A STRUCTURE IN THE AIR
Science, History, and Secret Knowledge
What Is Going On?
In the past forty years the question of the real nature of the UFO experience has been addressed by psychologists and psychiatrists, most notably Carl lung, by public personages ranging from presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford to Senator Barry Goldwater, by a plethora of scientists, by the United States Air Force and various security agencies, and by the general public.
In addition to all this recent interest there are reports of disk sightings, of airships, of little men in silver clothing, dating back over a thousand years.
I began this search by assuming that I was dealing either with a mental aberration or a visit "from another planet." If I had been asked, I would have said that the nature of my experience indicated that the visitors hadn't been here too long, and that I had been studied by a team of biologists and anthropologists.
Judging from the extraordinary range — not to mention the age — of some of the material I have found, thin cannot be the whole answer. Even if partially true, there is much more to it than a recent arrival of more or less comprehensible visitors. Whatever this may be, a correct and final understanding of it certainly poses an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual challenge of unprecedented complexity and subtlety.
There is so little final knowledge of this phenomenon that it is impossible to do more than speculate about its actual nature. But speculation need not be random; it can be careful and directed.
The visitors could be:
• from another planet or planets.
• from earth, but so different from us that we have not hitherto understood that they were even real.
• from another aspect of space-time, in effect another dimension. from this dimension in space but not in time. Some form of time travel may not be impossible, only unlikely and probably very energy-intensive. For example, if we could convert a human being into some sort of energetic medium — say light or radio waves — then place a reconverter 100,000 light years from earth, a person could step through a door here, feel as if he had come out the other side instantaneously, then step back and find that he was 200,000 years in the future. A cumbersome time machine, but it would work. We cannot assume that time travel is out of the question.
• from within us. I keep returning to this hypothesis because I find it so endlessly interesting and at its core so compelling. I suppose the idea that the gods we create would turn out to be real because we created them has a certain ironic appeal to a modern intellectual.
• a side effect of a natural phenomenon. We know so little about how magnetism and extra-low frequencies of all kinds affect the human organism. Perhaps there are natural electromagnetic anomalies that trip a certain hallucinatory wire in the mind, causing many different people to have experiences so similar as to seem to the result of encounters with the same physical phenomena.
• an aspect of the human species. We have a very ancient tradition of afterlife. The respect with which Neanderthals buried their dead in the Middle East more than thirty thousand years ago suggests that this belief may actually predate our own species.
Maybe we do have an afterlife, but not quite in the way tradition suggests. Maybe you and I are larvae, and the "visitors" are human beings in the mature form. Certainly, we are consuming our planet's resources with at least the avidity of caterpillars on a shrub.
Ancient astronomers of India believed that the Siddhas (human beings who have attained perfection) revolved between the clouds and the moon, having been transformed into a lighter, less material state.
Maybe the ancient and revered concept of human spiritual transformation relates to the emergence of the adult from the larva.
In our society transformation has a bad name, having been associated with various meditation fads and instant success groups. But real transformation has nothing to do with gaming a better life in this world; deliverance does not involve trying to use Buddhist chanting techniques to acquire a new Mercedes, nor is salvation a side effect of Fundamentalist healing services. Transformation for a Zen monk, a Moslem sufi, a Catholic, or a Jehovah's Witness is the same: It is a matter of delivering one's self into the possession of God. Meister Eckhart puts it very well when he says, "We must become as clear glass through which God can shine." But this involves giving up the "self," which feels just like dying.
My historical survey has found that the core experience of seeing flying disks and small figures goes back a long, long time. If we are dealing with extraterrestrials, would they really have been here, say, for a couple of thousand years and remained hidden all that time? Or did they come recently, and find a way to slip themselves into a preexisting human mythology in order to hide there? Or even more extraordinary, it is possible to consider that they might have really, physically arrived sometime in the future, and then spread out across the whole of our history, in effect going back into time to study us. This might mean that they could be here only a short time — say a few weeks or months-but are carrying out a study that would seem to us from our position in sequential time to have extended over our entire recorded history. Of all the theories, this one alone explains why creatures in 1986 would seem so unaware of our languages, nature, and even our clothing, and yet possibly have a history as fairies and gods going back thousands of years. It might also explain why they are so enigmatic and seemingly immaterial. If time travel can exist and is involved, God only knows what the travelers would look like to us as they reached back from the future. From our perception, they might appear in the skies one moment and have full understanding of our entire history, our cultures, and our languages the next. This would be because they would travel back across the whole of our time in the few moments between discovery and understanding, picking up and assimilating all the details at their leisure, while we would be presented with the illusion that they already knew us well even though they had, in effect, just arrived.
All these hypotheses are interesting, but none of them is in the least provable. They' do suggest, though, the rich range of possibilities that are available for further study.
The central question remains, Is there anything real about all this?
I have spent a great deal of time in the past few months searching what could only be described as a morass of literature on the subject of unidentified entities and their craft. I have talked to scientists who think that it's all nonsense and to scientists who are not so sure. I have read dozens of case histories and met many other people who have had visitor experiences.
Something is happening. This is clear. It is not a version of known phenomena.
In my research I found an undertone of claims that the government knew more about this mattes than it was saying I decided to do some investigation into the truth of this possibility.
I found myself in a minefield. Real documents that seemed to be false. False documents that seemed to be real. A plethora of "unnamed sources." And drifting through it all, the thin smoke of an incredible story.
There is some small reason to speculate that the United States government may have had some sort of communication from visitors as early as the late 1940s, as well as obtained pieces of crashed disks and the bodies of the occupants.
I base this notion on the two best pieces of evidence I could find, both of which I have personally investigated and confirmed as genuine.
These two pieces of evidence are certainly real, in the sense that they are not wilting hoaxes. Of course people can make mistakes. The first document is a letter written by Dr.