Unidentified Flying Objects
Among the most controversial psychoid experiences in modern times we must include UFOs. Since 1947 when they were first reported by civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold near Mount Rainier, countless people have reported seeing UFOs throughout the world. Some reported sighting them in the light of day, while others reported strange lights in the dark of night. Some have claimed to observe the landings of alien spacecrafts. Others have spoken of interacting with aliens or being taken aboard spacecraft where they underwent scientific investigation.
Public interest in UFO reports was sufficient to prompt the U.S. Air Force to undertake extensive studies, headed by a special committee at the University of Columbia. The conclusion of these studies was negative, attributing most UFO reports to people with mental disorders or to "misinterpretations" of easily explained causes, such as weather balloons, meteors, flocks of birds, and unusual light reflections. This research failed to satisfy serious researchers or the public. Government records attest to the fact that the main goal of these studies was to prevent public panic at the possibility of visitation by extraterrestrials. Other material shows that the Air Force has, on occasion, started its own UFO rumors to cover up crashes of topsecret experimental spacecraft of their own.
While many sightings of UFOs have been shown to be hoaxes, misperceptions of more easily explained events, or cover-ups of secret research, there continue to be sightings by people who are reliable witnesses—well educated, highly trained, emotionally stable, intelligent, and articulate. There are enough reports such as these to convince us that the UFO controversy is far from being closed and that it deserves further research.
Discussion in this area is usually limited to the question of whether or not our planet has been visited by actual physical spacecraft from other parts of the universe. However, it seems that the situation is more complicated than that. Many UFO experiences seem to have a psychoid quality, meaning that they are not merely hallucinations, nor are they "real" in the ordinary sense of the word. It is quite possible that they represent strange hybrid phenomena, combining elements of mental life and the physical world. This would, of course, make these experiences extremely difficult to study by traditional scientific methods, which depend on sharp distinctions between real and unreal or material and psychological events. A comprehensive study of these possibilities would have to involve a simultaneous examination of both physical evidence and the psychological perspectives that have emerged from modern consciousness research and the new physics.
As we have previously noted, encounters with alien beings, visions of physical or metaphysical spacecrafts, and extraterrestrial journeying have been reported throughout history. C. G. Jung, who was very interested in UFOs wrote a fascinating book entitled Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. This work was based on careful historical analysis of legends about flying discs and apparitions throughout the ages, many of which caused mass hysteria. He came to the conclusion that the UFO phenomena might be archetypal visions originating in the collective unconscious.
The majority of UFO sightings are associated with visions of lights with supernatural radiance, similar to mystical raptures. The descriptions of the extraterrestrial visitors, alien cities, and spacecrafts certainly have parallels in world mythology and thus could easily be explained as belonging to the collective unconscious. However, that is only one aspect of the story. What interests us in our present context is the fact that in many instances UFOs have left physical evidence behind, thus relegating them to consensus reality. It is this aspect that gives modern UFO phenomena a clear psychoid quality. The nature of the evidence is often ambiguous and is thus left open to a variety of interpretations. However, this capricious, almost tricksterlike quality of some UFO sightings seems to be characteristic for psychoid phenomena, rather than being an argument against their existence.
Many readers will remember a report, some years ago, of the UFO sightings by the captain and crew of a Japanese jumbo jet over Alaska. The entire crew saw a spaceship following them. At exactly the same time, a ground-based radar station registered an unidentified object in the location indicated by the crew. Later, when this sensational news made headlines all over the world, the embarrassed radar operator changed his report and announced that closer scrutiny revealed the image of the unidentified flying object to be a technical artifact. This strange error of an expert operator and its uncanny synchronicity with the sighting by a trained crew is characteristic of psychoid events. The confusion surrounding UFOs is also reflected in the approach of the news media, including the Soviet news agency "Tass," that alternates between reporting sightings and debunking them.
The controversial physical evidence for the existence of UFOs includes impressions in the ground, burnt soil at reported landing sites, materials that cannot be identified by chemical analysis, photographs and amateur movies, stigmata-like marks on the bodies of people who have reportedly been abducted, mysterious cattle mutilations, and others.
In comparing reports from people who claim to have been abducted by UFOs, there has been astonishing agreement in the abductees' descriptions of the alien life forms and certain symbols encountered during the contacts. Rather remarkable similarities have been discovered, even in abduction reports where the people involved had no knowledge of or interest in UFOs before their abductions. In follow-up research, people who have experienced close encounters have been hypnotized and examined by psychiatrists. The hypnosis has been used to clear the amnesia that many abductees seem to suffer. In many instances, independent reports of several witnesses to the same event fully concurred and were congruent with each other.
