by Colin Wilson
It may seem that, even if we could all learn to exercise Faculty X at will, our powers would still fall far short of those allegedly exercised by the kind of aliens described, for example, by Linda Howe. What I have tried to argue in this chapter is that this may be due only to our lack of insight into the powers that we do possess. The literature of paranormal research has always been full of extraordinary examples that few people have taken seriously.
Consider the following case from the French scientist Camille Flammarion:
My friend Alphonse Bue was on horseback in Algeria, and following the edge of a very steep ravine. For some reason his horse made a mis-step and fell with him into the ravine, from which he was picked up unconscious. During this fall, which could hardly have lasted two or three seconds, his entire life from his childhood up to his career in the army, unrolled clearly and slowly in his mind, his games as a boy, his classes, his first communion, his vacations, his different studies, his examinations, his entry at Saint-Cyr in 1848, his life with the dragoons, in the war in Italy, with the lancers of the Imperial Guards, with the spahis, with the riflemen at the Château of Fontainebleau, the balls of the Empress at the Tuileries, etc. All this panorama was unrolled before his eyes in less than four seconds, for he recovered consciousness immediately.[4]
There are dozens of similar accounts of this kind of panoramic review of one’s life—it really does, apparently, happen to drowning men—but this one is impressive because its sheer detail makes it clear that this was not just some vague impression of his life ‘flashing before his eyes’. It was a kind of slowing down of time in which he saw his life in the kind of detail that would normally have taken hours. Clearly, the human brain cannot only play back the past in detail (as Wilder Penfield discovered in the 1930s, when he touched a patient’s temporal cortex with an electric probe, and the patient ‘relived’ detailed memories of childhood), but has the equivalent of a ‘long-play’ device on it, so that years can be compressed into seconds.
Hilary Evans cites the research of the American psychologist Milton Erickson, who found that hypnosis could also ‘compress’ time, so that a dress designer who would normally have taken several hours to design a dress produced a design in ten seconds. Yet it seemed to her that she had sat at a table, gazed out of the window, and spent several hours working on it.
Another subject was placed under hypnosis and asked to evaluate a painful moral dilemma in which a girl who wanted to marry had to choose between marriage and her invalid mother. The subject believed that she had spoken at length to the young couple, and as a result of this she produced a thoughtful and detailed analysis of the situation. The hypnotised woman believed she had devoted hours to the problem, and was amazed to find that it had taken her only ten seconds.
Clearly, the power to manipulate time is not restricted to the aliens.
Neither is the power to make people do things against their will.
The Polish psychic Wolf Messing, who fled to the USSR when Hitler marched into Warsaw, was tested by no less a person than Joseph Stalin. His first assignment was to walk into a Russian bank and attempt to ‘will’ the cashier into handing over 100,000 roubles. Messing, accompanied by two witnesses, handed the cashier a note, which the cashier glanced at, then opened the safe, and handed over several packets of banknotes. Messing put them in his briefcase and walked out. Then he went back into the bank and returned the money. When the bank clerk looked at the ‘note’ and realised it was a blank piece of paper, he was so stunned that he collapsed with a heart attack.
The second experiment was apparently impossible: to walk into Stalin’s villa without a security pass. Messing strolled into the grounds and walked past the guards and the servants, nodding to them; they stood back respectfully. Then he walked into the study where Stalin was sitting at his desk. Asked how he had done it, Messing explained that he had simply willed the guards to think he was Lavrenti Beria, the greatly feared head of the secret police. In fact Messing did not look remotely like Beria.
All of which makes it clear that Hynek was exaggerating when he said that UFOs were the greatest mystery of our time. The greatest mystery of our time is the one that has puzzled mankind’s greatest thinkers since Socrates said, ‘Know thyself’. Two thousand five hundred years later, we are still as far as ever from understanding the mystery of human potential. The only thing that seems certain is that it is far, far greater than Socrates suspected.
