by Colin Wilson
Lying on the floor, beside a randomly selected partner, he decided to test his ability at ‘remote viewing’. His partner, a woman from Allentown, Pennsylvania, gave him the name, address and age of a neighbour, and asked O’Leary to describe him. Although feeling pleasantly relaxed, he had no belief whatever in his own ‘psychic’ powers. Nevertheless, he felt he was looking at a man in his forties, who was walking alone on a beach in Maui, Hawaii, and who seemed rather forlorn. They had a kind of imaginary conversation—about the climate and weather—which seemed oddly real. When it was over, his partner told him that the man had just lost his wife, lived in Maui, Hawaii, and was a meteorologist.
Of course, it is conceivable that O’Leary picked up these facts by telepathy with his partner—but, if so, that is just as remarkable as ‘remote viewing’. The experience made O’Leary aware that he had been living for thirty years in a false paradigm—the scientific paradigm that said that telepathy, remote viewing and psychic powers were delusions of feeble-minded New Agers. O’Leary now knew, beyond all possible doubt, that they were not.
When he began to tell Princeton friends about the experience, he received some odd looks. From their point of view, O’Leary had gone over to the enemy, the forces of irrationalism. But from O’Leary’s point of view, he knew beyond all doubt that the paradigms of science were inadequate. They failed to explain how he could know about a man he had never met.
It would be another three years before another remarkable experience led Brian O’Leary to make the break with his past. In March 1982, when he was driving from New York to Boston, his car skidded on ice at sixty miles an hour, and overturned several times before it went through a crash barrier. The car looked like an accordion—yet O’Leary emerged unhurt and was able to walk away. As the car had been turning over, he had experienced a sense of floating above it. There was no panic—only of a kind of euphoria. He recognised what had happened later as a typical near-death experience (NDE for short). A month later, he bought an old van and drove to California with all his possessions. One of the first results of his altered way of life was a book called Exploring Inner and Outer Space.
But he remained a scientist, attempting to explore the new paradigm with experimental methods. For example, he spent some time in the San Diego laboratory of Cleve Backster, the man who had discovered that plants can read our minds—Backster had attached a lie detector to a rubber plant, and found that it reacted when he thought of giving it water, or burning it with a cigarette. O’Leary was present at an even more extraordinary experiment. This time the machine recorded the electrical fluctuations in white blood cells donated by a young woman. As she and her boyfriend made love in a motel five miles away from the laboratory, the strip chart recorder registered wild fluctuations, then abruptly ceased. The next morning the recorder again registered fluctuations when the young couple woke and began lovemaking again, and then once again stopped as the session ended. Although separated from her body, the blood cells in her saliva were still responding to her sexual excitement.
Like Leon Rivail, Brian O’Leary had recognised that we are living in a wider reality than that recognised by science, and that the paradigms of science can be an active hindrance to our personal development.
Inevitably, O’Leary became interested in UFOs. And a curious, if unsettling, experience left him in no doubt that there was some truth to the stories of abduction. In May 1987, O’Leary and a girlfriend went to stay with Whitley and Anne Strieber in their cottage in upstate New York; Strieber was just about to publish his bestselling Communion, describing his own abduction experiences. Before retiring for the night, O’Leary and his girlfriend did some meditations. Then he began to experience a strange lethargy and paralysis, accompanied by a sense of euphoria. ‘We were being drugged without the help of an inducing substance’. Although he tried hard to stay awake, he fell deeply asleep, and woke up in the same position. His girlfriend had awakened four times in the night, still paralysed, and saw lights in the room. In the morning, all lights were off.
In the two years following this experience, O’Leary studied UFO reports and interviewed witnesses. He found himself agreeing with Jacques Vallee, who wrote that UFO phenomena ‘have had an impact on a part of the human mind we have not discovered. I believe that the UFO phenomenon is one of the ways through which an alien form of intelligence of incredible complexity is communicating with us symbolically . . . It has access to psychic processes we have not yet mastered, or even researched’. O’Leary’s own conclusion was that ‘through their experiences, an ever increasing number of people are telling us we are on a collision course with a destiny far beyond our conscious minds. My conclusion is that we cannot ignore the phenomenon any more than we can ignore the physical reality of an impending auto accident. Through the UFO phenomenon, the greater reality is being gradually but inexorably forced upon us’.
