All of these works make pretentions of being historical records. The Mormon bible is purportedly a history of North America thousands of years ago. Oahspe is a blatant revision of the Bible, “correcting” the historical errors. Each book contains verifiable historical facts, however, which lend credence to the fictional parts. We are fortunate in that the later inspired books come to us intact, exactly as originally written, while the Bible has undergone extensive revisions, changes, deletions, and additions. Whole sections of the Bible are remarkably dissimilar from the original texts in Greek and Aramaic. Latter-day translators deliberately censored and altered the meanings of whole passages. Biblical scholars regard the King James Bible with some disdain, while countless priests and ministers struggle to interpret passages that were mistranslated in the first place. Some of the Scriptures describing Christ’s life and ministry were written centuries after his death, and since no eyewitness testimony from his period exists in any form, we must wonder where the authors got their information. Were their eyes stung and their skins burned by aerial lights before they picked up their pens?
There are much bigger questions here than “Did Christ really exist?” We are confronted with a series of manifestations that indicate that the human mind can be programmed and reprogrammed like a computer, that human senses can be made to see anything and hear anything at the whim of the phenomenon, that our reality itself can be distorted by some mysterious force. When you study all of the manifestations, it becomes clear that the force has a childlike intelligence—capricious, often irrational. We have to turn back to Job’s anguished cry: Who is God and why is he doing these terrible things to us?
Questions that seemed totally unanswerable only a few years ago can now be answered, at least partially. The flying saucer phenomenon has not given us any information about life on other worlds, but careful, constant observation and study over the past twenty years or so has provided us with many truths about ourselves. We may not be one step closer to heaven, but we are many steps farther from hell.
2
On March 9, 1884, a pale, bearded little man sat alone in a dreary hotel room in Rotterdam, his stubby fingers clutching a cheap revolver. A clutter of letters and old newspapers were spread out on the bed beside him. His shoulders sagged, his watery eyes staring unseeingly through the narrow window. His world had suddenly shriveled to that restricted view: a dint of the wintery sky and the red-brick paving of a foreign street. There was a soft click as he drew the hammer back and slowly raised the gun to his temple.
The death of Moses Wilhelm Shapira was barely noted in the press. Then, as now, lonely strangers often shared their grubby hotel rooms with death, leaving less than an epitaph behind.
A year earlier the sun had shone on Moses Shapira, and visions of fame and the gratitude of whole nations lightened his step. He had traveled from Palestine to Europe in a mood of triumph, clinging to a frayed leather suitcase instead of a pistol, expecting to be summoned before kings. Instead, he had been branded a hoaxer and a fool. The contents of his suitcase had been scorned by the great scholars of the day, and their laughter still rang in his ears even as the pistol’s hammer snapped forward.
Some shepherds had come to Shapira’s little tourist shop on a back street in Jerusalem to offer him dark fragments of parchment that they claimed to have found in ancient vases in a cave near the Dead Sea. He sat up nights studying the faded writing, his excitement growing. He had in his hands, he thought, an original manuscript of the biblical book of Deuteronomy. And so be left for Europe to present his discovery to the world.
In Berlin, Paris, and London distinguished archaeologists and theologians examined Shapira’s parchments without enthusiasm. Obviously such fragile documents could never survive for lung in the dry desert air. They had to be shameless forgeries, and the little man himself had to be a mere con artist seeking an easy fortune. So he was publicly denounced and disgraced and made the subject of vicious cartoons in the press.
And the Dead Sea Scrolls were doomed to sit in their tightly sealed vases in that cave for another sixty-four years before another pair of Bedouins would find their hiding place.
Ah, you say, that was nearly a century ago. Moses Shapira would have received a fairer hearing in our own enlightened age. He would have been written up in the National Enquirer and made a guest on “What’s My Line?”
Or would he?
When a psychiatrist named Immanuel Velikovsky studied the world’s myths and legends to construct the curious cosmology of Worlds in Collision, he was unanimously attacked by the scientific establishment as a crank. His theory that Venus originated as a comet cast from the misty body of the planet Jupiter ran contrary to the accepted beliefs of the astronomers of 1950. Leading scientists applied so much pressure on his publisher that the editor who had “discovered” Velikovsky was fired and the book was transferred to another, more courageous publisher. But twenty years later the space probes of NASA and the Soviet Union sent back evidence that supported his once outlandish speculations. Today a new generation of scientists embraces his theories, and the old man must sit in his home in Princeton chuckling quietly to himself as he looks over his 1950 scrapbook.
We clicked our tongues in disgust when Hitler’s brown-shirts ravaged the home of philosopher-occultist Rudolf Steiner in the 1920s. It couldn’t happen here, we said. But we somehow looked the other way when our own society was seized by paranoid fits in the 1950s. In those days one of the world’s foremost psychiatrists, Dr. Wilhelm Reich, was sitting in a village, in Maine, quietly studying the skies and minding his own business, developing a complex theory about the energies that surround us and perhaps even control us. Suddenly a swarm of U.S. government agents descended on his laboratory, smashed his equipment with axes, and burned his books. The kindly old psychiatrist was tossed into jail, where he died a year later.
