Selections from “The Ether Ship Mystery (and Its Solution)” by Meade Layne, presenting unique insight into the enigma of the Flying Saucers as it was first presented by BSRF in the 1940s, an antidote to the purely materialistic view of the UFO that has become so fashionable today.

What are the 
FLYING 
DISCS?

First let us say what they are not. They are not delusions, fantasy, or lies. They are not constructed by any foreign government, or by our own. They do not come from the depths of the sea – though some of them may enter the sea at times. They do not come from the Polar regions, or from Tibet or Java – though it is conceivable that some temporary base on our earth may be utilized. They are not constructions of the Atlanteans or other ancient peoples, preserved in caverns against the coming day of need. We mentions these hypotheses because they have all been seriously advanced. Our categorical denial should really be read this way:

“We have no evidence that any of these explanations is correct, and none of them coincide with what we believe to be the correct facts. But we offer the first word and not the last in this matter. New data may appear at any time.”

To these denials let us add, the etheric craft, the Discs, do not come from any other planet (visible astronomical body only) of our solar system, or from any other heavenly body known to us. So far as a popular explanation exists, this planetary one is most in favor. The reason is obvious and the reasoning goes this way: The Discs are not made on this earth – yet they are real and not illusionary – therefore they must be made on some other planet, presumably Mars or Venus, since these are the nearest. This reasoning, however, suffers from what logicians call an “omitted middle”, or a third somewhat, an alternative which is overlooked. “Can you build a better mousetrap?” asks a magazine writer recently, clearly distrusting his own planetary theory yet unable to think of anything else. We reply promptly, we certainly can. The simplest description of this “mousetrap” is our present objective, and if your patience permits we shall try to make the whole concept reasonably clear – though not necessarily acceptable to your personal thinking, of course.

What are the Discs and where do they come from? We shall have to combine the questions and answers. They come from the region of existence called the Etheric Plance, or Etheric level – and by us with the name Etheria.

Who operates them? The Etheric People, the Etherians.

Are they friendly, or hostile, or dangerous? Neither friendly nor hostile on the whole, but mainly indifferent towards us. But they are not indifferent if we attack them, or pursue and annoy them, or make them uncomfortable (apparently) by our atom bombs, the release of atomic or nuclear energies.

Further on this point: It is highly likely, not provable, that our Air Force has already lost more than one ship through their attempted interference with these etheric craft. It is believed and is probable that they are surrounded by a powerful magnetic field, or some force corresponding to it, which easily disintegrates our own aircraft. It is likely that the release of atomic energies is felt on the etheric levels with some discomfiture. It is possible, though wholly conjectural, that they might intervene to prevent a world war with atomic weapons, and especially with such a weapon as the proposed hydrogen bomb.

But then, why do they come into our skies at all? Two reasons can be suggested, or two aspects of the same reason. These etheric craft have appeared at intervals throughout history, sometimes without a definite correlation with earth events, but always (it is said) when a civilization or culture had reached its peak and was entering upon a period of decline and fall. Their purpose was simply to observe and study the conditions and state of humanity, for their own information and their historical archives. They have also appeared prior to terrestrial convulsions, such as volcanic eruptions and earth quakes. In the present instance, it is likely that both reasons exist. The social and political state of the world is indeed perilous. Our weapons have become a menace to the Etherians themselves, and it is said that seismic disturbances are impending. Over the Pacific slope, for example, the flight of Ether ships has followed the magnetic meridians, north-and-south. It is said that the Etherians are doing this in order to observe the formation of the etheric vortexes which presage an earth quake; they are charting this area, and also the whole of the earth’s surface, for the same general purpose of scientific study.

Now, whatever you think of the ideas and explanations here advanced, remember that there is nothing vague and uncertain about the presence of these strange craft, or about their remarkable speed and power and complete superiority in the air. This is an intensely practical matter – and how far-reaching it may be, no one can say. Thi means that our personal attitude is also a matter of practical concern. Let us remember that the Etherians are not ill-disposed toward us, that we should NOT fear them, should never attack them. Further phenomena are almost certain to occur – and may be of the most remarkable kind. Panic and superstitious fear may seize upon the masses. It may happen that a considerable measure of responsibility will fall upon those us who have some measure of understanding of what is taking place. Heretofore the Etherians have withdrawn quietly when their mission was completed; men thought of them as Gods or Angels, or spirits of the air or demons, embodied them in folklore and mythology, and forgot them little by little. So it may be, this time. They may withdraw from our skies, and in a few months men will have almost forgotten them. But there are reasons which cannot be elaborated here, for believing events may take another and more striking course. Neither your will nor mine can stay these events, but fear, fanaticism and panic may work incalculable woe. Panic is contagious, it engulfs one like an enormous wave, and at the moment we fancy ourselves cool, calm and superior of mind, are dragged under by it. No other considerations would lead us to write these pages, which will for the most part be read with derision or be wholly disregarded.

From whence come the ETHER SHIPS?

Etheria is here – if we know what here means! Along-side, inside, outside of our world. Because our world, that is, the so-called dense matter of the objects in our world, is a rarefication. It is spaced out like a vast net – a net with enormous meshes. Imagine, if you will, a net of wire with meshes a mile wide. Would not wind and water flow through that net as if it did not exist? A little friction, very, very little!

On the strands of those meshes we live. That is the so-called dense matter of our world. We look out across the mesh and do not see anything in it, or hear or feel anything in it, and so call it empty space. Meaningless words in the abysses of folly! We see, hear, feel the other strands of the mesh, and call our world solid , firm and material! Call it a real and substantial thing! But the “spaces” of the mesh are a thousand and ten thousand times greater than the substance of the strands. What is in these spaces of the mesh of our “matter”? Space? Space is not nothing. Space is stuff, is matter. What kind of matter? The matter which makes the ethers. More dense – not less, but more dense by far than the rarefactions of our world. The matter of the Etheric world! Inside the molecules, inside the atoms, other atoms – still other atoms inside of those, or ten thousand Chinese eggs each inside of another. If you think that this is imagination, or that there is no room for these interpenetrating universes – ask the physicist and the mathematician. They will tell you there is nothing in the omniverse but room; and room, again, is space, is stuff, is basic world-stuff, mindstuff, life-stuff; and there is no emptiness anywhere – And that is why Etheria is here! But it is also everywhere. All heavenly bodies have an etheric realm.

A few lines more and we shall have done with the more practical and pressing aspects of our subject. The etheric “ships”, as everyone knows, are of many types, not all of them Discs by any means. Some are long and cigar shaped; many are shaped like balloons or dirigibles; some have wings or wing-like attachments. Many of them appear to change shape while in the air. Their color varies also and has also been seen to change. Some of them resemble fire-balls; others are accompanied or followed by smoke, vapor, and luminous appearances. Some are translucent, or seem to glow from within. They travel at all speeds, from zero (stationary) to thousands of miles and hour. They also vary widely in size, from a few feet or yards in diameter to nearly incredible dimensions; we have reports considered trustworthy of at least one craft ten miles in length. They have a curious way of disappearing suddenly when in plain sight, and also of rapidly dwindling in size without withdrawing in distance. It is well to bear all these items in mind, since any single explanation must obviously cover all of them; it is not enough to invent some theory for the discshapes alone and then imagine what that the whole matter is accounted for. Now, under the “etheric explanation” which we are presenting here, our understanding is briefly this:

ETHERIC EXPLANATION OF FLYING SAUCERS

All of the types of craft just mentioned come from the same source. All are constructed by Etherians. Their variety arises from the fact that many of them are experimental, and that different types of them serve different technical purposes. These craft are built in matter of the etheric plane and are imperceptible to us, since they exist in what we call “empty space”. They enter our plane or our level of perception by a process of materialization. The extremely dense matter which fills in the pattern of etheric stresses is replaced by matter of the kind that is visible to us – or better, its vibration rate is lowered until it becomes visible. A little like slowing down a very fast fan until one can see its blades. This is closely similar to what happens in the phenomenon or apportation (where objects, of any kind or size, are “miraculously” transported into and out of sealed rooms, sealed containers and the like). Many people, and most scientists, take no stock in this alleged phenomenon, but it is well attested and cannot be surrendered on that account. Neither the pattern nor the molecular filling is destroyed; the object becomes invisible because the atomic motion is speed up, and it can pass through other matter (a wall, e.g.) because of this same fact. This is equivalent to an increase in density when an object on our place is being apported from one place to another. To an Etherian, an object materializing on our plane would dematerialize on his; to us it materializes in our field of perception, and dematerializes when it returns to its etheric state.

If we understand this, we are on the way toward accounting for many odd items of behavior, such as have been mentioned above.

It is probably well known by this time, that several of these ether ships have fallen, and their contents carefully studied – although with utmost secrecy. We cannot enter here upon this part of, which has been printed in other BSRA publications; we wish to refer only to the “little people”, dwarfs about 30 inches in height, whose bodies were found within the Discs. We have reason to believe that the Etherians, who must operate on their bodies just as they do on the etheric substance of the disc in order to accompany them choose to materialize in small forms, simply for the convenience of operation and flight. This, like everything else set forth here, is according to our best knowledge and belief at this writing. We repeat, that we are offering the first words and not the last on this extraordinary problem.

The propulsion of the etherian craft is beyond the present concepts of our science – yet we have a good clue to its nature, and shall comment on it on a later page. (There is no motor, propeller or other mechanism inside the fallen discs, so far as we have been able to learn.) We must add the extraordinary fact, that under certain conditions, or at certain states of materialization, or at certain altitudes and pressures, the substance of the ether ships is jelly-like and actually does change in shape and apparent size. (The outer skin of the fallen discs, however, is harder than steel, and of unidentified substance.)

It is our information that certain types of the ether ships are and have long been used for interplanetary travel. Those who persist in the belief that they come from visible planets of our system, will eventually seize upon this as a confirmatory fact. But the ether ships do NOT originate on visible planets, as we have said. Interplanetary travel is simply one of their innumerable uses, and this fact should not mislead us. The craft are made in Etheria, and Etheria is in and around all visible objects. It is also the home and motherland of our plane, all the objects we see about us derive from that source, and our own bodies also. We ourselves are Etherians by ancestry and descent; for Etheria is the home of the human race. That we should be so grossly ignorant of it is strange indeed.

Related articles:

1. Mat and Demat: Etheric Aspects of the UFO
2. Let’s Be Fantastic
3. Fly, Lokas, Fly!

The following posting is a collection of three articles from 1947, presented as they first appeared in the original BSRA Round Robins and Journals, all three explorations of the flying saucer phenomena as they were reported to Borderland Sciences Associates by director Meade Layne.

