The Fantasy of the Galactic Federation

Recently, Dr. Steven Greer, the emergency room physician turned UFO researcher, organized his second Washington press conference designed to spur congressional hearings on the subject that would bring an end to a perceived government cover-up of UFOs.

A similar conference held some years ago by Dr. Greer was a disaster. Among other things, a letter was distributed erroneously claiming that Mr. Richard D’Amato, a Senate staffer with responsibilities for, among other things, intelligence oversight, could and would absolve people of their obligations under their security clearances. Mr. D’Amato had no such right, and had never claimed such.

This time, however, the conference worked better. A number of credible individuals brought forth evidence, and there was a substantial and often positive reaction from the press.

However, there was something wrong about this conference, something deeply and profoundly wrong. While it was never stated in so many words, a very definite viewpoint about the nature of the UFO phenomenon emerged from the conference, and about the US response to it.

It was that UFOs are artifacts of intelligent manufacture that represent a benign, even benevolent federation of civilizations–a galactic federation–that is hovering off- planet, delaying any landing until the United States ceases to be secretive and hostile. When they do land, they will bring us technologies that will enable us to, among other things, solve our environmental problems and enter space in a big way. A point was made that the proposed missile defense system is really an ‘anti-alien’ defense system and, for this reason, should not be built.

Personally, I don’t think that the missile defense system should be built–not because of aliens, though, but because it is probably going to be useless and a factor contributing to a dangerous isolationism.

Such is the complexity of American culture that Dr. Greer’s claim has the potential to affect the adoption of the program. It will never be stated in the press or in letters to congress that this is a reason for opposition to the plan, but it will most assuredly be there. In this sense, Dr. Greer became an important political factor at his press conference.

The reason that Dr. Greer’s position will be respected is that most people believe that UFOs are real for the simple reason that most people have either seen one or know somebody who has.

Whatever is out there has created an irresistible and undeniable theatre in the sky that, in the end, will defeat every denial and every lie. Present policy toward the phenomenon is, in other words, a failure that leaves the US open to being controlled by the very power whose existence it seeks to deny. Dr. Greer’s conference is an example of the assertion of such control. By attaching what was essentially a set of unproven assumptions about the nature and motives of whatever causes the UFO phenomenon to a conference involving sincere and credible witnesses, he himself acted the expert propagandist. Along with the calm, credible reports of UFO sightings from FAA officials and military officers, there came the unproven assertion that they were spaceships from a benevolent galactic federation that is waiting for only one thing to usher in a golden age in our world: a change in US policy.

Right now, this belief has only limited political potency, although more than all but the most careful observers may realize, as I pointed out earlier. However, the world-political situation is this: the planet’s environment is deteriorating fast, and in a few years there are going to be severe and obvious environmental disruptions–catastrophes, even–that are going to make many people fear that human destruction on a vast scale is at hand. At the same time, the United States government will then have a history as the world’s worst environmental obstructionist.

This combination of realities will be profoundly destabilizing, and at that time, Dr. Greer or his successors will gain genuine political power. They may even succeed in opening the secret records of US response to the UFO phenomenon. But they will not succeed in getting the galactic federation to land.

The reason is that it isn’t there. It doesn’t exist. It is no more real than the Greek pantheon–a society of gods on a high mountain where, in the real world, there exist only snow and wind, and long, long silences.

Why would I assert this with such assurance? The reason is that I am privy to a vast outpouring of human testimony that is entirely ignored by Dr. Greer. It must be ignored by him, because it is so very strange, so utterly beyond any trace of a conventional explanation, and in many ways so profoundly malignant that it can have no place in the benevolent space federation of his mind.

I refer, of course, to the largest, most enigmatic and most bizarre body of witness testimony ever produced by the human mind: the abduction and close-encounter narratives.

At Dr. Greer’s conference, they were entirely ignored. But they must not be ignored, and not only because so many of them depict something very different from what Dr. Greer would have us believe is the reality of the UFO phenomenon.

And it isn’t as if there are only a few hundred or even a few thousand such accounts. Since 1987 when I published Communion, I have received upwards of six hundred thousand such accounts. About 5% of them were highly detailed, involving multiple witnesses and extensive interactions. Most of these accounts are about fifty feet away from me right now.

These accounts are probably the most valuable single human document–in fact, the most valuable record in history. This is because they represent a narrative of contact–contact as it really is, not a one-dimensional fantasy out of some television program, but an incredibly strange, vastly rich, totally new and often extremely dangerous phenomenon.

Dr. Greer would assert that this body of narrative is foolish, that it is the work of hysterics and mental defectives, or of frightened people who are confused about what happened to them. In other words, he would defy the narratives of thousands of witnesses from all over the world with the narrative of one witness: himself.

This is no way to address this problem. In fact, what we must do is to begin a process of analysis, to, as it were, transform the raw witness testimony that is available into a coherent body of communication. We will discover, if we do that, an astonishing coherence among these narratives. What will emerge will be, quite simply, the first human dialogue with another world. For that’s what the narratives are: taken collectively, they are humanity’s description of the experience of contact.

Over the years, Dr. Carl Sagan said some of the most useful and prophetic things ever said about the contact process. As a scientist and a skeptic, he asserted that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I have lived by that assertion in my attempts to obtain physical evidence that one mysterious object or another has been manufactured off- world. He also said that contact would be extremely strange– strange beyond imagining.