More recently, an amateur archaeologist in Switzerland, Erich van Däniken, has earned the wrath of the wild-eyed scientists. His books Chariots of the Gods and The Gold of the Gods have enjoyed phenomenal worldwide success, even though the theories he presents have been kicking around since the 1920s and have long been a staple storyline with science-fiction writers. He has merely rehashed the notion that the gods of the ancient world were actually astronauts from some distant planet. His evidence, like Velikovsky’s, consists largely of the myths and the legends of other ages. But, unlike Velikovsky, he sees evidence of extraterrestrial intervention in every ancient cave painting and every old stone carving, and he has managed to enrage everyone from collegiate bone collectors to religious scholars. That learned journal Science has even editorialized against him, urging all true-blue scientists to take up arms against the dragon of “pseudo-science.” If his books had flopped and been read only by little old ladies in tennis shoes, Science would have ignored him. For some reason, scientists can’t stand success, even when it comes to a member of their own club.
Lee De Forest, the inventor of the radio tube, had to flee to Europe after American scientists denounced him as a hoaxer, regarding his outrageous clams for his little modified electric bulb as impossible. They accused Edison of ventriloquism when he unveiled his phonograph. The Wright brothers were laughed out of the country and went to France for recognition. Simon Lake, the inventor of the modern submarine, also had to cross the Atlantic to find acceptance. The list is long and painful.
In a hundred laboratories scattered around the world, scores of scientists are now recovering the steps of Dr. Reich, rediscovering the mysterious forces that he observed and tried to interpret. Reich thought sex lay at the bottom of everything, so he postulated the existence of orgone, an energy radiated by lovers at the moment of orgasm. The Food and Drug Administration apparently regarded orgasms as downright un-American—even though religionists had been talking about the same thing for centuries, the theological concept being based on the power of love. If we all loved one another, we’ve been told, our crumby little planet would be surrounded by a
golden aura and would turn into a paradise. Somehow we have never quite managed that.
Dr. Reich actually figured out ways to shoot UFOs down with beams of energy. He assumed that Earth was bathed in complex energy fields, and he tried to find ways to tap all that energy. Again, students of the occult had been discussing this very thing long before they had any technical definitions. The ancient art of astrology was based on the notion that earthlings are somehow influenced by energy from the cosmos. The magical arts, too, understood and tried to utilize these energy sources. If you generated the right kind of energy from your physical person, you could attract or repel the cosmic energies. The human mind was credited with the ability to concentrate these energies and focus them on a single point. If a mystic could visualize a chair and clearly see the image of every atom in that chair, well, a chair would spring into being. It would materialize. To make it disappear, you just reverse the process.
Entities—seemingly living beings could also be wished into existence. Tibetan lamas reportedly had the power to product such “thought forms.” The problem, according to the lore, is that such creations can get out of control, like Frankenstein’s monster, and turn against their creator. In fact, we can’t seem to win. Almost every aspect of this arcane business ultimately proves destructive to the unwary practitioner. If we welcome angels, demons, and spacemen with cups of coffee and kind words, they will still slip a cosmic shiv between our shoulder blades the moment our back is turned. Conversely, if we chase the entities with clubs and guns, they will get even, too. There are many gruesome, documented cases in which the vengeful saucer pilots, cloven-hoofed monsters, and red-eyed angels have wreaked havoc on their would-be pursuers and tormentors. A few such cases will be outlined further on.
Dr. Reich saw these things as the ultraterrestrial population of a hidden world of raw energy. At this moment you are surrounded by all kinds of energy, much of it manmade, vibrating on every frequency from the ultrahigh frequencies of modern military radios to the very low frequencies of generators and telephone lines. There are many other forms of energy mixed in as well. And there are, as we shall see, forms of energy on such high frequencies they cannot be detected with even the most sophisticated scientific instruments. If your eyes were tuned beyond the very narrow confines of the spectrum of visible light, you would find yourself looking into a thick fog of dazzling, unreal colors. Some psychics and UFO percipients have described these occult colors, and they have always been used to symbolize the supernatural entities. If you could peer into this superspectrum, you would undoubtedly see some frightening things—strange shapes and eerie ghostlike forms moving through a sea of electrical energy like fish in some alien sea.
When the levels of energy in this field are changed or somehow influenced by us, the whole character of these superspectrum entities is altered. They are also affected by sudden changes in the earth’s magnetic field (and that field changes often), and by the interchange of earthly energy with the powerful fields of space. In its mad rush across the cosmos, the earth is constantly passing through different energy fields like a train traveling across Europe and passing through many different countries. Radio astronomers are just now becoming aware of these energies, although occultists have been referring to them for centuries.
The standard definition of God, “God is light,” is just a simple way of saying that God is energy. Electromagnetic energy. He is not a He but an It; a field of energy that permeates the entire universe and, perhaps, feeds off the energy generated by its component parts. Your own memory, which is nothing more than an electrical circuit in your brain, could be feeding this cosmic brain, and a thousand years from now some superpsychic might be able to tune into the specific frequency of your mind and glimpse the residue of your life and all those rotten things you have been doing.
