THE EIGHTH TOWER: On Ultraterrestrials and the Superspectrum

by Keel, John A.

  The earth’s aura, which is now decidedly black or dirty brown, would turn golden again.

  This is the destiny all religions promise us. The Bible states that the end will be near when wonders appear in the skies, old men dream dreams, and young men see visions. The “youthquake” of the 1960s marked the beginning of this phase. Back in the 1950s everyone laughed when the UFO contactees spoke of a “New Age” when an interest in psychic phenomena would be revived and new wonders would unfold. Occultism seemed dead, killed by our materialistic and technological strivings. But the New Age did arrive, and Ouija boards did outsell Monopoly games. Famous astronomers are quietly studying old astrological records. Physicists are pouring over ancient books on alchemy.

  The superspectrum is no longer a remote fantasy. It is becoming a scientific reality in a thousand laboratories. What seemed immeasurable and untestable only a few years ago is now being measured and tested.

  What will we find at the summit of the superspectrum? When a particle vibrates at the highest possible frequency, a strobe effect sets in. It stands still. The energies at the peak of the spectrum must therefore change. They change into a form of cosmic rays and this means our whole spectrum is really a huge circle (figure 10). We can return to our starting point—to Marconi stalling automobiles on the Italian seashore, to lonely people standing on hilltops watching unearthly beams of light darting across the night skies, to a sense of wonder and a dark land of sea serpents, dragons, and things bumping in the night.

  PART TWO

  I now have a theory that, of themselves, men never did evolve from lower animals: but that in early and plastic times, a human being from somewhere else appeared upon this earth, and that many kinds of animals took him for a model, and rudely and grotesquely imitated his appearances, so that, today, though the gorillas of the Congo and of Chicago are only caricatures, some of the rest of us are somewhat passable imitations of human beings.— Charles Fort

  11

  Dr. Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst and one of the world’s leading parapsychologists, viewed the superspectrum from a slightly different angle. He speculated about a collective unconsciousness—a supermind composed of the unconscious minds of all humanity—having a will and reality all its own. But ancient Chinese philosophers did him one better. They visualized a monstrous spirit inhabiting space and feeding on the souls of earthlings. We were nothing but “moon food” in the cosmic order of things.

  The late Ivan T. Sanderson, a zoologist and a very original thinker, went one giant step further. If this collective unconsciousness existed like a magnetic blanket over the entire planet, and if it could manipulate our reality independently, then it would mean that this world is really a living organism with a mind of its own. To assure its own survival it has to feed off us. It has to “jolly us along,” as Ivan put it, urging us to breed and giving us some kind of hope so we won’t just throw up our hands and commit genocide. The earth needs us because each one of us is a cell in its massive brain. Just as the human brain controls each cell and organ in its body, the supermind has the power to control each of us and can direct our individual and collective destinies. In short, the earth itself is God.

  Some religions reach that humans are put here to house souls. Earth is a kind of farm, and people are its most important product. Other religions believe that souls move from one body to another in the long and boring process of reincarnation. The soul is being educated slowly over many generations, and when it finally receives its celestial diploma, it is freed to drift into space and become a part of the cosmic mind.

  Medical science does not recognize the human soul, because no pathologist has ever whittled one from a corpse and put it in a bottle. But men have always believed in the existence of a special force or fragment of energy which survived after death. Burial rites in many cultures took this belief into account. Egyptians portrayed the soul as a little bird flapping away from the corpse. Modern psychics claim to see a small light rise from the human body at the moment of death. Dogs stand in the dark and howl pitifully the moment their masters pass on. What signal triggers their cry? Do their sensitive eyes see a chunk of energy rising into the sky?

  In the 1960s UFOs had a curious tendency to hover above funeral homes and hospitals. In some cases the UFO lights appeared over homes nightly for weeks until one of the residents died. The “inspired” book, Oahspe, mentions “soul ships”—great luminous spheres that travel across the landscape collecting the souls of the recently departed. The ancient Egyptians were familiar with this phenomenon, and soul ships were even a part of their funeral rites.

  If you really think about it, the standard concept of the soul is quite impractical. That is, a soul that retains all the memories and personality characteristics of its owner when it ascends to another “plane” and settles in a little rose-covered cottage on the other side seems absurd and, more important, unnecessary to the cosmic order. Mark Twain once commented that he had no desire to go to a paradise where everyone is given a harp and a pair of wings. Imagine the clatter of all those non-musicians strumming their harps while they flutter helplessly into each other. Robert Ripley of “Believe It or Not” fame once calculated the number of people who have walked this planet since Eden and then estimated how big heaven would have to he to hold them all comfortably. The figure was staggering. Heaven would have to be much larger than our entire solar system. More to the point, what could be the possible purpose of such an inane immortality?

  The cosmos is too orderly and the individual is too insignificant. Other facts get in the way of immortality. Our personalities are really very closely related to our physical bodies. If we are gorgeous, we will develop a personality quite different from the one we would have were we born ugly. Strip the physical body from most people and you have removed 90 percent of their personality. As for our personal memories, our brains record memories with an electrical system. When we die, the oxygen is cut off from our brains and it is the first organ to shut down—usually within three or four minutes. It is as if a switch has been pulled. The brain circuits become a meaningless jumble of animal matter.

