerning democracy being taken from us.  They are tossed like javelins – at us ordinary citizens, at the NSA, and those who don't want to know, to face these questions, to wake up and take some responsibility for what we are, and where we are going.
Larry Warren and Peter Robbins are to be congratulated for finally succeeding in bringing fresh insight to a unique experience in human history, an experience that highly paid teams of experts, for over a decade, were trying to prevent them from disclosing.

Footnotes:
1)  In April a soft 'Uncorrected Proofs' copy of Left at East Gate arrived by surface mail.  Unfortunately the ASPR address in the appendix was incorrect.  The publisher was notified immediately, but was unable to make corrections to the first edition in time.
2)  A short article on this landing, 'Visitors at Rendlesham' by Carole James, appeared in The Journal of Alternative Realities, June, 1995.
3)  In a recent letter Peter Robbins sounded overjoyed at the way Left at East Gate was being received: "Looking back on the almost irrational amount of work that went into writing the book and bringing it into print, I found myself somewhat amazed that we were actually able to complete the thing ... You should have seen the manuscript three years ago – it was eight hundred pages."  The publishers feel it could become a best seller in Britain where both Peter and Larry toured through June.  On returning to the US they will be booked for more talk shows after a segment on Left at East Gate is broadcast on a television show which has 75 million viewers.  He also writes: "The three things that Charles Halt told us with the tape recorder switched off are all noted on page 413."  So the UFO did generate beams of light that, "penetrated some of the [nuclear] weapons storage area's hardened bunkers."  He apologised about the incorrect address of ASPR in the book, but says it has been corrected for future editions.  Peter concluded by saying that he expected to visit Australia in the next year or two.
 

CAIRO   After the heat hits you at the airport, the next thing to hit you is the sheer number of cars everywhere.  Crammed together on the freeway, they somehow always manage to avoid collisions through their code of horn-tooting – forget signals!  Cairo city does have a definite charm about it.  There are contradictions everywhere.  Like when you pass a thousands of years old Ramesses granite statue beside the freeway in the middle of the city.  Bullock carts are everywhere, and the French influence is to be seen in the architecture and shutters of the older apartments, which are full of antique French furniture and chandeliers; as synonymous with Cairo as the heat and desert sands.  It was a shock to see how massive the city is.  I expected a much smaller town, with less concrete, freeways and pollution.  There are high-rise buildings as far as the eye can see in any given direction – I felt I was somewhere in America at times!

GIZA PYRAMIDS   If I had to pinpoint exactly what impressed me the most, I would have to say without a doubt that it was the ancient monuments – especially the old favourites – the pyramids of Giza.  These monuments are really worth seeing at least once in a life-time.  One feels very humbled standing in the centre of a pyramid, looking at the huge, heavy granite and limestone blocks, wondering how on earth they ever did it.  The pyramids are a bit of a paradox as they are so enormous on the outside, yet inside only a very small area is actually utilised.  It's nearly beyond comprehension.

SOUND & LIGHT SHOW   The Sound and Light Show of the Giza pyramids is well worth seeing – very professional and stunning.  The coloured laser lighting at night really does show the mystical aspect of the pyramids to full effect.  It is very dramatic and eerie against the background of the pitch-black night sky.  One of my fellow travellers advised me that the Pyramids have an aura, and the Giza one (the largest of the three) is purple, just like the effect of the laser in the Light Show.

GRAND GALLERY EXPERIENCE   The Grand Gallery inside the Giza pyramid gave me an extremely de-energising experience.  I had a sudden physical reaction at a certain spot just inside the Grand Gallery, and I could not cope with going back inside again for several days.  (I am not claustrophobic, so it was definitely not a panic attack!)
To explain what happened.  We had just arrived in the Grand Gallery after going down the entry 'tunnel' and were waiting for a bunch of tourists, who were leaving the Gallery, to finish climbing down the steps from the narrow, wooden platform that runs along one side of the wall of the Gallery, and is raised about 1½ metres from the floor of the Gallery.
Ahead of me was the platform and its steps, and to my left was one of the Gallery side walls with a small alcove cut out of it.  While I stood in front of this alcove my knees began to start trembling strongly.  It was the most bizarre sensation!  It was the sort of reaction I would expect if I was in extreme fear of something, yet I was feeling quite calm, if not a little excited at the prospect of finally seeing and exploring the inner sanctum of the Giza pyramid.
I felt as if there was an 'energy' seeping through from behind the alcove wall, affecting me on a subconscious/psychic level.  A 'presence' that was hidden beyond the limestone wall, yet could have its effect felt as if there was no wall there at all – reaching out and trying to hold me there.  It left me with a strong feeling that someone, or something, of some significance is hidden there directly behind this alcove, waiting patiently and silently down through the centuries to be discovered.  It would not surprise me in the least if there is actually a tomb there of some sort, or at least a body.  And if it is a tomb, that this long-ago person had died suddenly in suspicious circumstances.
Yet maybe it is not unexpected to feel the presence of death when one enters the Gand Gallery.  After all, isn't the pyramid just a grand, elaborate tomb?  One big monument to death and its part in life?

