extraordinary%20encounters

xvi Introduction
deed to every indication channeling is just
that. It is not veridical (that is, independently
witnessed or otherwise shown not to be a subjective
experience); no channeling entity can
prove its existence, and the information provided
through the channeling process is susceptible
to neither verification nor falsification.
The “authority” of the channeling entity
rests solely on its self-identification. If you believe
he, she, or it is a discarnate Atlantean,
space alien, or ascended master, you will believe
what he, she, or it has to say. If you
choose not to believe any of that, the channeling
entity will prove helpless to get you to
change your mind. Experiences such as close
encounters, conversely, may be veridical in the
sense that on occasion they involve multiple—or,
more rarely, independent—observers.
In the case of multiply witnessed close encounters,
subjective explanations are applied
only with difficulty. An investigator in search
of an explanation has limited choices, usually
three: (1) the claimants made up the story; (2)
they naively misperceived what were in fact
conventional stimuli; or (3) they underwent
an extraordinary experience that defies current
understanding.
Between the extremes is a broad range of
nonexperiential material, a modern folklore in
which the world and the cosmos are reinvented
on the basis of believed-in but undocumented
(and often, to those who care about
such things, certifiably false) allegations. Most
persons who circulate such stuff are sincere,
but some of those who feed the stuff to them
are not. Hoaxers provide documents, such as
the supposed diary attesting to Adm. Richard
E. Byrd’s voyage into the hollow earth
through a hole at the North Pole, that believers
cite to prove their cases. Most observers
believe James Churchward’s famous (or notorious)
books on the alleged lost continent of
Mu are literary hoaxes—Churchward was
never able to produce the ancient documents
on which he asserted he had based his work—
but earnest occultists and New Agers cite his
books as overwhelming evidence that Mu
(more often called Lemuria) was a real place.
Of course, embellishments grow on top of
embellishments, and every legend of a place, a
world, or a realm that is home to otherworldly
beings evolves and has its own rich history.
Atlantis, for example, began as an advanced
civilization for its time, but by our time its
people had come to be seen as advanced even
beyond us, the creators of fantastic technologies
and even the recipient of knowledge from
extraterrestrial sources. The hollow earth of
John Cleves Symmes (1779–1829) is not the
hollow earth of Walter Siegmeister (a.k.a.
Raymond W. Bernard, 1901–1965), any
more than the imagination of one century is
the imagination of the century that follows it.
Flying saucers were not part of Symmes’s
world; consequently, they did not exist in his
hollow earth. By the time Siegmeister wrote
The Hollow Earth (1964), no alternative-reality
book could lack flying saucers.
It is entirely likely that nothing in the book
you are about to read will tell you anything
about actual extraordinary encounters and
otherworldly beings. If such exist, however, it
is not beyond the range of possibility that
somewhere amid the noise of folklore, belief,
superstition, credulity, out-of-control thinking,
and out-of-ordinary perception a signal
may be sounding. If so, it is a faint one, indeed.
The world has always been overrun with
otherworldly experiences, some of which certainly
appear to resist glib accounting; yet so
far it has proved exasperatingly tricky to establish
that otherworldly experiences are also otherworldly
events. The otherworld, perhaps,
can happen to any of us at any time, but we
may not live in it—at least if we know what’s
good for us—in the way that we live enclosed
within the four walls of the physical structure
in which we read these words. It is not wise to
pass through a world of physical laws while
distracted by all-encompassing dreams. Even
so, there is still a nobility to dreaming. There is
also an undying appeal to the sort of romantic
impatience that imagines new worlds bigger
and more wondrous than our own, then