Supernatural (84 page)

Keel was also interested by the parallels between reports of ‘space men’ and descriptions by people who claim to have had supernatural experiences.
The ‘angel’ that instructed Joseph Smith—founder of the Mormons—to go and dig for engraved gold tablets sounds very like the kind of space visitor described by Adamski and so many others.
During the First World War three children playing in meadows near Fatima, Portugal, saw a shining globe of light, and a woman’s voice spoke from it.
(Only two of the three heard it, although all saw it, suggesting that it was in their minds rather than in the objective world.) Crowds began to visit the spot every month where the ‘Lady of the Rosary’ (as she called herself) appeared to the three children—only the children were able to see and hear her.
But on October 13, 1917, when the Lacy had announced that she would provide a miracle to convince tie world, the rainclouds parted, and a huge silver disc descended towards the crowd of seventy thousand people.
It whirled and bobbed—exactly like the UFOs Keel had seen-and changed colour through the whole spectrum; all watched it for ten minutes before it vanished into the clouds again.
Many other people in the area saw it from their homes.
The heat from the ‘object’ dried the wet clothes of the crowd.
Keel cites this and other ‘miracles’ (such as one that occurred in Heede, Germany), and argues that they sound curiously similar to later UFO accounts.

There also seemed to be a more sinister aspect to the UFO affair: witnesses began to report that ‘government officials’ had called on them and warned them to be silent; these men were usually dressed in black, although sometimes they wore military uniforms.
No government department had—apparently—ever heard of them.
Albert K.Bencer of Bridgeport, Connecticut, suddenly closed down his International Flying Saucer Bureau in 1953, and declared that three dark-skinned men with glowing eyes had pressured him into abandoning his researches.
Most UFO enthusiasts blamed the government; but when Bender published his full account ten years later it was obvious that something much stranger was involved; the three men materialised and dematerialised in his apartment, and on one occasion had transported him to a UFO base in A???arctica.
Jacques Vallee, another scientist who had become interested in the UFO phenomenon, noted the similarity between this story and medieval legends about fairies and ‘elementals’.

When Keel began to investigate sightings in West Virginia of a huge winged man who seemed to be able to keep up with fast-moving cars, he himself began to encounter vaguely hostile entities.
A photographer took his picture in an empty street, then ran away.
Just after arranging to meet another UFO expert, Gray Barker, a friend revealed that she had been told about the meeting two days ago-before Keel had even thought of it.
‘Contactees’ would ring him up and explain that they were with someone who wished to speak to him; then he would have conversations with men who spoke in strange voices.
(He sometimes got the feeling he was speaking to someone in a trance.) Keel would be instructed to write letters to addresses which upon investigation proved to be non-existent; yet he would receive prompt replies, written in block letters.
On one occasion, he stayed at a motel chosen at random, and found a message waiting for him at the desk.
He says (in
The Mothman Prophecies
): ‘Someone somewhere was just trying to prove that they knew every move I was making, listened to all my phone calls, and could even control my mail.
And they were succeeding.’
The entities also made many predictions of the assassination of Martin Luther King, of a planned attack on Robert Kennedy, of an attempt to stab the pope; but they frequently seemed to get the dates wrong.
Keel concluded that ‘our little planet seems to be experiencing the interpenetration of forces or entities from some other space-time continuum’.

But this is enough to remind us that, according to Kardec, this has been happening throughout human history.
Stone Age shamans performed their magic ritual dances to enlist the aid of the spirits in hunting game.
Bronze Age priests performed their religious ceremonies to ensure a good harvest.
Devotees of the witch-goddess Aradia performed their nature rituals to enlist the aid of the moon goddess to aid the poor against the rich.
Mediaeval witches invoked the Devil to make their spells effective.
Upper-class Frenchwomen in the age of Napoleon indulged in ‘table turning’—and later in automatic writing—to interrogate the denizens of the spirit world .
.
.
And fifty years later, Spiritualists learned to ‘contact the dead’ through the agency of mediums.
It is arguable that they were all doing much the same thing—achieving contact with various bodiless entities who may or may not be what they claim to be.