Fly, Lokas, Fly!

Originally included as part of the the BSRA Round Robin (Vol. 3, No. 6, July – August 1947);
Article by Meade Layne.

On June 26, 1947, the morning radio broadcasts in California carried a seemingly crack-pot story, sandwiched between Hollywood gossip and some other puerility, about a flight of curious objects over the Cascade Mountains, observed and daringly reported by one Kenneth Arnold, a “flying business man”, “flying fire extinguisher salesman”, “U.S. Forest Service employee”, “veteran pilot”, “fire control engineer”, “owner and manager of the Great Western Fire Control Company” (etc., etc., crescendo as the facts were verified). Mr. Arnold, flying east toward Mt. Rainier on June 25, at 9200 ft., spotted nine saucer-shaped objects, “big as a DC-4 passenger plane”, flying in a “screwy formation”, at right angles to his own line of flight, about 25 miles ahead of him, at a 10,000 ft. altitude. They were “weaving and ducking in and out”, were “extremely shiny as if nickel plated”, had a “rocking movement”, were half-moon shaped, oval in front and convex in the rear, without tails, bulges or cowling, looked like disks – and the line waves “like the tail of a Chinese kite.” By clock time and later triangulation the speed was estimated as between 1200 and 1700 miles per hour.

This temerarious tale encouraged another “flying business man”, of Oklahoma City, to tell how, some weeks ago, he and his wife saw a “very big, shiny, silver object moving at terrified speed,” without any noise. “I know that boy up there (Arnold) really saw them,” said the Oklahoman. Several residents of Seattle next reported the strange craft; then an engineer at Joliet (Ill.) reported nine of them. If these were the same as seen by Arnold the same day, they had made the 2000 miles in 50 minutes. The craft flipped and righted themselves in unison, as if all were powered from the leading disk or were in tow. The same or a similar flight of nine was seen the next day over Kansas City. Reports of other observers came in from Oregon, and “nine or ten” of the objects were reliably reported over Woodland, Wash., two days later. Other accounts came from Boise, the Grand Canyon area, west Texas, New Mexico, the Columbia River country, and San Francisco. All the reports agree essentially in description. On July 3, the objects were reported over Denver, and even the Lt. Governor of Idaho saw something he couldn’t explain – this time a “comet-like object hanging in the sky”. And “three metallic gleaming disks” were seen “going around and around in a circle” over Beverly Hill, Calif. By the time RR gets into print the things may be as common as breakfast food advertisements, so we won’t follow the story seriatim any further. Enough has been said to show the first stages of the affair.

It goes without saying that public, official, and press reaction followed the familiar pattern: first a series of hoots, gibes and jeers, then a baker’s dozen of “explanations” (many of them incredibly asinine), finally a blessed silence by hooters and explainers alike, but not by disappearance of the reports. Among the explainers we regret to include General Wainright, who said “People obviously saw something, I don’t know what. I don’t believe all the claims. I don’t believe it at all” – which is understandable, if slightly incoherent. Howard Blakeslee, science editor for AP, obviously trying hard, suggested that the objects were merely reflected flashes of light from distant planes, which were being given a fanciful build-up by minds stuffed with scientifiction. A university of Oregon astronomer thought Arnold’s saucers were “persistent vision” caused by looking at reflections on the glass of his own plane; a Portland meteorologist thought it was all optical illusion caused by layers of atmosphere, and when one E.H. Sprinkle of Eugene, Ore., got a photograph of “seven dots lined across the sky”, other photographers said probably the negative had not been agitated in the developer. “Army rocket experts” decided in favor of jet planes, and the projectile theory was also popular for a while. Several ex-service men recalled having seen objects similar to the saucers during the war, when they of course got the brush-off from their superiors for reporting them. — We’re all for Caution, of course, and the judicious and common-sense approach to strange happenings, and we know that the Brush-offer League has a tremendous membership, and has been able to completely suppress and extinguish a whole book-full of desperately important facts which happened to be isolated and sporadic. This time, however, the facts, being saucer-shaped, fly right back again, refuse to accept the damned-datum status — By present writing the hoot-owl chorus has died away, but the affair remains front-page news and the newspapers are really in a bad fix, having a most sensational event on hand and nothing what-ever to say about it.

The Fortean Society (to which this writer belongs) is undergoing a most painful parturition, under the midwifery of Secretary Tiffany Thayer; so far the only issue has been an apparition of Charles Fort (to whom be honor), gabbling “I told you so” . Fort was a mighty hunter-out and collector of weird and science-damned happenings, of which strange sky-craft were not the least. The problem is right up the avenue for Vincent Gaddis also, who lately sent us some 20 instances of similar mysteries of the skies. The most incredible and outrageous things happen, and always have been happening, and students of such matters know about them; the most incredible fact of all is that there actually are people who think we live in a sane, orderly, intelligible and well-understood world, where “science” has explained everything or is about to do so,, and that these ignoramuses include about nine-tenths of our so-called intellectuals… Recurring to Secretary T.T. mentioned above, and while we think of it, it was he who gibed more than once at the Round Robin Corrida (Kareeta) story of last November, not because of its extraordinary nature but because it “stinked” of the “occult”. The “occult” got into because we printed a statement, for what it was worth, received clairaudiently by a most honest and non-professional medium. “Let Austin have his swink (or stink) to him reserved!” — We’re all for the Forteans, be it understood, in their war on scientism and smugism, but otherwise they get no forwarder with their hunting simply because most of them are nauseated by the mere mention of anything occult or spiritualistic.

To return to our saucers, so to speak: a sergeant of the State Highway Patrol reported seeing a dozen bright metal objects about the size of a football whiz over San Francisco Bay and fall into the ocean. A resident of a town in Washington says he saw one of the disks “explode about 200 ft. from the ground. There was a great shower of sparks but no flash, and flames which seemed to hurtle to the ground.” Other observers have reported a dim vapor trail and a faint humming noise – that one disk dropped a reddish-white flare – that some have been seen hovering or stationary. Lt. Col. Turner (N.M. Rocket Proving grounds) is sure they are jet planes, and that certain “falling bodies” were meteors, but “is investigating”. We also hear of a “disk-like bluish object following a zigzag course over New Mexico” – a flight of “soup-dishes dropping south at 150-200 mi. per hr” over San Diego, and “a silver ball that swooshed” over Colorado. Some of these items complicate the problem considerably – if that is possible; particularly the objects falling into the sea and the disk which “exploded”. And “Astronomers at Seattle and Joliet said there was no natural explanation for the reports.” Is’t possible our learned brothers have an unnatural one up their sleeves? Or maybe, just none at all? That sentence we quoted intrigues us almost as much as the saucers themselves; the more you think about it, the less sense it makes.

In a final sense there is, of course, no such thing as an explicable fact. Everything known to us is, at bottom, equally mysterious. But there are familiar mysteries, such as sunsets, and grass blades, and systems of philosophy, which we can fit into categories and hence relate to other facts — and things like “black days” and fairy tombs and Cock Lane apparitions which are unfamiliar and hence called mysteries. Add, flying saucers. The unfamiliar mysteries make mockery of “scientific” smugness, and also of common sense – and also of about nine-tenths of of all the alleged occult learning of the pseudo-adepts. Among these latter wise-acres there ere undoubtedly some thousands who pretend to exalted and secret knowledge of anything and everything, saucers included; and it’s equally certain that not a dozen of them will agree. We think there actually are people who know – but few if any of them are going to say anything, account of the utter futility of telling the ‘facts of life’ to children. They are merely sitting tight anf waiting for the Last Act, without expectation of surviving it, or much interest in doing so. If they have a pretty good idea what makes the curtain go up or down, they won’t say much about it, or start any last minute panic in the audience.

Having said this much, and taunted all learned men with their ignorance (ear-wig to our betters), we new present the only intelligent and intelligible comment on the saucer party so far offered by anybody. That doesn’t mean we ‘guarantee’ it in any sense; we wouldn’t ‘guarantee’ Tuesday after Monday. But it’s a point of view, and coherent end possible and probably interesting to everybody with a smattering of esoteric knowledge – which leaves most of our intelligentsia out of it, but happily lets in about fifty million lesser folk of this Pilgrims’ Pride. The commentator is our friend “Lingford”, a familiar control at the Mark P. seances. If nobody on our own plane has anything intelligent to say about saucers, why not interrogate the ghosties – get an astral viewpoint anyway, even if you don’t believe a word of it. Of course, if you think Lingford is a dissociated complex, a subconscious invention, a personalized memory, or a wholly fictional character invented the medium and the RR editor for ye sheckels sake (as RR has been credibly informed), your interest will be “O” with the rim left off. But having spent many hours in converse with this oeuf dur of the Invisibles, we consider him a very real person, and quite smart and well-posted and worth listening to. Our semi-quote is not verbatim-literatim-et-punctuatim but it does not misrepresent him in any way.

‘When will you people learn that there are worlds within worlds – that the etheric worlds interpenetrate with your plane and with each other? I know I should not be sticking my neck out by talking so much about those saucers, as you call them, at least until I have investigated more fully. But they are not craft constructed on your planet, nor is it necessary to assume that they came from any other planet. It seems impossible to get it through the heads of you people, that objects can pass from an etheric to a dense level of matter, and will then appear to materialize there. Then they may disappear by dematerializing – returning to an etheric condition. It is a perfect analogue to the materializations witnessed in the seance room, which many of your learned men bear witness to. Not only do human forms materialize there, but solid objects appear miraculously, as you say, and often these ore brought from long distances. You call them apports, but an apport is dematerialized so that only the etheric patter remains, and then the original atoms are reassembled in the pattern or mould and you have a materialized object. Well, these saucers that puzzle you so much come out of an etheric world also and can return to it. The purpose of these visitors is simply to compel your attention, to wake you up. They come with good intent. They have some idea of experimenting with earth life – I mean, of coming to your world to live. There will be many strange sky appearances, as we have often told you before in these seances. Watch for them. These saucers make their great speed because of their peculiar bun-shape and peculiar motion; they encounter almost no air resistance. I do not know their means of propulsion but I shall try to find out. The wilful ignorance and hostility of your time toward etheric and astral studios is appalling. The strange sky craft reported over your city last November was probably also an etheric construction. These visitors are not excarnate humans; but they are human beings who live in their own world, which happens to be made of stuff which your senses cannot directly perceive, and which you therefore childishly imagine cannot exist at a1l…

Sic dixit Lingford. This communicator (to add the personal touch) was a resident of New York State, and departed thence for his present ‘station astral’ some 40-45 years ago, at the age of 40 years. He is a somewhat stocky young man, very self-assured, a great reader and traveller about, good-humored but also a trifle impatient and sardonic at times. This ‘information’ comes from other communicators and from several persons on ‘this side’ who have encountered him while on astral excursions. (If you don’t believe in that kind of info., kindly skip this paragraph) We also understand that he lives in a house on the side of a valley, overlooking a beautiful lake, has many flowers, paints a little, and has a great many books. When we asked him if he lived alone, he replied “You bet I do – and I like it!”. He added that his plane is a “very lovely place” and that he has no desire or intention of going anywhere else, least of all of returning to earth life – at least for a very long time. We have talked with this communicator two or three times a week for nearly a year, and can only say that if he is a fraud, or a complex or secondary personality, no sign of it has so far appeared. He is unpretentious, conservative, strongly individualized, and apparently a very real person apart from the regrettable fact of being invisible and being obliged to talk through the organism of another person. We don’t ‘guarantee’ him, any more than we do Wednesday after Tuesday – or our next-door neighbor, who may be a hallucination (from 5:00 a.m. to midnight, anyway).

