Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact - Above Top Secret

The Salvation MythA great celebration in San Francisco: a thousand young people, the nucleus of everything psychicand countercultural in northern California, have gathered in a large auditorium. There are boothsselling health food, cosmic advice, tantric yoga courses, and consciousness training. A colorfulcrowd pulsates through the aisles and fills the seminar rooms. The One World Family Commune ofBerkeley runs a restaurant. It is directed by Allan the Messiah, wearing an impeccable red uniformand advertising the Everlasting Gospel revealed to him by the saucers. His information indicatesthat the earth is hollow, with the saucer people inside."Do you really believe that?" asks a friend of mine."Certainly," Allan replies. "If you were going to make a planet, would you waste all that good dirt?"I find myself on a panel with Dr. Andrija Puharich, Arthur Young, mathematician Charles Muses(Young and Muses are the two authors of an excellent book called Consciousness and Reality), andan Army scientist, Tom Bearden. Puharich describes his latest experiences with Uri Geller. Puharichexplains to the audience that he gets messages on his tape recorder, coming from a mysteriouscosmic source. But the tape vanishes regularly. There is nothing he can do to prevent it, and he istotally committed to the idea that he and Uri are now guided by a very high source of wisdom andthat the only course for mankind is to place its destiny in "their" hands.The floor is given another speaker. Humanity, he says, stands on the brink of catastrophe, at theedge of a chasm. How are we to reach the safe side? A flying saucer hovers above the chasm, ouronly hope: "Do you want a lift?" asks the UFO, helpfully.This topic is a familiar one in the "New Age" movement. The 1987 celebration of the so-called"Harmonic Convergence" used similar themes.Salvation from heaven. Shouldn't we know something more about the helpful stranger before wejump on board? Shouldn't we make sure that the chasm is real, and that we cannot bridge it with ourown resources? Cannot we reach the other side – our future – by our own means?When we are asked to suspend all our rational thoughts, to forget our "obsolete" critical faculties, tothrow control overboard, then the time has come to take all the data and go away with it to a quietplace to think. My fear is that the problem will not be seriously studied by scientists until it hasbegun to generate a high degree of public awareness, and then the approach will be an entirelyclassical one: millions of dollars to consultants and research institutes, thousands of questionnaires,field investigators with glass bottles, sociologists filling out correlation matrices, medical personneladjusting electrodes over the frontal lobes of ranchers. This would only be another wrinkle in thelearning curve, another step in the conditioning.There is a strange urge in my mind: I would like to stop behaving as if I am a rat pressing levers –even if I have to give up the cheese and go hungry for a while. I would like to step outside theconditioning maze and see what makes it tick. I wonder what I would find. Perhaps a terriblesuperhuman monstrosity the very contemplation of which would make a person insane? Perhaps asolemn gathering of sages? Or the maddening simplicity of unattended clockwork?Conclusion: Exploring Other DimensionsIn the first part of this book I have tried to document, as fully and as carefully as I could, thehistorical record that leads to the modern UFO phenomenon and to the belief in alien contact.In Part Two we dealt with reports of abduction from various times and various countries and withthe psychic and spiritual component of the contact experience.In Part Three we have built a case for aggressive new research while becoming sharply aware of thefactors that inhibit such research: the triple coverup, the political motivations. We have come torealize that we are dealing with a genuine new phenomenon of immense scope. The UFOs are realphysical objects. Yet they are not necessarily extraterrestrial spacecraft. To put it bluntly, the