Supernatural

by Colin Wilson

  The strange series of events that followed are described in detail in Puharich’s book Uri: A Journal of the Mystery of Uri Geller, yet are so bewildering and preposterous that they caused the book to be received with extreme hostility. The Nine stopped cars and started them again, made UFOs appear overhead, ‘teleported’ various objects (and even Geller himself), and performed so many other bizarre miracles that the reader is finally left in a state of punch-drunk indifference. (When I met Puharich, he told me that he had deliberately left out some of the more preposterous events for fear of creating incredulity; when he described some of them to me, I saw his point.) The book, which the publishers had expected to become a bestseller, was a flop.

  Geller and Puharich parted; Geller grew tired of being subjected to endless tests. But the ‘space intelligences’ were apparently enjoying themselves too much to allow Puharich to get back to science. When Puharich went to investigate a medium named Bobby Horne in Florida, they lost no time in re-establishing contact, and telling him that his purpose now was to prepare mankind for a mass landing of space ships on planet earth during the next year or two. Another medium, Phyllis Schlemmer, also began relaying messages from the space intelligences. (One of the space beings, a man called Tom, explained that the first civilisation on earth was founded by space visitors in the Tarim Basin in China thirty-two thousand years ago.) Stuart Holroyd, an English writer who became involved with the group, subsequently wrote a book called Prelude to a Landing on Planet Earth which describes the amazing goings-on that followed. They are too bewildering to describe in detail: what happened basically was that Puharich, Holroyd, Phyllis Schlemmer and another Englishman named Sir John Whitmore rushed around the Middle East, holding seances in hotel rooms and praying for peace; Tom periodically assured them that they had just saved-mankind. By 1975, the landing on planet earth had failed to materialise, and Holroyd settled down to writing his book. His own theory is that the unconscious minds of the people involved were responsible. He cites a curious work called From India to the Planet Mars, in which a French psychologist, Theodore Flournoy, investigated the mediumship of an attractive girl named Catherine Muller, who described her past incarnation as the wife of a prince in 15th century India, and the civilisation of the planet Mars. The Indian incarnation is convincing; she appeared to know all kinds of details about 15th century India, and the prince to whom she was married, Sivrouka Nakaya, proved to be a real historical personage. But the Martian details—which many accepted as genuine—were finally disproved in 1976 when a Viking spacecraft finally landed on Mars and revealed it to be an airless desert.

  The unconscious deception hypothesis would be more convincing if Catherine Muller had not displayed genuine psychic powers—for example, she could read Flournoy’s mind, and various ‘apports’ appeared while she was in trance, including Chinese artifacts and roses and violets (in midwinter). As it is, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Flournoy, like Catherine Muller, was the victim of the astral confidence tricksters that Joe Fisher has called ‘hungry ghosts’. And the same explanation seems to cover the weird events described in Prelude to a Landing on Planet Earth.

  But perhaps the best example of the problems encountered by unwary investigators of the paranormal is furnished by the career of the late F.W.Holiday, a naturalist whose modest aim was merely to establish (or disprove) the existence of the Loch Ness monster. Sightings of the monster—a kind of long-necked dinosaur—began in 1933, soon after the completion of a road along the northern shore of Loch Ness, Britain’s largest and deepest lake. A couple saw it surging across the loch, and another couple saw it on land—a strange grey creature with a long neck like a serpent. It was even photographed later the same year. In 1961, an engineer named Tim Dinsdale took a cine-film of the monster swimming across the loch. In the following year, Holiday stood beside the loch on a clear morning and saw a black, glistening shape like a hippopotamus rise out of the water, then dive below the surface; he estimated it at about 45 feet long. Holiday saw it twice more, and wrote a book called The Great Orm of Loch Ness (1968), arguing that it was a kind of giant slug. But Holiday was much intrigued to learn that Boleskine House, on the southern shore of the loch, had been tenanted by Aleister Crowley, and that Crowley had performed rituals to summon up ‘spirits’. He began to entertain a cautious suspicion that the ‘monster’ had been conjured up by Crowley, This was not as absurd as it sounds. After his Loch Ness investigations, Holiday went to Ireland to try to photograph lake monsters seen in a number of loughs (the Irish version of lochs) in Galway. The reports of sightings by various witnesses were totally convincing; yet what puzzled Holiday was that the loughs were obviously too small to support a large mammal. This led him to wonder whether the ‘peiste’ (as the Irish call the monsters) is a creature of flesh and blood, or some kind of Jungian ‘projection’ (i.e. illusion) of the racial unconscious. Jung had formulated this theory to explain UFOs (although he later came to accept that they were objectively real), and Holiday had also experienced UFO sightings.

