"Ultra-Dimensionals are the earth enties that change in relationship to the astral
etheric ignorance of the routine prone homo sapien..."

Project Serpo

Project Serpo is a term in ufology circles referring to an alleged exchange programme between ultra top secret levels in the government of the United States and an alien homeworld nicknamed Serpo.


Background

According to the most common version of the story, an alien creature survived the legendary spacecraft crash (or crashes) near Roswell, New Mexico in the late 1940s.[1] Detained but treated well by American military forces, the creature is said to have contacted its home planet and was eventually repatriated, leading to the establishment of some sort of relationship between the American government and the people of its home world – said to be a planet of the binary star system Zeta Reticuli.[2]

Twelve american service people voluntarily traveled to that world in 1965 as part of an exchange program worked out of that relationship. They lived there for a number of years, eventually returning in 1978. Welcomed by the inhabitants, known by the Americans as "EBENS", the terrestrial delegation was treated well and learned much. However, they suffered some hardships due to the strange environment of the planet. Two died - one through an accidental fall. The natives of that world were said to have expressed remorse and conducted burial services.

Eventually, the majority of the American service people returned home, except for two of their party who chose to remain. All of the party have since died. It has been said that part of the reason why all have since perished is from after effects of the difficult environment, particularly the high radiation levels from the two suns.[2]


Origin of Name

The name "SERPO" is something of a nickname for the planet given by the American delegation and others. It has no reference to the actual name of the planet, if there is one. The inhabitants were said to be unable to use words to communicate in a human manner.

Criticisms

Proponents of Project Serpo argue that witness testimonies from within the United States military validate the project's existence, and it therefore cannot be dismissed as an outright hoax.[citation needed] However, critics point out there is a lack of physical evidence in the public domain supporting the project's existence, and argue that unsubstantiated testimonies do not compensate for this ommission.[2]

Another criticism of Project Serpo stems from the veracity of one of its chief witnesses, Sergeant Richard Doty. It has been argued that Mr. Doty's involvement in other alleged secret UFO-related activities, such as the disclosure of Majestic 12, make the Project Serpo allegations suspect.[2]

Although most believers dismiss it as just coincidence, critics have noted that Serpo is an anagram for Prose. This could signal a possible hoax or practical joke perpetrated by a trickster, who carefully concocted an elaborated narrative and refined his joke encoding in plain sight a hint that all of it is just storytelling.

UFO Faerie Rings

geocromoterapia

UFO Casebook Files
Evidence Organization
Spacesite Community

Abduction phenomenon

The abduction phenomenon is an umbrella term used to describe a number of hypotheses, claims or assertions stating that non-human creatures (usually aliens) kidnap individuals—sometimes called "abductees"—usually for medical testing or for sexual reproduction procedures. Many such encounters are described as terrifying or humiliating, but others describe them as transformative or even pleasant. Reports of the abduction phenomenon have been made from around the world, but have perhaps seen most mainstream attention in the United States.

Skeptics tend to doubt that the phenomenon occurs literally as reported, and a wide variety of alternate explanations have been proposed (see below). Rather, such skeptics often argue that the phenomenon might be characterised as a type of modern-day folk myth (like the historic belief in vampires).

The alien abduction phenomenon has been the subject of conspiracy theory and as such has become a staple of popular science fiction works such as The X-Files.

Overview

Few mainstream scientists believe the phenomenon literally occurs as reported—some experts contend the field is rife with kooks and pseudoscience—there is little doubt that many apparently stable and sincere persons report alien abductions they believe are utterly genuine: as reported in the Harvard University Gazette in 1992, Dr. John Edward Mack investigated over 60 claimed abductees, and "spent countless therapeutic hours with these individuals only to find that what struck him was the 'ordinariness' of the population, including a restaurant owner, several secretaries, a prison guard, college students, a university administrator, and several homemakers ... 'The majority of abductees do not appear to be deluded, confabulating, lying, self-dramatizing, or suffering from a clear mental illness,' he maintained. He has encountered only one person who showed psychotic features." [1] Other experts who have argued that abductees are mostly free of mental illness or delusion are psychologists John Wilson and Rima Laibow, and psychotherapist David Gotlib[2].

Stigma and self-doubt may be obstacles to more widespread study and/or reporting of the phenomenon, whatever its origins or explanation.

Some abduction reports are quite detailed. An entire subculture has developed around the subject, with support groups and a detailed mythos explaining the reasons for abductions: The various aliens (Greys, Reptilians, "Nordics" and so on) are said to have specific roles, origins, and motivations. Abduction claimants do not always attempt to explain the phenomenon, but some take independent research interest in it themselves, and explain the lack of greater awareness of Alien Abduction as the result of either extraterrestrial or governmental interest in cover-up.

Others still are intrigued by the entire phenomenon, but hesitate in making any definitive conclusions. Emergency room physician Dr. John G. Miller asks, "How can a person have any firmly held belief about this when it's so mysterious? The opinions of the true believers are hard to swallow; and the opinions of the die-hard skeptics are not based on reality either. There is some middle ground ... It's clear that this is some sort of powerful subjective experience. But I do not know what the objective reality is. It's as if the evidence leads us in both directions." (Bryan, 162) Similarly, the late Harvard psychiatrist John Mack concluded, "The furthest you can go at this point is to say there's an authentic mystery here. And that is, I think, as far as anyone ought to go." (emphasis as in original)(Bryan, 269)

Putting aside the question of whether abduction reports are literally and objectively "real", literature professor Terry Matheson argues that their popularity and their intriguing appeal is easily understood. Tales of abduction "are intrinsically absorbing; it is hard to imagine a more vivid description of human powerlessness." After experiencing the frisson of delightful terror one may feel from reading ghost stories or watching horror movies, Matheson notes that people "can return to the safe world of their homes, secure in the knowledge that the phenomenon in question cannot follow. But as the abduction myth has stated almost from the outset, there is no avoiding alien abductors." (Matheson, 297)

Even hearing a tape recording of (or watching a video recording of) a hypnotic regression session can be a chilling experience, leaving little doubt to some observers that the individual is either an accomplished actor, or genuinely believes they are reliving a horrifying experience. Once hypnotized and supposedly recalling an abduction event, some people relate the event calmly, while others may beg pathetically for the event to stop, cry in apparent horror, shout angrily or tremble with fear.

Matheson writes that when compared to the earlier contactee reports, abduction accounts are distinguished by their "relative sophistication and subtlety, which enabled them to enjoy an immediately more favourable reception from the public."

Profile

Hand drawn picture depicting an Extraterrestrial Biological Entity Although different cases vary in detail (sometimes significantly), some argue that there is a broad, fairly consistent sequence and description of events which make up the typical "close encounter of the third kind". ("Abduction" in an extension of Dr. J. Allen Hynek's classifying terminology) Though the features outlined below are often reported, there is some disagreement as to exactly how often they actually occur. There has been some debate over the subject, and some researchers (especially Budd Hopkins and David Michael Jacobs) have been accused of excluding, minimising or suppressing testimony or data which do not fit a certain paradigm for the phenomenon.

As folklorist Dr. Thomas E. Bullard has noted (his essay is reprinted in Clark, 1998), most abduction accounts feature the following events. They generally follow the sequence noted below, though not all abductions feature all the events:

Capture (Abductees taken from room/area and find themselves in the "ship")

Examination (a seeming medical or physiological exam)

Conference ("Aliens" speak with abductees)

Tour (Not always described but some abductees claim to be shown the ship)

Loss of Time (Many abductees suffer from periods of time removed from their memory, often coming back to them later)

Return (Returned, sometimes with environmental changes)

Theophany (a profound mystical experience, a feeling of oneness with God or the universe)

Aftermath (Sickness, new phobias, ridicule, etc.)
Such alleged abductions are often closely connected to UFO reports, and are sometimes supposedly conducted by so-called Greys: Short, grey-skinned humanoids with large, pear-shaped heads and enormous dark eyes.

In his books on the subject, Harvard Medical School professor Dr. John Edward Mack explained that common features of alien abduction experiences in North America include the feeling of paralysis; the perception of having been transported immaterially, frequently through a beam of light; the sense of having been surgically probed or implanted with devices; the freezing or slowing of time; and sexual or reproductive contact or manipulation by the aliens.

There are however cultural differences in perception of these reported incidents. The frightening "terror abduction" experience is reported mainly in the USA, while in the rest of the world, the ET encounters are said to be largely benevolent -- this apparent incongruity perhaps raising a question as to the phenomenon's origins.

As noted above, the so-called Greys are most popularly associated with abduction reports. Again, however, this seems to be a North American paradigm best-known since the 1980s. On the contrary, some researchers (such as Kevin D. Randle in his 1997 book, Faces Of The Visitors: An Illustrated Reference To Alien Contact) have noted a vast variety of alleged creatures have been reported in abduction accounts worldwide, with some of the alleged creatures not even described as humanoid.

Although in North America, "aliens" of extraterrestrial origin are the most commonly blamed in these incidents, in Europe and other parts of the world, the beings involved are as often perceived to be demonic or spiritual in origin. Common elements in the descriptions of abductions and visitations vary by region and local culture, with only a very few elements being the same worldwide, such as an other worldly sensation, reports of mind control, repressed memories being rediscovered, and sexual experiences. These elements, and many aspects of what witnesses describe, are very common in old stories of encounters with faeries, demons, and other magical creatures.