It is quite obvious, of course, that this Voice from the neant is not going to get a hearing, and the fact distresses neither him nor the RR editor. If or when the mystery of the flying disks is solved, and if they turn out to be something quite different from Lingford’s description, we do not have a single syllable to retract. We are telling our readers the facts as they now stand, about this communicator and his statements concerning the phenomenon. What he has to say fits very well into the main body of occult knowledge – but he may be mistaken about the disks and we may be mistaken about him. We believe that the time is coming, and to some extent is now here, when scientists and students of every subject will accept the cooperation of the invisible helpers.

By the 7th of July the disks had been reported over 34 states – yet certain jackasses, by which we mean astronomers, physicists, editors and radio commentators were still gabbling about delusion, hysteria, mirages and the like. On that date the Editor held a short “sitting” with a non-professional medium (Mr. Mark Probert), and after some delay an interesting communication was received, of which we can here print the substance only:

“Well, how am I doing now?” (referring to difficulty in control). “No, I have never spoken thru a medium this may before, but I did speak once thru a trumpet at Lily Dale” (a spiritualist center in N.Y.). I was Thomas Edison. During my life on your plane I made many secret experiments, in the effort to recapture and reproduce sounds made in past time, and preserved in the ether. I still believe that this is possible and that it will be done. At the time I had only a hypothesis to work on, but one often has to use a hypothesis in order to have a starting point.

(Q. as to how he happened to come to the medium) . Well, you have a very unusual group over here, who are interested in the particular type of seance which you carry on. . . Continue with this work and you will probably get some very strange news. If you publicise it you will be ridiculed, but I was ridiculed too.

About these disks that are stirring up so much comment – I’m a little afraid they are going to make trouble. (Q). I mean, they may start a panic. My ideas about them are much the same as those given by Lingford. They are etheric in nature, and they materialize spontaneously on entering the vibration rate of your world of dense matter. I think this is going to stir up a hell of a lot of trouble. The great trouble, of course, is with your scientists, they can’t get into the right way of thinking about such problems.

(Q). They happen to be appearing just now, because your world is now in that phase of thought. Do you understand what I’m getting at? There will be many other types of strange sky craft also. That Corrida (Kareeta) you wrote about last year was the same type, etheric construction. It was an experimental craft. (Q) These people are much like yourselves but they are much bigger.

(Q) Yes, I think it might be right to say they come from the Lokas. * No, they are not astral, and not from any of the planets you know about. They come from an etheric planet which your senses do not perceive. Some of the disks carry a crew, but others are managed by remote control. These craft have some means of radiating a powerful energy which is very destructive. If they are attacked or interfered with they may easily destroy the attacking planes. (Q) No, I doubt whether they can be communicated with by radio, but if you can signal by radar perhaps that would work. I don’t understand radar, myself. If you can make friends with these people you can learn a world of new facts from them. The medium is getting very tired and I think I shall leave you.”

One point in the above which we feel sure is correct, is that “strange news” or any other kind, derived from mediumistic sources, will be ridiculed. We reflect for the ten-thousandeth time on the tragedy, the irony, and the futilities of the whole contemporary situation. Isolationism, applied to the life of our plane, is as stupid as in social and political matters; yet of help from beyond the border our ‘intelligentsia’ will have none… It should be easy to understand that a very serious and dangerous situation exists with regard to these disks, and we present here in these pages data which might avert disaster – yet it is doubtful whether any person high in authority can even be induced to read the facts here set down. Our science and our culture have no means of dealing with the issues which are new fast arising… If the same military judgment which permitted a Pearl Harbor should instigate an attack on these strange craft, the results, and the panic to follow, and the flood of international suspicion might well be the beginning of the end of our national existance.

Yet if you repeat in public our favorite RR principle, that public education in psychic matters is imperative, and intensely and supremely practical, you are considered as being teched in the head!

[NOTE: There are 7 of those Lokas under the Vishnu-Purana classification. The word simply means places (loci), worlds, wheres. They do not belong to the earth-chain of globes, nor to the astral. They are just as 'material' as our world, but the matter is of a different vibration range and cannot be detected by our senses or any existing instruments... Note that Corridas (Kareeta) was an experimental craft from the same Loka, as indeed the communicators asserted indirectly at the time.]

For the sake of the record we quote another Control, who declined to give his name:

“Most of these craft you are talking about are corrugated lengthwise of the oval. The controls are in the front section. The middle section is a laboratory. The rear contains defensive and offensive armament. They have means of sending out a powerful radiation of energy in all directions from the ship.”

Among the countless stupidities engendered by this new sensation, is the cackling in some journalistic roosts over the discrepancy in accounts of size of the “Lokas.” Such people should be threatened with instant death unless they can agree at once as to whether the full moon is the size of a pie plate or a cartwheel.

It is reasonably certain that a number of small objects are flying about. Some of them may have fallen from the Lokas. But a doughnut overboard does not prove that all air liners are doughnut size.

It may also pay us to take careful note, that new sky craft of various designs have been predicted. The Corrida (Kareeta) is a case in point; it did not resemble the Lokas at all, but is said to have been an experimental design and to have come from the same region. (Tho’ neither the public nor the so-called scientific mind of our generation is going to be able to grasp where this ‘region’ is, or rather what it is).

Only one fact has arisen, so far, to suggest that these sky newcomers are of earth invention. The general concept of the saucer-shaped craft has been grasped by several inventors, and a Frenchman named George De Bay actually made a working model, powered by rubber bands, as far back as 1928. Our own authorities, characteristically, turned thumbs down, Did this inventor find financial and technical aid from some foreign Power? The idea is not pleasant to contemplate. We prefer the Lokas, ourselves. It has not yet even occurred to our wise-cracking commentators, that the operators of the Lokas, whoever they be, have our world completely at their mercy.

Another cause of mirth, to the cackle contingent, is that strange sky craft have often been reported in the past – and since these are all supposed to have been delusions, the Lokas must be fancy-bred also. But students of such curiosa have compiled lists of them, and studied them for years past. And now somebody has discovered Charles Fort’s Book of the Damned, which also ‘proves’ that these happenings are very old stuff. It is described as a “rare old book” – tho every student of the borderland sciences owns a copy, and the complete works of Fort are on sale – page Tiffany Thayer, Fortean Society, with a five-dollar bill clearly displayed, sign of the Fortean Brotherhood.

We venture a small prediction of our own – that the Lokas will probably be withdrawn for a time (to the huge satisfaction of the cackle-club), but will reappear later. It is to be hoped – tho’ against all probability – that our Leading Intellects will learn a few pertinent facts in the meantime.

“The animals” (cattle and horses) “sure do get up and go when they see these things – So says rancher Henry Seay to a reporter of the Birmingham News (July 7), referring to a disk which swooped down within 500 feet “dropping sparks like dust”. We disrespectfully recommend this to AP science editor Blakeslee, and to all the “spots in your eyes” professors. Can a cow be frightened by muscae volitantes – in the eyes of her owner, or do Dobbin and his master have the same hallucination at the same moment? It will take more than the eye-wash of the Doctors of Science to explain this incident – plus some half-dozen photographs, plus reports of experience observers.. Perhaps our civilization ought to be destroyed – considering the number of learned, brilliant, and self-complacent FOOLS! (We thank P.W. Osman of Birmingham)

Concerning the Lokas, ‘Flying Disks’

Originally included as part of the the BSRA Round Robin (Vol. 3, No. 7, September – October 1947);
Article by Meade Layne.

In this September issue of Flying Roll, the RR Editor has recurred to this subject at some length, and there are a few points we wish to keep before the RR readers also. For one thing, it was stated in FR that this issue of RR would give the name of a national magazine which would presently print a special edition devoted entirely to the phenomena of the disks. But this information has not yet been released. We may have to handle this by means of a special bulletin to our readers.

We do not know at the moment, just what explanation, if-any, the magazine referred to will give concerning the Lokas. But we can assure you that any lingering doubts concerning their reality will be definitely disposed of. There never has been any question on this point, among thoughtful and informed people; but there has been a systematic campaign of denial and ridicule, as well as an unofficial but effective censorship on news stories. Make no mistake: the Lokas are real, and the authorities know it, and the F.B.I. and Military Intelligence are deeply concerned, and no one yet has been able to trump up a yarn that will satisfy the public, ‘if and when they return in large numbers. Some of these constructions are nearly a mile in diameter.

There are only three hypotheses about them: (1) That they are constructed by some foreign Power (Russia, of course). The practical objections to this theory seem to this writer to be conclusive. (2) The theory suggested by at least one distinguished occultist, that they are craft of Atlantean construction, kept stored in caverns, and now brought out for the training of crews against time of need in the ceasing war. Considering all the data at hand, RR does not at present incline to this view. (3) The flat statements made by the communicators at the Mark P. seances, that they are craft constructed on the etheric levels (etheric worlds interpenetrating with our own) , that their mission is friendly but for definite purposes. That there are flying objects and small craft of many sorts in our skies, all of them experimental efforts on the part of the Ethereans. Some details of construction and mode of propulsion have also been given. Of course, if you reject this last explanation a priori, on account of its source, it is useless at this stage to argue the matter. We only say here, that there is a large amount of contributory data, concerning the interpenetration of the planes of etheric and dense matter; and further, that so far at least, there is not a single item of objective data, of observed fact, which conflicts with the hypothesis of etheric origins When or if such data comes to us, we will present it at once.

