Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact - Above Top Secret

The recollections of the legionnaire beyond this point are vague and, by his own admission, maynot correspond to reality. Instead of either firing his gun to alert others or picking up the fieldtelephone to call his superiors, he remained staring at the object for over three-quarters of an hour.According to this man, as interviewed by Joel Mesnard: "The pale green and emerald colors werethe most beautiful, relaxing, and fascinating colors he had ever seen."The object departed in the most classical way: first the whistling noise, then the rising to an altitudeof about three hundred feet, and finally the climb at "tremendous speed" toward the northwest. Asthe object left and the man returned to full awareness, the happy, ecstatic feeling he had experiencedwas replaced by sadness. He picked up the telephone and reported what he had seen to hissuperiors. They initially thought that the experience was a hallucination due to stress, but it is to thecredit of the French military that a thorough investigation was pursued. Instead of sweeping the caseunder the rug (and the French Legion in Algeria had more pressing problems at that time thaninvestigating UFO landings!), the officers went to the site, examined it carefully, found no physicalevidence, resumed their questioning of the witness, and, as he kept insisting on the veracity of theevent and they had no reason to doubt his truthfulness, they sent him to Paris for a more detailedexamination. In Paris he was kept under observation for one week at the Val-de-Grace MilitaryHospital. An electroencephalogram revealed nothing unusual. The medical staff concluded that hewas in a state of good mental and physical health and was not suffering from the strain of war inany unusual way.Mr. Mesnard met the witness in May 1970. The legionnaire had returned to civilian life andimpressed the investigator with his practical, down-to-earth sense. He had been looking for nopublicity whatsoever and was even reluctant to discuss his experience. When he did so, he answeredquestions in a straight, matter-of-fact way. He has had no illness of any kind since the day of thesighting, no new experience of an unusual type, and he recalls the extremely peaceful state inducedby the presence of the object. "It was like time running very slowly... it was like being in anotherworld."Is the mechanism of UFO apparitions, then, an invariant in all cultures? Are we faced here withanother reality that transcends our limited notions of space and time? I see no better hypothesis atthis point of our knowledge of UFO phenomena. Certainly the space visitors hypothesis fails toexplain adequately the ancient symbolism. We do not have a simple series of incidents that could beexplained as an encounter with space travelers who might have spotted the earth and explored itcasually on their way to another cosmic destination. Instead, we have a pattern of manifestations,opening the gates to a spiritual level, pointing a way to a different consciousness, and producingirrational, absurd events in their wake.The Phoenician amulets, the close encounters with "occupants" in our time, the ancient beam fromheaven, and the focused light from UFOs seem to imply a technology capable of both physicalmanifestation and psychic effects, a technology that strikes deep at the collective consciousness,confusing us, molding us – as perhaps it confused and molded human civilizations in antiquity."Look But do Not Touch"It was a great wonder, a sign in heaven indeed, the marvelous airship that flew over the UnitedStates in the spring of 1897. And the rediscovery of the remarkable wave of reports it generated hasprovided a crucial missing link between the apparitions of older days and modern saucer stories,thanks to researchers such as Donald Hanlon, Jerome Clark, and Lucius Farish. The result of theirinvestigations is astonishing.In California, in November 1896, hundreds of residents of the San Francisco area saw a large,elongated, dark object that carried brilliant searchlights and was capable of flying against the wind.Between January and March 1897, it vanished entirely. And suddenly a staggering number ofobservations of an identical object were made in the Midwest. A witness named AlexanderHamilton described it: a craft with turbine wheels and a glass section with strange beings aboard