  There is an old saying, “Angels have no memory.” If we are released from this world without our memories and our personality, what could be left?

  Consciousness is exclusive to only a few animals, including man, and anthropologists have always been bothered by it. When did man first develop a conscious mind, and how? Religion credits God with the gift. Erich von Däniken thinks that ancient astronauts may have had something to do with it. There is another theory, backed by so much evidence that few people find it acceptable. They reject it because it simplifies everything and leaves no room for basic religious concepts.

  Man is a biochemical machine, a cleverly engineered robot. He is unlike all the other creatures on this planet, and, despite the strenuous efforts of several generations of evolutionists, there is no evidence whatsoever that he followed an evolutionary route from the lower animals. Man just suddenly appeared here, beetle-browed, arms gangling, walking erect with slobber dripping off his chin. Science would have us believe that this hairy biped loafed in caves for two million years or so and then, very suddenly, became incredibly industrious and within a mere eight or ten thousand years graduated from caves to skyscrapers. This does seem plausible when you consider that it has taken us only about 150 years to transform an agrarian culture into an industrial society. But we made the quantum jump by reforming the ancient god-king system and rejecting the stranglehold of religion and superstition. Before 1848, the pivotal year in modern history, man had submerged himself in his spirituality and had spent nearly two thousand years groveling to a God he did not understand but dared not question.

  Charles Darwin changed things with his theory of evolution, taking the credit for creation away from God and blaming, instead, a long series of natural accidents and coincidences. Woman did not spring from Adam’s rib, we decided, but evolved from a female salamander. Man hailed not from the stars but
from the ocean’s depths, shedding his gills and fins along the way, while other critters learned to grow feathers and fly.

  Today a very quiet revolution is taking place among scientists. The theory of evolution is losing ground, and new versions of the concept of cosmic creation are springing up. Man is too complex and too different to have simply sprung from a puddle of chemicals enervated by random lightning bolts. A more orderly process was undoubtedly involved; a controlled process. But controlled by whom or what?

  Ignore man for a moment and think about the other animals on this spinning ball of mud. Thousands of our fellow creatures are total absurdities both in appearance and habits. Some are covered with armor. Some have silly long necks, ridiculous noses, insanely unique sensory organs, and scandalous sexual practices. Were all these critters produced by accidental natural processes, or were they devised by a biological tinkerer with a perverse sense of humor? Is earth the Disneyland of the gods?

  If God, the Cosmic Mind, alone is responsible for all of the absurd life forms here, we have another good reason to question His sanity. Many lower animals have very practical and efficient systems for reproducing themselves. But the higher up the scale you go, the sillier sex becomes. Man’s reproductive system requires not only the awkward coupling of two different types of being but is accompanied by a very complicated mental and. emotional process. The participants are rewarded for their efforts by a series of signals transmitted to the pleasure center of the brain. Having granted us this biological reward, God—through His messengers and prophets—perniciously made it sinful to enjoy it. We become like rats in a maze, wandering through all kinds of confusing hazards to receive a kernel of corn at the end. The biochemical robot is preoccupied with the urge for self-preservation, first and foremost, and the instinctual need for sensual gratification. These two things are programmed into us, and then our society tries to short-circuit our nervous systems by banning expression of those instincts. We are allowed to find release under carefully specified conditions.

  When you reduce the system to its basics you have the kind of thing mad scientists dream up in their castle laboratories: (1) Stimulus, (2) response to stimulus, and (3) reward. Pavlov ringing bells for his dogs. Dr. Frankenstein’s friend walking through a wall to reach the blind fiddler.

  If God wanted man to fly, someone might have told the Wright brothers, He would have invented LSD sooner. If God wanted man to go forth and multiply, why did He invent so many sexual taboos? The answer, of course, is to protect society. If He had wanted Earth to be overcrowded, He could have created millions of people instead of just two.

  The process of creation is not a continuing one, much to the annoyance of the evolutionists. New species are not appearing on a large scale. Lightning bolts are no longer lashing at pools of ammonia. The story of Adam and Eve can be traced back to the earliest cultures. It served to explain the appearance of man and the beginning of his sexuality. Christianity later added the fillip of original sin.

  Man may be the holdover of a very ancient civilization, and perhaps he was the invention of that civilization, assembled by some slightly demented child with a biochemical set. My friend science-writer Otto Binder has argued persuasively for the man-was-planted-here-by-spacemen theory. Otto, like most scientists and evolutionists, carefully overlooked one of the most persuasive arguments of all for supernatural creation. Each month, somewhere on this planet, a monster appears briefly. It leaves huge footprints behind. Then it vanishes. For a short while it was real, a physical entity seen by one person, or ten, or one hundred, and then it ceased to be. These monsters take many forms and have been observed by millions of people over the past several thousand years. So far as we know they have no sexual system, but they do operate according to a set of specific rules. Rules that could only have been invented by a mad scientist.