We know that the Lokas are new present over other parts of the world, and sooner or later it is most probable that they will return to our own skies. There is danger of panic, and even of war, when once the public realizes that we are completely at the mercy of these visitors – and, of course, attributes them to some unfriendly foreign power. If, as we new believe, they are “apports” from the etheric, it is going to be quite useless to attempt to get this idea across to the masses, and even to most of our alleged intellectuals, and to a public press which is incapable of grasping even the first syllable of what it is all about. This is NEWS of incredible world importance (and so was the much-derided Corrida or Kareeta of last November). We are not trying to sensationalize it – it is already sensational beyond the reaches of imagination. We feel justified in pointing out to our readers, that no other publication in the United States has so far offered either the objective facts or the explanations which have appeared in Round Robin and Flying Roll. . . We do not wish to frighten anyone, but to allay fear, for we feel sure that the Lokas are friendly. But their existence and the issues raised by it must be faced sooner or later, and we believe that in the end our readers will be grateful to RR for preparing the way, to some extent, for the understanding of one of the strangest phenomena in the history of mankind.

Photo: “The Rhodes Photo” (July 7, 1947, Phoenix, Arizona)

Related articles:

1. Let’s Be Fantastic
2. Mat and Demat: Etheric Aspects of the UFO
3. “What Are & From Whence Come the 
FLYING 
DISCS?”

AEROFORMS are flying discs, “saucers,” mutants or indescripts, and best understood with respect to their origin and nature as being EMERGENTS: that-is, they emerge on to our plane of perception from a space-time frame of reference which is different from ours. This process may also be described as a conversion of energy and a change of vibratory rates.

That this is so is obviously suggested by the phenomena themselves; since physical matter as we know it could not withstand the speed, temperature and strain imposed by the observed operatons of the discs and other forms. This does not conflict with the apparent composition of the “landed” discs.

When the energy conversion takes place, the aeroform becomes visible and tangible. It appears to be and definitely is what we call solid substance, and so remains until the vibratory rate is again converted. The “steel” of a landed disc is an etheric steel and its copper is etheric copper — since the prototypes of all our metals exist in etheric matter; nevertheless, chemical analysis has shown certain radical differences. The conversion process amounts to materialisation and dematerialisation (“mat and demat”). “Demat,” on our plane of perception, would be “mat” for any consciousness functioning on the etheric level, and vice versa.

Just as there is a spectrum of sound and of colour (ending in sounds we cannot hear and colours we cannot see), so there is also a spectrum of tangibility, ending in forms of matter which are too dense to be touched. The ordinary matter of our plane is a rarefaction, and the interspaces between the nucleus and the electrons are relatively enormous. The extremely dense matter of the ethers passes through earth substance freely and almost without friction. But if the vibratory rate of an etheric object is slowed down, it becomes less dense and enters our field of perception.

[With reference to our use of the word density; this word is used in different senses by physicists and demands definition for which we cannot here afford space.]

Etheric matter, on account of its density, is subject to the play of many subtle forces, including the energic activity of thought. Any form or object of which the mind can conceive can be brought into existence by mental action, and controlled by the same means. Etheric objects are in every way as “real” as those of our own world. And there is abundant experimental evidence for the control of “mind over matter” on our own plane of perception.

The foregoing paragraph applies also to the bodies of Etherian people. Our own bodies are truly made by our minds; we identify ourselves with them and control them. The Etherian makes his own body in a somewhat similar way, but quickly and easy, and makes it in any size and form he chooses. By the same principle, he can produce the form of a sphere, a cylinder, a cube, a disc or “saucer” — and any desired vibrations of colour and sound.

Whether the Etherian people are “human” or not depends entirely on one’s definition of the word human. So far as we know, they are not excarnate humans and have not lived on our planet, though often visiting it. It is a cardinal mistake to assume that their bodies, and the other ships created by them, are necessarily the same as we have seen them, when they withdraw to their own planes of existence. It is a cardinal mistake to assume that they are all of the same kind and “race,” or of the same moral character and evolutionary development.

The “vehicle” of an Etherian, whether his body or his “ship” is thus essentially a thought-form (as our bodies are also) and a thought form can be positioned anywhere. The problems of space travel as we conceive them do not exist for him — as implied by the opening paragraph. By altering his vibratory rates the Disc Etherian penetrates our seas and the substance of our globe as easily as he does our atmosphere. All the aeroforms pass through each other – on occasion – and through our dwellings at will, and are (and always have been) invisibly present in great numbers.

The Etherians themselves – or entities purporting to be such – have given the following accounting: That the first step in constructing huge space craft (“mother ships” and others) is to isolate a cube of space, or ether, to a very low vibration frequency. This etheric substance is then given the desired form, and the proper equipment is placed within it, according to its proposed station and operation. This work is done mainly by mental means: the Etherians make use of machines and apparatus, but these also are etheric constructions.

Teleportation

When the “ship” is completed, it is positioned by mental means – “teleportation” – in any desired location, as, say, in the vicinity of our earth. So far, neither the ship nor any of these operations would be visible to us. But if the frequency of the etheric matter is then converted to other specific rates, the ship will, or may, become visible and tangible to our senses. But there is NO “crossing of space” involved at any time. There is simply a change of location — and this is equivalent to a change of frequency or conversion of vibratory rates.

This last principle cannot be reiterated too often. It is basic to any understanding of the whole mass of the aeroform phenomena. These huge craft may be miles in dimension, or even of planetary size — hence the feasibility of an “evacuation of the planet,” if necessary.

Under what conditions these huge objects, hanging hundreds of miles overhead, are converted to a frequency rate perceptible to us is, of course, unknown. But discs and other forms discharged by the mother ships are obviously so converted, in order to operate under gravitational and magnetic conditions peculiar to our planet. Or it may be a part of the overall plan that those objects be made visible and tangible to us, as part of the education of earth people.

Interpretation

Reverting to the concept of “emergence,” it may be helpful to quote the following illustration: Suppose we have a series of concentric balls, one within another like the “Chinese eggs.” Call the central ball No. 1 and the others Nos. 2, 3, 4, etc. For any given point on, say, the sixth ball, there will be a corresponding spot on both the inside and the outside of ball No. 5 and of ball No. 7 — and so on all the other balls. Consider that each ball has its own vibration rate. Then, if you wish to move any object on, say, ball 6 and place it on ball 5 or 7, you simply change its vibration accordingly. The object will then be located in a new place. It will not have to “pass over” any intervening space — it simply comes into existence in a new location. A change of frequency is equivalent to a change of location.

Such a statement as “I am here” means simply that I am “tuned in” to objects, sounds, and colours of my surroundings. If this receptivity were altered so that I “tuned out,” the environment would disappear, but would be replaced by a different one unless the change destroyed me. This would be a spacetime operation and a change of location without transit of space.

Contemporary distrust of the concept of the ether is unjustified and must be left to physicists who, apparently, do not read the literature of their own subject.

So far the whole mass of material on the aeroforms, with some tentative exceptions, has not produced an over-all interpretation which is at once intelligible science and sound metaphysics. Yet the interpretation reported by us and here summarised is steadily gaining ground, and we bespeak its thoughtful consideration on its own merits. It will be expanded and altered in details but it is basically correct.

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Borderland Scientist Dr. Wilhelm Reich posted that question in Chap. I of his 1957 book, “Contact With Space”:

On March 20, 1956, 10 p.m. a thought of a very remote possibility entered my mind, which, I fear, will never leave me again: Am I a Spaceman? Do I belong to a new race on earth, bred by men from outer space in embraces with earth women? Are my children offspring of the first interplanetary race?

Has the melting pot of interplanetary society already been created on our planet, as the melting pot of all earth nations was established in the U.S.A. 190 years ago? Or does this thought relate to things to come in the future? I request my right and privilege to have such thoughts and to ask such questions without being threatened to be jailed by any administrative agency of society.

(Dr. Reich was not the first man to harbor such radical ideas; nor was he the first to be jailed and executed for publishing them abroad. The Wardens of this prison of the solar system look with extreme prejudice on anyone who even suggests that it is possible to escape, or that there are advanced, loving beings who are ready, willing and able to help us to rehabilitate ourselves and get the hell off the earth!)

Many matters of my existence have, with this question, fallen quickly into place, having been uncertainties only four days ago; the temptation to answer the above question in the positive is irresistible. However, I shall postpone final decision until the facts have spoken. In the meantime I shall proceed on the assumption: It is not beyond actual possibilities that men from outer space have landed (or will in the future land) on earth and have begun to breed here for whatever reason they may have had.

This idea is not as foreign to the human race as it may appear on first encounter. In 1951, I believe, Hollywood introduced a new film with the title “The Day the Earth Stood Still“. In this film a spaceship landed on earth; a spaceman, looking much the same as an ordinary, but very intelligent earthman, met with earth people. He fell in love with an earthwoman, made friends with her little boy. He knew mathematics far better than the mathematical genius of the earth century. The earth people got panicky since he was able to stop all earthly traffic by pressing a button. In the end the earthmen did to him what they always do in such cases; they had their military hunt him and shoot him down in the street. He was brought to his spaceship by a robot; a new type of medicine, unknown on earth, revived him.

The film was intended to prepare the population for extraordinary events yo come. It had the right, and not the wrong, ideas about the functioning of cosmic energy used in the propulsion of space-ships. It pictured the spaceman as being akin to earthmen, but different in his attitude to women, in his behavior with a small boy, etc.. ? It conceded that insoluble problems of mathematics were easily solved with his knowledge of the Life Energy. There was no doubt that the Life Energy was meant: Light went on in the space-ship when fingers moved across certain switches; lamination of vacuum tubes can actually be achieved by approaching strong bodily energy fields.

A BIT OF REICH’S OWN STORY

All through the film show I had the distinct impression that it was a bit of my story which was depicted there; even the actor’s expression and looks reminded me and others of myself as I had appeared 15 to 20 years ago.

I did not at that time have the thought that I could actually be a spaceman’s offspring. Without my intention somehow a ball of history started rolling, putting me in the center of space problems: I made actual contact by way of the cloudbuster with luminous objects in the sky May 12, 1954, between 9:40 and 10:45 p.m. (And then he lists the evening planets for 1954.)

During this hour men on earth saw for the first time in the history of man and his science two “Stars” to the west fade out several times when cosmic energy was drawn from them. The shock of this experience was great enough not to repeat such action until Oct. 10th, 1954. The reason for the hesitation was obviously the risk to-precipitate an interplanetary war by such experimentation. The event was kept secret.