THE SOLAR BOAT, located on the south side of the Cheops pyramid, transported the dead King from Memphis to the Cheops pyramid for his entombment.  The Solar Boat is an incredible feat of modern archaeology.  When discovered under the desert sand next to the Cheops pyramid, it lay in over 2,400 separate pieces; wooden hull from Lebanon, masts, ropes, King's hut and various other paraphernalia.  These have been painstakingly and accurately reconstructed, and are on display in the Solar Boat museum.  It is fascinating actually to see this boat, knowing its age and how it has been recreated.
We also visited the Cairo Museum which is incredible because of the sheer volume of antiquities within its walls.  The artwork of some of the statues still has such a fresh look that at first glance they appear very life-like.  The Mummies section was morbidly interesting, and I would have to say the female mummies were more pleasing to the eye than the Kings!  Perhaps it was their wigs that helped.  Tutenkhamen's Mask and his various layers of coffins were overwhelming in sheer number, size and artwork – truly incredible workmanship.
Akhenaten's section was extremely fascinating, with unusual pieces of antiquities giving no answers, and adding to the mystery of this unique man.  Nothing I had previously seen in any book prepared me for how the artwork affected me – it is incredibly distinctive and different from any other ancient Egyptian era.  There is no bland sameness of beauty or style in any of his antiquities.  They were almost grotesque in comparison, but left one wondering what an unusual person he must have been to go completely against the usual pharaonic trait of portraying oneself as young, strong and handsome, no matter how far from the truth that really was; to display himself in statues and engravings emphasising his unique physical traits – no matter how opposite to the ideal of beauty, both then and now.  Truth, honesty and realism must have been qualities he believed in strongly.  Whatever his reasons, they are buried in the sands with him, and all we can do is gaze at the little that is left behind from his time, and wonder.
THE RED (PINK) PYRAMID, SAKKARA   We visited the Red Pyramid at Sakkara (or Pink Pyramid as the Egyptian archaeologists call it) – the first tourists to go inside since it was reopened a month or so earlier, and we were very excited at the prospect.  Inside it smelt strongly of ammonia from the cleaning chemicals – it certainly cleared out the sinuses!  This pyramid is smaller than the Giza pyramid, and had been closed for years as it was on an Army base.
No photos were allowed outside the Red Pyramid, as it's too close to the base, however we did manage to sneak a couple of the view away from the base across to other, older pyramids – including the Step Pyramid.  More ancient than the Giza or even the Red pyramid, they looked like piles of rubble in the distance – very irreverent of me to say that, and they are probably much more distinctive close up.  These ancient pyramids are mostly off-limits to tourists as the walls are very unstable, and liable to collapse at any time.

The Red pyramid was also interesting as we three each had an unusual experience at the same point inside the entry tunnel.  It started when we entered and crawled down the tunnel.  The last one in our group felt a pressure over their left arm and shoulder, as if someone was reaching forward over her.  I was the next one ahead, and our Egyptian guide was in front of me.
While we were inside the King's Chamber, another friend was waiting for us just outside the entrance.  When looking down the tunnel this friend saw what appeared to be my white T-shirt in the dim, interior light, mid-way down the tunnel.  After calling out a greeting to 'me' (which we all heard inside the King's Chamber), which was not answered, the white 'whatever' faded away, and my friend realised it was not us, but possibly someone – or something – else!
Finally, after we'd returned, we sat around the entry chatting and resting.  I was sitting positioned side-on with the actual entrance on my right, and the group on my left side.  During a lull in the conversation, I heard a low male voice talking (actual words) from mid-way down the tunnel, and automatically turned my head towards the source without thinking.  Then I realised no-one was there, we were all outside, yet the voice was quite distinct in tone from that of any of the other males in the group.

I felt quite excited that I had 'touched' something of another realm and era.  It had been proved to me that there really is a mystical, spiritual aspect to these pyramids.  It's not a myth – particularly around entry tunnels!  Perhaps it is symbolic of life and death in general – that spirits hover halfway between our physical realm and the borders of the 'other side'.  It would be even more intriguing to investigate further as to who actually resides within the walls of the Pink Pyramid and why.

THE BEDOUlN (BEDOUINI)   We next visited some Bedouin women from the local tribe at Sakkara, and they sold us veils, beaded bangles, necklaces and key-rings.  We spent a very relaxing hour or so with them, drinking their coffee and talking partly in sign language, partly Arabic and partly broken English.  It was very peaceful sitting under the open structure of palm-leaved walls and roof.  Surprisingly, it was extremely cool and shady, as the leaves let any whisper of a cool breeze through.

They reside next to 'Moses' Well' – supposedly the well in the Old Testament story where God told Moses to strike a rock and water would come out of it.  Today it is a warm rock pool; stuck in the middle of a dry, barren desert with a few old bushes around it.  The Bedouin women told us the water comes out quite hot from the rock-spring and is healing – I must admit it did work for me.  It stopped my 'Cairo-belly' in its tracks!  (I wasn't game enough to drink it, although the women said it was drinkable.)

LUXOR   The place that really tugged at my soul was Luxor.  It was one of my favourite locations, with lovely views along the Nile, and green vegetation until the water irrigation reaches its limit, then instant desert.  The Nile is certainly Egypt's life source.  We had a wonderful, panoramic view from our room in the Pharaoh Hotel across the river to the Valley of the Kings/Queens.  (It was just the flights of steps that killed me, getting to the top floor of the four level hotel, where our room was.)  When I first saw that view from the hotel balcony, I felt a strong sense of recognition – that 'at last' this was what I had been seeking.  Cairo did not affect me in this way – there was no recognition at all of any part of the huge metropolis.  One has to discount the well-known historical monuments as everyone recognises them.

