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What Had We Just Witnessed?

It seems so naïve to me now, but somehow it didn’t seem at all peculiar that we should receive such a dramatic exhibition of extraterrestrial aeronautics.  After all, thousands of individuals all over the United States, the world, were having sightings of strange lights and craft in the skies.  Hadn’t I just written a book about flying saucers?  Why shouldn’t I have a dramatic sighting?  Why should I not view absolute proof that such objects were soaring across our skies? I had been hoping to see a flying saucer since I was eleven.  

At the time, it didn’t seem to occur to either one of us what the odds would be that we would be discussing UFOs minutes before they appeared in the night sky and put on a dramatic aerial performance for us.  Neither of us argued that the synchronicity of our discussing the subject of flying saucers and then witnessing an incredible display of numerous “spaceships” performing intricate maneuvers for our personal edification would be akin to the odds of a neophyte zoologist discovering a new species of walrus on his first expedition to the arctic.  We did assume that everyone in Clinton and the Quad Cities had surely witnessed the same incredible show that we had, and we expected that the media would be profuse with people reporting the remarkable sightings.  

There were no reports of UFO sightings in any of the media the next day, but I really didn’t notice for I returned to my research completely convinced that extraterrestrial craft were making themselves at home in our terrestrial environs.   The fact that we believed that we had observed such an incredible exhibition was largely due to an acceptance of the new reality that we were being visited by extraterrestrials and that such aerial displays were being witnessed by men and women all over the globe.

Real Encounters, Different Dimensions, and Paraphysical Beings  

I can still vividly recall that remarkable evening in the summer of 1966 ,and in my own mental Imax theater, I can “see” the UFOs moving across the sky with great clarity.  I know what I saw, and my memory of that experience cannot be shaken.  

However, what I had once believed to be a profound demonstration of the power of Visitors from elsewhere in the universe, I now regard as a manifestation of “Cosmic Cinema in the Sky” projected by beings with their own agenda.  I now consider that UFOs are but a part of a greater, more complex reality, one that brings to mind Edgar Allan Poe’s fancy that “all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”    

After a number of years in the field interviewing hundreds of  UFO experiencers, contactees, and abductees throughout the United States and Canada and corresponding with their counterparts in the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy and several other European nations, I began to see very familiar patterns emerging:

*Throughout humankind’s recorded history, people have reported seeing bright lights soaring across the skies, as well as flying shields, chariots, and sailing vessels.  Readers of the Bible and the holy books of other religions who are advised to watch for “signs in the skies” have not been disappointed.

*Since the beginning of our species’ search for meaning, gods, angels, and assorted divinities have dutifully appeared to tutor us and to gift us with individual mystical experiences.

*For centuries, we have encountered what appears to be a companion species who is obsessive in its fascination of our sexuality and who is apparently interested in creating a hybrid species.  These Hidden Folk, the Fae, the Fairies, also seem to have a program of substituting their children (changelings) for ours.  The abductee phenomena seems so obviously this ages-old Magic Theater with a new cast and new costumes.

*After years of interviewing contactees, those who claim direct communication from the Space Brothers and Sisters, I became disenchanted with their wisdom when it seemed over and over to repeat the centuries’ old admonitions to be kind to one another and all of life and to cherish and care for the welfare of the planet.  I had heard these bromides years before when I sat listening to spirit mediums relay commentary from their ethereal guides.

*Time after time when someone who had reported sighting a low over flight of a UFO to me, he or she later called me to report that their home had been beset by an invisible or shadowy entity that smashed their furniture and pounded on their walls.  Those encounters sounded more to me like the classic poltergeist, the noisy, racketing, throwing ghost of psychical research rather than an outer space invader who had traveled light years only to molest an earthling’s home.

By the time that I wrote Revelation: The Divine Fire (Prentice-Hall, 1973) and Mysteries of Time and Space  (Prentice-Hall, 1974), I had come to doubt that it was extraterrestrial beings who were involved in what we deem the UFO mystery.  Rather than extraterrestrial miracle workers in our skies, I had come to believe that the entities associated with UFOs were as likely to be our fairy godmothers and godfathers as they were our saviors from outer space.

 UFOs–Harbingers of The World’s Greatest Mystery

Today,  Sherry and I refer to UFOs as but one aspect of an ageless enigma, a great mystery.   Today, we offer alternative theories for the UFOnauts multidimensional origin and purpose.  I was wrong in calling them “strangers” in our skies. They quite likely have been here even before we stood upright as a species

In our latest  book, Real Encounters, Different Dimensions and Otherworldy Beings, we present the thesis that the aliens, angels, spirit guides, demons, fairies, elves, and gods or goddesses encountered by receptive percipients may actually be the product of a multidimensional intelligence that masks itself in physical forms that are more acceptable to humans than its true image–if image it has. We choose to define and to name this multidimensional intelligence and its multitude of manifestations as the Other. 

The many guises of  the Other exist only a frequency away in the background of the unconscious, waiting for some triggering mechanism to bring it into focus.  The so-called “collective unconscious” of modern psychology is nothing less than a subliminal doorway to that immaterial domain which the physicists are so busily mapping on a different level. Once that “doorway” has been opened, an as yet unknown psychic mechanism activates the unconscious mind, the “higher self,” and summons the Other. Once activated, the Other is able to absorb, reflect, and imitate human intelligence, thereby creating a host of entities that are fashioned by the dramatic by-products of our collective unconscious.  Once the Other draws upon a human’s belief construct, it may produce an independent image that can sustain itself on the vagaries of centuries of legend and myth.

The messages relayed by the images that have been created by the Other are always relevant to the time context of human observers, but the symbolism that it employs is always timeless, archetypal, and instantly recognizable by one level of the percipient's consciousness.  Angels, genies, wee people, devils, and gods, it would seem have been popular in all cultures throughout history.

Many of the messages conveyed by the Other seem upon first examination to contain creative symbolic myths rather than literal truths. We maintain that in addition to mystical and spiritual insights, numerous literal truths have been prompted by the Other and that through the ages, the gods, angels, and alien messengers have provoked humankind into ever higher spirals of intellectual and technological maturity, steadily pulling our species into the future.  Throughout human history, the Other has demonstrated the possibility of air flight, radio communication, television, computers, and a host of technological extensions of our five senses.   

 What answers does the Other offer for humankind in what appear to be very turbulent times ahead?  Will it finally reveal its true identity?  Will it disclose our species true origins? And will it ever tell us why it even bothers with us?  

Seeking the answers to those questions is more than enough to keep us highly motivated to continue working in a constantly evolving field of research that seeks to more  accurately define our past and more carefully shape our future.

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Photo credit: UFO Digest stock photo