by Timothy Good
Chapter Twelve
Reluctant Guinea Pigs
It was the summer of 1968 in London’s West End. Leonard Mantle, a gardener for the City of Westminster, was busy spraying the roses in Soho Square when a stranger bade him “good morning.” In a busy public square, especially in summer, it was not unusual for tourists to stop by for a brief chat.
“I looked up and saw a man there, very immaculate, with a dark gray suit and an about-town shirt,” Leonard told me, in one of two interviews at his home in 1978. “I thought I’d better just carry on. The next thing he says is, ‘Obviously you’re enjoying your work?’ To which I replied, ‘Well, yes, of course.’ And when you’re seeing people rushing to work, you just carry on doing what you’re doing.”
“You’re not aware of time,” the stranger commented. “You seem to be more acutely aware of that than most people.”
“Well, time is important,” replied Leonard, somewhat bemused.
“That’s a very true statement,” replied the man. “But people’s concept of time is entirely different.”
The stranger introduced himself as Iso Khan. Leonard inquired if he was on holiday. “Oh, no,” came the reply. “I’m just on a visit—sort of.” Asked if he traveled a great deal, Khan confirmed that indeed he did, adding that he had met people from all walks of life.
“It would appear there hadn’t been any part of the world he hadn’t been to,” said Leonard. “At this point I excused myself, as it was my tea break, but suggested that he come back after I’d had my break. So I had my tea and came out of the hut, which is in a picturesque place in the middle of Soho Square.
“And, naturally, I never thought he would be there. I’d watered the rose beds, so I thought I’d get the mower out and start mowing the grass. I went up and down a few times, then got back to the seat. And there he was, sitting on the same seat. ‘They’re quite nice straight lines you’ve made with that cutter,’ he said. I replied that I liked to see them straight as it makes the grass look good.”
At one point in the conversation, Khan implied that he came from another world.
“His knowledge of things was so overwhelming,” Leonard emphasized. “It seemed as though he knew everything pertaining to our world: its formation, the psychology, the arts, literature, culture—not only our cultures but cultures I’d never heard of. He seemed to be familiar with every aspect of our world. ‘How could you possibly know what happened a hundred years ago unless you were there?’ I asked him.”
“Well, it is a question of time,” he responded. “Your whole concept of time is a man-made thing. Time, according to you, is being born, living, and dying; getting up, working, and going to bed. That is your concept of time.”
Leonard pointed out that, from his personal experience, he however had always been aware that there is “another time—a time where you sort of step out of yourself.”
“Yes, then you are going into time,” came Khan’s cryptic response, alluding briefly to a “sixth dimension,” which meant nothing to Leonard at the time.
Another meeting took place the following day in Park Lane. “I had to go onto the central reservation, watering all the way down and picking up the Coca-Cola cans and various things that visitors had thrown all around Marble Arch by the fountains,” Leonard explained. Khan seemed determined to accompany him. Leonard’s superintendent, who was checking progress at the time, just glanced at Khan, assuming him to be a member of the public. “So, it wasn’t as though it was a hallucination and that he was invisible to anyone but myself,” Leonard impressed upon me.
Khan alluded to our exponential developments in technology. “The tragedy of things here is that your technology has advanced too fast,” he pointed out. “You will not be able to contain it.”
“Well, I know we’ve got the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb,” responded Leonard.
“It’s not only that,” said Khan. “Your world is being destroyed without those things. You don’t need to have a worldwide war between two major powers to eliminate this world. That is entirely unnecessary…. The men who count know—they know they cannot contain what they have made,” adding that, at any given time, “a chain reaction could take place.”
“He never alluded to pollution of rivers or seas, or oil or anything like that,” Leonard explained, “just that the rate of pollution in the environment was now so rapid that it was highly improbable we would last for more than five hundred years—even without any wars.”
Psychological Problems
Leonard became so concerned by these encounters that he decided to inform Scotland Yard, headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, responsible for law enforcement within Greater London (excluding the City district).
“I was fed up with the whole thing,” he told me. “So one evening I went on my bicycle to Scotland Yard, and there was a sergeant sitting there. ‘Look, Sergeant,’ I said, ‘do me a favor, could you possibly let me see someone high-up I could talk to?’ So he just looked at me and said, ‘Do yourself a favor—just go home.’ ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m going.’ So I walked toward my bike, and I thought, no—so I went back. ‘Piss off!’ he said.
“I must be sincerely honest about this. Iso Khan, wherever he comes from, whoever he may be, certainly hasn’t done me any favors—because I went to Epsom.” (The name of this town in the county of Surrey was often used as a euphemism at that time, owing to the notorious prevalence of its psychiatric hospitals.) Leonard’s general practioner, Dr. Rydall, had recommended psychiatric evaluation.