KARNAK TEMPLE   Luxor is a tiny country town in comparison to Cairo, but it has a wonderful temple – Karnak – which is brilliantly presented at night with a fantastic light show that highlights the ancient ruins beautifully as groups of tourists are guided through the temple and finish at the pool.  As you are guided through, each section is lit up dramatically to play up the mystery, mysticism and eeriness of the ancient temples, walls and pillars.  The stones once again look as they did thousands of years ago, with the shadows of darkness concealing their age, and the coloured light emphasising their beauty.  Karnak Temple is still the largest temple construction in both the Northern and Southern hemisphere.

SUMMARY   I hope to go back to Egypt in a few years time and revisit Luxor and the Valley of the Kings and Queens.  There is still so much more to see, including one chamber where, due to humidity affecting the limestone blocks, they allow only 150 people in a day, first thing in the morning, and then close it for the remainder of the day.

The Egyptian people that we met were very warm and friendly, and reminded me in some ways of the Italian culture, with their spontaneity and ready sense of humour; at times their brashness and outspokenness; and their protectiveness of women.

I felt very safe the whole time I was there.  Women are held in great respect within their households and Egyptian society.  In comparison, in the West, a woman is made to feel that unless she has a career, or at least a job of some sort, she is of no real value to society; especially if she chooses to stay home and raise a family.  I came away feeling how wrong we are, and how right the cheerful Egyptians are.  Finally, I have to say that if the Pyramids are a monument to death, then the Egyptian people certainly know how to enjoy and celebrate life!
 

    "The human mind seems to exist in some way on a hyperphysical and hyperdimensional level, perhaps even a
   hypercognitive level.  What is happening is that the barriers between this hypercognition and normal cognition
    are falling, and we're finding that there is a physical evolution of humankind that exists at this hyperphysical
    or hypercognition level."                                                                                                        Whitley Strieber

Tuesday 13th  May 1997.  Around midnight a woman was travelling with friends along Riverside Drive, Perth in the direction of the Barrack Street jetty.  In front of them, towards King's Park, a bright orange half circle of light hovered above the road.  It rose up heading West towards the ocean at great speed.  Curiously there was no traffic in front of the witnesses on this normally very busy stretch of road.  Another woman reported seeing a half moon of light in the same area but at 10.30pm on the same night.
Sunday 11th  May 1997.   At 12 midnight a couple were driving South along the Roe Highway. They braked to avoid a white rabbit which ran in front of them.  This was followed by a group of white rabbits.  So surprised by this scene, the couple stopped the car and got out.  They then noticed in front and above them an orange light moving about erratically.  It was zig-zagging this way and that, up and down.  There was no sound.  It headed North at great speed.  The couple noticed there was no traffic on the highway, which was normally always busy at this time, but after the object had gone the traffic reappeared.
Friday 9th May 1997,  10.05pm.  A witness phoning from Rockingham reported a very bright light travelling exceedingly fast from South to NW.  The description would categorise it as a green fireball; large bright shimmering aqua green with a red leading edge and a short dark conical tail.  It appeared to drop straight down and was lost to view from the two witnesses.
Thursday 8th May 1997, 10pm.  A man reported what appeared to be a mass of light in the West from the Roe Highway, going West.  Three objects, red, green and blue, were seen at first to move slowly towards the West and were observed for half an hour.
Thursday 8th May 1997.  Between 8pm and 8.30pm.  Anna of Hillarys was in Waterford Drive and found a glow or ray of light engulfing her.  Looking up she saw a large glowing disc stationary above her.  Almost immediately she suffered a headache, which lasted several hours.  The disc just faded out after about two minutes, although an impression of the object remained.
Thursday 8th  May 1997,  11.50pm.  A woman in Lansdale, south of Wanneroo, reported an orange light moving SW away from Perth airport.  It was very large and the witness was convinced it was not an aeroplane.
Wednesday 7th  May 1997,  8.50pm.  William was driving south along the Tonkin Highway when he saw a huge fireball literally streak North to South over the hills.  It was the fastest moving object he had ever seen.
Tuesday 6th May 1997,  6.35pm.  Darlington, Helena Valley area.  Six witnesses reported three glowing, gold-coloured lights coming from different directions.  One would stop, another catch up and overtake, another move off at great speed.  One remained stationary for six minutes before streaking away.  The six witnesses were mystified, describing the objects like perfect spheres of polished bronze.
Monday 28th April 1997,  9.45pm.  A group of four people aged 14, 16, 18 and 22 stood in a driveway in Bathford Street, Darlington.  A ray shone down from a dome above, bathing them in light which felt warm.  After a few seconds the light and object vanished leaving the witnesses anxious and apprehensive.
Saturday April 26th 1997.  A number of witnesses from Greenwood and the Marangaroo areas reported two orange lights moving from South to North then West to East, and again NW to SE.  They seemed some distance apart, one above the other, then came together forming a figure eight or cottage loaf and moving in and out of the clouds.  This lasted for about two minutes.  No sound was heard.
Saturday 26th April 1997,  9.30pm to 9.50pm.  Hammersley.  A man reported a silent orange light moving NW to NE and considered it too slow, even for a helicopter.
Thursday 24th  April 1997,  8.30pm.  John Kernott, a Broome UFO researcher, reported a white 'rainbow' hanging in the sky for two and a half hours near One Arm Point.  A similar shaped cloud stayed in front of the 'rainbow' for some time.  Prior to the sighting three muffled explosions were heard from an unknown source.