  And now, slowly, Holiday was coming around to the view that lake monsters are not simply ‘prehistoric survivals’—that they may be somethng altogether more elusive. In the Middle Ages, ‘orms’ (or ‘worms’) and dragons had been associated with evil, and he had been struck by the number of witnesses who had experienced a sense of horror on seeing lake monsters. Could the Loch Ness monster be some kind of phantom?

  By 1971 Holiday had abandoned the notion that the lake monsters are simply ‘prehistoric survivals’. He was coming round to the admittedly eccentric view that there is some influence at work that actively prevents the final solution of the mystery, just as in the case of Unidentified Flying Objects. And some time in 1972 this view seemed to be confirmed when he read a newspaper controversy between an ‘exorcist’, the Rev. Donald Omand, and some opponent who thought the Loch Ness monster was simply an unidentified animal. Omand had inherited ‘second sight’ from Highland ancestors, and had no doubt of the real existence of powers of evil—or at least of mischief; he often performed exorcisms to get rid of them. He had caught his first glimpse of a lake monster in Loch Long in Ross-shire in 1967. In June 1968, in a boat in Norway’s Fjord of the Trolls, he saw another, which came straight towards them; the Norwegian captain who was with him told him not to be afraid: ‘It will not hurt us—they never do.’ And in fact the monster dived before it reached their boat. But the Captain, Jan Andersen, was convinced that the monsters were basically evil, that in some way they could do harm to men’s characters (or, as Omand would have said, their souls). In 1972 Omand attended a psychiatric conference at which an eminent Swedish psychiatrist read a paper on the monster of Lake Storsjön, and said that he was convinced that the monsters had a malevolent effect on human beings, especially those who hunted them or saw them regularly. He thought their influence could cause domestic tragedies and moral degeneration. So Omand began to consider the theory that perhaps lake monsters are not real creatures, but ‘projections’ of something from the prehistoric past.

  Holiday wrote to Omand, and the odd result was that in June 1973 Holiday and Donald Omand rowed out into the middle of Loch Ness, and Omand performed an exorcism of the loch. Holiday said they both felt oddly exhausted when it was over. And his suspicion that he was stirring up dangerous forces seemed to be confirmed two days later when he went to stay the night with a retired Wing-Commander named Carey. Holiday was telling Mrs Carey about a Swedish journalist called Jan-Ove Sundberg who had been wandering through the woods behind Foyers when he had seen a strange craft in a clearing, and some odd-looking men; the craft had taken off at a great speed, and after his return to Sweden, Sundberg had been plagued by ‘men in black’—people claiming to be officials who often seem to harass UFO ‘contactees’.

  Holiday said he intended to go and look at the place where the ‘UFO’ had landed, and Mrs Carey warned him against it. At this moment there was a rushing sound like a tornado outside the window and a series of
violent thuds; a beam of light came in through the window, and focused on Holiday’s forehead. A moment later, all was still. The odd thing was that Wing-Commander Carey, who had been pouring a drink only a few feet away from his wife, saw and heard nothing. The next morning, as Holiday was walking towards the loch, he saw a man dressed entirely in black—including helmet and goggles—standing nearby; he walked past him, turned his head, and was astonished to find that the man had vanished. He rushed to the road and looked in both directions; there was nowhere the man could have gone. One year later, close to the same spot, Holiday had a heart attack; as he was being carried away he looked over the side of the stretcher and saw that they were just passing the exact spot where he had seen the ‘man in black’. Five years later, in 1978, Holiday died of a heart attack.

  Perhaps a year before his death, Ted Holiday sent me the typescript of his book The Goblin Universe, in which he attempted to justify the rather strange views he had gradually developed since starting his hunt for the Loch Ness monster. He had already discussed them in his second book The Dragon and the Disc, in which he linked UFOs (‘discs’) and ‘worms’ as symbols of good and evil. Then, to my surprise, he changed his mind about publishing the book.