In many abduction reports, the individual(s) concerned are often travelling by automobile at the time of the incident, usually at night or in the early morning hours, and usually in a rural or sparsely populated area. A UFO will be seen ahead, (sometimes on the road) and the driver will either deliberately stop to investigate, or the car will stop due to apparent mechanical failure. Other forms of mechanical failure and interference are also common, such as a car radio producing static or behaving abnormally. Such descriptions match that of an EM pulse, which can be both naturally and artificially induced. In the occasions when they have been present, animals such as dogs usually also display a heightened fear response.

Upon getting out of the vehicle, the driver and passenger(s) typically will experience a blank period and amnesia, after which they will find themselves again standing in front of their car. While they very often will not consciously remember the experience, either subsequent nightmares or hypnosis will reveal an often harrowing and invasive medical examination, sometimes involving the removal or insertion of reproductive material. In some older cases, there were also occasional reports of abductees exhibiting symptoms consistent with nuclear radiation sickness.

Dr Don C. Donderi writes that "In many of these [abduction] accounts, there is independent confirmation of missing time--emotionally stable people arriving hours late after long or short automobile journeys. There is independent confirmation of abduction events reported under hypnosis, sometimes by nonhypnotized observers and sometimes by other hypnotized witnesses" (Donderi, 66)

History

The first ever abduction of a human by an extraterrestrial lifeform is tht of no other than Albert Einsten, of Germany. He was able to communicate with the "aliens" and they told him that e=mc^2. After he was abducted he called that formula as his own. As noted below, the Antonio Villas Boas case (1957) and the Hill Abduction (1961) were the first cases of UFO abduction to earn widespread attention. But as Peter Rogerson writes in the introduction to his four part article, "the growth of the abduction stories is a far more tangled affair than the 'entirely unpredisposed' official history would have us believe."[1] (The phrase "entirely unpredisposed" appeared in folklorist Dr. Thomas E. Bullard's study of alien abduction; he argued that alien abductions as reported in the 1970s and 1980s had little precedent in folkore or fiction.) See "external links" for all four parts of Rogerson's article.

Paleo-abductions

While "alien abduction" did not achieve widespread attention until the 1960s, there were many similar stories circulating decades earlier. These early abduction-like accounts have been dubbed "paleo-abductions" by UFO researcher Jerome Clark. [2] This same two-part article (part 1 and part 2) makes note of many paleo-abductions, some of which were reported well before the 1957 Antonio Villas Boas case earned much attention, or even before the UFO report claimed in 1947 by pilot Kenneth Arnold that first generated widespread interest in UFOs:

There was at least one case of attempted abduction reported in conjunction with the mystery airships of the late 1800s. Colonel H.G. Shaw's account was published in the Stockton, California Daily Mail in 1897: Shaw claimed that he and a friend were harassed by three tall, slender humanoids who were covered with a fine, downy hair covering their bodies. The beings tried to accost or kidnap Shaw and his friend, who were able to fight them off.
In his 1923 book, New Lands, American writer Charles Fort speculated that extraterrestrial beings might have kidnapped humans: "One supposes that if extra-mundane vessels have sometimes come close to this earth, then sailing away, terrestrial aëronauts may have occasionally left this earth, or may have been seized and carried away from this earth."[3]
The 1951 case of Fred Reagan, which was publicized by Flying Saucer Review in the late 1960s based on news clippings from 1952. Bizarre even by alien abduction standards, Reagan claimed to have been piloting his small airplane, which was struck by a UFO; the occupants (who resembled metallic stalks of asparagus) apologised, and tried to cure Reagan's cancer. Reagan reportedly died of a brain disorder not long after the alleged UFO encounter.
In 1954, Paris Match printed a story said to have occurred in 1921, when the anonymous writer was a child. The writer claimed to have been snatched by two tall "men" who wore helmets and "diving suits" and who took the boy to an "oddly shaped tank" before being released. Rogerson calls this story "the earliest known abduction survivor report."[4]
A 1958 letter to NICAP asserted that two U.S. Army soldiers witnessed two bright red lights near their base. The soldiers had a strange sense of dissociation, and found themselves in a new location, with no memory of how they arrived there.
Rogerson writes that the 1955 publication of Harold T. Wilkins's Flying Saucers Uncensored declared that two contactees, (Karl Hunrath and Wilbur Wilkinson) had disappeared under mysterious circumstances; Wilkins reported speculation that the duo were the victims of "alleged abduction by flying saucers".[5]
The so-called Shaver Mystery of the 1940s has some similarities to later abduction accounts, as well, with sinister beings said to be kidnapping and torturing people. Rogerson writes that John Robinson (a friend of ufology gadfly Jim Moseley) made a 1957 appearance on John Nebel's popular overnight radio program to tell "a dramatically spooky, if not very plausible, abduction tale" related to the Shaver Mystery: Robinson claimed that a friend of his had been held captive by the evil Deros beneath the Earth, and to have been the victim of a sort of mind control via small "earphones"; Rogerson writes that "in this unlikely tale that we first encounter the implants ... and other abductionist staples."[6]

Contactees

The UFO contactees of the 1950s claimed to have contacted aliens, and the substance of contactee narratives are often regarded as quite different from alien abduction accounts.

However, Rogerson contends that it is often difficult to determine the division between contactees and abductees, with classification sometimes seeming arbitrary.

Two landmark cases

Allegedly genuine stories of kidnap by extraterrestrials goes back at least to the mid-1950s, with the Antonio Villas Boas case (which didn't receive much attention until several years later).

Widespread publicity was generated by the Betty and Barney Hill abduction case of 1961 (again not widely known until several years afterwards), culminating in a made for television film broadcast in 1975 (starring James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons) dramatizing the events. The Hill incident was probably the prototypical abduction case, and was perhaps the first in which the beings explicitly identified an extraterrestrial origin (the star Zeta Reticuli was later suspected as their point of origin.)

If we include such clearly fictional sources as science fiction movies and pulps, the phenomena might be traced back to the 1930s.

Neither the contactees nor these early abduction accounts, however, saw much attention from ufology, then still largely reluctant to consider close encounters of the third kind, where occupants of UFOs are allegedly seen.

Later Developments

Dr. R. Leo Sprinkle (a University of Wyoming psychologist) became interested in the abduction phenomenon in the 1960s. For some years, he was probably the only academic figure devoting any time to studying or researching abduction accounts. Sprinkle became convinced of the phenomenon's actuality, and was perhaps the first to suggest a link between abductions and cattle mutilation. Eventually Sprinkle came to believe that he had been abducted by aliens in his youth; he was forced from his job in 1989. (Bryan, 145fn)

Budd Hopkins—a painter and sculptor by profession—had been interested in UFOs for some years. In the 1970s he became interested in abduction reports, and began using hypnosis in order to extract more details of dimly remembered events. Hopkins soon became a figurehead of the growing abductee subculture.

The 1980s brought a major degree of mainstream attention to the subject. Works by Budd Hopkins, Whitley Strieber, David M. Jacobs and John Mack presented alien abduction as a genuine phenomenon.

Also of note in the 1980s was the publication of folklorist Dr. Thomas E. Bullard's comparative analysis of nearly 300 alleged abductees. The mid and late 1980s saw the involvement of two esteemed academic figures: Harvard psychiatrist John Mack and historian David M. Jacobs.

With Hopkins, Jacobs and Mack, several shifts occurred in the nature of the abduction narratives. There had been earlier abduction reports (the Hills being the best known), but they were believed to be few and far between, and saw rather little attention from ufology (and even less attention from mainstream professionals or academics). Jacobs and Hopkins argued that alien abduction was far more common than earlier suspected; they estimate that tens of thousands (or more) North Americans had been taken by unexplained beings.

Furthermore, Jacobs and Hopkins argued that there was an elaborate scheme underway, that the aliens were attempting a program to create human–alien hybrids, though the motives for this scheme were unknown. There were anecdotal reports of phantom pregnancy related to UFO encounters at least as early as the 1960s, but Budd Hopkins and especially David M. Jacobs were instrumental in popularising the idea of widespread, systematic interbreeding efforts on the part of the alien intruders. Despite the relative paucity of corroborative evidence, Jacobs presents this scenario as not only plausible, but self-evident. Hopkins and Jacobs have also been criticised for selective citation of abductee interviews, favoring those which support their hypothesis of extraterrestrial intervention.

The involvement of Jacobs and Mack marked something of a sea change in the abduction studies. Their efforts were controversial (both men saw some degree of damage to their professional reputations), but to other observers, Jacobs and Mack brought a degree of respectability to the subject.

John Mack

Matheson writes that "if Jacobs's credentials were impressive," then those of Harvard psychiatrist John Edward Mack might seem "impeccable" in comparison. (Matheson, 251) Mack was a well known, highly esteemed psychiatrist, author of over 150 scientific articles and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of T.E. Lawrence. Mack became interested in the phenomenon in the late 1980s, interviewing dozens of people, and eventually writing two books on the subject.