The Western Australian UFO Sightings & Reporting Centre can be reached on:  (08) 9337 1638

The whole episode had been photographed by many civilians watching below and David had the responsibility of confiscating their cameras and having the witnesses sworn to secrecy.  Every item of confiscated material was then handed over and taken by higher authorities.
As the person responsible for writing up the incident in its entirety, David prepared a report which turned out to be the size of a telephone directory.  In response to this report submitted to them, the Officers of the Command stated to David that they were not happy with his findings and asked him to revise them, changing the story to something more appropriate.  As a man of high integrity David's conscience would not allow him to change the findings of the report which he knew to be true.  As a consequence of this refusal he lost his position, being transferred to serve as a seaman on the USS English.
Now, one day out at sea in the area of the Bermuda Triangle, the crew of the USS English were surprised to see an ancient sailing ship with ragged and torn sails.  Hardly believing what they saw, they followed the old ship.  Strangely, even at maximum speed they found that they were unable to overtake it.  Up on deck, viewing the ship through binoculars, the sailors were able to make out the name Peggott.  Later, back at port, this name was looked up in the record of old ships and it was found that the Peggott was reported to have gone down about three hundred years earlier.  It seemed to David that this sighting had been like something from another dimension.

Yet another strange event was to occur for David in this same area of the sea.  The Command for USS English received radio messages from persons said to be on two life rafts, calling for help, who gave their location details.  The ship was sent to rescue them.  Arriving at the location given, the crew of the ship saw the two life rafts and began to move towards them.  Surprisingly, as the ship approached, the rafts moved ahead, and though the USS English continued to follow, it could not catch up to them.  This was despite the fact that life rafts do not have any form of propulsion.
The sailors watched in amazement as their ship gathered speed, but the life rafts still moved at the same distance ahead of them.  The Captain of the USS English, realising that something was wrong and that his ship was probably in danger, gave the order to change course.  The ship turned right and then proceeded back to port.  Two more events had been added to the long list of strange happenings in the area of the Bermuda Triangle.

In the mid-eighties, Dolores Cannon, the wife of a US navel officer, and a grandmother of twelve, had been doing work in regressive hypnosis.  In 1986 she was working with Elena, who under hypnosis claimed to be a student of Nostradamus, and this led to the claimed contact with the seer himself.  Nostradamus said he was anxious to contact people in our time to better explain his quatrains, as dangers lay ahead of us in the next twenty years.  We would manage these difficulties only if we were forewarned.  Because Elena was moving to Alaska, Dolores had an ongoing search for other subjects who could tune into Nostradamus, and over three years, through trying them one at a time, six or more proved suitable.
A friend told me about meeting Dolores Cannon at a Conscious Living seminar in Perth, but I was hesitant about claims of hypnotic regression, more so about wringing any more sense from Nostradamus.  However, at the 1996 'Australian International UFO Symposium' in Brisbane, a Perth psychiatrist recommended Dolores Cannon's trilogy as a work on prophecy worthy of study.  She said that she had found regressive hypnosis useful at times, and suggested I borrow the books, and see for myself.
Initial browsing in the expectation of finding naïve assumptions and flawed logic proved unsuccessful, although Nostradamus' interpretations of astrology and the symbolism of his quatrains was often puzzling.  Cannon's writing seemed balanced, responsible, and her powers of organising such a vast range of material was impressive.  I felt compelled to read on.  In the books Nostradamus deciphers his quatrains.  Cannon puts questions to him through regressed subjects, who then quote him, or give their own version of his replies, such as: "He says …", or "I see him showing me ...".  Cannon: "Do you mean the allies will not be of earth?"
Nina: "No, they will not. They are from other areas that have been watching over us."

The tone of the writing is not gloomy or predictable.  Humour sometimes arises, and after exchanges it is common to see: "Laugh" or "Chuckle".  Nostradamus often contradicts Cannon's assumptions and suggestions, and gives interpretations that have a ring of authenticity.  Often a subject will give wonderful descriptions of what is seen or experienced while under regression.  Cannon adds enlightening comments on sessions, as well as informative pages on history and current world affairs to which Nostradamus and his quatrains refer.  No serious contradictions were apparent in the way her regressed subjects reported their contacts with Nostradamus.  Indeed, each added to the details of the seer as a consistent personality, who was always erudite about the quatrains, and the mood of the times – the early 1500s.
What is hard to accept, is that instead of contacting Nostradamus as a spirit somewhere in the ether, as one would expect a channeller to claim, he is being contacted as if he is still alive in France somewhere in the 1540s, often in awe of his own psychic gifts, that he knows will endanger him to being questioned by the Inquisition.  Because he is able to read auras and see visions of events happening at the end of our millennium, usually in a 'dark mirror' device, he feels it is his responsibility to contact us and warn us of the worst of the 'possible futures' awaiting us in the next twenty years.

Volume One was published in 1989, and some of the predictions have already proved correct.  In Volume Three she describes her feelings in the chapter So It Begins, when the Gulf War begins, and a tornado and an earthquake strikes the US.  Although some quatrains refer to patterns in history, the majority focus on specific events and people.  The questions and answers reveal fascinating news about the Pope, ETs, misinformation about the space program, the current dilemmas of nations, espionage, WW III, ancient documents to be unearthed in Egypt, records recovered from the Alexandria Library, earthquakes, gossip about Nostradamus' daily activities, possible futures, nuclear pollution, the stock market, economic collapse, advanced astrology, the rise of the Antichrist, (a sketch of him stares at you), and maps of unrecognisable countries – after the pole shift.  Not all the prophecies have come true.  The earthquake he predicted for San Francisco in 1995 did not come about.  It was arresting reading this when I realised I had been holidaying there at the time.