  There were, I suspect, two reasons. The team of investigators from the Academy of Applied Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led by Dr Robert H. Rines, had taken some remarkable underwater photographs in 1972 and 1975; one of the 1972 photographs showed very clearly an object like a large flipper, perhaps eight feet long, while a 1975 photograph showed very clearly a long-necked creature and its front flipper; this was particularly impressive because the sonar evidence—waves of sound reflected back from the creature—made it clear that this was not some freak of the light or piece of floating wreckage or lake-weed. By the time he was thinking about publishing The Goblin Universe, Holiday was probably wondering whether the book would be contradicted by some new evidence that would establish the physical reality of the monster beyond all doubt. Apart from this, the argument of The Goblin Universe was not quite as rigorous as it might be—he was attempting to explain why his views had changed so startlingly since 1962, and spent a great deal of time dwelling on ‘the paranormal’. At all events, he decided not to publish the book, and instead wrote another typescript confined to lake monsters. I finally succeeded in finding a publisher for the book in England and America, and it has appeared in both countries.

  The Goblin Universe will confirm sceptics in their view that any involvement in the paranormal is likely to result in some mild form of insanity. Without apology, he states his conclusion that both lake monsters and UFOs are ‘psychic’ phenomena—or, at least, have some psychic component—and that the same probably applies to such odd anomalies as phantom pumas, leopards, Bigfoots and Abominable Snowmen. It is an oddly frustrating book because he makes no attempt to advance some unifying theory that will explain these phenomena—although there are times when he seems to hint that, like John Keel, he regards them as some kind of attempt to force human beings to abandon their dogmatism and widen their mental horizons. Like so many investigators, Holiday has moved from the position of open-minded sceptic to that of a thoroughly confused believer in the paranormal. There is no reason to believe that, if he had lived, he would have become any less bewildered.

  The confusion, of course, is due to his attempt to reconcile the endless contradictions that seem to arise in any serious attempt to interrogate the paranormal. We, at least, are in a slightly better position, since, like any experienced detective, we recognise that a large number of our suspects are incapable of telling the truth.

  The latest—and in some ways one of the most puzzling—manifestations of ‘the goblin universe’ is the curious mystery of the ‘crop circles’.

  In early August, 1980, a Wiltshire farmer named John Scull was irritated to find three flattened circular areas in one of his oatfields. It looked as if vandals had stood in the centre, and swung around some heavy object on a long piece of rope, flattening the oats to the ground in a clockwise direction. But if this is how they were made, the vandal must have been a very tall and powerful man, for the circles were sixty feet in diameter. And the fact that the surrounding oats showed no sign of trespassers made it unlikely that the circles had a human origin. The Wiltshire Times reported the incident on August 15, adding that the circles were within the view of the famous White Horse of Westbury, the hillside figure cut into the chalk.

  Close study of the three circles established that they had been formed on three different dates, probably over a period of months. One of the experts, an atmospheric physicist called Terence Meaden, stated that the likeliest explanation was summer whirlwinds. But he admitted that it was odd that each ‘whirlwind’ had remained stationary, instead of flattening a path through the crops.

  On August 19 the following year—1981—three more circles appeared in a punchbowl formation below Cheesefoot Head, near Winchester in Hampshire. This time the pattern made whirlwinds seem unlikely. There was one central circle, about 60 feet in diameter, and two smaller ones—about 25 feet across—placed neatly on either side. Would a whirlwind ‘bounce’ three times?

  There were a few isolated reports of incidents in 1982, but they were unspectacular, and excited little attention. As if to make up for it, a series of five-circle phenomena began in 1983, one of them again close to the White Horse of Westbury. These made it clear that whirlwinds could not be the explanation. A ‘bouncing’ whirlwind might make three circles in a line, but these ‘fivesomes’ had a central circle, with the others placed neatly around it as if at four corners. ‘UFO’ enthusiasts had already noted that one of the groups had appeared at the foot of Cley Hill, near Warminster, where there had been dozens of UFO sightings. Now the ‘fivesomes’ began to excite the attention of the national media.

