Sharing the Secrets

The time has come to step back and examine this forest of undefined sensory experience for its underlying patterns.

Some large patterns emerge immediately. The discovery of the trans-Saturnian planets, beginning in the late eighteenth century, clearly delineates periods of revolutionary change. The discovery of Uranus brought the political revolutions of America and France; Neptune produced the mass popular consciousness of spiritualism and communism; Pluto revealed the dark underside of humanity, its lusts and corruptions, such as Fascism, the military industrial complexes, and the release of atomic energy. These are useful signposts, but they are too broad in scope to be definite. Think of them as the greater wave front in which the smaller eddies of synchronicity are embedded.

It is these smaller currents, standing waves and dissipative structures we are looking for; their shape holds the clues to the meaning of human evolution. Let us label one such current, with a nod to Dr. Dee, “Radical Truth,” and follow it through the flow of time. In the beginning, this evolutionary current toward sentience appears stable — a dissipative structure like a whirlpool or a smoke ring — while the information flows freely from inside, subjective, to outside, objective, then back inside, and so on. The culture using this current would then be open to the astral world, their consciousness a permeable membrane for the spirit, and at the same time part of a greater, perhaps galactic, community of such stable-structure sentients.

When there is an interruption in the flow of self-verifying information exchanges, then, like a smoke ring in turbulent air, the structure collapses. We can see these patterns emerge in the long wave of Egyptian history. Coherence with the current “Radical Truth” creates little standing waves of sentience and civilization in time. We can also see the turbulence of chaos sweep them away. The current, however, and the flow of information contained within it, can never be completely disrupted. It is part of Nature, a component of our DNA.

So, the “Radical Truth” current continues to create ever more complex patterns as it accommodates each new influx of chaos. The length of each of these periods of stable sentience and chaotic isolation grows smaller over time. As the oscillation gets faster, the psychic “temperature” rises. When a certain critical level, a sort of fever pitch, is reached, phenomena begin to erupt into consciousness.

These phenomena act like self-regulating mechanisms, sort of an evolutionary thermostat. Their appearance indicates a period when sentient standing waves are appearing and disappearing so fast that the culture has no psycho-spiritual anchoring. The thermostat kicks in self-regulating phenomena, and a new paradigm or religious perspective takes hold; the smoke ring of sentience becomes stable.

Applying this line of thought to the broad planetary signposts, we can see the political revolutions of Uranus as destablizing institutions, monarchies, empires and religions, while the mass consciousness of Neptune destablized the individual. Each period of instability created the possibility of a sudden re-organization at a higher level; kingdoms into nations, religion into science and philosophy. The dance between chaos and order, sentience and isolation, is one of long slow arpeggios, punctuated with brisk allegros.

With the discovery of Neptune, signpost to the emergence of the mass mind and the destabilization of the individual, appeared the phenomenon of spiritualism. This experience offered the possibility of reorganization at a higher level of communal society and communal mind. Spreading on an individual level, from contact to contact, spiritualism offered hope for individual survival, life after death, at the same time that the phenomenon itself was creating a collective awareness of unexplained experiences. The growth of this “gray area” of undefined sensory experience produced enough psychic instability to maintain a belief system, but without a text, that is without a self-verifying mechanism, the structure remained incomplete.

Those portions of the spiritualist phenomenon that did generate a text, such as the Spiritualist groups of Brazil who follow The Spirit’s Book or The Theosophical Society anchored by the writings of Madame Blavatsky, managed to survive through time. These are exceptions that prove the rule. Brazilian Spiritualism is a major religion in South America, but the Theosophical Society is a marginal pre-cursor to today’s New Age Movement. Both have been swallowed up by the new mythos of the UFO era.

If we think of spiritualism as a change in the beliefs about human psychic abilities, then the growth of both speculation about life on other worlds and science fiction are changes in how we view the universe and our place in it. Naturally these evolutionary developments appeared as entwined motifs. They are part of the larger pattern that is slowly emerging as the current “Radical Truth” weaves a vast tapestry of meaning around these simple movements toward sentience.

So far, we have looked at the process as one of evolution, aided and controlled by internal or psychic regulating mechanisms. However, unless we want to postulate the absolute uniqueness of human evolution, the process must have happened to other species, in other ways, at other times. This community of evolved sentience cannot help but be interested in the emergence of another such species. Let us just suppose that when the thermostat fails to restore equilibrium, the repairman appears to check it out.