In the first of these two assertions, he was wise. In the second, more than wise. He was prescient. In fact, the narrative of contact, as it has been produced by the direct witnesses, is not only the most important of human documents, it is also strange beyond belief and imagining.

What happens during contact is not consistent. The attempt to show that contact involves the witness being abducted and laid on a table in a spaceship, then being painfully assaulted by peculiar scientific instruments, is almost as much a shibboleth as the ‘galactic federation’ fantasy.

No, this is vastly more strange, more complex–and more deeply human–than any of those Buck Rogers or Star Trek stories. And in regard to the human side of this matter, we must NEVER forget that we ourselves are a living, breathing mystery. Who we are, where we came from, or exactly why the human mind is exponentially so much greater than every other mind on this earth–all of this is unknown. We have no idea what the human mind may accomplish in the future, for example. But it is likely to manage some great wonders. It could very well be that what we perceive as an alien intrusion, in other words, is the human mind looking at itself in some manner that we cannot yet imagine.

I wish that I could afford to mount proper studies of the narratives that I have collected. But it will take a lot of money and some very dedicated and capable scientists to do it well. To find people in the present scientific community who might be interested in this, but who are not also victims of scientism–the religion of science that has grown up around the degenerating remains of what used to be called scientific skepticism–is very hard. Everybody who comes to this body of material does so with an agenda, a set of preconceptions about what they are going to find.

From having read all the narratives, I know that these preconceptions are nothing but a lot of foolishness. They’re worthless. So the letters stay in storage, awaiting a day when the excellent and the rigorous will take an interest.

I have had direct personal experience of contact on many different levels. I have read hundreds of thousands of these narratives of contact, studied tens of thousands of them in some detail, met well over a thousand of the witnesses who have written me. I have tried never to close my mind to any of the narratives, never to impose my own preconceptions either on my own experience or that of others.

Trusting that I have been sufficiently rigorous in this, I can assert a few things about Dr. Greer’s ‘galactic federation’ that might seem rather different than the impression that he seeks to popularize:

First, there is no real evidence that any of this–either UFOs or close encounter experiences–has anything to do with aliens, at least in any conventional meaning of that concept. If they indeed came here from another planet in some fairly recent time, or were inspired to show themselves by our reaching some level of technological power, then they have brought with them a vision of reality so vastly different and so extravagantly unexpected that they might as well be not just from another planet, but from another universe with different laws of matter and physical being, or from some way of thinking so different from our own that the average person has about as much chance of understanding it as a cat has of understanding a computer.

However, it is also true that an average person of just a few hundred years ago could not have understood a computer no matter how carefully it was explained to him. Nothing you told an ancient Roman about a computer would have enabled him to understand, or a medieval scholar, or even the vast majority of Renaissance intellectuals.

While there is every evidence that what we are facing is profoundly beyond our present understanding, there is little evidence that we will turn out to be like the cat–unequipped with the facilities necessary for understanding.

I think that we can understand, but it is going to take far, far more effort than was suggested in Dr. Greer’s conference. For example, I would be very surprised indeed if we found any aliens in this galaxy of ours. What we are going to find, if we ever manage to escape the limits of the earth and go among the stars, is that life is common–in fact, is part of the very sinew of creation–but that intelligent life is astonishingly, terrifyingly rare. We are going to face, among the stars, a horror of loneliness that will finally reveal to us the frightening truth of our own preciousness, even as it threatens to drive us mad.

The reason is quite simple. While it does now appear that many stars have planets, the conditions necessary for higher life forms to evolve are extremely rare. Most specifically, a planet with a thick enough atmosphere to provide the energy that complex life forms need to exist, in the form of oxygen and other chemicals, must ALSO have a large moon that orbits the planet in such a way that the wind generated by the planet?s rotation is slowed enough to allow complex structures the freedom to grow without being immediately torn apart. For example, if there was no moon, earth?s wind would blow at something close to three hundred miles an hour all the time. Life would not have evolved beyond the level of lichens clinging to windswept stones.

The other side of the coin, though, is if there are any aliens about, and they have evolved the ability to travel between stars at any time in the past million years, then they are almost certainly already here and have been here for millennia. Our ability to address this issue is marred by a cultural impediment. Instead of facing the question as it really is, in all its complexity and ambiguity, we have divided into two camps. One group believes that we are the subject of alien interest. These are, in general, ?ordinary? people. The other group, composed largely of scientists and academics, profess to believe the exact opposite. Out of fear (very real) that they would see their careers destroyed if they showed any interest in the subject, they almost ritually assert that aliens could not possibly be here.

From the very beginning of the experience of the sighting of strange objects flying around in the sky, there has indeed been governmental interest, and this interest, just as Dr. Greer claims, has been focused on keeping this whole matter confidential. In his book Unconventional Flying Objects, Paul Hill, a NASA aeronautical engineer for 30 years, detailed his own sightings and speculated about how the craft he had observed at close range could fly. There is no question of his professional skill. He even used his observations in his work, applying them to the engineering of a flying platform back in the 1950s. However, he was prevented by NASA from speaking publicly about what he had seen, or about the dozens of other reports from equally qualified professionals that were sent to him over the years.

He planned to publish his book after retirement, but was apparently restrained even then. Only after his death was the book published by his daughter, who found the manuscript among his effects.

This story alone proves that there is a vital and aggressive cover-up in effect. The assertion on the part of the skeptics? community and elements of the press that no professional observer has ever had occasion to see a UFO in operation is false.

