Dancing in the Mirrors

At this moment on this website there are two of the most extraordinary interviews I have ever done. The first is with an abuctee, ?Cynthia,? on Dreamland. The second is with a particle physicist, Beatriz Gato-Rivera, who speculates as brilliantly about the ?alien problem? as any scientist ever has.

The interview with Cynthia puts the final nail in the coffin of the idea that the abduction experience is imaginary, or that it involves, in some way, any sort of ordinary human experience. There are a number of reasons for this. The first is that Cynthia had the experience with a friend, and they both remember how it started. They were out stargazing on a roadside on last July 31 when they saw a triangle of stars moving through the sky. A moment later they saw, in the light of a powerful flashlight, five sets of green glowing eyes in some brush by the roadside. They tried to get into the car but had trouble moving. Without any sense of any missing time happening, they drove away?only to find that 35 minutes had passed.

Not far away, other witnesses were observing the strange lights in the sky. The next day, the two women felt awful. Cynthia?s friend discovered a bizarre burn just above her coccyx. Her doctor thought it was a radiation burn. It has not healed properly even yet.

Given this, given all the UFO sightings worldwide, given that at least half a million people have written me and Anne telling us of their close encounters and abductions, given that strange objects have been removed from people that have demonstrably unknown properties, it is impossible not to conclude that mankind is under assault from an unknown quarter.

My interview with Cynthia broke my heart, as I heard her going through the same post-abduction hell that I lived through. She is depressed, afraid, feeling dreadfully helpless and in anguish over the fact that this also happens to her children (the youngest is a mid-teen) and she can?t stop it.

I remember sitting at my son?s door at night with a shotgun in my arms. I remember one dreadful, suicidal night, when I lay on the bed in the guestroom with that same gun cradled like a baby in my arms, trying to get up the nerve to kill myself so my family would be freed from the curse of the visitors. I have heard that same desperation in Cynthia?s voice, and have given her carte-blanche to telephone a therapist, Constance Clear, as much as she wants. Connie has written a book about the treatment of a group of abductees. If there exists an expert in the art and science of helping them, it?s her.

As I said on the air, I want to thank you Unknowncountry.com subscribers, because you put the money in the kitty that made this help possible. Cynthia is not rich. In fact, she?s on disability and unable to work because of potassium problems?another difficulty that faces many abductees. But at least she and her friend can talk on the phone with an experienced, licensed professional who has helped people like them in the past. Let?s hope it?s enough. As I predicted last October, 2003 has indeed become the year of the alien. With the taping of a UFO by a police helicopter in England and the recording of a clear video of a UFO in British Columbia in the process of making structural changes that would be impossible to duplicate even with a model, the jury is in on UFOs, too. They aren?t some sort of projection of the mind?an elegant exercise in imagination?but rather are real physical objects that make no sense?in other words, they are unidentified as to origin, nature and function, they fly, and they are physically real. Unidentified Flying Objects.

Not only that, the Mars connection first noticed back in the sixties by Dr. Jacques Valee, has been ringingly reaffirmed. Naturally, the general media, relentless in its ignorance, has sneered that the unwashed masses are simply mistaking Mars itself for a UFO. They have ignored the videotapes, the vast number of witnesses, the devastatingly convincing abduction cases?egged on by an irresponsible government eager to conceal the fact that it can do nothing whatsoever about the situation, possibly even abetted by the visitors themselves, who obviously also want to maintain as much secrecy as possible.

One has to ask, why is it like this? What?s really going on here?

Actually, there is plenty of evidence of what?s going on. First, the visitors steal genetic material. They take it from cattle, from housecats and from us. If they steal genetic material, then the must be doing something with it. But it might be very difficult for us to imagine what that would be, given their obvious high level of development.