[1]. See Mind Trek, Exploring Consciousness, Time and Space Through Remote Viewing by Joseph McMoneagle, Hampton Roads, 1993.
[2]. I am quoting from Frank DeMarco’s unpublished account, with his permission.
[3]. In A New Model of the Universe.
[4]. Quoted by Hilary Evans in Frontiers of Reality, 1989, p. 111.
10
THE WAY OUTSIDE
There is a story by the science-fiction writer Brian Aldiss that has always seemed to me to have some bearing on human existence. It is called ‘Outside’. Six people live together in a house that seems to have no particular location: four men and two women. Every morning, they get up and look in a storeroom, in which their supplies of food appear mysteriously. They spend the day playing cards and amusing themselves, but never get bored. At the end of the day, they go to bed. They never seem to wonder what they are doing there, or how they got there.
One night a man named Harley feels uneasy, and forces himself to stay awake. He sees another man leave his bedroom, and go to the storeroom. When he peers into the storeroom, Harley sees that the far wall has swung open, and leads to a corridor.
Deeply worried, he rushes to shake one of his companions awake. ‘Something’s wrong. There’s a way outside. We’ve got to find out what we are. Either we are victims of some ghastly experiment, or we’re all monsters’. But as he speaks, his companion seems to dissolve, and turns into a kind of stick insect.
Harley succeeds in finding his way outside. He is gripped by a desire to find out who he is and what he is doing there, and feels that he has been cheated of the years he has spent in the house. He sees buildings and runs towards them, then pushes open the door to a lighted room.
A man sitting behind a desk comments, ‘It has taken you four years to get out of there’. Then he explains. The Earth is in conflict with insect creatures called Nititians. They come to Earth, kill human beings, and take their place. They maintain their human body by a form of self-hypnosis. They are conditioned to behave exactly like human beings.
A group of five Nititians has been captured, and kept in a restricted environment. One human has been placed among them as an observer.
And, because the human sits around doing nothing, the Nititians also do nothing. They never ask where they are, or who delivers their food every day, or what lies outside the house. The men never even flirt with the women. They merely accept their situation.
The man Harley has seen leaving via the storeroom is the human observer, going off duty for the night.
Harley suddenly realises the implications of what he has just been told. He starts to shout, ‘But I’m not a Nititian . . .’, when he feels his body dissolving as he turns into an insect.
From that day at school, when we began to discuss where space ends, I have always felt rather like Harley. On the surface, this world looks straightforward enough. I was born in a certain town, I knew who my parents were, I went to school and learnt history, I became interested in science and learnt about the universe and about how human beings evolved. It all seemed very normal and secure, especially when I became devoted to H. G. Wells and was told that science would eventually solve all the riddles of existence. But on the day I realised that I had no idea where space ends, I also realised that I had no idea who I am or what I am doing here. It all seems to have an answer; in reality, we are all in the position of Aldiss’s Nititians, hypnotised into acceptance and passivity.
Most of my fellow human beings never seem to be bothered by these misgivings. They have their troubles, but
they never seem to worry that the whole thing is an absurd charade or a confidence trick. As to me, I never cease to suspect that someone is pulling my leg. A forgotten poet called William Watson expressed it in a poem called ‘World Strangeness’:
On from room to room I stray
Yet my host can never spy
And I know not to this day
Whether guest or captive, I.
As a child I had become interested in Spiritualism, and felt that the idea of life after death made more sense than Shakespeare’s belief that our little life is rounded with a sleep. Yet I still feel that the basic question—‘What am I doing here?’—is not answered by saying that I shall survive my death. It merely replaces the question, ‘What am I doing here?’ with the question, ‘What would I be doing there?’
One thing is clear to me: that the reason my fellow humans take so little interest in these amazing problems of the paranormal, or in whether aliens from other galaxies or dimensions are visiting our planet, is that, like those people in Aldiss’s story, they seem to be in a strange, passive state that is akin to hypnosis. I share enough of their state of mind to understand their longing for security, and their objection to the intrusion of strangeness. Nevertheless, it seems to amount to burying your head in the sand.