However, the fact that the government is hiding its knowledge of UFOs does not mean that it has much understanding of what they are or what they may be doing here. The reason for the cover-up is more likely to be that the government does not possess secret knowledge than that it does. As things are, the phenomenon is no more than a disturbing curiosity. Were the government to admit that UFOs are an unknown, it would also have to admit that the fundamental promise of protection that government offers is, in reality, not available to us. The government cannot protect us from this strangely physical chimera any more than it can prevent us from dreaming bad dreams.

The difference is that UFOs and their occupants are in some way real. They act independently of us. At times, they seem aggressive, even dangerous?even terribly dangerous. There are the cattle mutilations?eerie events that happen in the midnight and involve the destruction of cattle by unknown means. It is false to say that the animals are being destroyed by cultists or by the government itself. The wounds left behind bear no explanation. Residue found on their bodies suggests that their blood has been centrifuged on the spot, leaving a dust of hemoglobin behind.

What is worse, there are suggestions that this same process has been applied to human beings, leaving corpses in roughly the same state as the mutilated cattle. Unfortunately, I cannot provide details of these murders, but I have reason to believe that a few of them have taken place. So far, none of the police agencies involved have been willing to admit to the public what has happened, and it is up to those agencies to proceed further. I have no doubt that there has been an effort on the part of higher authority to restrict knowledge of these events.

Certainly, such events do not fit the paradigm of the benevolent galactic federation waiting in the wings to help us if only we would but respond to them in a pacific and intelligent manner. Far from it. The UFO phenomenon presents itself to us across a wide array of possibilities, ranging from a sublime potential to open minds and exalt spirits, to the utter horror suggested by such events.

The UFO community prefers to think of the phenomenon along lines that are easy to comprehend and thus offer the potential to control. The truth is, however, that the phenomenon is out of control. It has been out of control from the beginning. We will never gain mastery over it. What is possible for us is understanding, and then only on our own terms.

To accomplish this, though, the first things we must do are two: we must put aside our preconceptions; and we must find a way for the best thinkers among us to circumvent the cultural and social obstacles and begin a correct and productive study of the matter.

This study must proceed along three paths: making a record of what is going on in the sky; properly examining any and all possible physical evidence on the ground, including possible debris of all kinds, from UFO fragments and deposits to implants; and analyzing the vast close encounter narrative that is available, as well as the lives and psychological state of the witnesses.

Only then will we even begin to be able to describe the phenomenon in anything approaching a meaningful way. Right now, the two competing assertions–that aliens are present and that they are not?represent a pitifully meaningless debate. The problem is so important that the most capable human minds available should be addressing it, and at every level. It should be addressed not only from a scientific standpoint, but at every other level of the culture as well.

Whether they are aliens or something very much stranger? even in some way a part of us?the fact remains that somebody is here whom we do not know. There are strangers among us, and they are strange indeed. To try to diminish the mystery by asserting childish claims about it, or to deny it altogether, is simply not enough.

I would like to close with a few examples of the sort of witness narrative I have been talking about. These letters were all published in the book the Communion Letters. The book was virtually unreviewed. It sold few copies. But it nevertheless represents a cross-section of an extremely strange human reality. That this reality is denied instead of being addressed usefully is mankind?s great loss.

This first letter is from the mother of a family who experienced a level of close encounter very familiar to me. The closer you get to it?even in broad daylight?the more the physics of reality around you changes. You can literally end up in a situation where the world around you is no longer real in the same way that it was. By stepping across your living room or?as in my case?turning a corner on a perfectly normal street, you have stepped through the mirror into a curiously askew other world, where ordinary reality has been liberally mixed with the stuff of another world.