Or are they so highly developed? I wonder. Go back a hundred years. In 1903, nobody had ever flown in an airplane, ridden in a car, watched television or listened to the radio. Nobody had ever taken antibiotics. Pneumonia was a fatal disease. Appendicitis had a fearsome death rate. Nearly half of the US population was illiterate. Physics had yet to discover relativity. Rocketry was primitive. Computers were almost beyond conception. Most people had never traveled more than 12 miles from home. And the list goes on and on.

Flash forward to your own lifetime. Remember when there were no computers? I do. I remember my first one, bought in 1979 when I was already in my thirties. I remember the beginning of jet aircraft. I remember the first tubeless radios. I remember the first televisions. So do many of you. Again, the list is long.

Do not assume, therefore, that the visitors are eons ahead of us. That they are interested in us at all suggests that they may be much closer to us technologically than we imagine. They maybe be no farther ahead of us than the Spaniards were ahead of the Aztecs. It may be that they possess some dazzling technology that makes them seem all-powerful, when actually we are not far from discovering that technology ourselves.

I think that it?s a mistake to be intimidated or overawed by the visitors. If they were all powerful, they would not need to be so secretive. Probably, if our government had been open about their presence in the first place, we would have quickly equaled them technologically. But the government suffered, back in the late forties, a profound failure of vision when Harry Truman apparently made the decision to keep matters secret pending further study. He made this decision, I believe, at the urging of the US Air Force, which had discovered that the visitors tended to back off if threatened, but could not be successfully attacked in any way. I believe that they also came to feel that the opposite was true: just as threatening them kept their numbers down, perhaps acknowledging them would bring them in a wave. So it became policy: threaten them whenever possible, deny their existence, and in this way control the situation.

As time has passed, the very complex situation that now exists has evolved. Most thinking people completely ignore what?s happening. They live in a culture of denial that has arisen around a generation of official scoffing. As a result, scientists will not study the phenomenon, the media sneers and lies, and the general public ignores. A fantastic and bizarre situation has resulted: The most important thing that has ever happened has become, for most people and virtually all intellectuals, a form of rejected knowledge.

This gets me to Beatriz Gato-Rivera. She is a scientist with the courage to address this taboo subject honestly. She has come up with some excellent ideas. She has addressed Enrico Fermi?s famous ?alien paradox? in a paper that she has rewritten for this website in a layman? s version a nontechnical version edited by Anne Strieber.

Dr. Gato-Rivera suggests that we might be embedded in a higher civilization in the same way that mountain gorillas and chimpanzees are embedded in our civilization, and that alien secrecy may be nothing more than an inability to communicate with beings on a lower level. She points out that it might make as little sense for aliens to send us an ambassador as it would for us to send ambassadors to baboon troupes.

In my interview with her in our subscriber section, I suggest the notion that they might not be all that far advanced? that, in fact, progress moves so fast that they might seem vastly in advance of us even if they are only a few hundred years ahead.

She also speculates that advanced civilizations might have powerful reasons to conceal themselves from each other, and this might lead to their being very, very difficult to detect, especially for those who do not possess the same technologies of communication and camouflage that they do.

Could there be an advanced civilization all around us, as enigmatic to us as we must be to our own dogs and cats, and as far beyond comprehension?

Another civilization could well be here?in fact, I believe, is here?and is hiding in plain sight. It hides behind the culture of denial that we ourselves created to keep it out.

In the August, 2001 Chilbolton crop-formation response to the Arecibo Message transmitted by us in 1974, the material that indicated our form, our DNA composition, our location in our solar system and our population had been replaced by a form that appeared to be a ?gray,? a DNA composition that added silicon to the mix, and a suggestion that they occupied the 4th planet out from their star and possibly four moons around the next planet, and that there were about ten billion of them.

Could it be, given the ?Mars Effect,? that they were actually saying that they occupy Mars and four moons of Jupiter? Not necessarily all those billions, but some of them? That, in fact, this alien civilization is actually living in our solar system right under our noses without our realizing it? If Dr. Gato-Rivera is right, they would be so well hidden that we couldn?t find them?at least, not yet. This would explain why their numbers rise when Mars is close?it?s easier, possibly cheaper, to get here. It might also explain the astonishingly high failure rate for our planet?s Mars probes, and some other anomalies, such as the gigantic dust storm that swept the planet for months as our first photo mission, Mariner 4 approached. Mariner 4 saw nothing unusual.