In the light of this recognition, we can begin to understand the strange experiences of a contemporary scientist, Dr Andrija Puharich, who has also been drawn into the bewildering world of the paranormal.
Puharich started life as a nerve specialist who became interested in the phenomenon of telepathy—apparently the most innocuous and scientifically explainable of all paranormal phenomena.
He began a series of experiments with the well-known medium Eileen Garrett, who was placed in a Faraday cage (an electrified cage) to test whether telepathy is some kind of electromagnetic radiation like radio waves.
Apparently it was not: Mrs Garrett was able to tell Puharich that his friend Henry Wallace wanted to reach him urgently while she was in the Faraday cage.
Minutes later, Puharich’s secretary came in to tell him that Henry Wallace was on the telephone.
Puharich’s book
Beyond Telepathy
(1974) was to become a classic of parapsychology.

Now Puharich became interested in a young Dutch sculptor named Harry Stone, who, when examining an ancient Egyptian pendant, fell into a trance and began drawing hieroglyphics.
An expert on Egyptology confirmed them to be genuine hieroglyphics of the period of the Pharaoh Snofru.
They identified the writer as a scribe called Ra Ho Tep, who mentioned that his wife was called Nefert; both identifications proved to be historically correct.
Puharich watched with fascination as Stone went into a trance and wrote out messages in ancient Egyptian—and learned from them of a ‘cult of the sacred mushroom’, of which historians had never heard.
Another acquaintance also fell into a trance, identified herself as someone born in ancient Syria, and also spoke of the cult of the mushroom called amanita muscaria, which was claimed to cause ‘out of the body experiences’.
Puharich had his one-and-only such experience during the investigation.
Ra Ho Tep demanded a sacred mushroom while Stone was in trance, and applied it ritualistically to his tongue and the top of his head.
In a subsequent ESP test, Stone scored 100 per cent, and was able to see through a brick wall.

Soon after this, a Hindu scholar, Dr D.G.
Vinod, went into a trance while visiting Puharich, and speaking in a deep, sonorous voice quite unlike his own high pitched tones, identified himself as M, a representative of ‘the Nine’—short for Nine Principles and Forces, superintelligences whose purpose was to help the human race.
If Puharich had known anything about the history of witchcraft and Spiritualism, he would probably have told M to get lost.
As it was, he felt highly privileged and awaited further developments, which were not slow in coming.
Vinod relayed more messages from the Nine, and materialised a ball of cotton; and a couple named Laughead, whom Puharich had met by chance, also delivered messages from the Nine which were consistent with previous ones, convincing Puharich of the genuineness of the space people .
.
.

Next Puharich investigated a Brazilian ‘psychic surgeon’ called Arigo, and watched him performing delicate operations with a kitchen knife, cutting open patients, removing tumours with his hands, then sealing the incision by pressing its edges together with his fingers.
But when Puharich was informed of Arigo’s death in a car crash—by telephone—he learned that he had received the message
before
Arigo crashed.

In 1971, Puharich heard about a young Israeli psychic named Uri Geller, and hurried off to Tel Aviv to meet him.
He watched Geller perform successful feats of mind reading, saw him break a ring which a woman held in her clenched fist merely by placing his own hand above it, and bend spoons by gently rubbing them with his finger.
One day, Geller fell into a trance and told Puharich how, at the age of 3, he had fallen asleep in a garden, and been awakened by a space craft which had knocked him down with a beam of light.
Then a strange metallic voice, speaking from the air above Geller’s head, informed Puharich that it was a ‘space being’ who had programmed Geller at the age of three, and that its purpose was to help Geller avert an immensely destructive war.
The same ‘space man’ later identified himself as one of the Nine.
Whenever these beings communicated, they caused the tape recording to dematerialise.

The strange series of events that followed are described in detail in Puharich’s book
Uri: A Journal of the Mystery of Uri Geller,
yet are so bewildering and preposterous that they caused the book to be received with extreme hostility.
The Nine stopped cars and started them again, made UFOs appear overhead, ‘teleported’ various objects (and even Geller himself), and performed so many other bizarre miracles that the reader is finally left in a state of punch-drunk indifference.
(When I met Puharich, he told me that he had deliberately left out some of the more preposterous events for fear of creating incredulity; when he described some of them to me, I saw his point.) The book, which the publishers had expected to become a bestseller, was a flop.