I am a modest, orderly, rational man. I tend to understate my stature rather than to state my full potential as a scientist. I hate mystical irrationalism (Well, your editor hopes Dr. Reich wont mind this mystical irrationality reproducing part of his banned book in this Journal!); but I believe that even in the most flagrant irrationality there must be some rational truth; there is nothing in the world of men that is not true somehow, somewhere, even if distorted to the utmost; this I used to tell my students. However, I never permitted irresponsible mystification of such serious affairs as interplanetary contact to confuse our grave task.

The Ruppelt report (“The Report On Unidentified Flying Objects”) on UFO’s clearly reveals the helplessness of mechanistic method in coming to grips with the problems posed by the spacemen. The cosmic orgone energy which these living beings are using in their technology is beyond the grasp of mechanistic science since cosmic laws of functioning are not mechanical, but what I term functional. Even though the mathematics necessary to formulate these problems and make them technologically usable, cannot use any of the old mechanistic methods of thought to cope with the functional OR facts. (See Orgone Energy Bulletin, 19501953.)

The helplessness of mechanistic thinking appears in the tragic shortcoming of our fastest jet fighter planes to make and hold contact with UFOs. Being unavoidably outdistanced is not a flattering situation for military pride. The conclusion seems to be correct: Mechanistic methods of locomotion must be counted out in coping with the spaceship problem. Neither propeller or jet will or can ever get us into space beyond.

Easy contact was made on that fateful day with what obviously turned out to be a heretofore unknown type of UFO. I had hesitated for weeks to turn my cloudbuster pipes toward a ‘star”, as if I had known that some of the blinking lights hanging in the sky were not planets or fixed stars but SPACE machines. With the fading out of the two “stars” the cloudbuster had suddenly changed to a SPACEGUN. From then onward, too, our approach to the problem of space became positive, affirmative, confident in using our carefully screened data.

When I saw the “Star” to the west fade out four times in succession, what had been left of the old world of human knowledge after the discovery of the OR energy 1936-1940 humbled beyond retrieve. From now on everything, anything was possible. Nothing could any longer be declared “impossible”. There was only one conclusion: The thing we had drawn from was not a star.

It was something else, a UFO.

* * *

So, Dr. Reich suggested the formation of “a Planetary Professional Citizens Committee with sufficient work democratic organizational and statutory power to take over the responsibility for the direction of the Social Reconstruction of the Planet Earth and of the Ea operations of the future”, a work which was already underway with the organizations and functioning of the United Nations. Now, 22 years later, the formation of a UFO research committee is contemplated, which can make an “end run” around the Silence Policy on UFOs of the individual nations.

Dr. Reich’s plea to be allowed to think unthinkable thoughts about Flying Saucers and the possibility of his being a spaceman himself received an immediate and vindictive response from the U.S. government. His books were piled on the beach in Maine and burned. He was not only jailed but was suddenly dead in a U.S. prison.

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I watched a video of a Sky Serpent the other night, but it looked more like a giant butter-fly than anything reptilian. It looked like a floppy circle bending in half and flitting around like a fish out of water. “Things never seen seem familiar” is a paraphrase from an old Grateful Dead song, and this describes my experience pretty well as I instantly recognized it.

I have been familiar with “Etheric Critters” ever since a friend first brought my attention to Borderland Sciences Research Foundation. It was Borderlands who published some of the original photographs taken in the 50′s and 60′s for Dr. “T. J.” Constable in his book “The Cosmic Pulse of Life,” and the finest available versions of these photographs are in Borderland’s 1990 revised edition, now out of print (though there are still a limited copies available); Dr. T. J. has himself reprinted with third generation photographs recently with another publisher.

These Sky Creatures, or “Etheric Critters”, live in the sky, in the ether. This “ether”, however, is not the same ether that was disproved by Einstein and Morley-Martin — it is, instead, an attempt to describe a energetic atmospheric phenomena that has been observed on the borderlands of perception, and, indeed, the word ether has been used many times to denote different ideas as pointed out in the 2001 Journal of Borderland Research (“Ether, Electricity and its Manifestations”). The idea of ether as used to describe the UFO phenomenon can be roughly described as a physical density level that is most clearly understood as the Quantum Vacuum in the physics underlying the theory of Free Energy.

Ether is Extra-dimensional. Meade Layne described the first Etheric UFOs as the 4D Ether Ship Mystery. Any discussion of the fourth dimension becomes quickly and hopelessly confused when we try to differentiate between various ideas of the fourth dimension (i.e. equating the fourth dimension with Time), and we are only interested in introducing the idea of extra dimensional theories of the UFO. For a detailed explanation, see Meade Layne’s “Ether Ship Mystery (and Its Solution)”.

Can living creatures exist in this strange energy dimension? As hard as it is to picture anything living in this energy ocean, it was when borderland technology emerged that allowed us to perceive this living force that these creatures started being observed. The first Etherians were detected psychically in the 1940’s; a startling “scientific” technique that begs a new look into consciousness, physics and the life force. It has been postulated that the intense neurological activity of the brain may directly interface with the Quantum Vacuum in ways that seem to verify the claims of magicians for hundreds of years, that the intention focused brain has an effect on environment in which it is physically embedded.

Wilhelm Reich was no ordinary kook. Reich studied directly under Sigmund Freud, the Father of Modern Psychology. Reich discovered a primary life-force similar to Ether that he called Orgone Energy. One of the amazing features of this energy is that it could be manipulated at great distances in the sky creating rain by altering the relationship of the electrical charge between the earth and the atmosphere using a simple arrangement of tubes that are grounded in running water. He discovered this energy first inside the human body when he was studying the expansion and contraction of the biological organism. Optimum mental and psychic health required the regular contraction and expansion of this vital force in the physical body. The Orgone Accumulator was one of several tools he had developed to help facilitate his research. Atmospheric research led to the development and perfection of the “cloud buster” which could change the potentials in the atmosphere at extreme distances resulting in the creation and dispertion of clouds and rain. It quickly attracted the attention of our Sky Creatures.

Not long after his lab assistants and visitors started reporting strange occurrences in the sky and he himself heard something buzz overhead he began noticing a strange pollution that was effecting the local environment. In his most suppressed book, “Contact With Space“, Dr. Reich describes the destructive effects UFOs have on our energetic enviornment. It was not more than 30 days after Reich aimed an experimental “cloud buster” at one of the many UFOs that were beginning to somewhat harass the pristine wilderness laboratories that the Federal government issued an order for his to cease research and publishing… not long after, he died in prison and his books and tools were literally burned to ashes like some scene out of the darkest Inquisition.

In the wake of this suppression that was impossible to ignore, T. J. Constable set aside his phychic contacts with Ashtar Command and started building cloud busters out in the desert. His desire was to physically grasp the ether beyond the subjective impressions of the mind, to twist the invisible into scienifically observable forces that can be engineered. T. J. was able to extend the work of Reich by capturing images of the unidentified flying objects, amorphous blobs in man cases, with infrared filters on his camera. T. J. published his interpretation in The Cosmic Pulse of Life.

(Jose Escamilla using similar techniques as Mr. Constable was able to make similar photographs of atmospheric creatures he called “Rods”. His research can be found on the internet.)

These observations, although they take place consistently for the last 60 years of UFO reporting, have remained as a kook sideline to the more mainstream abduction conspiracy stories. The idea that some sort of sentient creatures live in the atmosphere or lives in the massively fluctuating energy in the atmosphere is exceedingly hard to conceptualize. This mental picture is becoming much easier to visualize with the images from NASA showing floppy blobs sporting around in outer space. “Critters” … some sort of atmospheric fish?

But why critters in space? There is no life in space… or is there? It is theorized by alternative scientists that Orgone Energy exists in space. There is a very important photo of the lunar landing where the astronauts are surrounded by a blue glow; this is thought to be an orgone charge luminescent in the vacuum of space.

The presence of humans and equipment in space is going to create the same energetic conditions as an Orgone Accumulator or a ‘cloud buster’; an extreme potential of Orgone Energy is attracting these critters like they were moths to a flame. We have indeed seen many pictures of “critters” hanging around the space station and space shuttle. The latest video of these “Critters” is similar to observing sea life in its natural habitat. These elusive “Critters” seem most like dolphins that swim along side the crafts that journey beyond the shores into the deep borderlands of science and perception.

Excerpts from “THE COSMIC PULSE OF LIFE” by Trevor James Constable

Chapter Seven

THE CASE FOR THE CRITTERS

… the mistakes and errors are the price for the great romance of doing something for the first time.

- SIR FRANCIS CHICHESTER

The concept that certain UFOs could be living organisms not originate with me. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story Horror of the Heights gives a startlingly prescient description of the “air jungle” and its denizens. Doyle makes other references to borderland residents in The Edge of the Unknown, published by Putnams in 1930. Charles Fort also speculated about critters in his Book of the Damned, available in several editions. The first modern theory encompassing this idea with specific reference to UFOs was probably the original “etheric interpretation” of the flying discs, formulated in 1946-47 by the late N. Meade Layne, MA.

Mr. Layne published his theory in a penetrating 1950 monograph The Ether Ship Mystery and Its Solution. He was founder and first director of the Borderland Sciences Research Foundation, Inc., in San Diego, California. A former university lecturer and an outstanding writer, Meade Layne produced one of the classics of ufology in his monograph. His achievement was to produce the only theoretical treatment of UFOs to survive the entire modern period. This document is still available today with added comments by Riley Crabb, second director of BSRF.

Mr. Layne’s “etheric interpretation” is also readily extensible to cover new UFO facts, and is required reading for any person with a genuine desire to break out of the bondage of mechanistic thinking. There can be no doubt that Meade Layne was a generation ahead of his time with his mobile thinking. He also emerges as easily the greatest writer of ufology’s break-in period.

The methods of obtaining advanced information that were employed by this pioneer, at a time when UFO data were sparse, will be dealt with later in proper context. A sample of his writings will illustrate that his work disqualifies with equal alacrity both the faint-hearted and the weak-minded:

“The aeroforms are thought-constructs, mind constructs. As such, they are, in effect, the vehicle of the actual entity who creates them. Just as our own terrestrial minds rule and become identified with our bodies, so does the entity of the Etheric world make for himself a body or vehicle out of etheric substance.

“This body may be of any shape or size, any one of a hundred mutants – such as the indefinite and changing shapes reported by observers of flying saucers throughout the world. The shapes may be a wheel, a globe, a fusiform or cigar shape, a fireball, vapor or gases. It may have any density, any rate of vibration desired. The impenetrable steel of landed discs, is, as it were, a sort of etheric isotope of our terrestrial steel, or we may call it ‘etheric steel’. The shapes and vehicles and the entity operating them form one being, just as a human being is a psychophysical mind-body unity. The body of this Etherian entity is a thoughtform which can go anywhere, and penetrates our earth and sea as easily as our air.”