Was something covered by that dust storm?intentionally? It seems improbable, but then again, this is a pretty improbable situation we?re in, isn?t it?

As I have written before in this journal, there have been some eerie indications of a connection between us and Mars, and not a very pleasant one. Last October, I wrote:

?One of the strangest close encounter descriptions I ever received came from somebody who was walking in the woods when a little creature dressed in dark blue came out of a cave. He said that he was a rebel, and wanted to let the truth be known. The truth was that there had been a war between advanced civilizations on Earth and Mars many millennia ago. Earth had wrecked Mars, but Mars had gained control over our souls. They had condemned us to a perpetual cycle of rebirth and forgetting, of rising and falling civilizations, of always losing track with our past, going on and on forever. They called our world ?Dead Forever.??

Now that the Mars Effect has once again proved true, and there is the Chilbolton message pointing at Mars, it?s not unreasonable to think that there might be some sort of alien presence on Mars that is affecting us. For whatever reason, it?s a very secretive presence. If we had made satellite photographs of Earth with the same equipment that we have orbiting Mars, we would have found plenty of evidence of intelligent life on our own planet.

So, all now seems clear: we must be of at least mild interest to a larger civilization that has a base on Mars and is collecting our genetic material.

But wait. Not so fast. Remember that the title of this journal entry is ?Dancing in the Mirrors.?

The year after the Chilbolton message, another one was deposited, that has become known as the Crabwood Formation. This consisted of a rather dangerous looking picture of a gray along with an intricately designed disk that contained, in simple binary code both encouragement and warning: ?Beware the bearers of false gifts and their broken promises. Much pain but still time. There is good out there. We oppose deception.?

Like the Chilbolton image, there has been much debunking of the Crabwood formation, largely because it is so very different from most crop circles, offering a relatively clear message. However, the elegant format of both formations suggests a skill with the manipulation of crop that is far beyond even the most skilled hoaxers and communicators known to me personally, so I believe that both of these formations come, in some way, from inside the mystery, and are not hoaxes in the general meaning of that word.

Who made them, though, is another question entirely. It goes directly to the twin issues of what the visitors are and what they are doing with the material they collect. However, before we continue, we must add yet another mysterious ingredient to the mix. It is the connection between the visitors and the dead. For there is most certainly a connection.

Here we depart from the speculations of scientists and, in fact, from the beliefs of most western intellectuals. In general, our intellectual culture does not admit of the spirit. This possibility was abandoned as superstition during the French Revolution, as a way of escaping from the tyranny of the church. The profound influence of Marxism and our continuing inability to sense, let alone detect, our own spirits has embedded this so deeply in our intellectual culture that it has neither scientific nor philosophical means for even addressing the possibility.

I am a member of western intellectual culture, but I have been literally dragged into the mirrors and flickering promise of the life of the spirit. Because of what I have experienced, I no longer see the soul as mysterious, and I do believe either that it persists after death or that somebody has, with exceptional skill, made an attempt not just to convince me that it does, but to embed experiences of the dead into my life that are essentially the same as my experiences of the living.

On the night of December 26, 1985, I did not see only aliens. I also saw and spoke with a childhood friend. He had been a CIA agent. I had not seen him in some years, and all I really knew then was that he had left the CIA, but I had no idea what he was doing. I certainly did not know that he had already died.

He told me about a problem with the design of the containment of the engine on stealth aircraft, which were just then becoming operational. He warned that these planes were liable to burn if this design flaw was not corrected. I was mystified by his presence and could make nothing of what he was saying to me.

One of the first things I did during the anguished months after the experience was to try to look him up. It was then that I discovered that he was dead. Knowing at that time nothing about the connection between the dead and the close encounter experience, I decided that I must have just dreamed his presence up and discounted it as part of my experience.

