Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (29 page)

In the fifth chapter of
Flying Saucers: A Myth of Things Seen in the Skies,
Jung points out that radar sightings do not prove conclusively that UFOs are spaceships, because there are cases where they are seen yet not picked up on radar, and cases where they are picked up on radar but cannot be seen.
All this, of course, was written in 1958, when the erratic behaviour of UFOs was not fully recognised—although Jung admits that some cases are so weird that he prefers not to mention them.
It was after that time that investigators like Jacques Vallee and John Keel became aware of their ‘psychic’ aspects.
It seems fairly clear that Jung was actually the first to grasp intuitively the strangely dual nature of UFOs.

This again is underlined by his choice of illustrations—particularly
The Fourth Dimension.
In the early twentieth century, the notion of the fourth dimension—a dimension at right angles to length, breadth and height—was immensely popular, largely due to the works of the mathematician Charles Hinton.
Many scientists believed that it was merely the limitations of the human mind that prevented us from seeing it, and a mathematician named Johan von Manen actually claimed to have had a kind of vision of a four-dimensional cube and sphere.
Then Einstein suggested that the fourth dimension was simply another name for time.
After all, if you agree to meet someone at a particular spot in a city, you not only have to specify where to meet them—in the second-floor lounge of a hotel on the corner of Third Avenue and Twenty-first Street—but
what time,
otherwise the other three-dimensional coordinates are useless.

Now it is quite plain that, by ‘the fourth dimension’, Birkhauser means something quite different from either Hinton’s extra dimension of space, or Einstein’s concept of time.
The veil through which the strange faces seem to be staring is obviously not a part of the physical universe, but a kind of parallel universe.
And that thought may well have come to Birkhauser from his own experience as a painter.
A painter cannot stand before a canvas and turn on his inspiration like a tap, and the same applies to poets and musicians.
If an artist feels dull and tired—entangled in the mere physical world—he cannot summon inspiration.
The inner freedom responsible for inspiration requires a kind of mental ‘push-up’ from the world of space and time.

The apprehension of beauty cannot be explained in mere physical terms, for, if we feel dull, we fail to see it.
It is doubtful whether a cow appreciates the view from its mountain pasture, no matter how magnificent, for it is too involved in the physical world.
So to see beauty requires the same kind of inspiration that the artist requires to paint it.
Living itself—insofar as it involves consciousness—means living in a kind of parallel universe, from which we view actuality, as a person looking out of the window of a skyscraper sees the street below as a separate reality.

Why do we not recognise this?
Because the consciousness that forms a kind of fourth dimension is as transparent as the air that separates the person in the skyscraper from the street below.
The world is made of solid matter and our bodies are made of solid matter, so we feel that we are merely a part of the world—although slightly less substantial and real than houses and buses.

In fact, consciousness is made of a different kind of substance from the world, and we exist as living beings insofar as we push ourselves away from it.
It is not quite true, as Bucke implies, that mystics breathe a different air and walk a different Earth from the rest of us.
We
all
exist in two worlds at the same time.

The implications of this insight are revolutionary.
If someone asks me what I thought of a television programme, I do not feel that I am being asked to do something that contradicts the physical laws of the universe.
Yet if my parrot had been standing on the back of my chair, watching the same programme (as he occasionally does), he would have been unable to form any judgment.
Because, in spite of being a bird, he would not have been able to take the same ‘bird’s-eye view’ of the programme as enables me to form a judgment.
Forming judgment, grasping meaning, appreciating beauty, all demand the same faculty as the artist calls inspiration, which consists, in effect, of pushing ourselves away from the world, taking a bird’s-eye view of it.

The consequences are startling.
When my senses are dull, reality seems curiously meaningless, as if I am watching a play by Samuel Beckett.
But I remain convinced that I am awake and alive and ‘grasping reality’.
This is clearly a mistake.
When I am cheerful and excited—for example, setting out on holiday—everything looks more meaningful:
in fact, I am seeing the world with what the artist calls inspiration.
And, if I can escape my prejudiced assumption that this is nothing to get excited about, any more than the glow that comes with a glass of wine, I can suddenly grasp that my senses are not passive receptors of reality.
Looking at the world around me is much more like writing a symphony or painting a picture than taking a photograph.

And if I could, so to speak, push myself further and further from the world, into Birkhauser’s ‘fourth dimension’, it would become steadily more meaningful until I was staggered by the revelation of its significance and complexity.
The further I can push myself into the fourth dimension, which gives me detachment from everyday reality, the more I grasp the sheer strangeness of the world.

All this Jung knew intuitively, even if he never formulated it in precisely these terms.
That is why he chose Jakoby’s
Fire Sower
and Birkhauser’s
Fourth Dimension
and the Rosicrucian woodcut of the pilgrim to illustrate the meaning of his book on flying saucers.
He knew enough of the world of the paranormal to realise that mankind is being offered a revelation that could amount to a new kind of consciousness.

This is underlined by the book’s curious epilogue.
After he had completed the manuscript, Jung received a copy of a book called
The Secret of the Saucers
by a ‘contactee’ named Orfeo Angelucci, a person who describes himself as a nervous individual suffering from constitutional inadequacy, who suddenly became an evangelist of the ‘flying saucer vision’.