Visitors In The Trees

The event I’m going to relate happened at our house, in a sparsely populated part of the countryside. The house has two stories and is built on a steep hill, so that when you look out the windows on the second floor, you can see into the tops of the trees that grow next to the house. At about nine p.m., what I thought was a large car with bright headlights rolled down our gravel driveway. I was washing the dinner dishes while looking out the kitchen window, which overlooks the circular driveway, but I didn’t see any car there, so I thought nothing of it and went on up to bed. We slept until about seven a.m., and when I was back at the kitchen sink after breakfast, I looked out the window to see a woman in a red windbreaker jacket enter the stables. She was wearing white pants, and was holding a long stick in her hand. I told my daughter to go see who it was, but when she returned, she said no one was there. I then saw a man jump off the pumphouse nearby, which is eight feet tall, and run off towards the trees. He was small, with brown hair, and seemed to bounce in a way that had no relation to gravity. Next, I left to do some marketing, and when I returned, my husband walked up to me and said, ‘There are people in the trees! We’ve been trying to talk to them, but they won’t answer.’ My husband and I walked up to the front porch, where we saw the children calling up at the treetops, ‘Come down, we won’t hurt you.’ I looked and saw that whoever was up there had constructed some sort of platform. We went upstairs to look out of the bedroom window at the beings we had been trying to talk to from below. The second story windows are just at the right height so that we could view them on a level plane. The trees they were in are right outside this window, about sixteen or twenty feet away, so we could see the beings clearly. I said to my daughter, ‘Do you see what I see?’ She said, ‘Yes Mom, there’s two of them. What’s that thing coming out of that one’s head?’ I noticed that there was some kind of beautiful beaded antenna sticking out of the left side of the head of one of the beings. One of them looked slightly Oriental, and the other seemed more American, but smaller and with a brown mustache. One of them had on a remarkable piece of jewelry–it was a band striped in different metals of all colors: silver, gold, platinum, green, red, purple and black. We could only see them from the chest up, since the branches and leaves covered the rest of their bodies. I got the feeling they were monitoring everything: our yard, the air, perhaps radio waves. Since they continued to ignore us, we went downstairs and outside again. I felt brave and wanted to find out more about what was going on, so I went and got our Rotweiler dog. Holding him by the collar, I explored underneath the trees. This caused a commotion, and I saw ten or twelve pairs of legs, all wearing white pants, scamper away from me up the hill. I let go of the dog, and as I approached the house, I saw a woman who was the same type of being you describe in your books. She was dressed in a kelly green jumpsuit and was too long and thin to be a human being. She was climbing among the branches of one of the trees next to the house. I said, ‘You have no right to do that without my permission; you should have asked.’ I instantly realized how silly this accusation sounded, and I quickly opened the front door and went back into the house. Back upstairs, at the bathroom window this time, I was able to get a closer look at her. She was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Her arms were long and unbelievably thin, and she had some sort of faun colored soft leather flight cap on, of the type that pilots used to wear in the old-fashioned open cockpits of early planes. She was also wearing goggles from the same era, although the lenses were shaped to fit her large, slanted eyes. I can’t recall that she had a mouth, or much of a nose. She had soft-looking gloves on, and her jumpsuit was closed down the front with some sort of metal fasteners. She looked like she was engaged in filming, and aimed a black video-type gadget directly at me. I immediately jumped into the shower and jerked the curtain shut as fast as I could, whereupon my husband walked in. I said, ‘Did you see her?’ and he said no, so determined to learn more, I left the bathroom and went out of the house, across the front yard and into the rundown paddock area of the property. There I saw the most incredible being that I have ever seen. It was almost indescribable–a silver, crystal, moving mass of energy and light with the exact same striped band of jewelry that I described before on it, perhaps where a neck would be. I stood three feet away from it, awestruck. The children and I are a little bit vague about what happened during the rest of the day. We remember that at about four p.m. two of our friends arrived, and I told them to come and see the people in the trees. I insisted that they come upstairs with me and look out the windows, but we saw nothing. The next morning, as we headed for the beach, we noticed that the birds were back in the trees again. There had been none there the previous day. My daughters and their girlfriend and my husband and I all talked about our adventure while at the beach. Jini had seen the man with the mustache, and well as some of the other beings. My daughters Dana and Ruth verified their height; Jini showed me with her hand how tall they were (about five feet). My husband took the stance of denial, postulating that we’d all somehow had similar hallucinations. Since then, he’s acknowledged their presence, but is reluctant to discuss it. I got very ill after that visit. The following week I lost thirteen pounds. I needed two liters of intravenous fluids the following Friday. On Saturday I was better, after a week of sore throats, fevers, restless nights and nauseous days. My littlest one has ground her teeth down, and pulls the covers entirely over her head every night, but we’re more calm about it now than we used to be.

This letter at once suggests just how little we actually know about our world and the creatures in it, and the tremendous mental and physical strain that is going to be involved in maintaining contact with the extraordinary presence that is either emerging from among us?an outcome of some activity of our own mind that we do not yet understand?or arriving here, perhaps from another planet, but equally possibly from some aspect of reality as yet unnamed.

The next letter addresses an aspect of this reality that is probably extraordinarily important, and may end up being the key that opens the door to an explanation for us. This is because it deals with an aspect of the phenomenon that is rejected not only by the skeptics but also by most UFO believers. In our culture, educated people in general do not want to trust the idea of the soul, or of continued conscious existence after death. But the close encounter experience is at once about encounter with apparent aliens and with our own dead. At its core, it is about profound questions?what is a living mind, and to what degree does it persist after the body is destroyed?

This letter represents human experience at is most powerful and most strange. It represents encounter at its most profound. This is the inner core of the thing, the reality that nobody involved, not the UFO believers, the skeptics or the government dares address. This is as close to the core reality as it gets.