One of the best documented cases of this kind is the study of the Andreasson family described in Raymond Fowler's book The Andreasson Affair. The investigation was conducted at the recommendation of the late UFO expert Dr. Allen Hynek. An investigative team was assembled that included Raymond Fowler, former member of the Security Service of the U.S. Air Force and Dr. Harold Edelstein, director of the New England Institute of Hypnosis. The comprehensive inquiry employed regressive hypnosis, psychiatric examinations, character checks, analysis of weather reports, and electronic stress analysis tests (lie detector tests). The investigators compared independent reports of the principal protagonist, Betty Andreasson, her eldest daughter Becky, and several other family members. The conclusion of the 528-page report that was the result of this investigation was that the witnesses were telling the truth about their experiences.
According to the report, the UFO sighting occurred on a dark January night in 1967. At that time a pulsating light enveloped the backyard of the Andreasson house. Several three-foot tall humanoid creatures with outsized pear-shaped heads, mongoloid features, and large wraparound catlike eyes entered the house. After a brief telepathic exchange, Betty was transported by a suction mechanism to the inside of the spaceship. There she was subjected to a painful examination that included insertion of long silver needles into her nostrils and her peritoneal cavity. Later, she was taken to an alien world with strange architecture and landscape. The culmination of this experience was an encounter with a giant archetypal figure of a bird surrounded by flames, resembling the legendary phoenix. One particularly interesting aspect of the report is that Betty had artistic skills and was able to produce drawings depicting the aliens, the interior of the spaceship, structures in the alien world, and the phoenix that she saw.
Jacques Vallée, a trained astrophysicist and UFO researcher, has been studying and writing about this subject for nearly two decades. His own opinion about the nature of these phenomena has evolved out of his own first-hand experiences, beginning with a sighting at an observatory in France where he was employed at the time, his examination of photos by others, and his own interviews with people who have reported close encounters. His conclusions support a belief that most UFO sightings conform to what we are here calling psychoid experiences.
Based on many years of intensiv
e research, Vallée has recently concluded that at least some UFOs have a physical reality but these are simultaneously tied in with unusual inner experiences on the part of those who report the sightings. He concludes that the spaceships come from "other dimensions" of space and time that coexist with our own universe and may not be "extraterrestrial" in the usual sense of the word. Vallée speculates that the alien intelligences that produce and control the UFOs might be able to manipulate space and time in ways that are completely beyond our present ability to even imagine. It is possible that the observer's state of consciousness makes it possible for the UFOs to enter his or her dimension of space and time and become visible. However, the UFOs are not products of the observer's imagination; like Jung's spirit guides they exist quite independent of our consciousnesses. In other words, rather than being fabrications of our own imaginations, the "extraterrestrials" are using our consciousnesses as doorways into our everyday level of reality.
In the study of UFO phenomena even the most serious researchers are confronted with investigative problems that perhaps have no solutions in our present state of knowledge. First of all, based on our present knowledge it seems highly unlikely that intelligent life exists on other planets in our solar system; thus, extraterrestrials would have to be coming from distances of many light years away. They would have to be in command of a technology that we can not even imagine. Either their spaceships would have to achieve velocities greater than the speed of light (transluminal travel), or they would have to be able to escape the dimensions of space-time as we know it and travel through hyperspace, or they would have to come from other dimensions of time and space altogether(interdimensional travel). If there exists a civilization out in space that commands such control of the universe, we might also assume that they would have the technology to use both individual and transpersonal consciousnesses in ways completely unknown to us. If all this were true, it is quite possible that their visits to our own dimensions of reality would very likely appear to us as fantasies, archetypal occurrences, or visionary experiences. We could even assume that if they have reason to mask their visitations they have the technology to exploit humans' deliberate efforts to perpetuate UFO hoaxes to create confusion or disbelief.
All this poses a fascinating problem for us. If UFOs do exist and are the products of the advanced technology we describe here, we are brought face to face with the convergence of two areas that we have always viewed as polar opposites: the rational world of advanced technology and the irrational world of fantasy. From our present vantage point we would no longer be able to distinguish between the two. Interplanetary travel of this scope would indicate the ultimate triumph of rationality and science—an astonishing achievement for any intelligent life form. At the same time, however, we would experience the results of this achievement as phenomena that we usually associate with the world of the magical and mythical—the prerational thought processes of primitive cultures, the creative imaginations of artists, and the hallucinations of the insane. It would seem that in these experiences a circle is closing where consciousness, having reached the ultimate frontier of material evolution, is returning to its primal source.
Mind Over Matter: Intentional Psychokinesis
With some psychoid phenomena, changes in consensus reality appear to be the result of the conscious intention of individuals, or groups of individuals, to manipulate events in the physical world. It is important to emphasize that this form of psychoid phenomena called "intentional psychokinesis" operates with no physical intervention; instead, physical changes occur simply by wishing them to happen, or sometimes by performing symbolic or ritualistic acts that have no commonly understood causal relationship with the outcome. Ritual activities aimed at influencing external events have been conducted in pre-industrial cultures for centuries, and descriptions of mind over matter phenomena abound in spiritual and occult literature of all times. However, the potential for human consciousness to directly influence matter has been refuted and systematically debunked by traditional science—in spite of significant supportive evidence from modern parapsychological research and from quantum physics.