Angelucci describes how, as he was driving home from the night shift on 23 May 1952, he experienced a sense of the dulling of consciousness, a dreamlike sensation, after which he saw a red, oval-shaped object on the horizon.
Suddenly, it shot upward, releasing two balls of green fire, from which he heard a voice telling him not to be afraid.
He stopped the car, and the voice told him that he was in communication with friends from another world.
Suddenly, he felt very thirsty, and the voice told him to drink from a crystal cup he would find on the car wing.
It tasted delicious.
Then the space between the discs began to glow until it formed a kind of television screen, on which he saw a man and woman of supernatural beauty.
They seemed strangely familiar to him.

Suddenly the screen vanished, and he once again heard the voice (which seems to have been telepathic), explaining that man had been under observation for centuries, and that every human being was precious to them, because ‘you are not aware of the true mystery of your being’.

The UFOs, it explained, came from a mother ship; but the space beings did not need flying saucers, since they were ‘etheric’ entities; the UFOs were used only to manifest themselves to man.
‘Cosmic law’ prevented them from landing and interfering in human destiny.
But Earth was in great danger.

Angelucci was exalted by these revelations, and felt that Earth and its inhabitants had become shadowy.
Two months later, on 23 July 1952, it happened again—the same dreamlike sensation, followed by the appearance of a kind of huge hemispherical soap bubble, with a door in it.
Inside, he sat in a comfortable chair.

There was a humming sensation, and music came from the walls.
He saw a coinlike object on the floor, and, when he picked it up, it seemed grow smaller.
(It is trivial, apparently meaningless details like these that lend the story verisimilitude.) Then he was looking at Earth from outer space.
The voice told him that Earth, in spite of its beauty, was a purgatorial world, full of cruelty and selfishness.
He was told that human beings are simply mortal shadows of divinely created beings, and that they are trying to work out their salvation on Earth.
Because Orfeo was not in the best of health, he had spiritual gifts which enabled the heavenly people to enter into communication.

As they were returning to Earth, there were more revelations, then Angelucci seemed to see all his previous incarnations, and understood the mysteries of life.
He thought he was about to die.

When he was back on Earth, the UFO vanished.
Going to bed that night, he noticed a burning sensation on the left side of his chest, and found a circular red mark with a dot in the middle, which he interpreted as a hydrogen atom.

Angelucci became an evangelist, preaching the gospel of the UFOs, and receiving a great deal of mockery for his pains.
On one occasion, after seeing a UFO, he again met his ethereal companion, who told him his name was Neptune, and treated him to further insights about Earth’s problems and future redemption.

In September 1953, he fell into a trance which lasted a week; during this time, he was transported to another planet, with noble, etheric beings who fed on nectar and ambrosia.
He was told that his real name was Neptune; his male teacher was actually Orion, while his female teacher was called Lyra.
When Lyra treated him with tenderness, he responded with human erotic feelings, which shocked his celestial friends.
It was only when he had learnt to purge himself of these feelings that he was able to celebrate a kind of mystic union with Lyra.

It is clear that Jung accepts that Angelucci is telling the truth; but he feels that his story amounts to ‘spontaneous fantasy images, dreams, and the products of active imagination’—Jung’s term for fantasy that takes on a dreamlike reality.
And Jung goes on to consider two fantasy novels—Fred Hoyle’s
The Black Cloud
and John Wyndham’s
The Midwich Cuckoos—
as symbolic accounts of the coming of UFOs to answer modern man’s spiritual needs.
In
The Black Cloud,
the cloud from space destroys most life on Earth, but proves to be alive and intelligent.
Its purpose is to regenerate itself by recharging its energies near the sun.
Jung sees the black cloud as a symbol of the collective unconscious, man’s dark side.
In
The Midwich Cuckoos,
a whole village falls into hypnotic sleep, and when the villagers awake, they discover that all the young women are pregnant.
The children prove to be of greater than human intelligence—the implication being that they were fathered by angels—and, when one of them learns something, all the others know it telepathically.
(The same thing has happened in Siberia, Africa and an Eskimo settlement.) But human beings realise that these brilliant children will grow up to become masters of the Earth, and they destroy them.
Wyndham’s conclusion seems to be as pessimistic as that of H.
G.
Wells in
The Food of the Gods,
where human beings try to destroy a race of giants—‘we must needs hate the highest when we see it’.

Jung’s reflections on ‘the flying saucer vision’ have clearly led him to some exciting conclusions—the major one being that UFOs presage a profound change in human consciousness, and an important step in man’s evolution.
He says of the strange events at Midwich, ‘It is divine intervention that gives evolution a definite push forward’.
And we can suddenly see why, although he regards UFOs as a kind of hallucination, he also regards them as far more than that.
They are, he seems to feel, an expression of man’s ‘religious function’, a kind of revolt of the soul, demanding a life with more meaning; therefore they should be welcomed as a precursor of the millennium.

Yet it is difficult to accept this conclusion without certain reservations.
The story of Geller and Puharich, cited in chapter 1, is a case in point; they received assurances from ‘the Nine’ that they were destined to change the world—but the sequel was anticlimactic.
Similarly, Jack Schwarz was promised, ‘You are God’s vehicle to bring the truth that is meant to be’—but the promise was not fulfilled.

In the section on Puharich, we also encountered Dr.
Charles Laughead, who passed on to Puharich various messages from the Nine.
Laughead had been receiving these messages via a trance medium, and the ‘entities’ made a number of predictions, which all came true.
Then the entities announced that the world was going to end on 21 December 1954—North America would split in two, the east coast would sink into the sea, and half of Europe would be destroyed.
Only the chosen few—including Dr.
Laughead—would be rescued by spaceships.