Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact - Above Top Secret

The Invisible CollegeAfter some thirty years of research into this phenomenon, I have reached new conclusions.Tentative as they are, they shed light on the experiences of "abductees" and on the reluctance ofprofessional scientists to analyze the facts.I believe that a UFO is both a physical entity with mass, inertia, volume, and physical parametersthat we can measure, and a window into another reality. Is this why witnesses can give us at thesame time a consistent factual narrative and a description of contact with forms of life that fit noacceptable framework? These forms of life, such as the small gray men seen by Kathy, may be real,yet a product of our dreams. Like our dreams, we can look into their hidden meaning, or we canignore them. But like our dreams, they may also shape our lives in many ways.The phenomenon has made a significant impact in my own experience. On two occasions I havetracked some unknown objects, using small telescopes. A few of my astronomer colleagues madesimilar observations, and, after making inquiries, we became aware of sightings kept confidential byprofessional astronomers the world over. The objects we were tracking were not spectacular, but thereaction they elicited among French scientists fascinated me. Instead of asking if these seeminglymaneuverable and "impossible" objects could be a manifestation of some advanced technology (andin some cases they may well have been terrestrial), they thought only of suppressing the records.They did this by denying every observation, by blaming it on airplanes or planets when thedocumentation was unassailable, and by destroying the data when it was demonstrated that noairplane could have behaved as the objects did.The insight I derived from this early experience with dogmatic scientific skepticism brought meinto contact with professionals who, like myself, wanted to understand the nature of thephenomenon, and especially to determine whether or not it had an intelligent origin. This group hasgrown larger over the years. Whimsically, it calls itself the "Invisible College."Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the American astronomer who served for over twenty years as the Air Force'sscientific consultant on UFOs, explained that name in an article called "The UFO Mystery,"published in the FBI Bulletin (February 1975):Way back in the "dark ages" of science, when scientists themselves were suspected of beingin league with the Devil, they had to work privately. They often met clandesinely toexchange views and the results of their various experiments. For this reason, they calledthemselves the Invisible College. And it remained invisible until the scientists of that daygained respectability when the Royal Society was chartered by Charles II in the early 1660's.My interest in UFOs has gone through several phases, but my curiosity has never been satisfiedabout the behavior of scientists who destroy, distort, or simply ignore the very facts they shouldinvestigate. Scientists are not the only ones to blame for the unfortunate stigma still attached to thissubject, but such a gap has appeared between the academic position and the beliefs of millions ofpeople that a reexamination of the entire problem is now imperative.We have, on one hand, the facts – thousands of unexplained observations by reliable witnesses.They stand as a monument to the limitations of our understanding. My book Passport to Magonia,published in 1970, contained a catalogue of 923 unexplained close encounters, and the size of thisevidence is increasing daily.On the other hand, we have a paucity of theories to account for this richness of data. Either theseencounters must be invention, delusion, hoax, and mirages, the experts tell us, or else we are beingvisited by an extraterrestrial race. I cannot subscribe to either explanation. I have argued for manyyears that the phenomenon could not be explained by hoax and illusion alone, that it contains anopportunity to obtain genuine new knowledge. In this section I hope to go a step further and showwhy these unexplained observations need not represent a visitation from space visitors, butsomething even more interesting: a window toward undiscovered dimensions of our ownenvironment.