Anthropologists and Ceremonial Magic
Anthropologists studying aboriginal cultures have observed and described elaborate ceremonies for bringing rain, ensuring successful hunts or good harvest, and for achieving other practical ends. These anthropologists often expressed puzzlement when they found that these peoples exhibited "double logic"; they showed high intelligence, knowledge, and ingenuity in hunting, fishing, or agriculture, yet they felt the necessity for conducting rituals that seemed to Westerners to be unnecessary, superstitious, and childish. Only those who had sufficient exposure to non-ordinary states of consciousness understand that this "double logic" is related to two different levels of reality: making tools and learning specific skills applies to the material world, while ceremonial life acknowledges and addresses the archetypal dynamics of the transpersonal realm. The nature of these two domains and their mutual interrelationships is far from being clearly understood by modern science, in spite of concerted efforts by both scientists and philosophers. In his book The Passion of the Western Mind, Richard Tarnas amassed convincing evidence that this problem has been the main focus of European philosophy for the last two and a half thousand years.
The idea of drumming, chanting, and dancing to make rain seems at first glance preposterous to most Westerners. Yet those of us who have actually had first-hand experiences with such rituals have been repeatedly amazed by the results. The late Joseph Campbell, a man of superior intelligence and education, often told a story about his attendance at a Native American rain ceremony in the Southwest United States. When the ceremony began, he felt amused and somewhat cynical, as the sky was clear and blue and there was not a single cloud in sight. To his amazement, during the ceremony heavy clouds covered the entire sky and the day ended with a cloudburst. The Indians did not seem to be at all surprised; because of their past experiences with such rituals, they expected the ceremony to be successful.
During a two-year period of catastrophic drought in California, my wife and I conducted a month long seminar at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur. At the request of the group, the centenarian Huichol shaman Don Jose Matsuwa from Mexico, who was among our guest faculty, agreed to conduct a rain ceremony. At the conclusion of the all night ritual it started to drizzle. We were astounded by this unexpected outcome, but Don Jose did not show any signs of surprise. He smiled and said: "It is kupuri (the blessing of the gods); it always happens." As we walked down to the ocean to do the final offering, the drizzle developed into a heavy downpour that lasted six hours. This does not necessarily mean that Don Jose caused the rain, but similar strange synchronicities must accompany a substantial number of such ceremonies. It is unthinkable that so many cultures would continue conducting rain ceremonies for centuries without some statistically significant success rate. It would also be difficult for a shaman to maintain his or her reputation for a very long time against a series of failures.
The same is true for spiritual healing. Western professionals usually do not take seriously anthropological reports about the therapeutic successes of healing ceremonies and practices conducted in pre-industrial cultures. They attribute alleged improvements to magical thinking, suggestion, and the gullibility of the natives. However, controlled comparative studies of the therapeutic effects of Western medicine and various indigenous healing ceremonies have brought some interesting results. For example, in the southern United States, particularly in Florida, studies of Cuban and other Latin American immigrants have shown that ancient Caribbean healing systems produced, in many cases, better results than Western psychiatry and medicine. In addition, the curanderos (shamanic healers) seemed to know the limits of the indigenous healing procedures and referred clients with certain kinds of problems to American physicians.
Although one might expect successful results only in people with emotional and psychosomatic disorders, some spiritu
al approaches seem to extend to serious medical problems. I have had close personal contact with researchers who clearly possessed good academic credentials—people like Walter Pahnke, Andrija Puharich, and Stanley Krippner—who studied and recorded on film the work of psychic surgeons in Brazil and the Philippines and were deeply impressed by what they saw. The uneducated Brazilian peasant Arrigo, also called the "surgeon of the rusty knife," performed hundreds of successful operations daily without disinfection and anesthesia, closing incisions simply by bringing together the edges of the wounds with his fingers. While operating or prescribing medicines, of which he had no intellectual knowledge, he felt guided by the spirit of "Fritz," a deceased German doctor from Heidelberg.
Tony Agpoa and other psychic surgeons in the Philippines have been known to conduct surgical interventions without instruments of any kind, simply reaching into a person's body with their hands. These operations have been witnessed by many people at a time and they have been repeatedly filmed. Detailed frame-by-frame studies of the films revealed no sleight of hand or fraud. In some instances, successful results were confirmed by university hospitals, including a case of a tumor of the pituitary gland in a person I know. At the same time, in full accord with the trickster nature of psychoid phenomena, laboratory analysis of tissue samples allegedly removed from people's bodies during these operations showed them to be from animals. The fact that documented healings have occurred in this field suggest, if nothing else, that there are links between consciousness and the physical world that we have only begun to explore and understand.
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