Mack was somewhat more guarded in his investigations and interpretations of the abduction phenomenon than the earlier researchers. Matheson writes that "On balance, Mack does present as fair-minded an account as has been encountered to date, at least as these abduction narratives go." (Matheson, 251) Furthermore, Mack notes when alternative interpretations are viable; throughout Abduction, his first book on the subject, he allows and even considers likely that alien abductions are a new type of visionary experience.

Matheson notes that unlike earlier abduction researchers, Mack is generally quite cautious in his interpretations of physical evidence and corroborative testimony. He places little value in the scars and scratches often attributed to alien "medical" exams, and argues that trying to prove the actuality of alleged "implants" placed in abductees is largely a futile effort.

Mack argued that the abduction phenomenon might be the beginning of a major paradigm shift in human consciousness, or "a kind of fourth blow to our collective egoism, following those of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud." (Bryan, 270) Mack also noted that, after an initial period of terror and confusion (a phase he dubbed "ontological shock"), many abductees ultimately regard their experiences more positively, saying that their experiences broadened their consciousness.

In June 1992, Mack co-organized a five-day conference at MIT to discuss and debate the abduction phenomenon.[7] The conference attracted a wide range of professionals, representing a variety of perspectives. (In response to this conference, Mack and Jacobs were awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in 1993).

Writer C.D.B. Bryan attended the conference, initially intending to gather information for a short humorous article for The New Yorker. While attending the confernece, however, Bryan's view of the subject changed, and he wrote a serious, open-minded book on the phenomenon, additionally interviewing many abductees, skeptics, and proponents.

The Roper Poll

In 1991, Hopkins, Jacobs and sociologist Dr. Ron Westrum commissioned a Roper Poll in order to determine how many Americans might have experienced the abduction phenomenon. Of nearly 6,000 Americans, 119 answered in a way that Hopkins et al interpreted as supporting their ET interpretation of the abduction phenomenon. Based on this figure, Hopkins et al estimated that nearly four million Americans might have been abuducted by extraterrestrials. The poll results are available at this external link: The Roper Poll: UFOs & Extraterrestrial Life, Americans' Beliefs and Personal Experiences

However, critics have argued that there were significant problems with the poll's methodology which should invalidate the results. Writing in Skeptical Inquirer, psychologist Susan Blackmore notes that based on her analysis, "I conclude that the claim of the Roper Poll, that 3.7 million Americans have probably been abducted, is false."[8]

Interpretations, analyses and proposed explanations

There have been a variety of explanations offered for abduction phenomena, ranging from sharply skeptical appraisals to uncritical acceptance of all abductee claims. Others have elected not to try explaining things, instead noting similarities to other phenomena, or simply documenting the development of the alien abduction phenomenon.

Some have argued that alien abduction is a literal phenomenon: extraterrestrials kidnap humans in order to conduct studies or experiments. This is a well-known popular explanation, but has seen very little support from most mainstream scientists or experts.
Proposed psychological alternative explanations of the abduction phenomenon have included hallucination, temporary schizophrenia, epileptic seizures and parasomnia—near-sleep mental states (hypnogogic states, night terrors and sleep paralysis). Sleep paralysis in particular is often accompanied by hallucinations and peculiar sensation of malevolent or neutral presence of "something," though usually people experiencing it do not interpret that "something" as aliens. Occasionally the abduction phenomenon is also theorized to be a confused memory of past events (such as sexual abuse).
Researchers in the field of NDE and OBE notice the similarities between abduction experiences and OBEs, thus leading them to the conclusion that abduction experiences are closely related to out-of-body experiences.[9]
It is possible that some alleged abductees may be mentally unstable or under the influence of recreational drugs, though, as noted above, at least four mental health experts have argued against this explanation.
Especially criticised as unreliable is frequent reliance on hypnosis. It has been demonstrated that false memories are often very easily created, and that hypnosis can unintentionally aid in confabulation. Some abductees, however, report vivid, detailed accounts without hypnosis.
However, Budd Hopkins writes, " ... the Hill case bears upon one popular theory which has been widely but uncritically accepted by many skeptics: the idea that such accounts must have been implanted by hypnosis, consciously or unconsciously, or by manipulative practitioners who 'believe in' the reality of such events. Simon, who hypnotized the Hills, was avowedly skeptical about the reality of the Hills' abduction recollections. Yet the Hills stubbornly held to their interlocking, hypnotically recovered accounts despite Simon's suggestions at the end of treatment that their memories could not be literally true. It can therefore be concluded that the bias of the hypnotist had nothing to do with the content of their hypnotic recall." (emphasis as in original; Hopkins, 218) Hopkins also cites three therapists (Drs. Robert Naiman, Aphrodite Clamar and Girard Franklin) who were quite skeptical of the reality of abduction claims, yet who all uncovered detailed abduction scenarios from their patients. (Hopkins, 218)
UFO researcher Jenny Randles cited "an interesting study in which individuals were asked to describe imaginary alien abductions." (Bryan, 49) If these invented scenarios were similar to allegedly genuine abduction accounts, it might demonstrate that supposedly genuine accounts were indistinguishable from invented accounts. The study, however, found little in common between the two types of narratives. Bryan writes "Randles's findings strike me as significant: people who are asked to describe imaginary abductions do not come up with the scenarios, sequences or Beings described by the overwhelming majority of abductees. The 'medical examination,' such a major, recurring aspect of the abductees stories, is entirely absent from the imaginers accounts." (Bryan, 49)
Skeptics argue that the raw details of abduction accounts have been featured in science fiction since at least the 1930s, and that these details have had widespread currency, thereby influencing and shaping expectations of what an encounter with extraterrestrials might entail. For example, a 1935 issue of Amazing Stories featured on its cover an illustration of a being with large eyes and a large head who was restraining a human from entering a room where another human was reclined on a table with another large-eyed creature examining her. [10] See Rogerson's four-part article, and Martin Kottmeyer's "Entirely Unpredisposed" in external links.
Others have argued against this idea; folklorist Thomas E. Bullard asks, "If Hollywood is responsible for these images, where are the monsters? Where are the robots?" (Bryan, 50).
In answering Bullard's question, monsters and robots in fact are reported by abductees. In abduction cases investigated by UK UFO researcher Jenny Randles, "none involved the traditional gray figures conducting medical examinations seen the United States. What entities did appear were mostly human or Nordic. But there was a range of others, from monsters to robots." (Randles) Again, this might represent a cultural difference: Bullard is American, Randles is from the UK.
California based therapist Gwen Dean noted forty-four parallels between alien abduction and satanic ritual abuse (SRA). Both emerged as widespread phenomena in the late 1970s and early 1980s, both often use hypnosis to recover lost or suppressed memory. Furthermore, the scenarios and narratives offered by abductees and SRA victims feature many similar elements: both are typically said to begin when the experiencer is in their youth; both are said to involve entire families and to occur generationally; the alien examination table is similar to the satanic altar; both phenomena focus on genitals, rape, sexuality and breeding; witnesses often report that the events happen when they are in altered states of consciousness; both phenomena feature episodes of "missing time" when the events are said to occur, but of which the victim has no conscious memory. (Bryan, 138-139)
It is worth noting that many events reported during purported abductions often have parallels in anthropology, folklore and religion: Especially frequently correlate with certain imagery persistent in shamanic experiences (e.g., surgery-like procedures, foreign objects implanted in the body) and faerie contact stories, for instance. John Edward Mack, for one, suggested that modern abduction accounts should be considered as part of this larger history of visionary encounters.
In The Demon-Haunted World astronomer Carl Sagan wrote about the theory that the alien abduction experience is remarkably similar to tales of demon abduction common throughout history. "...most of the central elements of the alien abduction account are present, including sexually obsessive non-humans who live in the sky, walk through walls, communicate telepathically, and perform breeding experiments on the human species. Unless we believe that demons really exist, how can we understand so strange a belief system, embraced by the whole Western world (including those considered the wisest among us), reinforced by personal experience in every generation, and taught by Church and State? Is there any real alternative besides a shared delusion based on common brain wiring and chemistry?" (Sagan 1996 124)
It has also been noted that Terence McKenna described seeing "Machine Elves" while experimenting with Dimethyltryptamine (also known as DMT). The description of Machine Elves is often consistent with the description of "grey" aliens. In a 1988 study conducted at UNM, psychiatrist Rick Strassman found that approximately 20% of volunteers injected with high doses of DMT had experiences identical to purported Alien Abductions.
In a lengthy article, Martin Cannon makes the admittedly speculative argument that memories of alien abductions might in fact have been created in the "abductees" by a secret government mind control program, such as MKULTRA. [11]
Inventor Michael Menkin claims to have had success in stopping alien abductions with the creation of a hat known as the Thought Screen Helmet.

Michael Persinger's analysis

In a long article, Dr. Michael Persinger argues that most of the features of the abduction phenomenon can be explained as the manifestation of measurable functions of the human brain. Persinger writes that the "main theme" of his article "is to explore visitation experiences, now attributed by many people to UFO and implicitly "extraterrestrial' phenomena, from the perspective of modern neuroscience... From an operational perspective, the average visitation experience attributed to an alien entity is indiscriminable from average mystical or religious experience attributed to gods and to spirits. Instead we have been trying to isolate those areas of the brain and those electromagnetic patterns within the brain that are involved with the general visitation experience." (Persinger, 263)

He goes on to argue that "Nearly every basic element of mystical, religious, and visitor experience has been evoked with electrical stimulation" of test subjects' brains. (Persinger, 270). Individuals with some forms of epilepsy often experience vivid hallucination, and Persinger suggests that the same areas of the brain are activated in these individuals as in those who experience extraordinary visitations.