A Traveler Returns Home

I was born in Texas in 1945. I’ve had OBEs since I was a small child, and never thought it unusual, rather that they were private and no one talked about it much. They became very intense during my Freshman year in college, leading up to a period where I went completely blind for 3 days. My ESP seemed to become more and more prevalent, so since I was a “very rational” honor student, I began psychotherapy, thinking something was severely wrong with me and I wanted to get back to “normal” as soon as possible. I got married while still in college and would stay during summer sessions as well. We had a child in 1966. In the early summer of ’68, my daughter and I drove to New Mexico to visit some friends who had a small ranch there, before going west to meet my husband. Leaving Taos, we drove to Flagstaff and waited there until the early evening, to cross the Mojave Desert at night. About two hours outside of Flagstaff, my daughter began to shout that she saw a spaceship in the sky. How did she know what it was? The sky was unusually cloudy, and I looked to where she was pointing and saw first two and then three lights moving rapidly in the sky, turning at 90 degree angles, pulsating and disappearing, etc. I decided to pull off the road onto a dirt trail I saw to the right, leading into the desert. We were away from the road lights, but I thought I could still see them at a distance. We watched the sky together, she in the back seat and I in front, when suddenly in front of the car there appeared a huge, dark and glowing object with a partial row of lights in the middle. The next thing I remember is my breath being knocked out of me as I somehow went through the windshield of the car. I remember looking back for an instant and the car was completely empty of myself or my daughter, and I was stepping into an opening in a vehicle. I couldn’t see my daughter, and I asked in terror about her. “She’s going to be all right.” was what I heard in the center of my mind, and I was strangely soothed and unusually happy. These beings were tall, about six and a half feet, and seemed to be robed in a fabric that emitted a type of light periodically, during movement. Their skin was silvery and their eyes were round, and a violet blue that sometimes streamed out on me with a feeling of love or long lost family; it was almost like a homecoming. Their eyes were closer to the surface of their faces than human’s, and the nose wasn’t well defined. Their mouths were fascinating. Sometimes it seemed that they weren’t dressed at all, and the body definition wasn’t sexually differentiated. I was standing with two of them and noticing that they had no hair, but there was something like fabric that was crumpled and folded behind their backs. They seemed to be smiling, without moving their mouths. As soon as I thought “hair”, one of them seemed to produce beautiful reddish gold hair all over its head, smiling. This frightened me. The room I was looking into was about 25 feet wide and semi-circular. It was rather dark, and filled with TV screens running the full wall area, stacked upon one another three and sometimes four rows high. All sorts of pictures appeared on the screens, and strange symbols, and terrains 1?d never seen. Under the screens was a type of built- in desk, curving all along the wall. In the middle of the room was a long table with three or four chairs that were moveable. There were three beings in the chairs, two of them facing the screens and moving around, while another one at the desk area stood from time to time, moving things around. They did not look up. They seemed to be of the same slender body type as the two that stood with me, but were not quite so tall. Those two seemed to be laughing all the time and sometimes there was a sound like wind. They kept saying “Welcome, welcome!” in my mind, and laughing. They then told me some strange things about human origins and alien intervention on the planet earth at various times in the past and future. Then they started speaking to me about my individual history. This will sound outrageous, Whitley, but I’ll say it anyway: There was a whole generation of beings that came to earth in the far past and took up earth life. They were from the family of Ranm. That root family name was their name root also, but either that planet wasn’t in existence anymore, or it was now inaccessible. They said that was why the old god names were as they were on earth: Rama, Brahma, Raa in Egypt and Abraham, etc., in order that humans might remember. But so much confusion set in that the names became designations for gods or heroes, and that wasn’t the point at all. Rather it indicated the name form of the origin of them, and some of us, being from other star systems. Then they began telling me my name in their tongue: “Shalisha Li Ekimu Ranm,” and kept saying it in my head until I got it right. They said those words meant much more, and could be found in earth literature. There was such love flowing through them, as they helped me with the name and the earth lineages that went back to the stars. Understand, this wasn’t exactly like words, but were rather images or sound pictures that moved between us. Then they took me through a gray curved corridor to the right of the entrance where I’d come in. I can remember not being able to walk, and then walking with ease. We came to a room at the end and to the left of the corridor. This room contained the ship’s driving mechanism. This happened in 1968. I was 22 and had no idea what I was looking at. In front of me was a huge crystal, perhaps three feet across in the middle. It looked like two pyramids placed base to base, although at times it seemed multifaceted and totally brilliant and jewel like.. The crystal seemed suspended in the air, and around it was a matrix of wires or tubes connected into a solid type of material concealing the ends of the tubes in a dark smooth mass, so that the entire thing rose about four feet from the floor. They told me to put my mind into the crystal, and as I did I’d be able to learn how to fly the ship! One of them telepathized how to do it. I tried and failed, but they kept coaxing me and I could hear them smiling: “Go on, you can do it!” Finally I got it right and we began to move out, first above the earth and then through the angular pattern of space that was also time. I asked why I had to do this and they only said, “So that you can remember flying and piloting when necessary.”, and then there was laughter. After the initia1 information was placed in the crystal and wire matrix, nothing more was necessary, but we stood there anyway until they said, “Time to return to earth.” Frantically, I panicked and asked about my daughter and was soothed , again by them saying she was okay. Then they said they were sorry, but didn’t say why, and then there was great love. As we moved to the exit place, they said my name again several times, and something about “soul lineage.? I was reluctant to go, but the next thing I knew I had gone through the car windshield again, and found myself hanging out of the window gasping for air; I had been crying and was covered with sweat. My daughter was in the back seat crying. She told me never to touch her again, and that she knew who I was and she hated me. I tried to calm her and ask what had happened to her and she shouted, “I’ll never tell you! Leave me alone!” I had a notebook in the car, and before we left I forced myself to write these things down as I remembered them. I looked at the stars in a daze. It was almost midnight, and we had lost about two and a half hours. At that moment the scene seemed uncanny, yet so perfectly normal. I felt then that this was the first time I’d been able to remember, but that it had happened before and I was blocked in remembering. I drove on to California then, as if nothing had happened. I couldn’t tell anyone ever, and swore to myself to never discuss it. I then began getting afraid of going to sleep at night, and became really ill and nauseous. My hair began to fall out and my mouth started bleeding, and I was exhausted. I took more vitamins. One night my daughter woke up screaming and I went to her bed and she said very factually, “Mommy, I’m going to die. The spaceship people told me so. They said little bugs had gotten into my body and they were sorry, but there was nothing they could do since I’m a little girl.” Then she went back to sleep. This frightened me beyond belief. That morning, she woke up with a high fever and had severe joint swelling. I took her to the hospital and she was diagnosed as having rheumatoid arthritis, yet they weren’t too sure. They wondered if she’d been exposed to radiation. She was in great pain. I took her out of the hospital and drove back to Texas and put her in the hospital, only to find out that she had a very rare cancer of the nervous system, neuroblastoma, and it had metastasized, and she had just a few months to live. She lived until September of 1969. Before her death, she began to draw extraordinary pictures that were more advanced than a ten year old?s, even