An extra enigma is that Nostradamus is being contacted at different periods of his life.  When one channeller contacts him as a young man, he knew nothing about quatrains.  We may ask, if we go along with time-warps, did the questions Cannon put to him in the late 1980s, that he received as a young man, give Nostradamus the idea of writing quatrains?  Does the future influence the past?  Findings in quantum physics suggests that it does.  In Volume Two Cannon writes: "Every time I try to think of this concept of everything occurring at once: past present and future, I do not feel enlightened, I just get dizzy."  Such a time-puzzle reminded me of reading Gurdjieff and Ouspensky's difficult Eternal Recurrence theory in 1960, and someone explained it as the Eternal Now; that when you die you instantly return to your birth, and have another try at the same life with déjà vu, and, hopefully, more-conscious choices.  But that was a simplification.
How do we account for the material in these books?  Is some mischievous intelligence plugging Dolores Cannon into a fantasy she would like to hear?  Or are some individuals really able to leap the time barrier, and connect us up to a visionary from the Middle Ages, who can tell us things for our own good?  Some people would prefer to believe that it is simply clever, imaginative minds unaware that they are deluding themselves; that it is just Cannon's unique mind-power and expectations of what Nostradamus is like, being projected into, and reflected back from, each of her seven or more subjects?  Whatever proves true, her honesty and integrity remain apparent, and her work shows the mind can indulge in some strange activities that are worthy of serious study.
If only a portion of Cannon's work is true, we have substantial adjustments to make to our current concept of time.  The fear for some, most obvious in fundamentalism and scepticism, is that her claims threaten our narrow and cosy sense of reality.

We could be in for a jolt of unlearning, and a sudden rush of new learning.  But for the moment let's return to our usual perception of sequential time where conversing with the past, or foretelling the future, is impossible.  It could be said that much of the material matches some of the darker expectations of the New Age, which is open to millennium fears and has absorbed a percentage of Nostradamus' prophecies.  Pessimism is in the air.

Cannon, after all, is asking Nostradamus, through a regressed subject, about quatrains he was alleged to have written, and he is saying: "I write these quatrains while in a trance, and I am often surprised by what I have written."  Is Cannon the source of this 'automatic writing' that comes from the 16th century?  We know this contradicts our normal belief in sequential time, but consider the words of Albert Einstein: "People like us who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
The consistency in this trilogy, the impressive time-span in which it operates, conjures the physicist's notion that times past, present and future coexist, and perhaps the sharpest anomalies that parapsychologists face occur in our little understood fabric of time.  Perhaps the Pentagon, and other security agencies, are taking an interest in these volumes, keeping watch on the disclosure of secrets, the potential for mind control, and the occasions the predictions ring true.

According to the Foreword, Cannon is not a scholar, and prior to her discovering Nostradamus, through regressing a subject to a previous life, she knew little of his life or his prophecies.  The transcripts of the taped regressions clearly indicate that she does not lead, guide or prompt her subjects, but allows their perceptions and information to come through untainted.  In fact, she is at times repudiated by Nostradamus for her misperceptions.  Only when the project was completed did she begin to research the life of the man.
In seeking an analogy to understand the enigma of persons in the late 1980s tuning into Nostradamus in 1540, I thought of the crystal hanging outside our window.  For most of the year the angle of the sun projects a small, scarcely noticeable, coloured bead on our wall, but for a few days in March and September the bead spreads to a brilliant four centimetre rainbow.  Perhaps, when conditions are right, certain people, who are normally separated by time, can by-pass time; are automatically tuned into one another, so that expanded consciousness and new knowledge lights up.
 

     "Time is really stretched out to form a sort of 'timescape', and the concepts of past, present and  future are merely psychological constructs for the  benefit of humans."
 Paul Davies.

The problem which I have with all of this is that for most people such knowledge is based on belief and not experience. It's a very strange world our there. It's not actually beyond the realms of possibility that some experiencers are delusional, that demons do exist, or that aliens are going to come and rescue a misguided and insular humanity. But considering that such things lie on the fringe of accepted truth, perhaps some reflexivity is in order. By reflexivity I mean the ability to stand back and look at your thinking and realise - hey, maybe my view of reality is tainted by my desires and word view - maybe there is another equally valid way of looking at things? As a case in point I'd like to apply some reflexivity to some popular ufology assumptions which are fast approaching the status of canon.

1) Whatever an alien tells you must be the truth.

Some people seem to treat aliens as a higher authority. You don't believe everything you read in the media do you? Why should aliens have a monopoly on the truth? If they are technologically advanced they're possibly not very spiritually advanced - given that an obsession with materialism does have its drawbacks. Even if a serene, glowing white alien tells you that it is for your own good, you should think twice about its motives when it gives you an anal probe, or removes an ovum. Most 'visitors' that I've read about do not seem particularly interested in little things like morality. Yet they occasionally give their kidnap victims incredible stories about an up-and-coming global intervention to bring back to us.

2) Aliens are all out to get us.

