by John A. Keel
The Book of the Secrets of Enoch is another apocryphal book attempting to explain, or at least to interpret, the invisible world around us. Earlier we discussed the story of Enoch’s trips to other worlds, where he encountered wondrous beings and was given information to take back with him and spread among men. Here is how Enoch is supposed to have vanished at the age of 365 years:
When Enoch had talked to the people, the Lord sent out darkness onto the earth, and there was darkness, and it covered those men standing with Enoch, and they took Enoch up to the highest heaven, where the Lord is; and he received him and placed him before his face, and the darkness went off from the earth, and light came again.
And the people saw and understood not how Enoch had been taken, and glorified God, and found a roll in which was traced “the invisible God”; and all went to their homes.
The Bible reduces all of this to a single line (Genesis 5:24): “And Enoch walked with God; and he was not; for God took him.”
All of the religious prophets seem to have undergone contactee-type experiences. A man named Hermas, brother to Pius, Bishop of Rome, left behind a controversial book of visions, which details numerous UFO-like events early in the Christian era. Hermas was dictated to write the book by “angels,” and in it he describes seeing a great cloud of dust on the desert. As it came closer to him he saw “a great beast, as if it were a whale; and fiery locusts came out of his mouth. The height of the beast was about 100 feet, and he had a head like a large earthen vessel …Now the beast had upon its head four colors; first black, then a red and bloody color, then a golden, and then a white.” He also spoke with strange beings dressed in white, with veils over their faces. Some of his “angels” appeared as human beings who could suddenly transform themselves into different persons in front of his eyes. Once, he reports, he was handed a book to read, and as soon as he was finished, it disappeared magically from his grasp.
The winged angels in gossamer gowns with halos around their heads are the fictional creations of artists. Throughout history, those who have claimed actual experiences with these entities have described them either as radiant beings surrounded by brilliant light, or as very ordinary-looking human beings. They sat down and supped with Lot, just as our modern Venusians reportedly sit down at kitchen tables and drink coffee with backwoods farmers. In the great majority of all these cases, including the numerous UFO stories I have recounted, these entities appear as very young men in their late teens or early twenties. We have both male and female entities in our catalogs of the weird, but there seem to be more male “angels” and ufonauts than female. Many witnesses have the distinct impression that these entities are actually sexless (androgynous). The males with their long hair, angular faces, and mincing manners suggest they might be hermaphrodites and homosexuals.
The “inspired” (ghost-written) book Oahspe, by Dr. John Newbrough, hammers away at the asexual theme, claiming that the great leaders of early mankind were sexless, as are the great angels. This condition is called iesu and is defined as follows in Oahspe:
A sexless person; one without the possibility of sexual passion. Some men, as Brahma, attain to iesu. Improperly called iesus. The Hebraic word ieue was made from iesu; one who can hear the voice of the Great Spirit. Ieue has been improperly confounded with Jehovih. Men who attain iesu are said to have attained the state of woman, i.e., to have changed sex.
Leaders such as Alexander the Great were, in fact, suspect as homosexuals or asexuals. One very large religious cult still exists (in the Soviet Union, of all places), which is founded on the belief that asexuals will eventually rule the world. Men in the cult are deliberately castrated. Former Soviet Premier Georgi Malenkov was allegedly a member of this group and his masculinity—or lack of same—has been heatedly debated in several books. Today there is a rampant buffery dedicated to documenting and combating what they assert is a homosexual conspiracy to dominate the world.
Except for those who might be specially constructed for incubus-succubus activities (invisible entities who reportedly fornicate with human females and males), it does appear that our angels and spacemen come from a world without sex—and, very probably, a world without an organized society; a world in which each individual is merely a unit in the whole and is totally controlled by the collective intelligence or energy mass of that whole. In other words, these beings have no free will. They are slaves of a very high order. Often they try to convey this to percipients with their statements, “We are One,” “We are in bondage.”
