Ufology and parapsychology are two disciplines not on
friendly terms with each other.
But that’s a mistake. The two fields of research naturally converge into
one, more interesting discipline than either operating on their own.
Full disclosure, I write about
this because I’m trying to understand my own experiences. I am periodically befuddled by
experiences that seem incredible and impossible. So let me begin with a report of my own experience: a UAP,
an unidentified aerial phenomenon. My experience was more than a sighting. It was contact intending religious signaling
of some sort.
It was 11:30 P.M. April 23, 1971.
Relaxing together on the couch, Jane and I were listening to an intense piece
of music by John Coltrane, “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” Impulsively,
I got up and walked to the window, and looked up into a blue night sky, still
grooving with the music. Suddenly,
out of nowhere I saw a cluster of lights emerge from the sky. They began to dance back and forth,
performing impossible aerial maneuvers, echoing the rhythms of Coltrane—a few
hundred feet above our top floor apartment in Greenwich Village, New York, on
Bedford Street, NY. I then saw in the sky an apparition of a man, human,
smiling and gesturing happily, as if he too was part of our dance. His appearance
was not visible like the moving lights, but mental, which only I saw. And I called Jane to the window who was
immediately awed by the dancing lights.
Suddenly, the dance ended and the
lights stopped whirling about. Instead, they turned right and sailed in a straight line uptown a short
distance where they perched atop the dome of Our Lady of Pompeii, a Catholic
Church for immigrants. There, it
beamed several pulsations, as Jane and I watched from the sixth floor of our apartment. The lights then sailed straight back to
where they first appeared before us.
They resumed their dance for a bit, confirming the impression that this
was a communication, not just an anomalous flash in the sky. Suddenly, the
lights turned right again, but this time in a fraction of a second they shot
zigzag uptown, vanishing as they passed over the Empire State Building.
Amazed by what we saw, Jane and I
stepped out of the apartment and went one flight up to the roof where we met
Louie, a neighbor, who said, his eyes popping with astonishment, “Did you see that?”
Louie also saw and thought the lights had a pyramid shape. So, there was a
third witness to what we saw.
Asking around in later days,
there were no other reports in the neighborhood of strange lights in the
sky. A layer of coincidences I
should mention: It was Jane’s birthday and Shakespeare’s, and I was five days
from defending my Ph.D dissertation at Columbia University.
The first comment I want to make.
The intelligence guiding the lights certainly knew the music we were listening to. As often reported, UAPs
communicate by telepathy or, in this case, clairvoyance. . The intention seems
to have been to connect Coltrane’s music with a Church for emigrants. What that
might mean I lay aside as unknown. It had to be more than an ad for Coltrane’s music. My guess it was so I could tell this
story.
As the physical behavior of UAPs
clearly transcend present human technology, so do their mental capacities seem
to transcend ours. What about the blatant gap between our abilities, the psychic and the physical?
One might suggest that the spectrum of paranormal capacities revealed by modern
research represent human evolutionary potential. Ufology might plausibly be
construed as the evolutionary complement of parapsychology. As for the so-called Grays, associated
with cases of alleged abduction, it’s worth noting that they apparently have
faded slits in place of mouths, a relic perhaps of the talking and eating
phases of their evolution.
A second phenomenon helps us
appreciate the link between the two areas of research—levitation. Abductees often report being levitated
to the craft where they are subjected to medical operations. Further, the energetics of levitation
may well be involved in alien forms of transportation. Apports are kin to levitation insofar
as physical objects are observed to translocate instantly and appear to move
through solid matter. This turns up in accounts of poltergeist phenomena that
seem related to child psychology and ghost phenomenology—another point of
convergence of ufology and parapsychology. I once heard David Grusch say, almost
as an afterthought, that alien technology is mind-driven. If mystics like Joseph of Copertino for
35 years managed to defy gravity before innumerable witnesses, it is not hard
to imagine a more advanced scientific culture having evolved vastly developed
modes of transportation by tapping into the power Joseph had over gravity.
Grusch is a notable whistleblower
with regard to the now infamous U.S. decades-long cover-up of all it knows about
UFOs. If unknown agencies have evolved
somewhere in the universe an advanced mental
technology, it would mean their operations might be independent of the
constraints of time and space as we know them. The forbidding spatial distances
between Earth and other viable planets around the universe might then cease to
be an issue. We may be dealing with intelligent beings that travel from one
perceptual scene to another though a ‘tunnel’ outside the normal constraints of
time and space.