However, when people began sending me letters, I was shocked by the persistent reports of the presence of the dead in these encounters, usually as peripheral players, with the apparent aliens more-or-less calling the shots. In one case, a desperate family called me for confirmation that the dead might appear with aliens. Their teenage son, who had died in an auto accident a short time before, had appeared to his younger brother in the company of aliens and told him to reassure his parents that he was all right. As this was happening upstairs, the mother was witnessing a huge light near the house downstairs.

As I challenged my relationship, such as it was, with the visitors by going into the woods at night unarmed and helpless?hiking miles into isolated areas on purpose, to make myself as vulnerable as possible?the contact experience came into tighter and tighter focus. It finally centered on a single individual who first came to me while I was meditating one night. He seemed to be accompanied by six others, as there were seven loud thuds on the roof above my meditation room one night. This was followed by a sense of presence in the room so appallingly vivid that I could not handle it. I left the room. The presence followed me into our bedroom. I told it that, in order for me to cope with it, I would have to have some physical reference point. I had to see it. I asked if I could smell it, knowing from experience that enlisting my sense of smell would anchor it for me deep in the instinctive lexicon of the real.

It went away after that, and I fell asleep in my wife?s arms. At about three in the morning, I was awakened in a way that would become familiar?a strange, almost mechanical punching at my shoulder. I didn?t see anybody there, and was just turning over to go to sleep again, or try to, when I noticed someone sitting very still on the foot of the bed.

I almost screamed, almost went for the shotgun under the bed, but when I saw how he looked, dressed in a worn tunic and sitting there as still as a rag doll that had been tossed aside, I realized what had happened. This invisible creature had somehow done what I had asked.

I went down to him. His eyes were black darknesses, but otherwise his face was passably human. I took his hand in mine. It was like holding a little sparrow. He was not large. Indeed, he was as slight as a child, but his face was mature. I smelled his skin, which was as pungent as the skin of a person who never bathes. It was a smell that one finds in a crowded bazaar in the third world.

The next night, he came again, and this began many weeks of meditation together. I would go into the room at midnight. He and his friends would come at once, banging down onto the roof. A moment later, I would feel him in the room. At three he would wake me and I would meditate with them again. The same thing would happen at six. This went on for weeks.

When I asked my wife to come into the room and join us, and she heard them dropping down onto the roof, she was seized with a deep instinctive terror and left the room, saying that she wasn?t ready. I knew that terror well. I had tasted it deeply out in the woods. It was not the terror of aliens, I don?t think. I think that it was the terror of death. I asked him who he was and he led me to a book in my own library called Life Between Life. He indicated that he was between lives. He was trying to rescue me from a similar fate. He was trying to point me toward a tiny door that enables escape from recurrence, whatever it is. He instilled in me the importance of this escape, and left me with the ambition to communicate all I discovered about how to do it to others. This, more than understanding the alleged aliens, has become the aim of my life. It?s why I wrote the Key and the Path. It?s why I lavish time, money and attention on this website, why I am sitting here on a Sunday morning writing this instead of taking a day of rest.

The more we worked together, the more physical he became. Eventually it was obvious not only to me, but to our cats and to Anne that he was living in the house. She became more able to accept him, even to the point of tidying rooms he had spent time in.

At the same time, neighbors began to report to me seeing seven glowing balls of light moving through the woods together. Andrew brought friends to stay with us from his boarding school. He gave us strict instructions to mention nothing about aliens, UFOs, etc. But his friends saw the lights in the woods.

Are you still with me, dancing among the mirrors? Where are the aliens, now? On Mars? Are we indeed embedded in a greater civilization? If so, I would suggest that it does not recognize the boundary between life and death that we do. The closer you get to it, the more you embrace it, the less you see of that boundary yourself.

But is that really true. The Crabwood formation warned of deception. Why? What is the deception?