though she was only three and a half. She began to write poetry, which I sometimes wrote out for her. The doctors were amazed and thought it might be the chemotherapy, but were not sure. The day after her funeral, a friend of mine who was a graduate honor student at UT called me from Austin hysterically, saying that she had to drive to Houston immediately and tell me something that had happened. Without glasses, she was legally blind, but she drove anyway. I didn’t think I could handle another emotional crisis, since I was in such grief, however she came that day. We went for pizza, and she told me what had happened. She said that two nights before at about 2:20 AM, she was awakened by a noise and then saw her roof begin to dissolve. In the air above, she saw a type of spaceship. Two tall beings appeared, and in between them was my daughter. They told her they hadn’t been able to get through to me because of something, but to let me know that my daughter was okay and was with them! She thought at that point that she’d gone completely insane. At that point in her story, I broke my promise to myself and told her what had happened that night in the desert, and we both cried and cried. My career has changed radically since that year of 1969. I became, due to these experiences, a professional psychic and astrologer and Qabalist. I’ve never advertised, but have lived and worked all over the world. (She relates that she reached a high position in an eastern esoteric organization, but eventually left it because it was too spiritually confining for her. She asked a spiritual leader to free her of her connection to the visitors, and feels that he may have succeeded.) Mystical experiences continued, but never anything specific about the Visitors. Before that, in 1975, while on an archeological expedition in Bimini in the Bahamas, there were two solid weeks of Visitor communication. It culminated with a message that they would appear in their vehicle at 9:15 PM over a friend?s flat, and that we should all be there. I felt out on a proverbial limb. Sure enough, though, the craft appeared to all the expedition members present. There are so many other experiences. I was in Port Aransas when I was twelve, since we spent some of the summer on the water. I have been to England 3 times in the last Yr., and many interesting things happened at Glastonbury. There have been probably 25 Visitor experiences that I have recall of, all of which leave me with an incredible elation for about 3 days, and then a horrible fear of going to sleep at night. I’ll close with what happened in October of 1989,which is what spurred me to write this. A week before, I?d decided that I wanted to regain the connection back to my destiny, although as I look back, that alien connection happened many times, even after (the leader) said he’d take it away. The only difference seemed to be that I wasn’t fascinated and fearful somehow, and that it wasn’t important. Then, I wasn’t interested in anything but the mystery that we humans seem to be part of; I wanted to know that mystery outside of any tradition, system or dogma, no matter what anyone said to the contrary. On the evening of 10/20, I set my meditation circles around the house and bedroom, and went to sleep. I’m no longer married and live alone with three other friends in a fourplex. I wanted to try to get out of body, since it was the first anniversary of an intense experience I’d had in Glastonbury, and if I could I would try to go there. Sometime in the early AM, I heard the crackling sound I always associate with going OOB, and sure enough I could see myself lying in the bed, as I moved in light body through the floor downstairs to see if I could grab my neighbor, and get him OOB too. He saw me, and moved OOB, and we roamed around a bit before I departed for Glastonbury. He had always requested that, if I was able to get OOB, I should come to get him if I could. This did happen several times, and we shared the occurrences immediately in the morning. Usually I was drinking coffee, and he’d knock on the door at about 8:00 AM with, “You’ll never believe what happened to me last night.” Usually I said, “Try me.” The recalls were exact. After an extraordinary experience at Glastonbury, I came back in through the roof and sat up in my body. It was about 4:00 AM. Then I went back to sleep, with no thoughts of Visitors. I was awakened awhile later by two taps on the glass windows in the bedroom that have a small, slanted roof under them. Since I live upstairs, this is the only area vulnerable to entry, and I keep the windows and screens locked. For the tap to happen, the screens would have to be pulled open. As I awoke, there were two more raps, one long and one short. I turned over and looked toward the window. The moon must have moved to that area of the sky, since there was a lot of light streaming in and casting moving shadows of leaves and branches on the half open blinds. There’s also a light that comes in at night around the corner, attached to my neighbor’s wall, as well as a night light that we had installed to be activated by body movement. It seemed they were all on. Staring in at me was a little grey being such as you described, but the cranium was larger. I could see it through the half open blinds, and also its shadow, which unlike the branches stayed perfectly still. My first thought was, “That’s the being the guy who wrote that book was talking about.” Then to be sure I was awake, I looked at my hands and sat up in bed and pulled the covers down a bit. If I’m OOB, these actions are impossible; either I can’t move my body in the physical, or my hand goes through matter and has no effect on it whatsoever. In those circumstances, only thought causes matter to move, nothing else can. I sat up and looked at it, and it looked at me. It didn’t enter my room, perhaps because of the circle I had previously set. Nothing else I know of could have kept it out. We stared. ?You don’t have the right to knock on my window and wake me and come to me with your mind, uninvited, and expect me to go with you. Come back when we’ve both agreed to a visit, not like this at 5:15 AM!” I felt absolutely no emotion from the being surveying me. Then I turned on the light. “Go away!”, I said out loud. “You’re scaring me.” There was no soothing energy or anything. Maybe it was drawn to me because I’d passed through its world while OOB, and it had come to see me in my world to show me what it was like; I don’t know. I looked at the digital clock, and it was 5:20 AM. About then, there were noises downstairs. It sounded as if my neighbor had begun to open and slam his windows shut, and then the closet doors. There was also a pounding sound, like a few people running hard on the floor downstairs. In the night silence, it seemed loud. The windows continued to slam, and I thought he was participating in some sort of bizarre behavior, and made a note to inquire of him in the morning. With the light on in the bedroom, I could not see outside. I reached under the bed for my revolver, and mentally told the figure that if it didn’t leave, I was going to shoot at it. If it came inside, I’d shoot it for sure. It sounded like my Texas upbringing talking. Thinking back on the incident, I wouldn’t have shot it, but I can never know for sure. When I turned off the light it was 5:30. The being had moved to the other window by the slanted roof. It seemed to be sitting on he roof and looking in. I laid back down with the gun in my hand, on top of the covers, and stared at it until I went to sleep. The noises downstairs had finally stopped before I dozed off, and I felt strangely comfortable about the whole scary thing. The next morning at 7:30, I sprang out of bed and tapped on the window. Yes, that was the exact sound. I went downstairs at 8:00 and was looking up at the roof when my neighbor came out. It had been another interesting night, he said, and guess what? I d come to get him again, but this time he was able to come upstairs to my place too, before we had gone into that golden twilighty place we always went, where I showed him how to go through walls. I laughed and said I remembered, but not exactly in the same way he did, since I had been able to successfully go to Glastonbury in what seemed like an instant. Then I told him what I’d seen on the roof, looking in the window. They could have climbed up there from the porch without much trouble. Then I asked him about all the noise downstairs. He hadn’t heard a thing. He’d had a dream that was disturbing, however, after the OOBE. He said that there seemed to be someone up to no good who were trying to break in downstairs, and he was able to keep them out of the house. They then went next door in a vacated area of a garage apartment, and began drawing up plans for the next attack. They were up to no good, he reemphasized. He was doubtful about experience and said he thought that I believed it, but a real physical being?! It had cast a shadow, unlike a projection, and I?d been wide awake sitting up in bed. I woke up with the gun on the top covers. It was real.