Etherian physics in all its significance for true ufology – the ufology of the Future – will be enlarged upon as this book proceeds. The important point for now is that I was not the originator of the theory that some UFOs could be living organisms, and that Meade Layne – and also John Bessor – preceded me by about ten years. When Meade Layne saw my collection of more than a hundred photographs of these mutants not long before his death, he was exuberant. He termed their capture on film “the death knell of the old order.”

Meade Layne’s daring hypothesis – a brilliant synthesis of physics and metaphysics – was shown to be valid when I literally stumbled across these organisms in the summer of 1957. This experimental accident, and my subsequent photography of dozens of these critters in situ, merely confirmed the extant theories of far brighter minds than mine. This borderland breakthrough was crude, awkward and some at uncomprehending, but it nevertheless threw light immediately into the darker, previously impenetrable corners of history’s greatest mystery.

Endless implications ensued. Technical, theoretical,cognitional, philosophical, psychological, methodological and scientific questions arose of staggering magnitude. Unraveling all this will take the best efforts of far better and younger, more functional minds than those that currently dominate world science. The response we found, outside the mall circle of friends and associates who understood our work, was essentially confined to fear and anxiety. We understood some of this only too well.

When these strange living forms burst into our ken, we found it essential to be light-hearted about our work – if only to diminish the psychological impact of unknown terrors. The sight of these queer, plasmatic fauna in photographs was sufficient to repel sensitive people otherwise interested in UFOs. Motion pictures of them sometimes caused psychically sensitive persons to bolt from the room during screening. Numerous persons today who have tampered chemically with their perceptions by ingesting LSD have become aware of these strange organisms. Back in 1957-58 however, few people were willing to attempt chemical extensions of perception, and prior knowledge of the critters was confined to learned and accomplished occultists, who knew only too well how real the things were that we had been able to capture on film.

We conceived of ourselves as children, struggling to stay upright by clinging to the side of a crib. Our falls and spills and mistakes were almost perpetual and often comical. Everything we touched was new, and there were no technical ~ texts to consult. Our ability to see the funny side of our adventures never left us, and was always a counterbalance to what might otherwise have become overwhelmingly serious.

Kidding in no way diminished our curiosity. We kept on after the critters. No one had ever done anything like this before, and it was a tremendous thrill. The laws of these etherain realms are essentially functional and biological, and they open themselves only to the researcher who, in his experimental work, has not lost his ability to play – to play like a child. The searching organism is almost always playful. A sense of humor is essential, for experience quickly teaches the field worker that the stupidity and cupidity of contemporary man must surely be the comedy of the gods.

Chapter Eighteen

FROM ORGASM TO UFOs

No unimportant man is hated and persecuted as Reich was.

- A.S. NEIL

The following account of Wilhelm Reich’s involvement with UFOs is drawn from Contact With Space. Supplementary and illuminatory material has been contributed by Robert McCullough, one of Reich’s research assistants at the time. A student of Steiner’s work in the interim, McCullough is better able on that account to evaluate what happened at Orgonon and in Tucson during those haunted days. My own interpretations and evaluations have been also added, based upon insights, findings and experiences already described in this book.

The discovery of the orgone energy is the practical, technical break-in to the UFO problem. Appropriately enough, therefore, we find Dr. Reich’s theoretical involvement with the technical principles immanent in UFOs commencing right after he discovered the orgone in the atmosphere in 1939-40. During the WWII years he worked out a mass-free energy formula, and also a pendulum formula. Both these formulae, and the mathematics from which they are derived, are published in Contact With Space. These formulae anticipate enormous velocities in kreiselwelle functions, and anticipate mathematically the characteristic wobbling and swinging associated with UFOs since 1947. Developed long before that, the formulae ran parallel in the time of their calculation with the first radar sightings of UFOs made by military and naval units during WWII.

Dr. Reich was a practical man. Since he could not at the time confirm these formulae with actual observations and experiments, he deposited them in the Orgone Institute archives until such time as they could be empirically confirmed. His discovery of the orgone energy had obsoleted the old physics by filling the universe with a mass-free primordial energy. He recoiled from making the kind of abstruse mathematical gambits – factually unsupported – that had emptied out that same universe, divesting it even of ether. These notions had hamstrung physical research, blocked comprehension of the orgone energy and led to systematic biasing of the scientific mind against any conception of a living cosmos.

Dr. Reich decided to wait for factual developments. In 1947 he started his work on vacua that led to blue lumination of the orgone energy. He detailed this work in the first issue of the Orgone Energy Bulletin, published in 1949. This was contemporaneous with Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting in Washington state, and the subsequent early work and writing of Major Donald Keyhoe.

In the late 1940s and early ’50s, Dr. Reich occasionally heard about UFOs through newspaper reports and news broadcasts. He was so immersed in his work in biophysics at this time that he paid these reports scant attention. Considering the scope of his research and inventions, the extent of his responsibilities in teaching and running Orgonon, and his artistic diversions into writing, painting and poetry, his brushing contact with the UFO subject is understandable.

Visitors saw UFOs around Orgonon in 1951. In August of 1952, standing on his front porch, Dr. Reich heard something whizz by from southwest to northeast in a few seconds. He did not see the object. Although the whole subject of UFOs was still largely ridiculed, Dr. Reich himself did not consider that there was anything particularly strange in the earth receiving visitors from outer space. These reverie conditions were soon banished, for in the post-Oranur period the alien invaders intruded upon Dr. Reich and his work – forcing themselves into his life with malefic intent.

This truth is far stranger than fiction. The presence of these malevolent aliens might have gone unnoticed, as it has in most of the world, had they not tackled a scientist of such phenomenal observational powers as Wilhelm Reich. His ability to single-handedly punch right through to the orgone discovery, on observation and experiment, is a matter of record. Those same observational powers rallied to his aid in 1953, when UFO attentions to Orgonon developed into an attack.

Visions of space ships shooting destructive rays into the ground, Hollywood-style, rise to mind at the use of the word attack. The assault on Reich and his work was on a far more subtle and clever scale. Again it aimed at keeping the presence and the purposes of the attackers concealed while the destructive work was done. In the spring of 1952, Dr. Reich noticed a strange black substance settling on the rocks from which his observatory was built. The black deposits also began to appear on other rock surfaces in the vicinity.

As Bob McCullough recalls, Reich’s ability to detect such subtle processes was well-nigh incredible: “Dr. Reich’s powers of observation were simply tremendous. I never found his equal among the scores of scientists I have worked with since. He was continually drawing my attention to things that had completely eluded me, even close up. His awareness was also astounding, as was the case with melanor, the black substance that we later connected with UFOs.”

Dr. Reich noticed the black substance gathering. He made time-lapse films over a period of several weeks. These films proved beyond doubt that the blackening was an ongoing process. Other similar substances Reich detected he named brownite and orite. McCullough made preliminary analyses of these materials in 1953, his findings being published in 1955 in CORE (Cosmic Orgone Engineering), a publication of the Orgone Institute Press.

Melanor attacked and destroyed rocks and dried up the atmosphere. The substance created excitation of the biological energy of workers at Orgonon, who were afflicted with cyanosis, nausea, thirst and miscellaneous pains. When McCullough scraped or hammered melanor off the rocks for analysis, pressure would quickly build up in his head and his face would flush and burn. Scraping seemed to excite the melanor, which caused a corresponding strong reaction of the biological energy of any human being nearby.

To melanor was added the compounding problem of DOR – Deadly Orgone Radiation. DOR is orgone energy that has become sequestered, and resultantly stagnant and stale. DOR clouds surrounded Orgonon and deadened the light. The landscape in the magnificent splendor of rural Maine turned bleak and somber. Trees and shrubs blackened and withered.

An enterprise dynamically devoted to life thus became surrounded by and infected with death processes. There can be little doubt today – and McCullough for one has none – that a new kind of warfare was being waged against Dr. Reich’s scientific oasis. Had these processes not been rapidly detected by Dr. Reich’s phenomenal observational powers, they might well have advanced to the point where this malefic engineering would have extinguished Orgonon, Wilhelm Reich and everything to which his discoveries have led us. There are very few people able to tolerate for long – biophysically and biopsychiatrically – the kind of conditions that the malevolent aliens subtly imposed on Orgonon.

Dr. Reich, McCullough and others at Orgonon became aware as events proceeded that their energy was being drawn out of them. In November of 1953, Dr. Reich read Keyhoe’s Flying Saucers Are Real, and began to put two and two together. Minus any knowledge of orgone energy, Major Keyhoe had set down facts in his book that could not have failed to connect with Dr. Reich’s pioneering in the borderland of etherian physics. Reich could relate the noiselessness of most UFOs to the near-noiselessness of his own orgone energy motor. The bluish lights often reported around UFOs and as UFOs were functionally related to the blue lumination of orgone energy in vacor tubes. The spinning rotating discs with their oft-noted swinging motions in the heavens were fully compatible with the spinning wave motion of orgone energy, and the mathematical formulae that Reich had worked out during World War II.

UFOs hung in the night sky around the laboratory. Occasionally they moved and shifted their positions. Dr. Reich took time exposures to objectify their presence. Such photographs proved that UFOs concealed themselves among the stars, a stratagem that I reported from personal experience in They Live in the Sky. Dr. Reich’s photographs demonstrated the ability of UFOs to materialize and dematerialize. Objects appeared during time exposures and disappeared before the exposures were terminated.

Dr. Reich and his facilities were getting a great deal of attention from UFOs. This attention was unwelcome, unwanted, disruptive, damaging and dangerous. On many nights, Reich himself was unable to sleep in the quarters at Orgonon, and drove from place to place in a station wagon, snatching fitful catnaps. McCullough has said of this baleful time: “It was as though the energy – or something – was following him around and you could see him becoming slowly exhausted by the strain.”

What was actually going on is not too difficult to deduce, given the reality of invisible entities of vast technical skill in those matters to which Wilhelm Reich had broken through. There could be no more effective way to deal with this gifted, brilliant man than to drive him crazy, cause him to break down and to lose his mind and otherwise formidable reasoning powers. To reduce his laboratory with ray guns would only raise endless questions and investigations. Drive him crazy however and every armored nincompoop of high academic qualification would stand vindicated when saying: “I told you Reich was nuts.”

The shutters could be drawn on etherian physics for another century.