This is the flip-side of blind faith in the goodness of EBE intentions. They've been abducting us for centuries, mutilating our livestock, breeding a new super-race to replace us - why, they must be inherently hostile, right? There are supposed to be something like ten or eleven different general kinds of aliens around, and many different variants of these. Provided that all of these reported species weren't the product of one shape-shifting (polymorphic) group, can we really presume that they're all united in their efforts and have similar aims? If some aliens are conspiring with governments, are they all conspiring with them? There could be alliances going on here which we can't even begin to guess at. Some aliens may have vastly different origins to others. They may not care one bit about what other alien species are doing if it doesn't interfere with their activities. Given their reported diversity, we could be living in a world where ancient submarine dinosaur-descendant races, which founded Babylon, coexist with space-faring Atlantean survivors, interstellar grey geneticists/mad scientists, child-like inter-dimensional beings, a brotherhood of helpful New Age guardians, time-travelling highly evolved humans from the far future or past, and extraterrestrials bent on a New World Order of world domination, and the subjugation of the human race through their human pawns.

3) Aliens are more technologically advanced than we are.

Just what does this mean? The theory goes that if they were able to get here they have to be hundreds or maybe thousands of years more advanced than we are, right? Possibly. But then humans are currently developing things like ion drives, electron beam ships, and anti-gravity. How far away from interstellar travel are we? But then alien visitations have probably been around for thousands of years, haven't they? Even medieval documents talk of myriad suns in the sky, like the underbellies of flying saucers, or perhaps like the flying energy balls which have been reported all over England and Australia recently. The Mahabharata describes flying ships as some kind of rocket propelled craft. From rockets to anti-gravity in a couple of thousand years? And then no significant development since the Middle Ages? What can this mean? Perhaps they weren't all descriptions of extraterrestrial craft. On the other hand, if an alien being were to use near-light speed travel to arrive here, there would have to be some significant temporal gaps between each of their visits. An alien's time line for harassing earthlings would be rather shorter than what we would experience, due to the distortion produced by near-light speed travel. Whilst the alien's home culture continued to advance, it could find itself cut off in some backwater of the galaxy with outdated equipment, making periodic visits over its hundred year life span to generations of primitive humans who hadn't yet worked out what relativity was. The classic argument about alien technology seems to rely on the idea that sheer power is the best gauge of technological advancement. It is possible that we might never develop interstellar travel because of the limitations of scientific discourse. Science is more a means of empirical measurement and verification, and does not readily stimulate creativity. Its institutions stifle free thought in much the same way that the Catholic Church did during the Dark Ages. Change in attitude occurs only very slowly. But will the race to improve technology stand still during all this? Of course not. It will remain focussed around what it is best suited for; developing means for manipulating the material environment as a function of capitalistic utilitarianism. If the solutions to space travel lie outside of these demands, we may never discover them. Yet we still continue to advance. It is possible that alien technology is the result of a disparate mind set. A way of thinking which is truly alien to ours. They may have actually had a very short history which placed different demands on them than our own Earth life system. For them, space travel might have been the next logical step after achieving gunpowder. Or to use a more appropriate analogy, after developing the kind of vibration-based telekinesis required to lift Cyclopean stones for their 'primitive' astronomical temples. Finally, if they lived in a less demanding environment, their rate of advancement may have been less vigorous. After all, China was ready to industrialise at around the birth of Christ. It had the production base, the infrastructure and the science. Yet it didn't make the leap. Its society was caught in a kind of equilibrium - it was too stable and too secure. And maybe there is not a logical progression to the process of invention. Some of our greatest minds, like Nikola Tesla and Albert Einstein, seem to have produced their knowledge from insight, dreams and visions. They spent their waking hours trying to bridge the gap between what they had been taught and what they somehow knew would work.

4) Aliens are more intelligent.  Just look at their brain size!

 This kind of argument seems to apply to several of the more humanoid 'grey' aliens. Especially those which turn up on dissection tables in Socorro, New Mexico, and then get mistaken for Roswell crash victims. Most of the depictions of greys that I've seen seem to have fairly ordinary sized brain cases, but rather reduced facial anatomy instead. This may simply make their brain cases seem larger. Anyway, it is important to understand that questions of cranial capacity alone have a sordid history of racist interpretation. It was once argued that Africans were demonstrably less intelligent than Europeans because they had on average a lower brain capacity. But brain size has since been shown to have nothing at all to do with intelligence. Some birds are as intelligent as dogs, yet their brain size is vastly inferior. Neanderthal man had a massive brain, yet seems to have become extinct around 40,000 years ago. Its larger brain did not give it enough adaptability to survive whatever catastrophe befell their species. So, it seems that it is brain quality that counts, not quantity. Brain size to body size ratio might be a more pertinent comparison. The capabilities of the human brain might be more related to our own neotenous characteristics. (Whereby infantile features are retained in adult form. A neotenous trend is evident in the primates, particularly in humans, resulting in longer childhood and the acquisition of knowledge and values by children. The trend will theoretically continue, implying that, at some time in the future, human adults could look more like today's children. Editor) Small grey aliens might thus be at an advantage in this respect. But that does not hold true for some of the alien Titans which have been sighted in Russia.

5) The government is preparing us for alien contact by fostering alien stories in the mass media.