“I was there three days and they said I could go home for the weekend. They said I was emotionally upset and just needed rest.” He spent a total of six weeks in Epsom, returning home each weekend. “They didn’t keep me there, fortunately, but once you get that label stuck on you…. So what have I got to thank him for? I’m quite philosophical by nature and of a logical mind, but there are times when I thought, My God, this fellow has done me irreparable harm, in a way. I thought maybe it’s this obsession of mine about the time thing, or that it could all be illusory—hallucinations.”
Len related to me one of several instances when he claims to have experienced a “time shift.”
“A neighbor from my block of flats in Clapham was just coming out of Hannell’s grocery store, and I was standing outside. As he was walking, and before he got to the door, I was suddenly there and opening the door for him! And he started scratching his head, looked at me again and again. The same thing happened again in the afternoon when he was coming down in the lift. And he looked at me again in disbelief. If you’re behind someone and all of a sudden you’re in front of them, how can you explain it?”
Further Meetings
The first of several further encounters with Iso Khan took place in the summer of the following year (1969), in Marble Arch, London. As usual, Khan was immaculately dressed, with what Leonard thought looked like a suit tailor-made in Savile Row, and handmade shoes.
“You’re a fine one, you are,” began Leonard. “I had a breakdown last year. Will you tell me something: Why, of all people, did you pick on me?”
“Oh, no,” replied Khan, smiling. “I haven’t only picked on you. There are three other people.” The other three apparently had been selected from another country or countries.
“But why in this country then am I the only person? I’m cutting the grass, watering the roses, digging the flowerbeds—you know full well no one is going to believe me.”
Kahn laughed. “It’s the obvious thing you do: pick the lowest common denominator. The lower down you are, the lower intellectually people think you are, and the less likely they are to believe you.”
“That’s not very complimentary to me.”
“It’s logical to follow. Who’s going to believe you? The only important point is that you are aware of time. And we know this.”
“Come off it. How could you possi
bly know?”
“We have an inbuilt register. If we walk near people, we can calculate the intelligence level of that person. You’re very intelligent, and you have six senses. We have nine….”
“But why pick on me? Look what I’m doing—old trousers, great big boots, and messing around with mud—of all people, why me?”
Kahn replied that he’d talked to other people and had met with a negative response.
At one point during the several days of meetings that year, Leonard invited Khan to his home in Dolman Street, Clapham North, southwest London. “He was reluctant at first. And I said ‘Why don’t you? There’s nothing to stop you.’ And so he agreed.”
Khan declined Mantle’s offer of food and drink. He behaved impeccably, and liked his host’s three cats, which he petted. But his telepathic ability was disturbing. “He knew what you were going to say before you opened your mouth,” Leonard explained to me. “It’s like being dissected brain-wise.”
One of the many topics discussed was our space program. “A very primitive way of getting off the ground,” commented Khan. “There are far better ways of getting around.”
“Give me an instance.”
“Well, our spacecraft are relatively simple. Our technology is completely different from yours. We work with an electro-magnetic field. The craft can either be [disc-shaped] or cylindrical. The principle, in effect, is that you have two magnets: one on the bottom and one on the top. Do you understand magnetism?”
Len replied that he knew very little.
“Well, if you have two magnets and you push them together, they repel each other,” Khan explained.
“I know that well,” rejoined Len, “for the simple reason that I had a Black & White whiskey promotion toy involving two small magnetized dogs which pushed one from the other.”
“Well, the principle is the same. There’s a magnet on the bottom and one on the top. And we have a cylindrical column which is a mercury barometer. A long thing comes down like that, and up, and it’s used when we enter barometric pressure.” (I presume on entering a planetary atmosphere.) Khan added that a “dimensional field” was also involved.
In our last interview, Leonard expanded a little on the propulsion aspect, struggling to comprehend what he had been told. He referred to a “hydro-electric magnetic field,” and thought that “the top half of the cylinder-type central column was identical to the bottom half.” Takeoff was at a “terrific rate,” which occurred “when the top half hit the bottom half.”
It should be borne in mind that Leonard had no scientific education and thus conceded that, although blessed with a good memory, he might easily have been mistaken regarding some of these explanations. It is equally worth pointing out that he was not a “ufologist,” thus unfamiliar with any of the numerous books on the subject: he hadn’t even bothered to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he assured me.
Queried about his extraterrestrial origin, Khan said he came from a world very much like own, though lacking in pollution. His race was about 5,000 years ahead of ours. He claimed to be around 150 years old.
“You know,” he added, “your people are under an illusion. You seem to think that people from other worlds have got all sorts of funny faces.”
I asked Leonard for a detailed description of Khan.
“He was debonair, slim, and about five feet eight. He had straight brown hair, immaculately well cut, and a sort of pointed, aquiline nose, high cheekbones, and a very determined chin. His eyes were greenish: it wasn’t so much the color but their expression. They never darted about and were static—very calm. He didn’t seem to blink. His teeth were absolutely perfect—nothing irregular at all. If you saw him, you’d say: there’s a very smart, well-groomed business man—you wouldn’t say handsome. He had the look of a man who knows where he’s going.”