Dr. Reich decided to fight back. His weapon was his own Invention, the cloudbuster. Designed and developed to control the weather, the cloudbuster was an obvious tool to use against anything operating in the heavens and employing orgone energy functions. Dr. Reich demonstrated weather control with these devices, reported his findings fully in his journals and bulletins, and also made the information available to the U.S. government.

Others have carried on this work since Dr. Reich’s death, including myself. As one who has personally worked for many years with cloudbusters, designing, building and operating them experimentally, I have no doubt whatever that they work. In 1974, because of my concern over the spurious expanding use of these devices by amateur experimenters, I personally produced and financed a 75-page survey of orgone energy weather engineering and circulated it to the relevant Federal agencies. The reader will recognize that such a heavy expenditure is not made unless there is both genuine concern over the matters involved and conviction as to the power of the device. This is mentioned here to emphasize that in dealing with Dr. Reich’s use of the cloudbuster as a weapon, I can once again write as a participant, having myself used cloudbusters to provoke the appearance of certain types of UFOs.

The original Reich cloudbuster consisted of an array of parallel, hollow, metal tubes. One end of the array is grounded into water. The tubes, or pipes, are mounted on a turntable or similar pivoting assembly so that the free ends of the pipes may be directed into the atmosphere at any elevation and on any bearing like a battery of Oerlikon guns. Dr. Reich theorized that the hollow metal pipes “drew” orgone energy into the water, thereby permitting manipulation of the orgone energy potentials in the atmosphere. Through such manipulations, control of the weather may be exercised.

The cloudbuster gets its name simply. The device will dissipate, i.e. “bust”, any discrete cloud at which it is precisely aimed. Since Dr. Reich felt that he was being drawn upon by the UFOs around Orgonon, and that the whole environment was being sucked to death by such drawing, he decided to draw upon the UFOs with his cloudbuster. There have been writers and commentators with no practical knowledge whatever of these matters who have elected to refer snidely to Dr. Reich’s use of the cloudbuster in this way. He used it as a spacegun because he had no option. He was within his rights to defend his own life, his laboratory and his work against the entities who deliberately set out to harm him.

On 12 May 1954, between 9:40 p.m, and 10:45 p.m., Dr. Reich turned the cloudbuster on luminous UFOs hanging in the nearby sky. Two UFOs to the west of Orgonon were made to fade out several times by training the cloudbuster on them. This proved that Dr. Reich’s invention could technically reach the strange aerial objects whose presence was associated with the overall deterioration of the environment at Orgonon. Perhaps it was possible to impair or even disable the propulsion systems of these weird craft. The scenario was that of a battle.

This experience of causing UFOs to dim out shocked Dr. Reich deeply. He feared that if he attempted further to mitigate UFO mischief upon his scientific center at Orgonon, he might precipitate an interplanetary war – something General MacArthur had inferred might lie in the near future. Accordingly, Dr. Reich took no further action against UFOs with the cloudbuster until much later that same year. Nor should it be forgotten, in understanding the terrible burdens borne by Dr. Reich at this time, that he was under simultaneous attack by the unholy alliance of Big Medicine and Big Government. Like the UFOs around Orgonon, they too wished to see Wilhelm Reich and his work extirpated.

An order dated 19 March 1954 directed Dr. Reich to halt all research activity in orgone energy, including publications and publishing. This action hampered his work at Orgonon because revenues that sustained the center came largely from accumulator rentals. Seldom if ever has scientific work of such vital moment been so mindlessly harassed in the name of the law.

There can be little doubt, with the perspective of the years since these happenings and an understanding of the New Knowledge, that the whole destructive scenario was conceived and executed by the Boys Downstairs. Psychic control of officials who are spiritually inert is about as difficult for alien technology as making a telephone call is for us. The aim of the whole venture was to bring Reich down and bury his work.

The measure of Wilhelm Reich’s striking clarity of mind is his ability to keep plowing ahead despite all this engineered adversity. The advancing desolation of the area around Orgonon was associated with the incursion of these big, yellow and “stars” after the Oranur Experiment. Melanor, orite and brownite appeared pursuant to the UFO onslaught. Dryness and discomfort ensued in man, animals and vegetation.

Dr. Reich began to transfer this picture to a world canvas. He began to see the connection between the withdrawal of life energy from Orgonon – the world center of thought and work on life energy – and a similar sapping of life energy from the planet as a whole. He could readily relate, with his functional mode of thought, the world-wide expansion of desert conditions to the local conditions at Orgonon. He began to see the drying up of the planet and the planetary problem of DOR as engineered conditions rather than natural developments.

Dr. Reich began to suspect that UFOs were undermining earth life, subtly, silently, steadily and secretly. He thus became the first scientist to anticipate from knowledge and experience the unpleasant truth about the Boys Downstairs that has been delineated in this book. All of it was based, in his case, upon observation and experiment and without any study whatever of what Dr. Steiner has said about these same matters.

The years since Dr. Reich’s death have served to confirm his well-grounded suspicion of what he called the COREmen (for Cosmic ORgone Engineering).

reddish pulsating

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3. Round Robin: Does the Planet Earth Harbor Spacemen?

UFO researcher and author John Keel’s column in the November, 1998 issue of FATE magazine dealt in part with the increasingly lucrative “business” of UFOs (movies, television shows, books, videos, etc.) As interesting as that article was, I was even more intrigued by the sidebar that accompanied it. Although it was un-attributed, an Associate Editor at FATE told me privately that columnists there frequently write the sidebars accompanying their articles. This one offered a rather provocative statement, “Movies have had a huge influence on UFO lore. Often the plots of old sci-fi movies from the 1950s have been adapted by UFO buffs 20 or 30 years later.”

As a lifelong fan of both science fiction and the UFO phenomenon, I was not particularly shocked by that charge. For many, the relationship between ufology and science fiction has always contained an element of the “chicken-or-the-egg” conundrum. In his 1991 book “Watch The Skies!” aviation historian and UFO skeptic Curtis Peebles made his own position clear in the book’s sub-title: “A Chronicle Of The UFO Myth.” A very good argument can – and has – been made to support the proposition that the UFO phenomenon represents a latter-day expression of humanity’s propensity for myth-making. I tend to agree with the idea that in the centuries prior to organized science, mythologization was the only way for the human mind to apprehend those aspects of the universe which denied easy explanation.

Ever since Kenneth Arnold’s historic UFO sighting of June 24, 1947, ufology has become entrenched within the popular consciousness and culture. Over the course of the last fifty-two years, this great body of knowledge has been revisited, reinterpreted and expanded upon countless times. Considering the fact that the very idea of UFOs is an intriguing one, the creators and purveyors of popular fiction have addressed it repeatedly in search of new ways and means of self-expression and mass-entertainment. One consequence of all this has been an increasing difficulty on the part of individuals to perceive the dividing line between palpable “fiction” and ostensible “fact.”

How much of a connection is there between science fiction and ufology? One way to find out may be to explore the ways in which the two have been linked during the second half of the 20th century. Our first stop on this journey will be the medium of Television; specifically, three highly regarded science fiction T.V. programs of the 1960s. 5. The legendary series “The Twilight Zone” featured an interesting episode titled “The Odyssey of Flight 33,” which dealt with the eerie fate of a New York-bound jetliner. While over the Atlantic, the aircraft enters a mysterious, glowing cloud. Immediately, the plane’s instruments malfunction and the doomed aircraft begins a one-way trip back in time. Upon reaching New York, the crew and passengers are horrified to see below them not the thriving metropolis, but a sprawling swampland teeming with dinosaurs. The story-line here seems to be a composite of various strange incidents involving aircraft that were alleged to have occurred in the “Bermuda Triangle” and elsewhere. One such real-life incident comes easily to mind: the mysterious loss of “Flight 19” in December of 1945. The disappearance without trace of five U.S. Navy torpedo-bombers – and the large seaplane sent in search of them – remains as perhaps the great unsolved mystery of “The Triangle.”

“Star Trek” fans will remember the original-series episode “Tomorrow is Yesterday.” Here, the starship “Enterprise” is accidentally catapulted back in time to the mid-1960s. In the opening sequence, a U.S. Air Force jet is sent to intercept a UFO over the American Midwest: which turns out to be the “Enterprise.” Fearful of the plane’s air-to-air missiles, “Captain Kirk” orders that an energy-beam be used to hold the plane off until the starship can climb back into outer space. However, the plane proves too flimsy to withstand the beam’s energy and starts to break apart. As its pilot is “beamed” aboard the “Enterprise” the plane’s wreckage crashes to earth. UFO savants will easily recognize in this episode the tragic “Mantell Incident” of 1947. On January 7th of that year, U.S. Air Force pilot Captain Thomas Mantell died when his F-51 fighter plane crashed after chasing a UFO over the state of Kentucky. UFO debunkers maintain that the accident was caused by a non-functioning oxygen mask, while ufologists cite the hundreds of mysterious small holes allegedly found in the wreckage of Mantell’s plane.

“The Outer Limits” was the third sci-fi television program of the 1960s to deal intelligently with the idea of UFOs and extra-terrestrials. In his book “Hollywood Versus The Aliens,” author Bruce Rux noted that the Executive Producer of “The Outer Limits” was a former U.S. Intelligence Officer named Leslie Stevens. Rux has also wondered if Mr. Stevens’ experience within the American intelligence community might have allowed him access to tightly held information about UFOs and their alien occupants.

Here we have intriguing evidence that ufology has had a profound influence on science fiction. In the case of the “Twilight Zone” and “Star Trek” episodes, it should be noted that the episodes themselves were written,produced and broadcast in the 1960s; while the incidents they were based on occurred in the 1940s. In the case of “Outer Limits” participant Leslie Stevens, he had left government service by 1960. At least publicly.

The manner in which science fiction material is sometimes presented may explain some of the difficulty people have in differentiating “fact” from “fiction.” This point can be illustrated by referring to a best-selling science fiction novel of the late 1960s.

“The Andromeda Strain” by Michael Crichton was published in 1969 and dealt with a “fictitious” U.S. satellite program to harvest micro-organisms in near-earth orbit for use in biological warfare experiments. In chapter one, two military men sent to retrieve one of these satellites enter the fictitious town of “Piedmont.” To their horror, they soon discover that all of the inhabitants appear to be dead. Soon thereafter, they themselves die mysteriously. The rest of the book deals with the life-or-death efforts of a small team of scientists. Toiling in a secret, underground government laboratory, they race against time to destroy the alien germ before it can eradicate all life on Earth.