Something like that seems to have occurred roughly fifty years after the onset of spiritualist phenomenon: the airship arrived. Spiritualism is an anonymous experience in the sense that no guiding intelligence is discernible in its manifestations. With the arrival of the airships, something different seems to be happening. Think for a moment of the Kansas City sightings; the airship acted as if it wanted as many citizens as possible to catch a glimpse of it. In the large majority of sightings, this seems to have been the major activity of the airships. Perhaps their only motive was to be seen. Perhaps the repairmen showed themselves just to see our response.

In that case, the airships were not encouraged. No mythic structures developed around the airship sightings. The instability of our psychic structures increased as we lurked into a series of species wide convulsions of violence. Phenomena, of all kinds, erupted on all levels during The Great War. During the twenties and thirties, science fiction developed a language from which a mythos could grow, but not until the mid-forties did the phenomenon find its text.

That the flying saucer mythos should arise from the occult backwater of pulp fiction indicates much about the nature of the process. Shaver’s visions, like Swedenborg or Helene Smith’s, tapped into a “real” level of archetypal information. Just as Swedenborg’s bent toward religious speculation colored his images of life on other planets, so too did Shaver’s paranoid dysfunction flavor his descriptions of Lemuria. At the core of both is a kernel of truth.

Shaver’s truth is the essential recognition of our “star-daemon” nature: We are not entirely from here, but a hybrid of Handy Monkey and Sentient Human. His Deros are symbolic of the Set worshipping Killer Monkey counter-force we saw at work in Egyptian history. Most of all though, it was Palmer’s insistence on the truth of Shaver’s ravings that tipped the scale. When observers such as Kenneth Arnold began to see phenomenon, Palmer was there to insist on a mythological interpretation.

The mythos that crystallized into a standing wave of belief in the summer of 1947 was inherently unstable, but in ways that are different from that of spiritualism. The flying saucer myth has a text, that is a self-verifying mechanism, unlike spiritualism. The problem with the mythos lies in the nature of that text. In order to communicate with the repair and rescue team, human awareness must expand even further. In 1947, the myth was too narrow to carry the full weight of the information.

To test our hypothesis, we must follow the growth of the UFO mythos through time. As the phenomena continued, the belief structure changed, guided by subtle changes in the phenomena itself. However, the very nature of the experience seems to be a fundamental re-organization of consciousness. As Kenneth Arnold discovered, just sighting a few unidentified objects can open the doors to a vast funhouse filled with strange events and ambiguous meanings.

By the end of 1947, the mythos had solidified into a few basic assumptions. Strange aircraft, with impossible flight characteristics, have been seen. They may be ours, they may be Russian, or they could come from outer space. A handful of so-called classic cases in 1948 and 1949, such as the Mantell incident, expanded the mythic structure to embrace a belief that an extra-terrestrial origin was more likely than any other. Along with this grew the conviction that the Air Force knew more than it was telling.

The phenomena continued. In 1950 and ’51, the myth took on its first crisply defined form. Disk-shaped objects have been around for centuries. They are extra-terrestrial craft ,flown by alien beings, capable of maneuvers and speeds far beyond ours. These visits are for the purpose of observing human activities, such as atomic testing, that may pose a threat to them and to us. The United States government knows the truth, has proof in fact, and is covering the whole thing up to prevent panic.

The phenomenon responded with the 1952 flap, in which a small armada of saucers buzzed the entire east coast, including Washington, D.C. This did not change the belief structure, but brought it into focus in public consciousness. It also brought a variety of government agencies into the business of studying UFO reports. The CIA was interested in the panic potential. What if the Russians used a UFO flap to mask a first strike? Eventually the Robertson Panel convened to look for explanations. They only succeeded in reinforcing the belief that the government knows more than it was telling.

In 1953, the myth began to grow again. The spark this time was a spate of contactee stories. These encounters almost appear to be a psychological corrective to the hardware sightings of 1952. They contain elements of the Shaver Mystery, although in a new and different context. The contactee additions to the mythos include the idea of telepathic or psychic contact with space brothers from utopian societies on other planets. These space brothers, who often take contactees for rides in their space ships, are here to help mankind overcome its problems. To do this, the contactee is often given a message of hope, which he is told to spread throughout the world. Along with the good space brothers, the contactees reported mysterious “Men in Black,” (not too dissimilar from Harold Dahl’s visitor during the Maury Island affair) who are intent on covering up the existence of flying saucers.