Sticking to what I know from the
details describing saint Joseph’s flights, based on about one hundred and fifty
sworn eye-witness reports, one fact is clear about his mental state. Ecstasy was invariably his mental state
while levitating. This was the
case, for instance, while saying mass; he would lift off and hover in the air
inches above the ground. Other flights
were more spectacular when he flew over people’s heads or aloft to a branch of
a tree.
Surely the scientific challenge
is to understand why and how a state of mind can serve to release a person from
the physical grip of gravity. The only space where that can happen is in dream
space. A solution to the enigma of levitation may open the door to a new and
more sustainable mode of transportation on earth. Psychic technology may conceivably become part of the answer
to reducing the consumption of fossil fuels. After all, the current climate crisis is based on fossil
fuels whose energy use is heating up the planet. The challenge is to switch to new eco-friendly forms of
energy like wind and solar. But
what about mental energy? Parapsychology,
psychical research, clearly hold clues to new forms of mental energy. New forms
of psychic energy may then represent an evolutionary step toward solving the
climate crisis. A new form of eco-friendly energy production would be part of
the response to the climate crisis.
But there’s another more
fundamental problem that has to be addressed—the malignant greed, the paranoid streak, and the violent
propensities of the human animal. Again,
the convergence under discussion contains the germ of a solution to this
problem—the higher mystical forms of consciousness marked by empathy and
emotions centered around the unifying force of love. The latter are features of near-death encounters, of certain
psychedelic episodes, and of yogic and shamanic experiences. All kinds of data suggest
that it may be possible to learn how to activate our extraordinary potentials, and train ourselves to
use them for creative purposes—aesthetic, moral, revolutionary.
The question I’m asking—how can
we actualize these higher forms of consciousness without having to undergo a
near-death experience? One feature of this extraordinary experience may hold
the secret to dealing with the darker side of human nature—the so-called
life-review so often reported. People review their whole life and report seeing
how their actions affected the people they interacted with. They feel, sense and know what’s going
on inside others as clearly as they feel, sense, and know what’s going on
inside themselves. One’s ego
expands in a way that includes the consciousness of the other as well as one’s
own.
So the question is, can we learn
to evoke the life review process and experience a more comprehensive sense of
human identity? If science and a new psychology could devise ways to induce
periodic life-reviews in human beings as part of the education and liberation of
their wider humanity, it might be
a turning-point in the history of our species.
To function in a modern
democratic society, you have to be able to read, and as a minimal intellectual achievement
you must understand and honor the concept of factual truth, basic to all the
higher notions of truth, such as aesthetic, social, scientific, and mystical. There is another reading skill without
which democratic and social life rely on. We need to be able to read each other, that is, encounter
each other with patience and receptivity, with awareness and sensitivity. The
interesting news is that a capacity for remarkable intuition and empathy may
very well be part of our untapped deep self. We know this in particular from
modern studies of the near-death experience.
The importance of the life-review
has been underscored especially by one of the American founders of near-death
research, Kenneth Ring. Moreover,
as far as I know, Dr. Ring has written the only book that aims to unite
parapsychology and ufology, The Omega
Project: Near-Death Experiences, UFO Encounters, and Mind at Large. This book, and others I could cite,
point toward a new paradigm of scientific research that promises a more hopeful
outlook for our human future. But there are also signs of danger.
Countries that have had
encounters with UFOs are interested in acquiring their technology. This is
borne out by a reading of Coulthart cited above. Any nation that did so most likely would be able to subjugate
the entire world population before long. While such efforts are doubtless under
way, I see no evidence of any major progress, i.e., aircraft that can make 90
degree turns at a thousand miles an hour.
But this sort of scientific success would only exacerbate an already
explosively violent human condition.
Science needs to focus on research that promises to jump-start the
evolution of human consciousness, at least to the point of palliating climate chaos and murderous human
aggression.
Parapsychology and ufology, two outlaw
intellectual disciplines, are avoided if not outright denied by most
mainstreams of officialdom. Nevertheless, these two research domains have been covering
stories about as big as stories can be. In the first story, beings not of this world are constantly
interacting with us in all sorts of ways—beings obviously superior to us in ‘technology,’
if that’s the right word. Second
story—a careful para-psychological look
into human experience reveals a body of evidence that points to a possible breakthrough
in the evolution of the human species.
Just in time, some might say.
For without some kind of drastic breakthrough in our collective
spiritual life, the world process our species has set into motion since the
Industrial Revolution is going to bring down world civilization.