A few days after Communion was published, an editor from Wm. Morrow & Co., Bruce Lee, went into a bookstore to see how the book looked on the shelves and was treated to an appalling experience: two aliens with big eyes, looking very much like the picture on the cover of the book, were paging through it. They wore hats, coats and scarves, but their faces were unmistakable. He went closer. They were talking about all the things I had gotten wrong?in Queens accents, which he interpreted to mean Jewish accents. (Plenty, I am sure.) Then they stopped. They looked at him. He turned and left the store.

I met this fearsome woman a few more times after Communion. I began to think of her as my teacher. I believe that she did function in that role. Once, when my brother was at my cabin, I was indulging in a bit of ego over my accomplishments. She did not like ego at all, and was always ready with a lesson when I indulged in any feeling of pride. My brother and I were walking down to the spot where I had first met the visitors when I heard her low, menacing voice say, ?Arrogance! I can do anything I want to you.? A moment later, we saw a UFO in the sky, then three misty figures appeared at the far edge of the field.

We returned to the house, and all seemed normal. But the next morning my agent called me in a real tizzy. A large check had come in, which I was counting on to feed my family for the next two years. That was good. But what was not good was that the bank had called to say that the account into which it had been deposited had mysteriously disappeared from their database.

I spent the next twenty four hours begging her to forgive me, promising never to indulge ego again, and pleading with her to give me my money back. The next day the agent called again. As mysteriously as it had disappeared, the account had rematerialized.

Once, when Andrew had a guest at the house who worried us, she showed up again. She did not like this boy, either. I had often let her mind come into mine. It felt at first like being annihilated in a deep way and was among the most terrifying things I had ever done. But I was used to it by then, and I lived through all sorts of fearful scenarios involving Andrew and this boy.

The next morning, the boy reported that he?d been waked up again and again in the night by seeing long fingers with black, claw-like nails coming around the door, as if some monstrous being was about to open the door. I knew whose hands they were. I had held those hands in mine. I had felt them caressing my cheeks. I knew them as gentle hands, but he was not amused. After that, his friendship with my son faded.

Years later, in Texas, she treated me to what I thought at the time was a vision of the future. This immersion in her being and her world was so profound that the next morning I could not understand the English language or navigate the car through the streets to go to a church I?d been attending all of my life. I felt as if I had come back from another planet, it was that deep a journey into her.

I thought I saw our apartment in ruins. I thought I was looking at its future. But I was actually seeing it, I think now, as she saw it?in the same way we might see the lair of an animal, dirty, roughly made, coarse and ridden with insects. In other words, through her eyes, and perhaps through the eyes of all her kind, this is a world of animals.

So, you might ask, what in the world does this have to do with the dead, let alone Martians, let alone aliens abducting people and stealing genetic material from them?

Well, now, I told you at the beginning that this was about dancing. For those of you who have read the Path, or the material about the card of the Dancer in my last journal entry, you will know more of what I am driving at.

But not entirely. Actually, I am skimming a very complex, hyper-dimensional surface. This essay is a sort of crop circle of the mind. Let me leave you with an image. We are sitting beside a pond together, you and I. It?s a summer afternoon, and sunlight dapples down through the trees onto its still surface. Spiders skate across the surface of the pond. Below, fish lie in the still water. Deeper still, beneath the muck, the unknown begins.

We lean over, we see our faces staring up at us, the eyes dark, the sunlight framing us in the bright light of mystery. The skating spiders have no idea that we even exist. They cannot know. I strike one of them, smashing it under. I do this to illustrate a point about the fluid nature not of water or the subtle electricity of its surface, but to illustrate the mystery of perception.

Perhaps the skating spider, as the fish race to devour it, calls out, ?O God why have you forsaken me?? And then does it die into nothingness, or does it find more glittering water in the faraway?

The ripples subside. The spider becomes food in the belly of a fish we cannot see or know. Our faces reappear, looking back at us with whatever gravity or laughter we care to express.

What is really down there?

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