"Most people who report these experiences [alien abduction] display average to above average intelligence, are not 'crazy' and are very aware of the social and personal consequences of their experiences upon their families, friends and vocational opportunities." (Persinger, 278)

Persinger relates a specific case of a "thirty-five year old woman" who "reported ... the presence of multiple, elongated humanoids, in shimmering gray-silver clothes, that would surround her bed for a few nights every month." The woman hesitated to tell her regular physician of the encounters, for fear that she'd be seen as "crazy". (Persinger, 278) The woman was prescribed a low dose of "the antiepileptic compound carbamazepine" and after regular use of the medication, the visitations "disappeared". Persinger is quick to note that "This does not indicate that all people who report visitor experiences associated with UFOs are undiagnosed epileptics or that the phenomena will cease when with this particular medication. Instead, it indicated that well-formed and meaningful experiences, attributed to alien sources and sufficient in magnitude to disrupt the person's sense of self and adaptability, can be associated with periods of electrical activity that can be affected by treatments not typically associated with these types of experiences." (Persinger, 278)

He also cites polls indicating that up to one third of people have had some sort of similar experience: 39% of more than 1700 people polled over 20 years have answered "yes" to the question "At least once in my life very late at night, I have felt the presence of another Being." (Persinger, 280). Given that visitor experiences are somewhat common, and that worldwide, they tend to follow the same patterns, Persinger suggests that while underlying neurological factors give the experience its basic form, how such events are interpreted is shaped by cultural factors: "Because human brains are more similar than they are different, the themes of these experiences have been and remain remarkably similar across space and time. The details are simply punctuation from the person's culture." (Persinger, 296)

Persinger's hypothesis ties into another observation that alien abduction is in many regards similar to shamanic initiation.

Remote viewing the Greys

(Extra terrestrials of UFO fame)

December 1996

I have never seen a flying saucer or have been abducted. Perhaps I am too horrible for them. So if they will not come to me, I decided to use an available window and go to them. The notes are somewhat scrappy, but then if one tries to elaborate one loses accuracy.

Remote Viewing is a technique developed by the KGB and the CIA during the Cold War. It involves giving a psychic operator (a sergeant or junior officer) a set of map coordinates, asking him to project to that point and describe it. A useful method of gaining information when one cannot send a "tourist" to the spot in question.

In the course of investigating Remote Viewing, I have come by certain information, which others may wish to verify or check. The findings of one count for very little in remote viewing, and may be regarded as science fiction. When two others come to similar conclusions, the results start to be of interest. The method used was to locate on malice, in this case technical malice.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In some ways the Greys are a very young race, and in some ways very old. Their planet is rather watery with the bulk being sea, with islands or continents which may only last a few million years before being submerged again by the sea. Thus their planet does not favour land life. Land life does have certain advantages. One can see enemies at a greater distance and one does not have to swim in one's own sewerage. Thus the Greys developed intelligence before coming out of the water. They are still short of genetic material. Genetic material only suitable to life in water has got lost, and the variety for that needed on dry land is still in short supply. They are adapted to finding new dry land in a hurry, possibly psychically. They do also use floating cities. Should they go swimming, they are likely to be eaten alive by their ancestors. To them, our oceans must look like Heaven.

The Greys must be admired for the great strides they made in a relatively short time.

They still appear to be egg laying though this is liable to change, as they favour the egg taking more time to develop inside the female. Males outnumber females by about 10 to 1. Females are also dumpier and larger. The male when successful, donates his testicles to the female, who is then fertilised for life. The location of the male testicles appears to be on the forehead as bumps or horns, which seems to be a daft place to keep them. The male after losing his testicles, dies in a state of religious ecstasy. Since coming out of the water, the males have learnt how to delay sexual union, and thus has changed their society from a matriarchal one to a male dominated society. This has also meant that the males have to do most of the work. As sexual union is well worth dying for, their society is very competitive. A male must either to seen to have done great works, or have some genetic advantage. Genetic breeding plans and genetic engineering are used extensively by the Greys to improve the race, with the result that a lot of variation has been lost..

The male can be kept alive after sexual union by means of drugs and programming implants, but the result is an intelligent zombie or bio-android, who is subject to a lot of degeneration. It appears that living males and females have never been seen on Earth, only zombie males. Only a zombie Grey can survive long periods of space travel, but look very different to the original. As far as Grey's are concerned, a zombie has lost its spirit or soul. Thus zombies are oversensitive to human emotion.

Their psychology is a little different to ours. The elements of fire, air and earth appear to be about the same, but water is very different. Water has a lot to do with pecking orders and their biology, which also describes the human element of water. They are a logical race.

Their digestive and excretory system is also a little strange. I found myself in a Grey's body in one of their loos. There was a notch at the back to take the anus, and a slop pan in front. I discovered the reason for the slop pan when I vomited. Evidently they relieve themselves of waste and excess water, and indigestible material by vomiting it out. They appear to be complete carnivores, using vegetable matter for unwelcome medicine only. Anything that eats vegetable matter is a food animal. Let us hope they regard us as carnivores with chronic hypochondria.

I also experienced being a pilot of one of their planetary craft, but as I could not make head or tail of the controls, I had to leave them to the body I was in. ..The chief scientist had said that when travelling faster than light, matter does not exist, and therefore cannot be hit. That test flight proved him wrong. Also to a Grey, faster than light drive is indescribably painful.

The detail in the last 2 paragraphs on loos and space craft came within the time span of 5 minutes, and therefore could not possibly have come in real time.

On no account invite a Grey home for dinner. They are guaranteed to give the hostess a nervous breakdown with their habits, and probably the host too.

© Edmund Meadows - January 1997.

The Grey Area

Grey

AKA: Roswell Aliens,Zeta,Reticulian

Extraterrestrial Data

First Reported: September 19, 1961

Last Sighted: Present Day

Country:

Status: Unconfirmed

The Greys, also known as Roswell aliens, Zetas, Reticulians, are alleged extraterrestrial life forms that appear in modern UFO conspiracy theories and other UFO-related paranormal phenomena. They make up approximately 75% of all aliens reported in the US, 20% of all aliens reported in Mainland Europe, and 12% of all aliens reported in Britain. [1]

Appearance

Typically, Greys are described as being approximately 4 feet tall, with grey (sometimes blue-grey/green-grey) skin. Their body is typically described as being elongated, and lacking in muscular definition. Their legs are shorter and jointed differently than one would expect in a human, giving them an apparently awkward gait. Their arms often reach down to their knees, and some accounts give them three digits, or three digits and a thumb on each hand. They have a bulbous, hairless head supported by a thin neck, which is dominated by large black lidless eyes. They typically have small flat noses, small mouths and small ears lacking an auricle. In some cases, Greys are reported as having slit-like nostrils on a flat face.[2][3][4][5]

Some reports have Greys wearing tight neutral colored uniform like jumpsuits. Other reports have them appearing to be naked. In most cases, clothed Greys have no determinable gender and naked Greys have no visible external genitals.[3]

EXTRATERRESTRIALS & THE ENVIRONMENT - SERIES

THINKING LIKE A CANCER

by Robert J. Begiebing

Robert J. Begiebing teaches English at New Hampshire College

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all Heaven in a rage.
A dove-house filled with doves and pigeons
Shudders Hell through all its regions.
A dog starved at his master's gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.
A horse misused upon the road
Calls to Heaven for human blood. . . .
Every wolf's and lion's howl
Raises from Hell a Human soul . . . .
The strongest poison ever known
Came from Caesar's laurel crown.
--William Blake "Auguries of Innocence"



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

After Rio, the Earth Summit, and the Kyoto Protocol and its revisitation in Buenos Aires, are we finally ready to admit that we can expect little ecological wisdom and political will from national leaders and global conferences? Is it possible that we will have to depend on ourselves for wisdom and will?
It is, of course, an awful lot to expect humanity, in all its frailty, to demonstrate wisdom and will by acting on the central challenge of most religious traditions—self-transformation. We may well be a species ill suited to idealism. But even if we are not up to the timeless challenges of our ideals, we are still confronted by the stark reality of a growing scientific consensus: If we value life on earth, we must change our lives. We human beings must embark on a kind of collective metamorphosis. Yet even in the face of harsh, material realities, we deny and resist.
Given the state of biotic health on land, sea, and air, an objective observer from, say, another planet might be forgiven for assuming that most of us most of the time think like Donald Hodel, President Reagan's Interior Secretary. We squint up at the sky. "Well," we say, "maybe we are damaging the earth's ozone layer, but we don't have to worry or change much; it's no problem if we'll just all agree to wear broad-brimmed hats and sunglasses!" As Barbara Bramble put it at the gloomy end of the United Nations' "Earth Summit + 5" conference in June of 1997, the slow progress we make represents a "total disconnect in time scale between what is being done and what is really needed."

