Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact - Above Top Secret

1. Ancient EncountersLet us start with a simple fact: man has always been aware that he is not alone. All the traditions ofmankind carefully preserve accounts of contact with other forms of life and intelligence beyond theanimal realm. Even more significantly, they claim that we are surrounded with spiritual entities thatcan manifest physically in ways that we do not understand. This chapter summarizes some of thesetraditions and draws a close parallel between the ancient accounts and modern cases of contact withsimilar entities.I started work on this book during a business trip to Paris. A few hours of free time between twomeetings gave me the opportunity to pay a visit to one of the most extraordinary artisticachievements of all times, the Sainte Chapelle, which is located inside the Palace of Justice, a blockaway from Notre Dame. It is an incredible feeling, one which can only be compared to a trip withina jewel or, rather, an entire treasure chest of jewels. There is almost nothing inside the chapel itself:a few sculptures, painted wood. But the walls are made of stained glass, and the various lights ofParis shine through to create a mood, a perception, which is totally alien to the rest of humanexperience.One of the stained-glass panels of the Sainte Chapelle shows the abduction of the prophet Ezekielby an object that came as a whirlwind. He saw wheels within wheels and four strange creatures. Hewas carried away to a remote mountaintop, where he found himself in a state of wonder andconfusion.In my many years of UFO investigations, I have spoken to numerous witnesses – people I couldhear and touch and look straight in the eye – who told me they had been caught in a whirlwind, hadseen strange creatures, and had been left wondering and confused. They looked to me to dispel theirconfusion. All I could offer them was the assurance that they were not alone, that many othersshared the same experience, and that I believed future science would eventually accept andunderstand it as an important source of new knowledge.The people I interviewed would not someday be represented as stained-glass figures in the chapelswhere kings and queens bend their knees and bow their heads in worship. They were ordinarypeople with all the hopes and weaknesses of human beings. But their stories, nonetheless, are worthlistening to.The Abduction ExperienceMy first meeting with the woman I shall call Helen [Out of concern for the privacy of the witnessesmentioned in this book, their names have been changed unless they had already been published inthe media.] took place after she called to tell me about a particular motor she wanted to build. Talland fashionably dressed, she could have been a model or an executive secretary behind a big desk.Instead, she told me she was bent on solving the energy crisis by building a new type of engine.During our interview, Helen confessed that the motor idea was triggered by an abduction aboard aUFO. It seems that she had seen the UFO with a group of musicians coming back from Lompoc,California, to Los Angeles in the summer of 1968."We left after the last performance on that weekend," she told me. "We probably packed up the gearby 2:15 A.M. We must have been on the road half an hour to forty-five minutes, it might even havebeen an hour. At that point, we were on a flat stretch of land. There were hills on the right-handside, and we were going south. Out of these hills came a white light, and it moved up and began tocome in our direction. An airplane couldn't have turned the way it did, so we figured it was ahelicopter. Then it began to do very erratic things and twists, go very far out and come closer veryquickly."I interrupted her to slow down her excited recollection of that episode. I wanted to get the step-bystepaccount of her perceptions. "How did you all react to this?" I asked. "What did the others see?"Her reply was forceful: "All four of us were very aware of it," she said immediately. "We talked a