Khan invited Len to examine one of his hands. “The pigmentation—it’s the same,” Len declared.
“Not quite. Our pores are a little bit larger.”
Khan was conversant with many of our languages. “In the acquisition of a language, it doesn’t matter whether it’s Chinese, Russian, or any other,” he explained: “to us, any forms of language or speech are relatively simple.”
He spoke English “in an educated way,” said Leonard. “Only once did he ever make a mistake. Instead of saying ‘I don’t understand you,’ he said ‘I have not the meaning of your words.’ That was the only time ever that he said something that was not compatible with the ordinary way of speaking English.
“He had a very reassuring type of smile—and a sense of humor. He also seemed compassionate about us, almost as if he felt sorry for us in a way.
“Since he had been responsible for my breakdown, I told him that the least he could do was to prove to me that he was who he said he was.
“I had a Dynatron record player,” Leonard continued. “I’ve always been passionately fond of music. I had an album of Nat King Cole numbers, and ‘Let There Be Love’ was playing.”
”That’s quite nice,” Khan commented. “I’d like to hear that again.”
“Yes, well, hang on….”
“There’s no need for that,” rejoined Khan, making a slight gesture with his hand.
“The pick-up arm lifted itself up and it moved back, which is impossible because the record should have finished first—it had one more track to go. So I said, ‘Well, do it again!’ Sure enough, it came back and started again. So then I took off all the other records, left this one on, and told him that he could stop any track he didn’t like. And sure enough he did—and he never touched the thing. And what’s more, it happened for several days after he’d left, witnessed by my wife.
“It was absolutely incredible—you just don’t know what to think; you’re so nonplussed that you begin to doubt your senses. ‘There are probably people in a laboratory who would have the answer to this,’ I told him, ‘who could probably do it with an electronic beam. But if you say you really are from somewhere else, just do something that nobody on this Earth can do; say, fly up to the top of the house.’
“‘Well, how about this?’ he responded.
“And without making any effort, he just sort of rose up to about two feet off the floor.”
“‘How about that?’ said Khan.
“Then he went right around my octagonal table at the same height!”
Khan explained that his people had discovered inadvertently that they were able to do this about fifteen hundred years ago. While walking in a group, they suddenly noticed that they were taking more prolonged strides, followed by levitation just above the ground. (Advanced yogis are also reported to have achieved this ability.)
Ironically, the demonstrations—convincing though they were—did nothing for Leonard’s equilibrium, resulting once again in his return to the psychiatric hospital for two weeks, unable as he was, yet again, to convince anyone of the reality of his experiences.
Was Mantle mental? I do not believe so. Having spent quite a lot of time with him and his wife, I remain impressed by his total sincerity, by his erudition, and—incidentally—by his talent as a jazz pianist.
The night of November 22, 1977, was very clear, with an almost full moon. Barbara Beavers was relaxing in her bedroom with yoga exercises in her Yucca Valley, California, apartment. Suddenly, through her westward-facing window, she noticed an erratically moving light describing various maneuvers. It then approached and appeared to hover over the apartment building, forcing Barbara to stoop at her window to continue observing it.
The bedroom had become suffused with a blueish light, and even when she closed her eyes it felt as though a spotlight was shining on her face. The light in the sky then moved northward, so Barbara went to her living room window, which also faced west.
“At this point,” writes Shawn Atlanti, the investigator who in 2002 kindly sent me this unpublishe
d report, “she glanced at the clock on the north wall of the living room and noted that it read 11:45. She then ‘heard’ a voice which said: ‘Barbara, come to Desert Christ Park.’”
Desert Christ Park, overlooking the high desert town of Yucca Valley, is dedicated to “Peace on Earth and the Brotherhood of Man,” featuring over forty statues and images portraying scenes of Christ’s life and teachings. The walk from Barbara’s apartment was slightly uphill, and it took her fifteen or twenty minutes over the mostly unpaved, sandy roads. “Reaching the parking area, she heard a sound like rushing wind, looked at the mesa to the north, and saw a glow which resolved itself into an almost transparent half-dome with translucent panes, four in number on the side that could be seen.
“The upper portion of the vessel appeared to rotate clockwise, in the direction opposite to that of a disc on the underside. When the craft came to rest, hovering a few yards off the ground, the rotation ceased. The light from the upper portion was a soft electric blue-white: the underside had the same hue but was darker than the upper surface, from which it was separated by a rim-like projection that glowed like white heat.
“The craft hovered about twenty feet over the witness, and an aqua blue beam was directed from the lower disc to the ground. Barbara was illuminated by a blinding light and the same voice that she had heard in her apartment spoke in an English accent: ‘Are you prepared for this visitation?’ Accompanied by a rosy flickering of the surface, a ramp then came down from the upper portion of the vehicle. A voice, sounding like an intercom, warned her not to stand under the ship or to touch its exterior. Ascending the ramp, she walked through an automatically opening door into an inner room.”