I experience the same sense of absurdity when I listen to a cosmologist like Stephen Hawking telling us that the universe began with a big bang fifteen billion years ago, and that physics will shortly create a ‘theory of everything’ that will answer every possible question about our universe; this entails the corollary that God is an unnecessary hypothesis. Then I think of the day when I suddenly realised that I did not know where space ended, and it becomes obvious that Hawking is also burying his head in the sand. God may be an unnecessary hypothesis for all I know, and I do not have the least objection to Hawking dispensing with him; but, until we can understand why there is existence rather than nonexistence, then we simply have no right to make such statements. It is unscientific.
The same applies to the biologist Richard Dawkins, with his belief that strict Darwinism can explain everything, and that life is an accidental product of matter. I feel that he is trying to answer the ultimate question by pretending it does not exist.
And what is wrong with the ‘scientific’ view that ultimate questions do not exist? Only that we feel instinctively that it is an evasion. All living creatures need a sense of security, and that applies to human beings more than most, because we feel particularly vulnerable. Without a sense of security, we would be nervous wrecks. But it is possible to go to the opposite extreme, and to convince yourself that life is as comfortable and unproblematic as a Jane Austen novel. When that happens we vegetate—or, worse still, stagnate.
Let us try to take a bird’s-eye view at how man found himself in this peculiar situation.
In the Middle Ages, the Church disapproved of people who thought for themselves, and the friar Roger Bacon spent most of his life in prison for pointing out that that is how we learn. But, during the Renaissance, the Church could no longer keep the lid on individuality, and the invention of printing soon made it impossible. So, when Copernicus suggested that the Earth was not the centre of the universe, and Kepler and Galileo went on to prove it beyond doubt, and then Newton outlined the first ‘theory of everything’, the old belief systems began to shake and crumble.
Yet the major figures of the Age of Reason—Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau—were not great thinkers. In fact, they devoted most of their time to the less strenuous activity of attacking the Church. And the philosophers who followed were more interested in asking how we can be sure that our senses are telling us the truth than in understanding the universe. In fact, the whole idea of understanding the universe became thoroughly unfashionable.
In the nineteenth century, scientists were irritated by a sudden upsurge of interest in ghosts and poltergeists; they denounced it as a revival of the witchcraft superstition. One particularly violent outbreak of poltergeist activity, in the Fox household in New York state, led to the formation of the Spiritualist Church, which made the scientists angrier than ever. Yet intelligent men who studied the problem admitted that it could not be dismissed as superstitious ignorance. The mathematician Charles Dodgson—who wrote Alice in Wonderland under the pen name Lewis Carroll—admitted: ‘That trickery will not do as an explanation of all the phenomena I am more than convinced’.
In effect, the nineteenth century was faced with the same problem we face in UFOs. And its reaction was much the same: to pretend it did not exist.
In fact, Lewis Carroll suggested that it might be explained by some new force similar to electricity, but the investigations of the newly formed Society for Psychical Research showed that this would not explain thousands of ghost sightings. Yet most scientists went on refusing to pay attention to the paranormal. ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, Thomas Henry Huxley, explained that he ‘simply could not get up an interest in the subject’.
So the twentieth century still found science busily trying to create a ‘theory of everything’, while refusing to look at half the phenomena. By 1900, it began to look as if it might succeed.
And at that point, the edifice of science itself began to crumble. To explain why requires a brief—and I hope painless—digression on modern physics.
When J. J. Thomson discovered the electron in 1897, it became clear that atoms, after all, were not the smallest thing in the universe. He concluded that atoms are lumps of positively charged electricity, with negatively charged electrons embedded in them like raisins in a Christmas pudding.