The concept of a supermind running the universe objectively, without compassion, is not new. Several religions are built around it. Thinking of God in these terms is not heresy but is advanced theology. The old-time God—the big bearded man sitting on a throne in the sky—is dead. He committed suicide a few years ago when thousands of people began to see lights in the sky again and, like Saul, was trapped in blinding beams. The results are plainly visible in the sociological changes all around us. The human race is being reprogrammed. Young people everywhere suddenly became pacifists in the 1960s after a millennium of violence. Our world was invaded, but not by the hordes of Martians and Venusians envisioned by the flying-saucer believers. We were invaded by new ideas and a new inner structure that would help guide us to the anticipated crises of the 1990s.
A Canadian psychiatrist, Dr. Richard M. Bucke, put it this way in 1900:
The simple truth is, that there bas lived on the earth, “appearing at intervals,” for thousands of years among ordinary men, the first faint beginnings of another race; walking the earth and breathing the air with us, but at the same time walking another earth and breathing air of which we know little or nothing, but which is, all the same, our spiritual life, as its absence would be our spiritual death. This new race is in the act of being born from us, and in the near future it will occupy and possess the earth.
Christianity was not born with the life of Christ but with his death and the fanaticism of men like Saul/Paul who were reprogrammed by blinding lights on the desert. The world of the year A.D. 2000 has already begun, and in a like manner. Beams of cosmic energy have shed their awful glare across the planet, and the children of the 1960s now belong to another, very special race. The children of that other age faced two thousand years of bloodshed with millions dying in the name of religion. Tomorrow’s children face another kind of menace: a world at peace with itself but in ecological ruins, where famine, overpopulation, and hitherto unknown societal pressures will force us into a new Dark Age.
Just as the archaeologists discredited Moses Shapira and the astronomers assaulted Velikovsky, the older generation has watched the arrival of the New Age with a mixture of fear and disdain. They remain programmed to the old ways—embracing immorality in business, war, and politics while denouncing bathing suits and boring, amateurish pornographic films, which, interestingly, are mostly ignored by the young and patronized by the middle-aged.
A few years ago, former Vice-President Spiro Agnew delivered one of his celebrated speeches attacking not the media or those “nattering nabobs of negativism” but a gentle psychologist named B. F. Skinner. Skinner is a behavioral scientist concerned with the future direction of the human race and painfully aware of tomorrow’s problems. In his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, he proposed a dramatic plan to reprogram the man animal, pointing out that man has always been programmed by his environment, even while he snuggled to change it. But in a future where there will be too many people and too few natural resources, science may have to find ways to change man so he can survive in this new and rather unpleasant world. Mr. Agnew, it seems, wanted to skin Skinner as some kind of emotional fascist. The truth, however, is that man has constantly been programmed and reprogrammed throughout history. Adolf Hider changed the German people by giving them a new set of myths about racial superiority. But most of the old systems are certain to break down in the face of tomorrow’s pressures, and Skinner is suggesting that we evolve a new system of behavior to enable us to cope with those pressures. Mr. Agnew was dedicated to resisting change. Although he sat on the inner councils that were plucking young men out of their natural environment, reprogramming them to be merciless killers, and sending them off to Southeast Asia, Agnew saw Skinner’s plan as a threat to individual freedom. His listeners, most of whom were already programmed to hate “eggheads” like Skinner, mentally frothed at the mouth. To them Skinner was another Moses Shapira with a suitcase filled with unacceptable evidence.
Kill the messenger who brings the bad news!
Bobby Fischer is a man obsessed with the game of chess. When someone talks to him about another subject, he will listen impatiently and then demand, “But what has that got
to do with chess?” We all know people living with magnificent obsessions. They spend all their waking hours thinking about a single subject to the exclusion of everything else.
What is an obsession?
It is a form of programming that has gotten completely out of hand. Religious fanatics are a prime example, as are those people who become enveloped in a political concept. Most of man’s progress has come about as a result of obsessions. The Wright brothers were not just tinkerers with an idea; their idea swallowed them up. Most leaders are obsessed with power or possessed by egos so large their only concern is their place in history. I have known writers obsessed with a single subject. Like Bobby Fischer and chess, anything and everything outside their subject seems meaningless. Any art form—music, painting, dance—is done best by those who are completely possessed by it. Such possession often borders on madness. This world would be a sorry place without such madmen.
I once considered writing a book about “the call” that drew men and women to the cloth. Some ministers, priests, and preachers I have talked with told how they were bathed in a mysterious beam of light and suddenly became obsessed with religion. Then I met other people obsessed with nonreligious subjects who had also “seen the light” and had been profoundly changed by what they considered to be an experience with flying saucers. Receiving a “call” is not an unusual experience at all. It happens constantly all over the world to all kinds of people. Perhaps Gauguin was zapped by one of these beams before he abandoned his job and his family and went off to the South Seas to paint.
THE EIGHTH TOWER: On Ultraterrestrials and the Superspectrum Page 2