Such a world would have no need for money, and contactees are often told that the great civilization in outer space does not use money. Ego would be unknown, and so all of the social problems, conflicts, and ambitions produced by ego would be unknown, too. Even death would hold no terror. To us, death means the end of our enjoyment of material things, of sex, of ego. To them, death means nothing more than the termination of existence. If they are really mere manipulations of energy, as I believe them to be, then they might be reconstructed at some time in the future. Because they lack ego and personality, it would be like taking an automobile apart and using those parts to build another one.
All of the above points have been stressed in the ancient contacts with angels, as well as the modern ufonaut meetings. Sometimes the information is cunningly disguised, but it is always there.
Angelology is a fascinating offshoot of demonology. The appearances of angels have been chronicled down through the ages, and several new angel reports still turn up each year. Once again we find that these reports contain all the basic ingredients of the UFO reports. The same phenomenon is at work, utilizing a different frame of reference or being misinterpreted by devout witnesses.
A writer named Gustav Davidson spent several years of his life sifting through all the religious, occult, and psychic records to compile his massive Dictionary of Angels. The reflective factor, so common in ufology and demonology, seems to have bothered Mr. Davidson, too.
Davidson wrote in the introduction to his book:
At this stage of the quest I was literally bedeviled by angels.
They stalked and leaguered me, by night and day. I could not tell the evil from the good… I moved, indeed, in a twilight zone of tall presences… I remember one occasion—it was winter and getting dark—returning home from a neighboring farm. I had cut across an unfamiliar field. Suddenly a nightmarish shape loomed up in front of me, barring my progress. After a paralyzing moment, I managed to fight my way past the phantom. The next morning I could not be sure whether I had encountered a ghost, an angel, a demon, or God. There were other such moments and other such encounters, when I passed from terror to trance, from intimations of realms unguessed at to the conviction that, beyond the reach of our senses, beyond the arch of all our experience sacred and profound, there was only—to use an expression of Paul’s in I Timothy 4—”fable and endless genealogy.”
Fable and endless genealogy. That sums up what we face in trying to isolate the UFO phenomenon from the larger and more important “big picture,” the overall situation of which the UFOs are merely a small and perhaps even insignificant part.
The Elementals
When I was just a farm boy new to the big city, I met an elderly woman who hired me to type up a book manuscript she had written. It was largely incoherent, and I suspected she was a little bit off her rocker. The book described her interminable conversations with an ancient Roman named Lucretius. She first met him while walking along Riverside Drive one afternoon. He materialized suddenly in front of her, Roman toga and all, and when their conversation ended, he melted away into thin air. He had long flowing hair, aquiline features, and dark, piercing eyes. To the best of my recollection, their discussions revolved around religion and philosophy.
Several times since then I have met other people who claim to have had frequent encounters with similar entities. For some reason, most of these percipients seem to be on the fringes of the art world. They all describe essentially the same type of
being. Those who are bright enough quickly realize that their mysterious visitors are capable of assuming any form they wish. One artist told me in great detail of her thirty years of experiences with an androgynous entity who resembled an Indian and who was fond of playing little jokes on her, such as turning up in the form of Abraham Lincoln. She also described his/its volatile temper.
“They’re Valkyries, you know,” she said. “They have a wonderful sense of humor, but they also get very angry if you contradict them.”
Throughout history occultists have called these entities elementals. There are several kinds of elementals in psychic lore. One type is supposedly conjured up by secret magical rites and can assume any kind of form ranging from that of a beautiful woman to hideous, indescribable monsters. Once a witch or warlock has whipped up such a critter, it will mindlessly repeat the same actions century after century in the same place until another occultist comes along and performs the rite necessary to dissolve it. Many hauntings are ascribed to elemental beings. Generation after generation the entity returns to the same spot to walk along a specific course. If a house is built on the spot, it will walk through the house leaving unlocked doors in its wake, parading through bedrooms and pantries, wandering blindly across gardens. There are innumerable documented instances in which knowledgeable occultists have gotten rid of such entities by exercising certain rites and chanting ancient prayers. Sounds ridiculous, but, as with the exorcism rites of the Church, it seems to work.