I hope to demonstrate, if the reader will indulge me with a little patience, that the best legacy of the nineties, however, may turn out to be that researchers in a variety of disciplines have challenged us to rethink profoundly our whole relationship to the earth. Some startling new convergence is afoot. Those investigators who take a visionary or mythic approach to our global environmental crisis are reinforcing the conclusions of those who take a scientific or materialistic approach. It is as if faith and science might become strange new bedfellows. It is as if William Blake and Isaac Newton were by dire Necessity finally sitting down together--like two aged colleagues who had decided to throw aside their old collegial enmities--in order to confront some wholly new catastrophe under the sun.

Rather than one more dreary "review of the literature," I want to start with two representative researchers, one from each tradition as it expresses itself in the final decade of our century. Let’s look first at what we might feel most comfortable with, the scientific point of view. Donella Meadows, who is the co-author of The Limits to Growth (1972) and the sequel Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future (1992), wrote a column recently for Timeline Magazine that efficiently sums up the results of her team's long research. Meadows constructs a dialogue between Economics and Earth--a sort of latter-day dialogue between Body and Soul.

She begins her Dialogue: "The first commandment of economics is: Grow. Grow forever. . . . The first commandment of Earth is: Enough." Of course she is talking about our current system, our biotically ignorant system, of economics, a system she suggests is merely about 200 years old, a system John Muir termed "the gobble-gobble school of economics." An arrogant economics that has one rule: "Do whatever makes sense in monetary terms," as Meadows puts it. Every other conceivable value and priority is negated. An economics that is gleefully ignorant of anything but itself--like an adolescent striking attitudes before a mirror.

"Economics says: Use it up fast. . . . That makes the gross national product go round. . . . Grab materials and energy to make more. Shave the forests every thirty years. Get the oil out of the ground and burn it now. Make jobs so people can earn money, so they can buy more stuff and throw it out. The Earth says: What's the hurry? Take your time building soils, forests, coral reefs, mountains. Take centuries or millennia. . . ." As Meadows points out, the first rule of Earth is give to the future; of Unconscious Economics, take it now. Moreover, as Beyond the Limits demonstrates, our human populations and material systems grow by a mathematics of exponentiation, by a doubling and redoubling and doubling again that we are astonished to discover when we look at the available data.

Meadows, I begin to understand (though she doesn't say it outright), is suggesting that we have so far denied Aldo Leopold's admonition for humanity to be "Thinking Like A Mountain"--like a fragile but complete ecosystem—that we are, on the contrary, “Thinking Like a Cancer.” Of course we might just as readily have evolved an economics of much greater complexity and consciousness. An economics of consequences. An economics of sustainability. An economics of self-examination and ethics.

But we chose not to. We have affirmed only the economics of exploding populations and proliferating earth-waste, of undifferentiated cells, of an entity that reproduces itself exponentially out of itself, or out of something driving it to so reproduce.
Thinking like a cancer.

When Leopold coined that phrase “thinking like a mountain,” he had been using the example, still relevant and symbolic, of extirpating predators off mountains in the Southwest. "I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddle-horn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise." And then of course the deer herd begins to starve, dying as any over-consumptive species "of its own too-much." Even the farmer, the cowman who cleans his range of wolves, has failed to realize that he has taken over "the wolf's job of trimming the herd to fit the range." His inability to think like a mountain leads to "dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea."

In Beyond the Limits, Meadows and her team collected massive documentation from disinterested scientists (non-partisan, non-nationalistic) from around the globe, demonstrating the results of our own “too much”:

world populations are about to double in forty years,
merely in the last twenty years industrial output grew by 100%,
because of waste and inequitable distribution of food and wealth
500 million to 1 billion people are chronically hungry,
13 million people die every year of causes related to hunger
(that's 35,000 deaths per day, most of them children),
global water resources will run down to crisis limits at our
current rates of doubling (i.e., exponential) demand in about
30 years, in U.S. waters alone fourteen major fish species are so
seriously depleted as to require, variously, from five to fifteen
years to recover if fishing stops completely, half of the global
forest loss occurred since 1950, the U.S. has destroyed 85% of its
continental primary forests and China 75% of its forests,
half the original forest cover of the tropics (containing 50%
of all global species) is gone, independent biologists' estimates
of species collapse range from 10 to 100 per day, every single ton
of the millions of tons of waste produced by consumersproduces
5 more tons at the manufacturing stage of the stream and 20 more
tons at the resource extraction site, such greenhouse gases as
methane and carbon dioxide are far higher than they have been for
160,000 years, every day 3 to 5 new chemicals enter the marketplace
and 80% of them are not tested for toxicity, just as toxicology data
are unavailable for 99% of the 65,000 industrial chemicals now in
regular use, and, finally, 90% of the hazardous wastes are generated
in the industrialized world.

When we hear such data, who among us is not tempted to go into denial. It almost becomes understandable why some would turn to cults or other escapism, just as some would turn even to terrorism.
Who among us, moreover, has the continuing strength to fight, often alone, not just for clean air and water or economic equity or the rain forests, but for nothing less than the de-commodification (if I may coin a word) of the world, of every material resource and living being in it?

The forces arrayed against any individual with a different vision, a vision opposed to global market economics, are enormous, but tragically these forces come from us. Is it any wonder, then, that a more mythic (is it too much to say millennial?) vision was struggling to find expression by the 1990s? And here I want to introduce my second example, a researcher from an opposite tradition—a tradition of psyche, of vision and soul. Dr. John Mack, author of Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994), and my second researcher, incidentally recommends Meadows’ Beyond the Limits as a "well-researched" depiction of the destructive consequences of our habits of consciousness.

I want to suggest that we might view Mack's and Meadows' books as parallel texts from this last decade, as two different approaches to the same problem. The former is a philosophical-visionary approach, the latter a scientific-materialist approach. The striking thing is that they both arrive at the same conclusions about our ecological crisis and about the causes of that crisis embedded in modern culture. We might even say that Mack’s mythic narrative emerges in spite, or because, of our denial of the data and science. No challenge to transform ourselves is more strange and potentially more unsettling than this Harvard psychiatrist’s clinical examination of what is popularly known as "the abduction phenomenon." And surely no one has taken greater professional risks than Dr. Mack.

Of course Mack's Abduction might be just one more case of conglomerate-publishers cynically pandering to what they see as the ignorance and superstition of the masses. But I think we might do better to look at Mack's work--at the visionary warnings of his patients--as simply one more in an ancient and honorable line of mythic narratives of transformation. The stories Mack's patients bring to us are above all reminders of human arrogance and hubris. We are a global species with enormous pretensions. But we are also a species that has managed to devote the last three centuries of this millennium to a process of separating biosphere from ethics.

I can’t of course reproduce here the scores of case histories documenting the repeated essential narrative that emerges from the hundreds of pages in Mack’s book. Readers can read the book and judge for themselves. Suffice to say that again and again patients speak of a penetration by “other presence and consciousness,” a journey outward, and a revelatory (often aerial) vision of the earth in ultimate catastrophe. The abductees’ revelations are apocalyptic, biblical: images of volcanic eruption, towering and thundering surf, global warfare, toxic heavens, shifting plates, the "Earth shuddering in anguish, crying, weeping at the stupidity of humans losing contact with the inner soul of their being." One of the alien figures tells a young man, "Listen to the earth. You can hear the Earth. You can hear the anguish of spirits. You can hear the wailing cries of the imbalances." You can hear the wails of the dying, the cancer-stricken.

Out of the messages his "abductees" bring to us from their trials and adventures, Mack identifies four patterns of our destructiveness: 1) corporate acquisitiveness, 2) economic injustice, 3) "ethnonational" violence, and, above all, 4) "ecological destruction on a scale that threatens the survival of the earth's living systems." Such patterns are getting harder to deny every year.

There are several possible explanations for the extraordinary visitations between human beings and something Other that about a hundred of Mack's patients describe. (And there are thousands of people with similar experiences whom Mack has of course not examined clinically). Are they all, as humorist Dave Barry would say, making this up? Is this a vast, cross-cultural fraud of epic proportions?

Or, a second explanation, is Mack dealing with a mass psychological, even religious, experience--the archetypal imaging of the collective unconscious with striking similarities for scores of people in different places and from different backgrounds? Or, finally, is something more real happening--a phenomenological event we ought to be heeding? "Yikes, Ma, even ET's are environmentalists!" There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio . . . .

Frankly, I don't see why it should really matter whether we are witnessing mass fraudulence, collective psychological imaging, cosmic visitations, or something else still. Or, I should say it matters only slightly what the source is of a particular truth being revealed. For whatever reason, and from whatever source, perhaps we are in need of the revelation being offered. For thousands of years the deepest truths, and humanity's moral truths in particular, have been embodied in fictions--in parables, myths, epics, and allegories, and in poems, novels, and theatrical dramas from ancient amphitheater to modern movie theater. The real issue we need to consider is the transformative vision being offered. The subsequent and very real question (the lives of future generations and millions of species depend on it) is: What should we do with the vision?