This letter and the one before it represent different aspects of life in close encounter, different parts of the reality. I could easily provide another ten thousand such narratives, each one offering a different array of insights and experiences. Think of that. A few feet away from me, as I write, there are thousands and thousands more of these stories, and no qualified professionals without preconceived agendas?let alone any foundations or academic institutions? exist who might be able to work toward a useful interpretation of them.

The last of these letters is in many ways the most provocative. It is the only one I am aware of about an abduction that began while the victim was in full consciousness, during the middle of the day. It was written by a teacher and grandmother, not an American. Despite her need for anonymity, an agent of the intelligence service of the country in which she lived, posing as a UFO researcher, exposed her name publicly. This was done to terrorize others who might come forward with similar stories. It is often done to close encounter witnesses by such people, and the purpose is always the same: to cause them to lose their jobs, to harm their familial relationships, to do whatever is necessary so that they will stand as public warnings to others who dare to tell their stories: keep your mouths shut.

I will not keep my mouth shut. Something is happening, something strange, and it is unlikely to have much of anything to do with any sort of benevolent galactic federations?or with any sort of aliens of the kind that flit about in the movies and in our sadly limited imaginations.

Captured by the Visitors

In 1976 I was vacuuming my living room floor at about noon. Suddenly I felt quite ill and thought I was going to vomit, so I sat down on the couch to see if the sick feeling would subside. I then saw that I was not alone; there were three strange little people standing alongside the couch, just looking at me. I froze with fear, as I had never seen anything like them before, not even in the movies. Two of them were short and fat, about four to four and a half feet tall, with broad faces and enormous black eyes, but with only a hint of where a nose or mouth might have been, almost like a pencil drawing. They had wispy bits of brown hair at the back of their heads, and they didn’t have blue suits on like the ones you described in Communion; instead, they were wearing brown shrouds. These, I knew instinctively, were the workers. The other was female, thin and about five feet tall. She wore a black shroud and had black wispy hair at the back of her head. Her face was very elongated, with huge, dark, piercing eyes, and once again just a hint of where a nose or mouth would have been. The tall thin one started to speak to me with her mind, and told me I was to go with them. I answered with my own mind that I wouldn’t go. Somehow, telepathic communication seemed perfectly normal at the time, and I felt quite comfortable communicating that way. This doesn’t mean that I wasn’t frightened–I was beside myself with fear. She kept saying, ‘You must come with us,’ and I kept refusing. She then said I could go free, and I got up off the couch and crawled along my hallway to the front door. When I got there, they pulled me back with their minds until I was on the couch again. They let me go again, and the result was identical, except that this time my husband was standing at the front door. I clung to him, and I will always remember how the sweater he was wearing smelled. They pulled me out of his arms and back to the couch and once again told me it was useless to fight, as I had to go with them. The two workers seemed to be busy doing something all the time this was going on, but I have no idea what it was. The next thing I was aware of was the sound of my husband’s car pulling up to the house. I heard him come through the front door and down the hallway, and at this point, I noticed that the visitors were gone. When my husband walked through the door, I didn’t believe it was him at first; I thought it was another trick. It took me about fifteen minutes to really believe that they were gone and that my husband was home. My next shock came when I found out it was 5:30 p.m. It seemed like it should be 1:30 p.m. at the most. I wonder, where did that time go?