Carl Sagan had been one of the first to break with him after his ‘travelling clairvoyance’ experience, and O’Leary finally had some critical words to say about his old friend. In Miracle in the Void (1996), he comments:
In his zeal to debunk the evidence, astronomer Carl Sagan seemed to go to extremes in distorting existing data on the ‘face’ on Mars and about the abduction phenomenon in popular articles for Parade Magazine. Sagan sees abductions as hallucinations, says there is no evidence of UFO phenomena, and seemed to contrive a second photograph of the Mars face which appeared to be doctored from the original version to look not like a face. Either Sagan is totally unaware of the available data, or has become a disinformation specialist for the existing world view.
In fact, Sagan had long been acting as a disinformation specialist. The year 1973 had seen one of those peaks of UFO activity—one sheriff’s office in Mississippi was receiving two thousand calls a day. On 11 October, two shipyard workers, Charlie Hickson (forty-two) and Calvin Parker (nineteen) were fishing off the end of a pier in Pascagoula, Mississippi, when an oval-shaped UFO landed close to them, and three bizarre entities floated out. They had pointed projections instead of ears and noses, and very long arms with clawlike hands. Hickson and Parker were ‘floated’ on board, and Parker fainted. (He later had two nervous breakdowns.) After being ‘scanned’ in some way, both were returned to the pier. They finally decided to call the sheriff’s office. At one point, the sheriff left them alone in a room with a secret tape recorder, and their conversation made it quite clear that they were not shamming. They also passed a lie-detector test. Expert after expert later concluded that they were honest—a conclusion John Spencer also came to when he met Hickson.
Sagan did not agree. Three months later, Hickson and Parker appeared on the Dick Cavett show on television with Allen Hynek, Carl Sagan and Larry Coyne, a helicopter pilot who, together with his crew, had almost experienced a midair collision with a cigar-shaped object that scanned them with a cone of green light. Says one writer who saw the interview:
Sagan went last, giving one of his standard, suave, debunking performances. He took dramatic pauses to emphasise the scientific unlikelihood of interstellar visitation, chuckled dismissively in response to Hickson’s story . . . and did everything but call Coyne a liar (responding to Hynek’s observation that ‘altimeters don’t hallucinate’, he rejoined instantly with, ‘I don’t mean to attack Captain Coyne, but people who read altimeters hallucinate’.)[1]
By this time, the UFO phenomenon was displaying a new and terrifying aspect: animal mutilation. On 9 September 1967, a three-year-old horse named Lady was found lying on her side on a ranch in the San Luis Valley of Colorado, her head and neck completely stripped of flesh. Her hoof tracks stopped a hundred yards from the place she was found. Strange lights had been seen in the sky in the past few days, and newspaper reports of the mystery mentioned UFOs.
By the 1970s, there was a wave of animal mutilations all over America. Inner organs had been neatly and bloodlessly removed; so, often, had the genitals. Newspapers spoke of ‘Satanic rituals’, but few Satan
ists were likely to be found out on the open ranges.
The cuts looked as if they had been done with some kind of laser, which seemed to explain the lack of blood. (Surgical lasers were not in use in 1967.) An investigator who went to look at the site of Lady’s death months later noted that nothing would grow on the place where the carcass had lain.
At about the time of the Pascagoula abduction, a former air force security officer named Jim decided to retire to a ranch in Colorado, together with a business executive named John; his wife, Barbara; and their teenage sons. In the investigation carried out by APRO (Jim and Coral Lorenzen’s Aerial Phenomena Research Organisation) and by Dr. Leo Sprinkle (a researcher of impeccable reputation, who had regressed Patrolman Herb Schirmer), the three asked for their anonymity to be preserved.
They soon found that the ranch they had selected in Colorado was virtually haunted by strange phenomena. There were electrical failures, sounds of someone walking outside the farmhouse, and sightings of ‘Bigfoot’-type creatures in the woods.