The answer may lie in the most significant dimension of the revelation. More than any research he has undertaken in his career, Dr. Mack reports that his investigation of abduction phenomena has led him to challenge the "consensus reality" he himself had so long embraced and indeed practiced in his clinical endeavors. The whole "Western, Newtonian/Cartesian, or materialist/dualist scientific paradigm," Mack believes, is now being challenged. We have cut ourselves off from a universe that, as world religions have so long taught, contains intelligences beyond our material realm.
Even for those rationalist readers who could never accept such a formulation--religious or otherwise--the prevailing message Mack discovers in most abduction experiences should give anyone pause. The repeated warning is as follows: It is our very world-view, our separatist materialism, to coin another phrase, that lies behind most of "the major destructive patterns that threaten the human future."

More, the collective abduction experiences are reminding us that revelation comes not only to those who seek it. On the contrary (and this too is a religious tradition) it can knock on any door at any time. We live in a universe that, perhaps, will not allow us to exempt ourselves from participation in it; will not allow us to exempt ourselves from our deeper humanity, and certainly from our moral (that is to say global, spiritual, and ecological) obligations. If we have spent several centuries contracting human consciousness to reap the enormous material rewards of technology, capital, and industry, could there not by now be something in us or outside us (or both) that is pressing for an expansion, perhaps a renewal, of human consciousness?

As we read the stories, the journeys and quests, of Mack’s patients, we can not help being reminded of the willing and unwilling heroes of old--traveling among gods and demons, descending into underworlds and ascending into heavens, to return with "the boon," as Joseph Campbell called it, the prophetic utterances, of larger consciousness. Are those of us who live in technologically developed, materialist cultures, especially, being confronted not only by a new scientific paradigm but a new ontological paradigm (what Mack calls "ontological shock") as well? At the very least, as his patients repeatedly report, whatever has happened to them is something beyond mere cognitive process; it is something that reaches deep into their emotional and spiritual lives, changing perceptions of themselves, the world, and their place in the cosmos.

Moreover, is it possible for non-abductees (like you and me, reader) literally to have something of the view of ourselves and the earthscape that alien visitors, especially if they were to come from other solar systems and galaxies, would have? Our astronauts certainly have had something like a transforming perspective. Following the Apollo 11 landing on the moon, for example, Buzz Aldrin wrote a monograph with his minister Dean Woodruff entitled The Myth of Apollo 11: The Effects of the Lunar Landing on the Mythic Dimension of Man. Here Aldrin argues that we need not more science and technology alone, but "cultural symbols" by which we can live, an through which we can embody the "experience of the whole." Most of us flying in and airliner or private plane could have such a view if we looked out the window consciously.

In fact, I was reminded of this possibility by an article entitled "A Hawk's Eye View," which I came across in the same issue of Timeline where Meadows’ dialogue between Earth and Economics appeared. The author, a helicopter pilot named Richard Rathbun, describes the revelatory view from above. In the realm of birds, as Rathbun puts it, the world looks "more like a system of relationships." Once removed from ground-level, he no longer sees merely the linear strips of roads and paths, but the "more spatial, more contextual, more related" actualities of human interaction with the landscape. Freed from "our earthbound ways of seeing the world and ourselves," he feels compelled to contemplate "the consequences of our species-centered view." Consequences. Another name for ethics.

"From the air, a pattern emerges," Rathbun writes. "Every desirable place draws people. . . . Now it seems we are even taking the less desirable places. We establish a foothold and from there things grow. You can see this most clearly flying at night. Because of the stark visibility of the lights and the patterns they portray, you can see how our intrusion develops. . . . The lights look like a strangely beautiful cancer, spreading out along the veins and arteries of roads and highways." Rathbun has seen from above the same pattern in his own bioregion--San Francisco Bay--as he has seen in Brazil, Mexico, Nepal, Kenya, Oregon, Montana, and South Dakota. Even in the Sahara, he saw that traditional, nomadic peoples replicate the pattern. Population and cattle grazing are so dense around rare African wells that no new trees or grass can gain a foothold during drought periods. The Sahara takes over pastureland at the rate of about a thirty-kilometer leap every year.

But we busy human beings don't really notice such changes from the ground. Things seem pretty normal, Rathbun points out. Time unfolds in our linear way; growth occurs bit by unnoticeable bit. And Growth Is Good. "It all seems normal and benign." But the birds, he assures us, know otherwise. From the birds' perspective, surely a kind of "alien" perspective, another pattern is obvious. The people Rathbun takes up into the sky often begin to wonder about consequences.

Meadows' description of economics reminds me of Rathbun's flights over the central California coast, when he veers off into relatively untouched areas. "Some days, as a meditation," he reports, he listens to beautiful music in his helicopter as he escapes "the grip of the city, climbing out over the windy hills toward the coast. This is steep, rugged country. Topping the hills, the land opens up, and the ocean takes over the horizon. The lack of roads chokes back the chokers, and there are more cattle than people. The red-tailed hawk still owns this territory. One sees deer, coyote, bobcat. It is beautiful. . . . Wild and untamed and very alive. Here it is still dark at night. But the humans are coming--unless we decide not to." Unless we decide enough is enough. Unless we begin to think like a mountain.

In the spring of 1997 as I read of Rathbun's flights over California, I was reminded of my own trip to California that April, a sorrowful trip all the way from New Hampshire where I live. I recall driving up from Big Sur with my mother and three sisters. We had been exploring that rugged, sublime coast for a place to scatter my younger brother Richard's ashes. Many years ago he had lived in Big Sur for a time, and he always returned when he felt in need of regeneration. Once he and I hiked redwood forests where he showed me great rusting hulks of abandoned engines used a century ago to haul massive trunks out of the woods. But he also showed me the giant ferns that endure the dance of butterflies when the sun breaks through. Another time when I was visiting California, we hiked those coastal mountains, where the seawind sweeps up the grassy hillsides and blow-dries the sweat off your body and out of your clothes. Where you look down thousands of feet to the wild Pacific below.

Driving back from Big Sur in the spring of 1997, my mother and sisters and I felt relief for the first time since we came together to arrange for my brother's memorial service and disposal. We felt relief because we had finally stumbled onto a place that my seventy-five-year-old mother could walk to, less than a hundred yards in on the eastern side of Highway 1. Here we found a stream cascading in a true forest glade, an opening in redwoods. Ferns abound. Green plants of all kinds, many I do not recognize, spread within and up along the sides of this canyon whose stream leads under the highway down a steep ravine to the Pacific. My sister Suzanne, ostensibly the least spiritual of my sisters, swears she had an experience upon finding the trail to this spot, for it was she who found it. She heard my brother, in his unmistakable growly voice, say, "Ahh, little sister, this is the place." No one else heard the voice, but even before she told us about it we were all convinced immediately that it felt right. It felt like Richard.

At his packed memorial service, the priest my mother arranged for had been delayed, so some of us had to get up--sisters, cousins, friends (there were scores of old pals)--and painfully speak our personal memories of Richard. They were authentic and poignant memories, all of them. He was a man whom many loved, but he was an outsider to the system--a glazier by trade who drank himself to death when he lost his job due to injury and then lost the woman he loved. As one of his best friends said, "Richard was a man born about a hundred years too late." I would have said about two hundred, but I, we all, knew the friend's truth. My brother was more at home in Big Sur than anywhere else, save perhaps the Sierras where he went with his buddies on fishing trips.

But then as Suzanne drove the car north, I noticed a hawk, perhaps one of Rathbun's California red-tails? It seemed to accompany us. We were astonished because just as we were leaving the site where we had decided to spread Richard's ashes once the funeral home gives them to us, I looked up over the roof of the car and a great hawk circled above the very ravine we had chosen. "I can't help feeling that's Richard's spirit," the same sister who heard the voice says when I point out the hawk. "That this is the spot, and everything's okay. He's telling us." For a while the hawk flew along the coastal road above the car, while we watch amazed. Finally it veered off over the ocean like a pilot dipping his wings to his kids below at an air show.

I don't know what to make of it; I try not to say or think much about the hawk. Talking about such experiences one starts to sound a bit loony, like one of Mack's patients. But the point is that I felt the cancer as we entered Carmel again and then Monterey--the burgeoning population and ceaseless development, the crowds, the glib suntanned shoppers, the convenient malls, the packed highways, the high-density housing, the water-crises and diminishing aquifers. The cancerous culture of unchecked, exponential growth. The culture my dead brother loathed. This is a feeling I recognize from my experiences of driving down Interstate 89 when I've spent a few days in our family camp among the old hill farms of Vermont, three miles off the paved roads and up an old carriage path. What we human beings have wrought is wrong, deadening, alien to the best spirit in ourselves. And we know it. But perhaps now we need some apocalyptic revelation to be reminded of it. We need that perspective of the Other. We need something much larger and more threatening than ourselves to be able to see again, to be able to think like a mountain, rather than like a cancer.

Are we at the point where something larger has to come to us, or into us, and transform us--by vision, by fear, by whatever it takes? Maybe our minds and souls are responding finally to this deep need. Maybe Mack's patients are instigating not quite a classic dialogue between our bodies and our souls, but a dialogue between our best and worst selves.