Aliens are much more acceptable now. We have been indoctrinated by alien contact stories and government conspiracies. Close Encounters, Star Wars, Star Trek, Aliens, The X-Files and Dark Skies, to name but a few. It is an interesting theory which many hold to be evidence of either an upcoming conflict with aliens in general, or a sign that they're coming down to intervene. But I think that such so-called indoctrination achieves its ends at the expense of trivialising the entire subject. Abductees and ufologists are treated with derision more often than not when they show up in sitcoms. They're a source of cheap laughs. Who can honestly say that it has got any easier to bring up UFOs as a serious topic in conversation with people at work. Afraid of hearing those dreaded words, "Oh! You've been watching too many X-Files!" Most shows on UFOs (besides ET, and Alf) treat aliens with fear and insecurity. They're a source of xenophobia and hatred. If you ever wanted to unite humanity, a common threat like alien invasion would work a treat. Now there's a conspiracy!
On the bright side, the preponderance of grey alien abduction scenarios in the media, has meant that anyone spouting the stock standard abduction claim based on media exposure, is pretty easy to spot as a hoax. I would guess that most 'real' abductions probably contain details which are very rarely made public, and only then at elitist (because of the price) UFO symposiums. Unfortunately, genuine experiencers might now be beginning to bury their actual encounter memories beneath media-based abduction scenarios because they are more familiar and less traumatic. Ufology needs to establish its own truths, boundaries and limitations, in order to give itself a sense of identity. It has found that relying on the scientific community for broad based support is rather self-destructive. Yet if it becomes too fixed in its assumptions, and too dogmatic about its interpretations of events, then it runs the risk of alienating people whose ideas and creativity may be very useful to it. Perhaps it would be best to leave matters of blind faith and witch-hunting to religion and science. ?

One exception is Professor John Mack of Harvard University in the USA, who has written extensively on the abduction phenomenon.  Professor Mack has instigated a new journal for therapists and believes that possibly 5% of Americans may have experienced some aspects of this phenomenon.  Also in America, the Program for Extraordinary Experience Research (PEER) was founded in 1993 under the auspices of the Center for Psychology and Social Change, and works with the therapeutic community and experiencers to foster an understanding of these experiences, and to develop a network of support and education.
In Australia, most organisations dedicated to exploring this phenomenon are geared to the research aspect and there is an unfortunate lack of resources to draw on in addressing the emotional and psychological support of the individual.

I began my professional life in the scientific and very practical arena of nursing, followed by midwifery.  After moving into the field of emotional and psychological health, and studying a diverse range of philosophical, spiritual and metaphysical disciplines, I was more prepared than most to keep an open mind.  But nothing really prepared me for the world of the abductee.  For me, it was the abductees themselves that affected me the most profoundly – the intensity of emotions as they relive their experience leaves one in little doubt that something very traumatic has indeed occurred.
I believe that Carl Rodgers' basic concepts of person-centred counselling are the most useful tools for dealing with any therapeutic situation, and must be maintained in dealing with such obscure situations as the abduction phenomena.  These are Congruence, Empathy and Unconditional Regard.  For the therapist to be open, to listen and honour the individual in a non-judgmental way, to give them the opportunity to discuss how this has affected them, physically, emotionally and psychologically, how it has impacted on them, their family and their perspective of reality, is vital if the therapist is to assist in integration and healing.

Often the individual cannot share their experience, even with close family, their partner or friends, for fear of derision, avoidance, fear or confusion.  The option of professional therapy may seem threatening if there is a chance they will be perceived as mentally ill and possibly hospitalised or medicated.  Conventional religions may interpret their experience as some kind of possession, evil hallucination or even as devil-inspired.
Thus, isolation and confusion are two of the main difficulties for clients.  Support groups can be extremely valuable for providing safe caring and support and a confidential environment to share with others their similar experiences.  The acceptance and validation from those who understand is tremendously healing, and strategies for dealing with the fear and lack of control can be useful for reducing stress or panic attacks.
In my experience, those clients who appear the most healthy and integrated are those individuals who are trying to make sense of their experience by viewing it as a spiritual journey or challenge that can teach them something valuable about themselves and their lives.  It becomes one of the ways they can feel empowered to continue to live in our recognisable three-dimensional reality, but also in a reality that has no recognisable boundary, that may at times appear to be multi-dimensional and obey no known rules of conventional science.
A therapist may not be able to explain these experiences, but can offer the invaluable support of openness, acceptance and honouring the experiencer.  In a world that is often hostile to a phenomenon that challenges a person's view of reality, to find someone who is open and willing to listen without judgement can lead to healing at its most profound level.
 
 

This article first appeared in NOVA,
Western Australia's Holistic Journal, May 1997. Vol 4, No. 3.

For years I have been living a secret life.  A life filled with confusion, confronting and often terrifying experiences, anxiety, fear and panic attacks and the enormous pressure of living in isolation with bizarre and incredible events occurring in my life.

From a very young age I have dreaded the darkness.  Within the darkness of night lurked the visitor who would come to me, my little body frozen with fear and apprehension of what was to come.  I often spoke to primary school friends of my visits to spacecraft in the sky, and the beings that would visit me at night to take me up with them.  This was accepted as childish imaginings, a creation of my overactive imagination, as my sceptical mother used to phrase it.