And, just as it began to look as if science was getting close to the secret of the universe, a physicist named Max Planck introduced an awkward complication. He was trying to explain a problem that had been labelled the ultraviolet catastrophe. Expressed very simply: he wanted to know why, when you turn on an electric fire, you do not also fill the room with ultraviolet rays, X-rays, gamma rays, and all kinds of other dangerous radiation. After all, when you strike any note on the piano, it makes all the other strings vibrate, and the same ought to apply when you turn on a light or a bar fire, since heat and X-rays are—as Clerk Maxwell had shown—all part of the same keyboard of electromagnetic energy. But this clearly doesn’t happen. Why?
In 1900, Planck made the suggestion that perhaps energy does not flow in continuous waves, but comes in small packets, called quanta. If you pour a cup of water on a table top, it will flow all over the place. But, if the water is frozen to make powdered ice, it will stay in a heap. This, in essence, was what Planck was suggesting about energy.
No one believed it—not even Planck himself. But, in 1905, a young patents clerk named Albert Einstein pointed out that Planck’s idea could explain a puzzle called the photoelectric effect. When light falls on a sheet of metal, it causes particles to evaporate from its surface. Now if the strength of the light is increased—say, substituting a 150-watt bulb for a 60-watt—you would expect it to make the electrons fly faster. Instead, it simply increases their number. It looked as if the light consisted of shells being fired at the metal—in other words, quanta.
No one liked the idea. It took Planck several years to acknowledge that Einstein could be right. He then had to admit that light behaves like waves and particles. But how could a wave be a particle or vice versa? Quite suddenly, the ‘theory of everything’ began to look like a distant hope.
But at least the particle theory helped to build up a new picture of the atom. In 1908, Ernest Rutherford disproved the Christmas pudding picture when he fired alpha particles at a thin sheet of gold, and most of them went straight through. This proved that atoms must be made up mainly of empty space. He went on to suggest that the atom had a positively charged nucleus, like the centre of a roundabout, with the electrons somewhere round its edge. And in 1913, a young Danish physicist named Niels Bohr improved on this picture, suggesting that atoms are like miniature solar systems, with the electrons revolving around the nucleus like planets a
round the sun. But, unlike the planets, electrons can absorb or emit energy—in ‘quanta’, of course—and could jump from their orbit inward or outward.
Now there is a fairly simple way of finding out what is going on inside an atom. When light from some heated element (say hydrogen) is passed through a prism, it has a distinct spectrum. That spectrum is due to the vibration of electrons in their orbits, and can therefore tell us something about these orbits. The bright and the dark lines in a spectrum (called emission and absorption lines) are individual for each element, so it is even possible to tell what elements are present in a star. Bohr was able to use his knowledge of the hydrogen spectrum to explain what is going on in the hydrogen atom.
That still left many problems. When Newton had explained the solar system in his Principia, his mathematics described exactly why the planets moved as they did. But Bohr’s mathematics failed to explain with the same exactitude what the electrons were doing inside the atom. Even when the German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld pointed out that the atom would work better if the orbits were elliptical, this still failed to solve the problem. For the next twelve years, quantum theory was in a state of confusion, taking one step forward and two steps backward, or, if it was lucky, just marking time. In 1922, Bohr met a brilliant young student named Werner Heisenberg, and admitted that he had reached an impasse. Atoms, he told Heisenberg, were not ‘things’.
Then what could they be? In 1923, a student at the Sorbonne named Louis de Broglie had an apparently absurd idea. If light waves behave like particles, why should particles not behave like waves? The idea of ‘matter waves’ admittedly seemed a contradiction in terms. But, if the atom was not a ‘thing’, it followed that electrons were not things either. If an electron was not a little hard ball, perhaps it was a wave inside the atom, rather like a spring bent round into a circle, or a snake with its tail in its mouth. This would explain why electrons had orbits, since only certain wavelengths could fit into an exact circle. Or perhaps, de Broglie added as an afterthought, electrons consisted of a particle associated with a wave—an idea that was greeted with even less enthusiasm.