We have been avoiding the "land ethic" Aldo Leopold propounded a half-century ago. "We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. . . . When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect." Each of us is a member of an ecological community that includes soil, land, water, plants, and animals. To abuse any part of the community for self-gratification or self-indulgence or even for mere convenience is not only anti-ecological, it is anti-survival and therefore anti-social behavior; it is bad citizenry. It is, in a word, unethical.

The extension of ethics to the land, to our "land-relation," in Leopold words, is "an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity." We have in our long evolution as civil beings developed, first, an ethic between individuals and, later, between the individual and society. But we have balked at taking the next step, an ethic of our relation to land that is as far evolved beyond commodity or chattel relationships as is our modern ethic of anti-slavery. It is not an easy evolutionary leap, Leopold knew. Much is being demanded of us. "No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions." Everywhere around the globe we human beings are being asked to transform our whole world-view, which is wholly, disproportionately, cancerously economic.

Leopold again: "a system of conservation based solely on economic self-interest is hopelessly lopsided. It tends to ignore, and thus eventually to eliminate, many elements in the land community that lack commercial value, but that are . . . essential to its healthy functioning. It assumes, falsely, I think, that the economic parts of the biotic clock will function without the uneconomic parts." This is the lesson at least as deep in our own English-language tradition as Wordsworth, Thoreau, and, earlier in our own century, Rachel Carson and Leopold himself. Yet we have chosen to ignore the fathers and mothers of this new ethic. We have dutifully strapped on our blinders and cast our lots with the manufacturers and millionaires, hoping we too might glory in such material wealth, or at least in the golden crumbs falling from their tables.

The question keeps returning then: are we somehow (even in a nomadic state) destined to think like a cancer? Is our industrial and post-industrial system in the developed world simply a product of something disproportionate and cancer-like in our deepest, primitive being? Or is it the system that is now out of control by some mistake or overloading ( or to use the term Meadows borrows from William Catton, Jr., "overshooting") the carrying capacity, a system that may still be correctable if we change in fundamental ways--change our thinking, behavior, dreams, desires?

We Americans, at least, are so totally immersed in a powerful and seductive Business Culture that we often blame the government or the messengers (the concerned scientists, alarmists all) for the various fixes we are in, whether local, national, or global. We want to say that the only inhibitions for responsible corporate behavior are those terrible government regulations. But if we insist on allowing prices not to reflect social and environmental costs (what economists call "externalities"), if we weaken our regulations so that they can be bought off or finessed, if we continue to reward businesses that (like bloated infants) get someone else (taxpayers) to clean up their messes, if we are more obsessed with our stock prices than our stock of wild plant and animal species (whose biotic health and chances of survival reflect our own), it may be high time to stop our old habits of thought long enough to re-examine the American and increasingly global Business Culture we by now so thoughtlessly accept and evangelize. It may be time to listen to some Alien Messenger from within or without. But who could be more alien now (whether scientist or visionary) than a Thoreau, a Leopold, a Rachel Carson, or a Meadows?

Can any of us really know whether it is even now too late? Meadows and her co-authors argue for the possibility of healing, sustainability, and development (as opposed to mindless growth) if we act radically and promptly, if we can marshal the required "maturity, compassion, and wisdom." They provide examples of individuals and corporations acting with maturity, and in some cases saving money as a result. They provide a flexible, broad program of restructuring, and the first order of restructuring--the key to social and personal transformation--is information, changing the "information links" and "flow" from the current system.

The corruption of information links is an essential element of our problem, and it is the very subject of another book, The Heat Is On (1997), by Pulitzer-Prize winner Ross Gelbspan. As if to reaffirm the point Meadows makes early in the '90s, Gelbspan unearths and scrutinizes the propaganda campaign waged by OPEC governments and fossil fuel companies (propaganda which, as Gelbspan convincingly details, was swallowed whole by the news media) to discredit the scientific consensus on global warming. Never mind that 2,500 scientists of the United Nations Panel on Climate Change have issued massive, science-based warnings to governments around the globe. The fossil fuel lobby by its own testimony, in a 1991 planning memo, revealed its determination to "reposition global warming as theory rather than fact." They began by paying off a handful of toady academics to dispute the scientific panel's findings and present their minority view before Congressional committees, as if they represented the principles of balance and equal time. Congress and the mainstream press bought the greenhouse skeptics' story-line. And they bought it all the more readily for the added activity of industry front groups with titles like "The Information Council on the Environment" specifically formed to spread further disinformation and create the appearance of uncertainty among scientists. (Isn't it telling, by the way, that the insurance industry, whose profits are threatened by climate and weather change, now lobbies for reduction of greenhouse gasses?). Like the aging tobacco giants no one really believes anymore, the fossil fuel lobbies are now taking their turn at mis-educating the Congress, the news industry, and the public. Must we accept their "educational" program?

Such disinformation and “brownlash,” as Paul and Anne Erlich have called it in their own massively documented book The Betrayal of Science and Reason (1998), is why Senate leaders and White House aides declared the tentative agreement in Kyoto Dead On Arrival well before it arrived in 1998. And they can get away such arrogance because although, according to a New York Times poll, 65% of the American people believe we should take steps unilaterally to limit our own greenhouse gas emissions, only one percent of Americans believe the environment is the most important issue facing us. And business, labor, and agriculture campaigned hard to defeat the Kyoto Treaty. As Senator Joseph Lieberman told John Cushman of the Times, the presence at Kyoto of big corporations with revenues larger than many of the countries attending, of the labor unions with more members than some nations’ armed forces, and of industrial trade associations with headquarters more grand than embassies, made the conference look "as if a large chunk from the capital has been transported from Washington to Kyoto for two weeks." And the Global Climate Information Project, an industry coalition, spent tens of millions of dollars on anti-treaty advertising to scare Americans with warnings of economic hardships and disasters. Apparently such advertising works; so far we seem to be afraid of change, or afraid to demand change.

As Leopold argued two generations earlier, and Meadows did so recently, we need qualitatively different information and education; we need to know the data and the trajectory of our current behavior and growth. How else will we be motivated to change and act wisely? Social sustainability and biotic equilibrium, Meadows and her co-authors argue, are attainable. I can't help believing that we need a public discussion, finally, of the program they outline at length in their final chapter, a program they summarize under five headings: Visioning, Networking, Truth-telling, Learning, and Loving. The revolutionary goal is sustainability. And "information is the key to transformation." I want to believe we have it in us to change.
And there are other voices of hope we might turn to for solace. One is Jan Tinbergen, Nobel Laureate economist. Writing of Meadows' book, Tinbergen says it convinces us that "sustainable development, a clean environment, and equitable incomes can be organized." For this Nobel economist, at least, Meadows' work reveals "the consequence of our failure to understand the limits . . . of natural resources"--that "the highest present incomes" can not be maintained and "market economies are obviously in need of some intervention in order to provide public goods, to avoid too much inequality, and to approach sustainability."

Another hopeful voice is Dr. Willis Harman, President of the Institute for Noetic Sciences: the science of transformational potential in the human mind. His speech to an audience of the Center for the Evolution of Culture in 1996 emphasized, in language not unlike Dr. Mack's, our current limits of thought and the signs that we may be preparing to transcend those limits.

Our chief limitation, Dr. Harman argues, is that we are not yet serious enough about planning for the future--our children, our grandchildren, and the generations to follow. Either we approach problems at a merely superficial level or we approach merely a part of a problem when a holistic approach is required. (The level of dialogue in the 1996 presidential campaign is one of his examples of our superficial and partial thinking). Harman sees, however, the beginnings of a global dialogue that is challenging our most cherished assumptions--most of which sound to me like the assumptions of a global Business Culture and its simplistic (that is to say willfully ignorant) vision of economics. The force for transformation, Harman believes, is a growing sub-culture of spiritual, ecological, and feminine values that are beginning to challenge our old materialist-economic values. In part, this subculture is beginning to emerge as a force around the globe because it is getting more and more difficult to fool ourselves that our problems are local or soluble by a little better management or a little more technology. Instead, we are being forced to admit by a growing mountain of evidence that "there seems to be an interlinkage of problems [social, political, environmental] that get progressively worse." Harman's hope is that our species will begin to listen to this other voice and deeper vision of the world, its resources, and our place in it.

Can any of us say whether we are now capable of realizing (before catastrophe forces us too late to realize it) the potential Willis Harman sees in us? Probably not. But without hope, we'd simply continue our denial or give up. And before long what would be left to us but to end up dancing and fornicating in the streets like the soon-to-be victims of some medieval pandemic. Yet this time Death will not be borne on ships and rats from afar. The plague will be of our own making, the result of our failure of vision, of the failure of several generations now to attend to any consequences beyond themselves, beyond their own moment, beyond their material benefit and convenience. It will be, in the purest sense, an ethical failure.
Yet it seems also important to be clear that there is always a danger pursuing false gods and prophets as well: that we careen off into another disproportion, into cultism and utopianism, toward Never-Was and No-Where. Flying away, as it were, out of our bodies and therefore out of our tougher responsibilities to the living here-and-now, to each other, to the earth and its entire still-viable species. It is a kind of fanatical quietism that some religious traditions may at times lead to. Yet is anything more amoral than fanatical quietism in the very teeth of destruction? That is, I think, the warning example of the Heaven's Gate suicides during the convergence of the vernal equinox, a partial lunar eclipse, and the Hale-Bopp comet in the spring of 1997. If , like such cultists, you believe that your leader is the living Messiah, or even if you believe you have God's e-mail address, and if you add to that a strange and literal mix of extraterrestrial show-biz and web-chat, you are already mixing the vodka and phenobarb cocktail for yourself and the rest of us. And probably for most of the species on this planet as well. Through your fanatical quietism and escapism. Through your denial of your body, your here-and-now humanness, your animal connections to the biosphere and to every creature great and small within it.
The solution, if there is one, certainly is not in the denial of our bodies and our connections to terrestrial nature. Nor is the solution to be found in the glinty-eyed righteousness of flesh-denying fundamentalisms. Any way out will have to come through the humble admission of our bodies, of the body's essential, unavoidable, and therefore ethical connection to the earth.