Geller and Puharich parted; Geller grew tired of being subjected to endless tests.
But the ‘space intelligences’ were apparently enjoying themselves too much to allow Puharich to get back to science.
When Puharich went to investigate a medium named Bobby Horne in Florida, they lost no time in re-establishing contact, and telling him that his purpose now was to prepare mankind for a mass landing of space ships on planet earth during the next year or two.
Another medium, Phyllis Schlemmer, also began relaying messages from the space intelligences.
(One of the space beings, a man called Tom, explained that the first civilisation on earth was founded by space visitors in the Tarim Basin in China thirty-two thousand years ago.) Stuart Holroyd, an English writer who became involved with the group, subsequently wrote a book called
Prelude to a Landing on Planet Earth
which describes the amazing goings-on that followed.
They are too bewildering to describe in detail: what happened basically was that Puharich, Holroyd, Phyllis Schlemmer and another Englishman named Sir John Whitmore rushed around the Middle East, holding seances in hotel rooms and praying for peace; Tom periodically assured them that they had just saved-mankind.
By 1975, the landing on planet earth had failed to materialise, and Holroyd settled down to writing his book.
His own theory is that the unconscious minds of the people involved were responsible.
He cites a curious work called
From India to the Planet Mars,
in which a French psychologist, Theodore Flournoy, investigated the mediumship of an attractive girl named Catherine Muller, who described her past incarnation as the wife of a prince in 15th century India, and the civilisation of the planet Mars.
The Indian incarnation is convincing; she appeared to know all kinds of details about 15th century India, and the prince to whom she was married, Sivrouka Nakaya, proved to be a real historical personage.
But the Martian details—which many accepted as genuine—were finally disproved in 1976 when a Viking spacecraft finally landed on Mars and revealed it to be an airless desert.

The unconscious deception hypothesis would be more convincing if Catherine Muller had not displayed genuine psychic powers—for example, she could read Flournoy’s mind, and various ‘apports’ appeared while she was in trance, including Chinese artifacts and roses and violets (in midwinter).
As it is, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Flournoy, like Catherine Muller, was the victim of the astral confidence tricksters that Joe Fisher has called ‘hungry ghosts’.
And the same explanation seems to cover the weird events described in
Prelude to a Landing on Planet Earth.

But perhaps the best example of the problems encountered by unwary investigators of the paranormal is furnished by the career of the late F.W.Holiday, a naturalist whose modest aim was merely to establish (or disprove) the existence of the Loch Ness monster.
Sightings of the monster—a kind of long-necked dinosaur—began in 1933, soon after the completion of a road along the northern shore of Loch Ness, Britain’s largest and deepest lake.
A couple saw it surging across the loch, and another couple saw it on land—a strange grey creature with a long neck like a serpent.
It was even photographed later the same year.
In 1961, an engineer named Tim Dinsdale took a cine-film of the monster swimming across the loch.
In the following year, Holiday stood beside the loch on a clear morning and saw a black, glistening shape like a hippopotamus rise out of the water, then dive below the surface; he estimated it at about 45 feet long.
Holiday saw it twice more, and wrote a book called
The Great Orm of Loch Ness
(1968), arguing that it was a kind of giant slug.
But Holiday was much intrigued to learn that Boleskine House, on the southern shore of the loch, had been tenanted by Aleister Crowley, and that Crowley had performed rituals to summon up ‘spirits’.
He began to entertain a cautious suspicion that the ‘monster’ had been conjured up by Crowley, This was not as absurd as it sounds.
After his Loch Ness investigations, Holiday went to Ireland to try to photograph lake monsters seen in a number of loughs (the Irish version of lochs) in Galway.
The reports of sightings by various witnesses were totally convincing; yet what puzzled Holiday was that the loughs were obviously too small to support a large mammal.
This led him to wonder whether the ‘peiste’ (as the Irish call the monsters) is a creature of flesh and blood, or some kind of Jungian ‘projection’ (i.e.
illusion) of the racial unconscious.
Jung had formulated this theory to explain UFOs (although he later came to accept that they were objectively real), and Holiday had also experienced UFO sightings.