“The Andromeda Strain” was a seminal work on more than one level. It introduced the world to such emerging technologies as fiber-optics and computerized medical, biological and genetic research. It also focused public-awareness on the unsettling reality of “Black Ops”: highly classified government projects conducted at Top Secret locations; many of which are situated in the most remote and inaccessible parts of the United States. In many ways, this book was a product of the anti-Vietnam War/anti-Establishment mood of the 1960s. Prior to that decade, most people were unaware of the hidden machinations of the “Military-Industrial Complex” and very few suspected that vast, secret and hugely expensive research programs were being developed.

Michael Crichton presented “The Andromeda Strain” – a novel – in a manner that would tempt readers to believe that it was actually a work of non-fiction. The text is full of authentic-looking “documents” and official-sounding terminology. He also makes repeated references to real people, places and things; and the careers and accomplishments of his scientist-heroes are skillfully interwoven with those of real-life researchers. He even goes so far as to include a bibliography at the end of the book where actual scientific papers and publications are listed; along with those of his fictional characters. Thirty-years after its publication, there are still those who believe that Crichton did indeed have access to Top Secret information – and that the story behind “The Andromeda Strain” was a true one.

In 1971, a movie-version of “The Andromeda Strain” was released in theaters. Critics and movie-goers alike applauded it; not only for its efforts to pierce the veil of government secrecy, but also for the fact that it was an informative, suspenseful and entertaining film. Turning a best-selling novel into a successful motion picture usually requires a considerable amount of cinematic license. The story-line of a book is usually too lengthy and complex; and in order to craft a workable screenplay, elements within the text are often condensed or deleted. In the case of “The Andromeda Strain” however, two subtle changes were made which bear close scrutiny.

In the book-version, author Michael Crichton placed the fictitious town of “Piedmont” in the state of Arizona. However, Producer/Director Robert Wise and Screenwriter Nelson Gidding chose to place the doomed town in New Mexico. In one of the movie’s opening scenes, the two men searching for the deadly satellite consult a map – which gives the location of “Piedmont” as the northwest corner of New Mexico. Why might this be significant? To address that question, we must turn briefly to the late ufologist and conspiracy researcher Phillip Schneider.

Mr. Schneider told an amazing – and horrifying – story during his lecture at the 1995 Global Sciences Conference in Denver, Colorado. Schneider claimed to have been a structural engineer in the employ of a construction company in 1979 that had just won a government contract. The contract called for work to expand an existing underground military installation. During the course of the excavation, workers accidentally discovered a large, seemingly man-made cavern near the underground base. To their surprise, they found that it was occupied by small, alien beings which ufologists refer to as “Grays.” To their horror, the Grays attacked them using some form of high-energy weapon. Mr. Schneider said that he had been struck and almost killed by a blast from this weapon. Although U.S. military personnel were able to kill a few of the creatures, only three people survived the attack which claimed almost seventy human lives.

One of those in attendance at that Global Sciences Conference was Robert C. Warth, President of S.I.T.U., (Society for the Investigation of The Unexplained.) According to Mr. Warth, Schneider opened his shirt during a question and answer period after his lecture to reveal a large scar on his chest and abdomen: evidence, he claimed, of his near-fatal “Close Encounter.”

What possible link could there be between the shocking story of Phil Schneider and the motion-picture “The Andromeda Strain?” Well, the secret installation where the violent, human-alien encounter occurred is, according to Schneider and others, located somewhere beneath the desert near the town of Dulce – IN THE NORTHWEST CORNER OF NEW MEXICO AND VERY CLOSE TO THE LOCATION OF THE FICTITIOUS TOWN OF PIEDMONT, AS DEPICTED IN THE MOVIE-VERSION OF “THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN.”

Even more shocking are accusations by Schneider and others that the alien presence outside Dulce is actually the result of a treaty between the U.S. government and the Grays. In exchange for access to alien technology, the U.S. government allegedly allows the Grays to abduct, implant and experiment upon U.S. citizens; as well as allowing the aliens the right to harvest biological compounds through animal mutilation. Unfortunately, the voice of Phillip Schneider has been silenced: he died, under what some believe to be questionable circumstances, on January 17, 1996.

The other curious change made in the movie-version of “The Andromeda Strain” was the relocation of the secret, underground government lab where the scientists waged battle against the deadly germ. In his book, Michael Crichton chose to locate this facility – which he called “Project Wildfire” – in the northwest corner of Nevada. In the movie, it is located in the desert south of Las Vegas. A meaningless detail? Perhaps, but remember that Area 51 – the U.S. Air Force’s test-site for exotic aircraft, (and the place where many believe the U.S. government stores and tests captured UFOs), is also relatively close to Las Vegas. Area 51 was still a relatively obscure place in 1971 and had yet to achieve the notoriety it enjoys today. In fact, “Hangar 18,” the first major motion-picture to address the question of Area 51 as a storage facility for captured UFOs and aliens, would not appear in theaters until 1980.

Were Robert Wise and Nelson Gidding alone responsible for the curious changes made to “The Andromeda Strain” story: or were they acting upon outside “advice?” Although the true extent of Hollywood’s inside knowledge concerning UFOs is a subject for debate, it is not likely that definitive answers are forthcoming. However, another possible link to “The Andromeda Strain” might be found in recently revealed “Majestic-12” (MJ-12) documents acquired by researcher Tim Cooper, Dr. Robert Wood and his son Ryan.

The Woods appeared on the December 7, 1998 broadcast of the nationally syndicated radio talk-show “Coast To Coast A.M. with Art Bell” to announce the existence of the compelling papers. The term “Majestic-12” refers to a Top Secret presidential commission purportedly founded by U.S. President Harry Truman in 1947. The group included a number of high-ranking government officials; including then Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, (who would commit suicide under mysterious circumstances in 1948), and presidential science advisor Vannevar Bush. Their mission: to evaluate – among other things – reports of crashed UFOs and aliens near Roswell, New Mexico in July of 1947: the now-famous “Roswell Incident.” The first examples of so-called MJ-12 documents came to light in 1984, and others surfaced ten-years later.

Contained within the documents obtained by the Woods are startling reports that certain individuals who handled the corpses of dead aliens succumbed to a frightening disease. Reportedly, at least four persons died of seizures and massive bleeding as a result of physical contact with aliens. Although the exact cause of death is not reported in these new documents, it was suspected at the time that some micro-organism of extra-terrestrial origin was involved: perhaps a real-life version of “The Andromeda Strain.”

These newly revealed MJ-12 documents also suggest a possible link to another science fiction movie: one of the classics of the 1950s.

“Earth Versus The Flying Saucers” was released by Columbia Pictures in 1956 during the height of the “Flying Saucer Craze.” It was produced by Charles H. Schneer, who would go on to create such memorable fantasy films as “Mysterious Island,” “Jason and The Argonauts” and “Clash of The Titans.” The special-effects were created by the legendary master of that art: Ray Harryhausen. “Earth Versus The Flying Saucers” was meant to be a fast-paced sci-fi thriller that was also rooted firmly in the UFO headlines of its day. The screenplay was “suggested” by the book “Flying Saucers From Outer Space” by Major Donald E. Kehoe.

The film opens with an alien attack on an American rocket launching base somewhere in the deserts of the Southwest. Later, the aliens “abduct” two humans in order to gain information. The climax of the movie is a dramatic and action-filled attack on Washington, D.C. by giant saucers. Fortunately, a heroic scientist is able to develop an ultrasonic weapon in the nick of time, and the aliens are defeated.

The Flying Saucer assault on Washington may have been inspired by an actual UFO event that occurred over the U.S. capitol. During the night of July 26-27, 1952, three different radar sites surrounding Washington picked-up unidentified, high-speed objects. Jet interceptors were dispatched from nearby air bases in an attempt to identify the UFOs: those attempts failed. The incident made national headlines, and according to historian and UFO skeptic Curtis Peebles, it resulted in the largest press conference since World War Two. The conference was convened on the afternoon of July 29, 1952 by Major General John Samford, Director of Air Force Intelligence. Samford stated the Air Force’s belief that the “UFOs” were merely false radar images resulting from a “temperature inversion” over the Washington, D.C. area during the night in question.

The alien attack on the desert launching site in “Earth Versus The Flying Saucers” could have been based on reports Major Keyhoe had received concerning multiple UFO sightings near the “White Sands Proving Ground” in New Mexico: the place where much of America’s early rocket experimentation took place. According to the newly discovered MJ-12 documents, however, UFOs did more than just fly around over the New Mexico desert. One document indicates that U.S. test-launches of captured German V-2 rockets were actually interfered with by UFOs. One particularly stunning memo was addressed to a Lieutenant-General Nathan Twining. The memo, dated 8 July 1947, ordered the general to proceed to White Sands and evaluate reports of a captured UFO. The tone of the memo also suggests that the White Sands facility was in something close to an uproar; with allegations that a Military Policeman had committed suicide. The full-story surrounding these new MJ-12 documents will be found in the upcoming book “The Secret: Evidence That We Are Not Alone” by Robert and Ryan Wood.

One of the most well-regarded science fiction movies of the 1950s was the film “This Island Earth.” Although I have seen it at least a dozen times, it is the sort of motion picture that can offer new revelations with every viewing. I have identified four different elements within it that are also part of contemporary ufology:

1. Humans abducted by aliens, (a la Budd Hopkins and Dr. John Mack.)

2. A flying saucer parked in a concealed hangar dug into the side of a hill, (alleged to be a reality at Area 51.)

3. Secret alien bases at various places on Earth, (the Dulce, New Mexico underground alien base, UFO bases alleged to be beneath the ice of Antarctica, and underwater bases off the coast of Puerto Rico.)

4. Alien technology being covertly introduced into a commercial research laboratory in the United States, (the late Col. Corso’s allegations that technology from crashed UFOs at Roswell, New Mexico was secretly transferred to Bell Labs by the U.S. government.)

During my most recent viewing of “This Island Earth,” I was stunned to realize that the design of the small “Zagon” spaceships, (seen only briefly in the film), was almost identical to that of the Lockheed-Martin F-117A stealth fighter. The resemblance is truly uncanny – and also a bit eerie! The final-design of the stealth fighter would not achieved until more than twenty-years after the movie’s release.

Is modern-day science fiction the stepchild of ufology, or vice-versa? Regrettably, that question may never be answered. The evidence presented here could be interpreted to support either position. Some have speculated that the genre of science fiction is being used to channel truths too controversial to be represented as such publicly. Others suspect that ufology itself is frequently tainted by deliberate disinformation; skillfully planted to create confusion and foster doubt as to the reality of UFOs and other things. Perhaps all we can do is heed the advice offered at the conclusion of that memorable sci-fi flick of the 1950s – “The Thing”:

“Watch The Skies! Keep Looking! Keep Watching The Skies!”

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