extraordinary%20encounters

e c o rded on occasion. The most famous such
case became the subject of a pioneering book
in the emerging discipline of abnormal psyc
h o l o g y, T h e o d o re Fl o u r n oy’s From India to
the Planet Ma r s (1899). In various states of
a l t e red consciousness, a woman given the
pseudonym Helene Smith (Catherine El i s e
Muller) interacted with persons from the
Red Planet, which she also visited astrally.
She produced a Ma rtian language that
Fl o u r n oy identified as an “infantile trave s t y
of Fre n c h” (Fl o u r n oy, 1963).
Reflecting a belief popularized by American
astronomer Percival Lowell, Smith/Muller
“saw” canals on the Martian surface. Her
story, like those of Swedenborg and the contactees
of the saucer era, mirrored astronomical
and other scientific theories of the period.
Within a few years, the notion of a Martian
canal system would be thoroughly debunked.
In the late 1940s and into the 1950s, it was
still vaguely possible, some astronomers
thought, that some neighboring planets (most
likely Mars and Venus) could harbor intelligent
life. Perhaps not surprisingly, the aliens
in contact lore often hailed from our immediate
vicinity. After space probes in the 1960s
established, beyond further rational discussion,
that beyond Earth there are no planets
hospitable to life in this system, the extraterrestrials
in contact claims were placed farther
out in the cosmos. Either that, or the Venus,
Mars, Saturn, and other solar planets said to
harbor advanced civilizations became etheric
counterparts, existing on a higher vibratory
rate and distinct from the lifeless worlds we
know.
Another influential early book was Oahspe
(1882), the product of automatic writing at
the guidance of angels, or so New York occultist
John Ballou Newbrough asserted.
Written between January and December
1881, the book is a mystical account of the
cosmos, its history, and its inhabitants. The
book stayed in print for decades and was
widely read in contactee circles, where
ashars—guardian angels who fly spirit ships—
became extraterrestrials in spacecraft. Indeed,
Contactees 69
the ubiquitous starship commander and channeling
entity Ashtar may owe his name and
occupation to Newbrough’s creation.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891),
who founded Theosophy, wrote of a hierarchy
of “ascended masters,” including the Venusbased
“Lords of the Flame.” In the 1930s the
flamboyant, fascist-oriented Guy Warren Ballard
marketed a simplified, popular version of
Blavatsky’s doctrine. He spoke of his own
meeting with twelve Venusian “masters” in the
Teton mountains in Wyoming. Religious
studies scholar J. Gordon Melton identifies
Ballard (who died in 1939) and his I AM
movement as crucial to the development of
the later contactee movement. “Not only did
Ballard become the first to actually build a religion
on contact with extraterrestrials,” he
writes, “but his emphasis was placed upon frequent
contact with the masters from whom he
received regular messages to the followers of
the world contactee movement. The movement
took over the I AM [spiritual] hierarchy
and changed it into a space command hierarchy”
(Melton, 1995).
In The Book of the Damned (1919), the first
volume ever written on the subject that would
eventually be called ufology, Charles Fort
(1874–1932) speculated that strange lights
and constructions observed in the sky and
space during the previous century could be
evidence of visitation from other worlds. He
also advanced the possibly tongue-in-cheek
speculation that, perhaps, some human beings
were secretly in contact with the occupants of
such vehicles.
The first explicit contact in the context of a
UFO sighting occurred on the evening of October
9, 1946, over San Diego. Many residents
had gone outside in anticipation of a
predicted meteor shower. Among them was
medium Mark Probert, who channeled cosmic
philosophy from a group of discarnates,
including a 500,000-year-old Tibetan named
the Yada Di’ Shi’ite. He worked with occult
theorist N. Meade Layne, who the year before
had founded Borderland Sciences Research
Associates. Probert and many others wit-