In 1992 I experienced a rapid onset of psychic and healing ability.  It was in 1992 that I also began to see non-human beings appear around me in my house.  To many people, even the idea of having such an experience would sound ridiculous and certainly bizarre.  Let me assure you that seeing these beings, who are so alien in form, appear with intelligence and intent in one's own home is the most bizarre and terrifying situation I have ever encountered.  I had absolutely no warning and no understanding as to why they had come to me.  In fact, I found myself struggling to deny it, hoping that they would not come back; that it would all go away.
It was then that my daughter, at two years of age, suddenly described to me one morning an encounter she had had with a being that, "had no hair and no clothes on and took me out the window and up and up and into a room, then brought me back down."  Amazingly, she had also drawn a picture of this 'lady' who had come to visit her.  The being she had drawn had a large head with almond shaped eyes.  I was struck with fear and confusion.  I could not believe she could have drawn it herself.
I became so protective of her, often praying over her during the night and asking for her protection.  It wasn't until I was drawn to attend the first 'Australian International UFO Symposium' in Brisbane last October that I began to make enormous shifts and discoveries that have changed my life.

The conference had a huge impact upon me.  At first I battled feelings of confusion and uncertainty, wondering what on earth I was doing there with rooms full of people listening to speakers discuss the most incredible information I had ever heard.  I was in utter resistance, desperately clinging to rationality.  I sat and listened to these speakers discuss details absolutely accurate to mine.  I was stunned.  I could feel my resistance and barriers breaking down.
The credibility of the speakers was undeniable: a Harvard University psychiatric professor, a nuclear scientist, and a psychiatric hypnotherapist to name a few – all well qualified, experienced and from mainstream backgrounds.  It was after John Carpenter (a psychiatric hypnotherapist from Missouri, and head of Abduction Research for MUFON in the USA) spoke, that I felt compelled to approach him, and ask if he would carry out a hypnosis session with me.
Conscious memory recall was triggered prior to the session.  It seemed that something was beginning to shift deep within me, something that was pushing me to move beyond my known reality.  The session with John was one of the most incredible events of my life.  I had entered into it hoping to prove that all my memories and experiences were in fact rationally explainable.  I was to be proven so very wrong.  In a matter of hours the entire perception of my life had been shattered.  The discoveries were enormous: lifelong interactions with non-human life forms, surgical procedures on board spaceships both large and small; and other detailed information that John could correlate accurately with other experiencers, not only in the US, but worldwide.
The memory that had probably the greatest emotional effect on me was that of being shown children, babies that were mine from supposed 'miscarriages' I had had since I was eighteen years old.  The grief that was expressed was as real and traumatic as with stillbirth or cot death.  The emotion and memory of my children living away from me, was recalled consciously in vivid flashbacks even before the hypnosis.

I returned to Perth feeling devastated, and yet compelled to know more, to speak out, to write about what is a reality of traumatic and transformative proportions for many thousands of people all over the world.  With stillbirth or cot death, those who are touched by these tragic events can receive understanding and sympathy from support groups, government and private organisations, the media and the greater public at large.

But with those who experience interactions with non-human life forms, whose children are taken, who live in secrecy and fear of being labelled mentally ill, ridiculed or humiliated, there is often no support from family or friends, little or no group support, and certainly minimal understanding by the media, or the general public, of the devastating effects this situation can have on one's life.

As I commenced writing my book following the conference, my experiences became almost daily occurrences: electrical disturbances in my home, mind control episodes that were terrifying beyond description, and vivid flashbacks triggering enormous confusion, fear and panic.  One night the experiences became so traumatic I was driven to phone John Carpenter in the USA just to demand that he explain my memories and experiences as unfounded and of little correlation – which, of course, he didn't do.  He has, in fact, been one of my strongest supporters through all this.

Subsequent hypnosis sessions have revealed countless more details and information about my experiences.  These sessions, along with my exposure to other experiencers, both in Australia and overseas, who have lived through the same grief, fear, confusion and isolation I have felt, have led me to the place where I can no longer live in secrecy and denial.

One positive aspect of the overall jigsaw puzzle of my experiences is that my psychic and healing abilities have been assisted and enhanced by the non-human beings I have interacted with.  In the years following their sudden onset, my abilities have increased and broadened to the point where I now carry out 'psychic surgery' on clients who suffer from a variety of
problems, from chronic pain to cancer.  The results have been wonderfully positive.  If the intent of these beings is supposedly so malicious, as many people believe, then the discovery of my healing abilities raises the question as to why these beings would assist people to provide relief and healing to those who suffer pain and illness.

Further research provided by John Carpenter (who now specialises in multiple encounter experiences) and others, points to insurmountable evidence that something is going on.  John has many cases of several people experiencing strange lights and missing time simultaneously, and subsequently finding themselves and their vehicles kilometres off course without any rational explanation for the occurrences.  John's research has found multiple examples of people under hypnosis recounting identical detail of encounters with non-human intelligent life-forms.

These experiences are as real as rape and, for many, just as traumatic.  Many of the procedures recalled are extremely intrusive and confronting.  They leave the experiencer with fear and stress that is devastating, and yet often these people have little or no support or understanding shown to them.

Having these experiences has forced me on a journey of massive proportions.  It has opened me to dimensions both within and around me that I had never dreamed could have existed.  It has taken me through a depth of emotion and experience that I find very challenging to describe.  These encounters have brought me into contact with the very core of my being: my soul.
Perhaps through these encounters we are forced into an awareness of a greater reality within us and around us.  The very fabric of each element of our daily life is challenged, and often rendered obsolete, by these interactions.  Is this then their purpose?  To force us to awaken?
 
 

This article first appeared in NOVA,
Western Australia's Holistic Journal, May 1997. Vol 4, No. 3
 
 

     "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."
                                                                                                                                              Jacques Vallee