On 16 October 1975, the cattle were braying with alarm, and the guard dog was trying to get into the house. John went out with a rifle, and saw a large lighted object hovering in the air. He decided to go back home. Jim had decided to go ‘hunting’ for cattle mutilators—for which a large reward had been offered—with a twelve-bore shotgun, but found himself unable to get up from the couch. ‘It was like paralysis, like I was drugged’.
At the same moment, Barbara experienced a sudden increase in her heartbeat, a sense of panic, and a flood of memories. She screamed, and Jim managed to get up from the couch. But he was unable to speak. When Barbara tried to tell her husband about it, she could only stutter.
Sometime later, when it was snowing, they discovered a mutilated cow near the house. Huge eighteen-inch footprints were found in the snow, and even in the barn.
The cow’s udders had been removed with surgical precision, and an eye and an ear were missing; there was no blood.
The incident was reported to a law officer in the nearest town; he promised to investigate, but never came. When a second mutilation occurred two weeks later—a bull—Jim asked the officer why he hadn’t kept his promise. The answer was that there was no point. The mutilation was being done by extraterrestrials, and there had been about four hundred so far. Jim, understandably, thought this was an excuse for laziness, and told the policeman what he thought of him.
A few days later, he was not so sure. Visiting friends went to investigate a noise coming from a cistern, and fled in terror as a huge, dark shape came through the barbed wire fence. Jim collected long strands of hair, and a Denver biogeneticist said they matched no known species.
Still Jim was inclined to believe that some real-estate man was trying to drive them out so he could sell the place to someone else; he began to sleep near the door with a shotgun. One day, awakened by a humming sound, he rushed out to see a disc-shaped object flying past. Another night he fired at a hairy creature and saw it flinch, but there was no blood.
One night, after more disturbances, Jim lost his temper, and swore, ‘If we can’t have this place, you won’t either—I’ll blow it up’. And, when he later went out of the house, a voice speaking from nowhere said clearly, ‘Dr. Jim, we accept’.
Jim asked the local lawman if he thought the boys ought to be moved away; the lawman said that, as far as he knew, no human beings had ever been harmed. But Jim was inclined to doubt this. He allowed two pilots to start putting an airstrip on the land, but, a week later, one was killed in a crash. He heard of other people who had died once they enquired too closely into the mutilations, including a magazine editor. After two Air National Guard interceptors crashed, the air above the farm was buzzing with aircraft. (The land overlooked an air force installation.)
One evening, no fewer than nine discs landed within sight of the house. Jim walked towards them. And, as Barbara watched out of the window, she was struck on the forehead, and knocked unconscious. While the others gathered round her, the discs vanished. Jim reflected later that it could have been a practical method of getting him back inside and stopping people looking out of the windows.
One night, with guests present, a mechanical-sounding voice spoke out of the radio and TV speakers. ‘Attention. We have allowed you to remain. We have interfered with your lives very little. Do not cause us to take action you will regret. Your friends will be instructed to remain silent about us’. One of the guests, a computer expert, dismantled the stereo, but could find nothing unusual. (On the other hand, many radios—or even gramophones—pick up police broadcasts, so what happened is not beyond the reach of normal technology.)
Speaking again with the law officer, Jim learnt of an incredible incident. On patrol one night, the lawman had seen a box with a blinking light, in a group of trees. The officer returned to get a colleague—but by the time they returned, not only had the box disappeared but the trees as well.
One night in January 1977, Jim experienced an odd compulsion to go to the top of a nearby hill where grass refused to grow. There was a box on the ground with a light inside it, and it was making a noise like ‘a bunch of angry bees’. Jim was with one of the teenagers, and told him to get back in the car. By the time he went back, the box had vanished.
Soon after, Jim saw another light, and walked towards it. He found two fair-haired men in tight-fitting clothes waiting for him, and one of them said, ‘How nice of you to come’. (It sounds as if he had learnt his English from a phrasebook—‘How nice of you to come’ is laughably inappropriate under the circumstances.) Down the hill was a disc. The light seemed to be coming from nowhere in particular. And there was also a Bigfoot present.