  If some force in this universe can temporarily create a monster, then that same force could certainly create a man. The evolutionists should gather together their foundation and government grants and go into the field to investigate the monster reports. They would not have to travel far. Our monsters have visited the suburbs of New York and Chicago. They are seen annually throughout the Mississippi valley. They are an integral part of the mysteries of the superspectrum.

  12

  “My dog took off right up the ridge and up on top of the hill,” Edgar Harrison said, recalling how he and a group of reporters pursued a tall, hairy humanoid. “They took off after the thing when they heard it. Boy, you should have had a recording of those men when they hit the smell. I was with them, and it stank so bad you would have thought you were walking in horse manure. It was that strong. The dog went three hundred feet up there, then he came back with his tail between his legs. He laid right down in back of the house and just got sick as can be. His eyes got bloodshot and he lay there for over an hour throwing up. I can’t get him to go near that hill anymore.”

  Harrison was the central figure in the famous Momo (Missouri Monster) episode of 1972. Momo was first seen on July 11, 1972, by the three Harrison children. “It was right by a tree,” said Doris Harrison, 15, “six or seven feet tall, black and hairy. It stood like a man but it didn’t look like one. I started crying and ran to call Mom on the telephone.”

  This first sighting was at 3:30 in the afternoon, a rather exceptional fact since most of our bilious bogeymen are nocturnal critters. Terry Harrison, 8, said the animal’s face was completely covered with hair, it seemed to have no neck, and it appeared to be carrying a dead dog flecked with blood under one arm.

  In the days that followed, some odd white and green “fireballs” were seen in the skies around the town of Louisiana, Missouri. The night air was rent with horrible screams described variously as the sound of a woman screaming, a baby crying, and an animal in pain. Some huge footprints and bits of black hair were found in the woods on Marzolf Hill near the Harrison property. Police Chief Shelby Ward organized a twenty-man posse, and they scoured the area. Although the monster remained hidden, the screams and terrible smell returned again and again. These episodes stirred up considerable publicity. A team of UFO investigators from Oklahoma City visited the site and soberly announced that a flying saucer had obviously dumped the monster there. It was, they said, just another friendly visitor from outer space.

  Eventually Edgar Harrison moved his family out of their little house and tried to sell it, but there were no takers. No one wants to live with a monster for a next-door neighbor.[11]

  However, thousands of people do live in monster territories throughout the United States. These giant, smelly bipeds leave their massive three-toed footprints everywhere. One inhabits the Brookside Park area of Cleveland, Ohio, and is seen every year or two. Another has been bedeviling campers at Lake Worth, Fort Worth’s reservoir in Texas, for several years.

  In Florida the “Abominable Sandman” has been stinking up the Everglades since the big UFO wave of 1966. Up along the Atlantic Coast of New Jersey, the “Jersey Devil” has been blundering around in the Jersey marshlands for at least 40 years. California boasts of “Bigfoot,” a giant humanoid who practices discus throwing with truck tires. Further north in Oregon and Washington, there is the Sasquatch. He seems to be a tourist from Canada. There have been so many sightings in British Columbia that a local newsman, John Green, has published fat catalogs listing his appearances. American Indians called Sasquatch “the Windigo.” He stomps around the Great Lakes region, particularly in Michigan and Illinois, where his activities are an annual event.

  Two teenagers, Cheryl Ray and Randy Creath, got a glimpse of the furry outer-space visitor in June 1973. This one was covered with white hair, according to Miss Ray of Murphysboro, Illinois. It walked around on two legs like a man and didn’t seem to pay any attention to the startled couple.

  A few years ago I collected documented reports of 70 cases of this sort. Forty-four described creatures taller than a man—from seven to ten feet tall. In 16 cases, the creatures had approached o
r even attacked automobiles and their drivers. Animals such as dogs, sheep, and cattle were found killed or mutilated in six cases. Clearly, these fellows were nobody to fool with.[12]

  Throughout 1972 dozens of people in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, area received unwelcome glimpses of a tall, hair-covered monster. Stan Gordon, a local investigator, interviewed over one hundred witnesses. A few years earlier when I published some of my own findings, hardcore UFO enthusiasts howled with derision. Now Gordon and others have confirmed some of my stranger discoveries. For example, I found that both UFOs and monsters seemed to zero in on human females undergoing their menstrual period. I also noted that animal disappearances and mutilations were commonplace in UFO/monster areas. Gordon found that dogs, cats, chickens, and sheep were disappearing or meeting horrible fates in the wake of the monster sightings.

  This raises a very important question: If these creatures are real, what do they eat? The obvious answer is anything or anyone they want to. An animal seven to ten feet tall and weighing from 300 to 800 pounds (judging from the depth of the footprints) must have a voracious appetite. If they are vegetarians like, say, elephants, they would leave a wide path of despoiled foliage. If they are carnivorous, they would certainly require more than an occasional dog or cat. They would be emptying entire chicken coops, gulping down whole herds of sheep, or grabbing dozens of toddlers on their way to kindergarten.