Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact - Above Top Secret

her "the best psychic in the U.S.") as prophesying an imminent change in our understanding ofUFOs, "and it will bring great benefit to Mankind," she says.According to an interview with Dixon published in May 1974, the UFOs are flown by women pilotsand come from a planet located beyond Jupiter but still undiscovered: "The people in the UFOs areinterested in us, but have avoided contacting us until now because we have not been mentallyready."As a society, we are developing a great thirst for contact with superior minds that will provideguidance for our poor, harassed, hectic planet. I think we may be ready to fall into a trap, perhaps akind, benevolent pitfall. I believe that when we speak of UFO sightings as instances of spacevisitations we are looking at the phenomenon on the wrong level. We are not dealing withsuccessive waves of visitations from space. We are dealing with a control system.The thermostats that regulate your house temperature summer and winter are an example of acontrol system. In summer, a thermostat allows the air to get warmer until a certain limit is reached,and then the cooling system is triggered. But in winter, when the outside atmosphere turns cold andthe temperature drops below another limit, a different mechanism, the heater, comes into play andwarms the house. A naive observer might try to explain all this by assuming that warm is "good"and cold is "bad." He or she would be right half the time. Another naive observer of the oppositeschool might take a reversed view and decide that warm is "evil." He or she would also be right halfthe time. To understand the whole phenomenon one needs a grasp of the control concept, and onemust be ready to understand that it needs two opposite principles for its function.I propose that there is a spiritual control system for human consciousness and that paranormalphenomena like UFOs are one of its manifestations. I cannot tell whether this control is natural andspontaneous; whether it is explainable in terms of genetics, of social psychology, or of ordinaryphenomena – or if it is artificial in nature, under the power of some superhuman will. It may beentirely determined by laws that we have not yet discovered.I am led to this idea by the fact that, in every instance of the UFO phenomenon I have been able tostudy in depth, I have found as many rational elements as absurd ones, as many that I could callfriendly as I could call hostile. This is what tells me that we are working on the wrong level. And soare all the believers, and this definitely includes the skeptics, because they believe they can explainthe facts as strongly as the most enthusiastic convert to Ms. Dixon's vision of Jupiterian Amazons!There are ways to gain access to the reference level of every control system. Even a child, if smartor daring enough, can climb on a chair, change the dial of a thermostat, and elicit a response. (Theresponse in question might be a sound spanking from his father, of course. The road to higherknowledge has such accidents.) It must be possible to gain access to the control of the UFOphenomenon, to forget the spirits and the pranks and the claims of extraterrestrial contact, and dosome real science. But it will take a very smart approach – and a very daring one.A Schedule of ReinforcementPsychologist B. F. Skinner has shown under what conditions an organism reacting to an externalphenomenon learns a new behavior. We also know under what conditions this learning isirreversible. These conditions are precisely similar to the pattern that the UFO phenomenon hasbeen following over the years – intense activity followed by quiet periods when it seems to havegone away entirely. Is it trying to teach us something? With every new wave of sightings, the socialimpact becomes greater. More people become fascinated with space, with new frontiers inconsciousness. More books and articles appear, changing our culture in the direction of a new imageof man.Skinner has been working for half a century to study behavior and the process of modifying it. Hisexperiments, which are hotly debated, have centered on observations of rats, pigeons, and otheranimals placed in reinforcement situations. (I am indebted to Mr. Fred Beckman of the Universityof Chicago and to Professor Douglas Price-Williams of UCLA for the suggestion that these