The leprechauns of Ireland seem to be another form of elemental. They may be akin to the legendary elves of the Black Forest in Germany and the mysterious little “Stick People” of the North American Indians. The Irish have all kinds of stories and lore about the “little people.” In 1968, the people in Ballymagroartyscotch were up in arms when road builders threatened to cut down a skeog, or fairy tree. According to tradition, some fairies locate themselves in skeogs, and woe to anyone who tries to cut them down. Several contractors refused the job of chopping down the tree. One of them, Ray Greene, said, “I heard of a chap with the electricity board, and he cut down a fairy tree, and the next day he fell off an electricity pole and was killed.”
The problem was finally solved by diverting the road around the gnarled old tree.
From the days of Moses burning bush to the modern appearances of angels and holy personages, these strange events seem to have concentrated themselves around trees and shrubbery.
A few years ago a sidhe, or fairy mound, was found by workmen building an airport in Ireland. They flatly refused to take a shovel or bulldozer to it. Like the skeog of Ballymagroartyscotch, the airport sidhe became the focal point of a controversy before the builders finally gave in and bypassed it.
At least one man has died on a sidhe. His name was Robert Kirk, and he was the minister of the church at Aberfoyle, Ireland, back in the seventeenth century. After a lifetime of scholarly research, he decided that fairies were invisible creatures composed of “congealed air.” His body was found on a fairy mound and gave rise to the legend that the little people had carried off his soul.
The brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, not only wrote scores of charming fairy stories, but they also studied the occult and wrote books about it. Some of their children’s tales were based on the lore they collected. You undoubtedly remember the various stories about how secretive fairies are about their names. In Spence’s The Fairy Tradition in Britain we are told, “To mention the fairy name either individually or collectively was not permissible. This restriction is associated with the belief that to know the name of a being presupposes a certain measure of power over him.”[11]
In Scotland, the na fir chlis were “nimble men” who inhabited the sky. In Ireland and Wales, fairies with reddish skins were called fir darrig, and the legendary ancestors of the men who built Stonehenge were known as fir bolg, the “men with bags,” who lingered in swamps and bogs.
Angels, elementals, and ufonauts all play amusing games with their names, favoring minor variations on ancient languages. The late George Adamski, one of the first UFO contactees to receive publicity in the early 1950s, claimed that he had met an illustrious space person named Fir Kon; a name that was probably derivative from the ancient Gaelic, a language completely unknown to Mr. Adamski.
A forty-six-year-old TV repairman and ham-radio operator named Sidney Padrick was strolling along Manresa Beach near Monterey, California, early on the morning of January 30, 1965, when he reportedly encountered a grounded UFO and was invited aboard by a mysterious voice. He is supposed to have met a 5-foot, 10-inch-tall man with short-cropped auburn hair, very pale skin, a very sharp nose and chin, and unusually long fingers. This ufonaut identified himself by a name which Mr. Padrick later spelled phonetically as Zeeno. Although Padrick had no knowledge of Greek, xeno (pronounced zee-no) is the word for stranger in that language.
In England, a glass phial filled with silver sand was found at an alleged UFO landing site in April 1965. It was wrapped in a piece of parchment containing Greek lettering which spelled out “Adelphos Adelpho,” meaning brother to brother. This was just one of the many curious finds in that Devon field where a gardener named Arthur Bryant reportedly chatted with two ufonauts on April 24, 1965. One of the ufonauts identified himself as Yamski. It was weeks before British ufologists learned that contactee George Adamski had died suddenly in Washington, D. C., on April 23, 1965, only a few hours before the Bryant contact. Mr. Bryant, himself, died of a brain tumor on June 24, 1967—on the anniversary of Kenneth Arnold’s “first” flying saucer sighting twenty years earlier. Coincidentally, journalist Frank Edwards, author of two popular UFO books and a longtime researcher, passed away a few hours before Bryant in his home in Indiana. There have been other seemingly coincidental deaths in the UFO field on June 24. Frank Scully, author of Behind the Flying Saucers, died on June 24, 1964. Richard Church, a well-known British ufologist and contactee, died on June 24, 1967. And Willy Ley, the pioneer rocket and space authority, suffered a fatal heart attack on June 24, 1969. Perceptive readers will note that many of the events, both modern and historic, outlined in this book occurred on the twenty-fourth of the month.