  When another ‘fivesome’ close to the Westbury Horse proved to be a hoax, paid for by the Daily Mirror, the sceptics said ‘I told you so’. But the man who had detected the hoax was Bob Rickard, editor of an ‘anomaly’ magazine called the Fortean Times. He noted the tell-tale signs of human intruders which had not been present in any of the original circles.

  From then on, circles began to multiply. The whirlwind theory remained the chief standby of the experts. As if to disprove this, the circles began to increase in complexity. Anti-clockwise flattenings began to appear, and some of the circles had a larger ring outside them—some as many as three rings. This was getting preposterous. At Oadby, near Leicester, three circles appeared in neat triangle formation around a larger ringed crop circle in 1988. On Charity Down, near Goodwood Clatford (Hampshire), a remarkable ‘Celtic Cross’ appeared in August of the same year—a double circle with four symmetrical circles in its outer rim. When the circle expert, Dr Terence Meaden published a book explaining the circles in terms of an ‘electromagnetic plasma vortex’, and pointing out that successive rings in ringed circles caused flattening in opposite directions, a circle that contradicted all his theories promptly appeared at Cheesefoot Head, reminding students of poltergeist phenomena that poltergeists often show the same sensitivity to comments made about them. But when a group of UFO enthusiasts suggested that the circles were made by UFOs landing, another circle quickly appeared under a power cable, where a landing would have been virtually impossible.

  Crop circle experts now called themselves ‘cereologists’, and they also noticed that the phenomena seemed to respond to human ideas. An aerial photographer named Busty Taylor was returning home from a day of photographing circles when he remarked that he would like to see one in the form of a Celtic Cross; the next day, a Celtic Cross circle had appeared at the spot he was flying over at the time.

  The circles went on becoming increasingly complex, ruling out most ‘natural’ explanations. In 1990, an extraordinary pattern of six elaborate circles—in a straight line—appeared near Alton Barnes, in Hampshire, with a number of key-like objects sticking out of the sides of three circles, p
roducing the effect of ancient pictograms.

  There have been a number of eye-witness accounts of the formation of the circles. Typical of these is one reported from Scotland in August 1989 by a Mr Sandy Reid. Meaden reports: ‘For half a minute as he watched, at a distance of 15 metres, the wind was violently rustling the corn over a circular area, all the time making a strange noise, but where he stood there was no wind at all. Then suddenly a ‘force’ shot downwards and a circle appeared almost instantaneously. This was a good observation of the vortex-breakdown of a standing eddy vortex.’1

  Here are a number of other eye-witness descriptions, compiled by Bob Rickard:

  ‘Suddenly the grass began to sway before our eyes and laid itself flat in a clockwise spiral . . . A perfect circle was completed in less than half a minute, all the time accompanied by a high-pitched humming sound . . . My attention was drawn to a “wave” coming through the heads of the cereal crop in a straight line . . . The agency, though invisible, behaved like a solid object . . . When we reached the spot where the circles had been, we were suddenly caught up in a terrific whirlwind . . . [The dog] went wild . . . There was a rushing sound and a rumble . . . then suddenly everything was still . . . It was uncanny . . . The dawn chorus stopped; the sky darkened . . .’

  All that seems clear at the time of writing (1991) is that the circles cannot be explained in ‘natural’ terms, although it is still just conceivable that they might have been made by some brilliant hoaxer flying a tiny helicopter. In a book called The Crop Circle Enigma (1990), an article by John Michell points out that the phenomena bring to mind John Keel’s descriptions of his own experiences with UFO phenomena—that ‘strange ideas and experiences force their way into the lives of all who enquire into such subjects’. ‘Like many other cereologists, and like Keel, Shuttlewood and ufologists before them, they admit that their lives, minds and outlooks have been radically changed by their investigations.’ And he adds the significant evalaluation: ‘On one level the change is philosophical; after honest appraisal of ufology and crop circle data, it is impossible to maintain the rationalistic world-view on which modern science and education are founded. One is led into unfamiliar channels of thought, which point away from structured theories and hard-and-fast beliefs towards a more mystical view of reality and, eventually, towards the greater mysteries of divinity and the living universe.’