The contactees split the UFO believers into two camps; those who supported the space brothers and those who favored a more hard science, hard evidence approach. The hardware advocates began a long struggle with the government for more information. The contactees began to form religious communities. By 1957, another jolt of phenomenon was required.

A brief three day flap of hard sightings brought the myth back into focus. A new belief developed; flying saucers could interfere with magnetic fields, stopping car engines and effecting electronic instruments. They could even cause sunburned skin and other radiation effects. The hard science believers continued to fight the government for full disclosure of its information, while denying that any contact reports were true.

By the sixties, many things were changing in the global consciousness. The 1957 flap had coincided with our own entry into space. By 1964, the United States and Russia were locked into a race for the moon. The UFO mythos blossomed between 1964 and 1972, fueled by several flaps, many new books and movies, as well as the general explosion of consciousness among those who had grown up with the UFO era.

Basically, the myth asserted that the saucers had been here for thousands of years and are definitely of extra-terrestrial origin. This was thought to have been proven by radar sightings, landing traces and metal samples. UFOs have the ability to cause blackouts and other magnetic interference. They may also be hostile, causing air crashes, disappearances and cattle mutilations. The government is covering up, along with the CIA and the Air Force, which may be purposefully bungling all UFO investigations. The aliens are here to observe human activity, and, hopefully, to save us from our own destruction. There have been no reliable contact reports, although some people claim to have established mental contact, traveled in space ships, and been abducted and subjected to medical experiments.

In the late seventies, the myth struggled to redefine itself. The 1973 flap had raised unfulfilled expectations. In the face of that stimulus, the myth began to shift toward the emerging themes of crashed saucers, cattle mutilations and alien abductions. By the mid-eighties, the myth had reshaped itself into a dark and forbidding image that seemed worlds away from the up-beat warnings of the contactee’s space brothers.

The alien craft were now seen to be manned by small gray- skinned aliens from a dying world who are trying to save themselves by genetic experiments on abducted humans. These abductees are often unconscious of the experience until their “missing time” is re-lived under hypnosis. The aliens keep track of the abductees through implants in the nose and under the skin at the back of the neck. The aliens are also using cattle for the same genetic purposes. The government has recovered crashed saucers and used this technology in its newest generation of secret weapons. The government and the CIA are of course covering all this up.

This myth came into clearer focus with the publication of Whitley Strieber’s Communion in 1986. However, the darkness of the belief system also came to light with the realization that some of the UFO information in recent years had been tainted by a government dis-information project. Strieber, a successful fiction author, moved the discussion into a mass arena with his best-selling book, but the UFO “community” preferred the morbid ravings of William Cooper and other possible dis-information operatives.

The shape of the UFO myth in the nineties is very dark and full of grim “gloom and doom” predictions. It almost seems as if the mythos had been co-opted by the Killer Monkey counter-force for the express purpose of scaring the population into avoiding all contact with the phenomenon. The new UFO myth of the nineties asserts that the government made a pact with the aliens to allow genetic testing in exchange for alien technology. The people in control of this technology then formed a new world order or secret government. They are willing to use any means necessary to retain their control, including assassination. This New World Order is on the verge of taking over the entire world, with the help of the Grays and Reptiloids. When this is accomplished, the abductees and others will be herded into new concentration camps.

In his latest book, Breakthrough, Strieber presents a picture of an on-going relationship with an alien being. In his view, the fear comes from our ignorance of the overall process. We are afraid of ourselves, afraid of what contact will reveal about us. Looking back on fifty years of phenomena, we are left with the feeling that something is missing; something has been overlooked or deliberately obscured. The missing detail is not aliens on ice in Ohio; it is something we have missed within ourselves. The mythos has a text, but the ability to self-verify has diminished over time.

Perhaps, although we can interact with the phenomenon through the context of outer-space aliens, we have lost the ability to communicate directly. It could be that the alien visitors speak a language we have yet to unravel, perhaps even the Angelic Language of Dr. Dee’s Ophanic teachers.

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