Another Englishman, Arthur Shuttlewood, the editor of Warminster Journal, became involved in UFO investigations when Warminster experienced a spectacular flying saucer flap beginning in December 1964. He was soon introduced into the twilight world of the elementals. First he received a long series of phone calls purportedly from the space people. Later the tall, pale, long-fingered gentlemen in coveralls came knocking on his door to engage him in long chats about cosmic matters. They announced that they were from the cantel (their word for planet) of Aenstria. They identified themselves as Caellsan, Selorik, and Traellison. These names were probably plays on old Greek terms. Aenstria could be derived from the ancient Greek story of Aeneas, the son of the Trojan prince Anchises and the Goddess Aphrodite. Aeneas roamed the world for seven years and was the subject of Virgil’s history, Aeneid, a book Shuttlewood had never even heard of. Caellsan could have had its roots in the story of Caeneus, a Thessalian woman who was supposed to have the power to change her sex. According to legend, she offended Zeus and was punished by being changed into a bird. One of the seven hills of Rome is named Caelian. The name “Selorik” might have come from Selene, the moon goddess of Greek mythology.
The name game is also played at séances, with materializations claiming a variety of names adopted from ancient Egyptian, Greek, and various Indian languages. Apparently the elementals have a language of their own which sounds like double-talk or bad science fiction, and they frequently toss in words and names from that language just to keep things confused.
Thousands of mediums, psychics, and UFO contactees have been receiving mountains of messages from “Ashtar” in recent years. Mr. Ashtar represents himself as a leader in the great intergalactic councils that hold regular meetings on Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, and many planets unknown to us. But Ashtar is not a new arrival. Variations of this
name, such as Ashtaroth, Ashar, Asharoth, etc., appear in demonological literature throughout history, both in the Orient and the Occident. Mr. Ashtar has been around a very long time, posing as assorted gods and demons and now, in the modern phase, as another glorious spaceman.
Angels, too, indulge in the name game. Gustav Davidson’s Dictionary of Angels is filled with names very similar to those that crop up in UFO and occult lore. And, of course, the fairies and leprechauns of northern Europe have played the name game with almost delightful vengeance, particularly during the Middle Ages. There is more truth to Rumpelstiltskin than most people recognize.
Fairies are supposed to possess magical powers—the ability to alter physical matter and to paralyze people through spells. To be bewitched by fairies is to have your mind and body controlled by them.
Accounts of little humanoids with supernatural powers can be found in almost every culture. In Indian Legends of the Northern Rockies, Dr. E. E. Clark describes the various Indian legends about little three-foot-tall beings who rendered themselves invisible by rubbing themselves with a certain type of grass. They were supposed to have incredible strength, and in one story an Indian exposed to one of these creatures suffered from a swollen face afterward. As in northern Europe, the “little people” of the Rocky Mountains reputedly kidnapped children from the Indian tribes frequently.
An anthropologist from Berkeley, California, Brian Stross, uncovered some interesting “little men” stories while studying the Tzeltal Indians of Tenejapa in Chiapas, Mexico. The local name for the three-foot-tall hairy humanoids is ihk’al. Legend claims that the ihk’al fly about with some kind of rocket attached to their back, and they occasionally carry off people. A little farther south, similar beings supposedly live in caves and are able to fly through the air. They are said to kidnap women and force them to bear children.