In the fallacious universe of Dr. Greer, this witness would probably be classified as a blathering victim of her own silly imagination. That time she lost?well, maybe she had one too many tipples while she was doing her vacuuming. Certainly the galactic federation would never do anything so brutal. However, the truth is that this heart-rending and frightful narrative points straight at the core of the problem. No amount of questioning effort enabled the witness to remember more. Nobody knows what happened to this woman, not even in the deepest, darkest recesses of the intelligence community. And this is why the cover-up will never end, why anything at all will be done to maintain it. There is, in fact, nothing we can do to change or affect in any way?let alone prevent?what happened to her. Nor do we know how many people do not come back, of what happens to those who do not.

But whatever happened to her is one of the things that we absolutely must come to understand if we are ever able to understand the whole experience, and our own true place in it.

No matter how many dreamers come forth peddling fantasies of galactic federations or dreams about alien scientists come to ?study? us, however brutally, the fact remains that this is a very much more provocative business than either of those theories would suggest. To suggest how provocative it may be, I have only to refer to two recent scientific advances. The first involves the concept that our universe is part of a vast array of universes that are interlinked and intertwined, but normally entirely invisible to each other. Physics suggests more and more strongly that these universes, which exist literally all around us and even within us, are physically as real as our own is. A paper that elegantly and convincingly promotes this idea will be published in the fall in the journal Gravitation and Quantum Cosmology by Jaume Garriga of the University of Barcelona and Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts. But if it is true, then what if somebody from some other of these universes has discovered a path into our world. What if they intend to meld our worlds?to expand their own domain by the order of an entire universe? Or simply to try to touch us, to find a doorway into the mystery of another world?which happens to be our home? For details of this story from Unknowncountry.com, click here.

The second involves sciences changing view of time travel. Up until a few years ago, noted physicist Stephen Hawking would ask, when the subject of time travel was broached, ?where are the tourists?? He was really suggesting that there was not enough energy in the entire universe to allow a situation in which somebody could enact the ?grandfather paradox??that is, to go back in time and kill their own grandfather. Therefore, the thinking went, time travel must be barred no matter how much physics might suggest that it should be possible.

But then it became clear that another law of physics, the principle of least action, would prevent a time traveler from enacting the grandfather paradox no matter how hard he tried. So Hawking changed his mind. He has, in recent years, said that time travel must indeed be possible.

Now another noted scientist, Dr. Ronald Mallett, believes that he can devise a time machine. In an article that was published in the New Scientist (19 May 2001), Dr. Mallet says ?with this device, time travel may become a practical possibility.? The device requires slowing down light almost to zero speed, and involves the use of temperatures close to absolute zero. It would involve literally ?bending? time into a ring, and while actually moving through the medium containing the time-backward light would be difficult, given that it would be rather cold, it might be possible to use this light to see the world in a very new way.

Of course, if this is being done in the future, we are experiencing the effects of it now. When he was a child, Dr. Mallett longed to go back in time and warn his father about the poor health habits that killed him at an early age?in other words, to use time travel to violate the grandfather paradox. He would have been prevented by the principle of least action?somehow.

Just how is an unknown. However, it could be either that the entire array of what we see involves time travelers, or a part of it does. If so, then they will almost certainly be fighting an extraordinary battle to change their world by influencing ours. It might be that they would seek to present themselves to us in the context of a totally alien appearance, if defeating the grandfather paradox depends upon concealing from us knowledge of their true origins.

Understand, I am not asserting that we are facing either interlopers from other o-regions or time travelers. What I am trying to point out is that there are scientifically viable explanations for what is called the UFO phenomenon that do not involve alien contact.

In any case, it is time to try to go beyond the childish debates and simple-minded assertions that now surround the phenomenon. The debate about whether or not aliens are here is, at best, premature. Something is demonstrably here, and attempts to assert otherwise are either being generated by confused government officials bent on concealing what they do not understand and cannot affect, or by academics and scientists afraid for their careers, or intellectuals assuming that their ignorance of the phenomenon is, in fact, knowledge. At the other end of the pole, the alien believers are in an equally untenable position. They are a little better off because they are at least willing to recognize the existence of an unknown phenomenon. Their explanations are premature, though, and the silliness of some of them is painful.

There is no galactic federation out there waiting to save us from environmental disaster, if only the US government would stop being so belligerent and secretive. The existing data suggests many different possibilities, but that is not one of them. In all truth, if our planet should begin to fail to support us, we are going to be alone with the problem, and the United States? admitting what little it knows?what pitifully little?about the UFO phenomenon will not help us solve our problems.

In a previous journal entry, I speculated that disclosure itself might be a mechanism that would enable the phenomenon to enter our world freely. If indeed it represents an intrusion from another universe, then what it is doing here?creating a theater in the sky while penetrating our intimate lives?might be a sort of military operation directed toward convincing enough of us that it is part of our reality to enable it to actually enter it. If so, then scientific denial and government silence are among the most important weapons we possess.

This would make Dr. Greer?s effort the work of a controlled mind, a mind seeking to destroy the very bulwark upon which we depend for our freedom. But it would seem premature to conclude any such thing, of course. However, the very fact that the question, in view of all the data at our disposal, is not entirely absurd, points to a central fact: we must find a way as a culture to usefully address this phenomenon. However, we must also tread carefully, for, as the letters I have quoted above make so eloquently clear, when human beings get near this phenomenon, the rules change, and profoundly, and not necessarily in ways that we would want.

We need to step out onto the ice, most certainly. But ever so carefully, and so lightly, so very lightly, must we tread.

NOTE: This Journal entry, previously published on our old site, will have any links removed.