The men, sounding perfectly normal, apologised for the inconvenience they were causing, and talked about ‘a more equitable arrangement’. They told Jim that he had been sensible not to approach the black box, and illustrated their point by ordering the Bigfoot to approach it; as it did so, the humming noise changed tone, and the Bigfoot collapsed. ‘As you see, it is quite lethal’.
Oddly enough, Jim did not ask any of the dozens of questions he had in mind. Yet he still did not think he was talking to aliens—he thought that perhaps some government agency was responsible. After five minutes, he felt it was ‘time to go’, and went away, feeling ‘pretty rocked’, and wondered why they had wanted to talk to him.
When speaking to the investigators, whom they impressed as truthful, the three expressed bafflement about the whole bizarre story; Jim even wondered if he had been hallucinating. This is obviously possible—with the corollary that it looks as if something was deliberately causing them to hallucinate.
The whole story—recounted in Timothy Good’s Alien Contact—sounds so fantastic (in the most precise sense) that the easiest way of dealing with it would be to assume that Jim and his friends are liars or madmen. But the APRO investigators, a psychologist, an anthropologist and a seismologist, had no doubt of their truthfulness, or of that of the witnesses, while the nearby air force base had also had so many sightings of ‘Bigfoot’ that they had instituted an official procedure for recording them.
As in Puharich’s Uri, we note the strange phenomena of voices speaking out of the air or out of loudspeakers. We also note Jim’s ‘compulsion’ to go to the hilltop, as if summoned—an indication that the ‘aliens’ can exercise the same form of mind control as (according to Rivail) disembodied ‘spirits’.
As to the purpose of animal mutilations—Timothy Good quotes one investigator as saying, ‘. . . the mutilations, involving the extraction of enzymes or hormonal secretions—were said to be essential to the aliens’ survival’.
Linda Moulton Howe—whom we have already met in connection with crop-circle analysis—was drawn into the problem of animal mutilation and alien abduction by chance. She had produced radio and TV programmes on medicine, and moved from Boston to Colorado in 1976. In 1979, she began researching a programme on animal mutilations. Oddly enough, the public was hardly aware
that they were still going on—the initial publicity had died away almost entirely, and some people had never even heard of them.
She learnt that, only two years earlier, locals in Sterling, Colorado, had become accustomed to the sight of a huge white light in the sky, and smaller lights that were seen leaving and entering it so often that they became known as Big Mama and Baby UFOs. A local reporter named Bill Jackson had pulled into the side of the road when he saw what appeared to be an enormous aeroplane about to land on the prairie. What he saw fly over him, in complete silence, was a machine as big as a football field, with hundreds of lights—green, white, orange, and red—that ran in lines along it. Sheriff Tex Graves tried tracking it down in a plane, but could get no closer than five miles.
Talking to locals about cattle mutilations and UFO sightings, Linda Howe soon began to suspect that they were connected, and subsequent investigation would strengthen this opinion.
When she heard of a Texas woman called Judy Doraty, who had experienced ‘missing time’ after seeing a UFO, she immediately contacted her. It seemed that, in May 1973, Judy had been driving back from a bingo game in Houston with four other people when they saw a bright light hovering overhead. She pulled up and found herself outside the car. Then they all experienced ‘missing time’, although no one recognised it then. Judy only knew that she got into the car feeling sick and very thirsty. Back at home, they were surprised by the lateness of the hour.
Five years later, she decided to undergo a hypnotic session to try to bring back what had happened. She then recalled seeing a calf being drawn up a beam of light into the UFO.
Later, under hypnosis by Dr. Leo Sprinkle, with Linda Howe present, Judy Doraty described her experience in a way that suggests that it was neither wholly objective nor wholly subjective; it belongs, so to speak, to a third category between the two. She recalls feeling ‘sick to her stomach’ at the sight of the calf having parts surgically excised while it was still alive, yet she does not seem to be in the UFO at this point. She seems to be asking why they are doing this, and receiving the information mentally.