But it is hard to blame people for going into denial or desperation these days. We are in desperate circumstances, after all. At rare, lucid intervals we look at our own cancerous disproportions and we feel like aliens indeed, aliens in our own landscape. We wonder: When and how did all this happen?

Perhaps, after all, this is the message of the voices Dr. Mack brings to us--from wherever they arise. "The result of all these experiences for abductees," Mack reports, "is the discovery of a new and altered sense of their place in the cosmic design, one that is more modest, respectful, and harmonious in relation to the earth and its living systems. Emotions of awe, respect for mystery and nature, and a heightened sense of the sacredness of the natural world are experienced along with a deep sadness about the apparent hopelessness of the Earth's environmental crisis." Think, the alien voices are telling us, like a mountain.

Because of capital and industrial forces put in motion two hundred years ago, because of our own limited, linear experience of those forces and their contemporary instrumentalities and impacts on our lives, we are now denying our own highest principles and traditions; we are failing ourselves as well as others; we are capitulating to our worst potential--to every childish greed and self-centeredness, to every manipulated adolescent-consumer impulse, to every condition of self-indulgent blindness. We no longer even know just where we are and how we fit into larger schemes--biotic, spiritual, cosmic.

As Bill McKibben put it in a 1997 op-ed piece in The New York Times entitled "The Earth Does a Slow Burn": "If we were looking through a telescope and seeing the same things happen on some other planet we would find it bizarre and fascinating. If someone's watching us, they're doubtlessly bewildered." Despite the magnitude of the changes and the scientific evidence, McKibben says, our responses have "been feeble." McKibben suggests forcing our leaders to convene on the crumbling edge of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to get them moving. But it would of course be up to us to send them there, even in a metaphorical sense. Will we? Not if we don't first change ourselves.

Not if we keep going as we are. If we look at the history of the growing scientific consensus on just the ecological issue of global warming alone, ignoring all others for the moment, we see a perfect single example of our patterns of denial for decades now. Individual scientists picking up indicators for years got together finally as early as 1979 to issue a National Academy of Sciences report on the dangers of humanity-induced, significant climate change. And by 1985 the United Nations, the World Meteorological Organization, and the International Council of Scientific Unions sponsored a conference and report making similar warnings. By the beginning of this final decade 49 Nobel prize winners joined the 700 members of the National Academy of Sciences to emphasize their consensus that we are dangerously amplifying the Earth's natural greenhouse effect. Worse, their estimates were that significant, effective reductions of emissions could still be made at a relatively "modest cost." Our failure to do so, the scientists warned, "would place stresses on natural and social systems unprecedented in the past 10,000 years." These warnings were repeated again and again, but the scientific consensus is not getting through to us. Whose countervailing messages are getting through, and why? What is feeding our denial and displacing the scientific consensus with contrary information? Who is glibly assuring us that "the evidence is not all in yet," that "oh, surely, things are not that bad"? Those are questions we had better begin to answer for ourselves.

For Dr. Mack, the abduction phenomenon invites us to participate in nothing less than an evolution of consciousness precisely because it defies the limits and paradigms of our current astrophysics and psychiatry. And we should not take that defiance of the norm, Mack argues, as grounds to negate the urgent, transformational imagery his patients report. Nor does such defiance negate the power of the regenerative myth (in the old, respectful sense) these patients seem, through Mack, to be telling all of us. The "alien beings" stand like Blake, Wordsworth, Lawrence, Carson, Leopold and a minority of other sons and daughters of Western culture (outsiders and renegades all) on some distant, more life-affirming shore of our humanity. You can almost see them still looking at us, shaking their heads in puzzlement at the "damned human race"--at our choosing not to think like a mountain, but like a cancer, choosing, in Mack's words, "aggression . . . and mindless or gratuitous destructiveness." The Other voices bear a hard lesson to Mack's patients--to all of us--about the necessity of ego-death, or at least ego-restraint, in our currently constructed consciousness.

Our choices now seem to be between acceptance of oneness or continued imbalance, disproportion, and collective insanity; between humility and harmony or continued disharmony; between corrective action or continued betrayal and destruction; between continuing to view the earth and all its resources as nothing more than a market or viewing it "as the jewel in the crown of our being . . . and the place where we experience our connection with a cosmic Source," as Mack ultimately phrases it.

Mack is no innocent, however; he fully acknowledges the forces--psychic and physical--arrayed against any transformation of consciousness. "Huge corporate, scientific, educational, and military institutions consume many billions of dollars of material goods and maintain, as if mindlessly, a paralyzing stasis that is difficult to reverse. . . . But there are psychospiritual vested interests that resist change and that are perhaps even more powerful than these material ones, . . . . [which] might explain why it is the intellectual and political elite in our culture that seems most deeply wedded to perpetuating the materialist view of reality . . . . For it is, to a large degree, the scientific and governmental elite and the selected media that it controls that determine what we are to believe is real, for these monoliths are the principle beneficiaries of the dominant ideology." It is our obsessive materialism, as much as our “human greed," that is at the root of our destructiveness, the impetus to think like a cancer. The impetus, if you will, for the biotic, social, and spiritual failure--so far at least--of "the human experiment."

The question remains: Can we transform ourselves? As I have suggested, there are many like Meadows who think we can. But there are more who think we need not transform ourselves, that we can continue pretty much as we are. All we need is a big hat and sunglasses.

And there are others who confess skepticism about our species' collective courage, about our resolve to change fundamentally, before we are confronted with a debilitating biotic correction or utter collapse. There are others, in short, who are suggesting that the necessary long-term, self-less vision seems to be at a dangerous premium in human beings. After all, are these not the lessons of history as well as the nightly news? Are we not tempted to say with Dante: This is the place I told you to expect. /Here you shall pass among the fallen people, /Souls who have lost the good of intellect.

Return for a moment to where we began--the international conferences and politics. As Razali Ismail, president of the General Assembly, put it at the end of the United Nations’ Earth Summit, "both rich and poor nations had shown a lack of political will to force more than convoluted compromises." Not only, he went on to say, are the indicators of environmental destruction "worse this year" than five years ago during Rio, but "the spirit of Rio is gone." The Union of Concerned Scientists was no less stunned than any of us by the lack of progress on all fronts, but the scientists particularly singled out Clinton's, and therefore America's, failure when the Union's Executive Director Howard Ris told Barbara Crossette of the New York Times, "We need to tackle global warming now, not tomorrow."

Perhaps we should forgive the skeptics’ view, then, of human self-lessness, our potential for transformation. For the sake of my own daughters, at the least, I hope my own skepticism is proved to be foolish. I want to be wrong. But as I think about Dr. Mack's psychiatric work with patients who have suffered something, and about the traditions, ancient and modern, that run counter to our current consensus of reality, the "extraterrestrials" feel to me like figures in a prophetic dream. They feel like the ghosts of some Ur-race of humans, waving and calling to us who would deny their prophetic vision, even as they drift back into the very cosmos whose physical and spiritual order, on this humanity's only planet, we have tried so long, so avariciously, to deny.

Robert J. Begiebing is the author of many articles and five books,
most recently two novels entitled The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin and
The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton. His fiction writing has been
supported with grants from the Lila Wallace Readers Digest Fund and the NH
State Council for the Arts. He is Professor of English at New Hampshire
College, where he has won several distinguished teaching awards.

The Power of Myth

Joseph Campbell, with Bill Moyers,

(Doubleday: NY 1988) pp. 32-4

Moyers: Don't you think modern Americans have rejected the ancient idea of nature as a divinity because it would have kept us from achieving dominance over nature?

How can you cut down trees and uproot the land and turn the rivers into real estate without killing God? ... Scientists are beginning to talk quite openly about the Gaia principle.

Campbell: There you are, the whole planet as an organism.

M: Mother Earth. Will new myths come from this image?

C: Well, something might. ... And the only myth that is going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the planet, not the city, not these people, but the planet, and everybody on it. That's my main thought for what the future myth is going to be. ...

M: So you suggest that from this begins the new myth of our time?

C: Yes, this is the ground of what the myth is to be. It's already here:
the eye of reason, not of my nationality; the eye of reason, not of my religious community; the eye of reason, not of my linguistic community. Do you see? And this would be the philosophy for the planet, not for this group, that group, or the other group. When you see the earth from the moon, you don't see any divisions there of nations or states. This might be the symbol, really, for the new mythology to come. That is the country that we are going to be celebrating. And those are the people that we are one with.