Vincent Bridges

Around 20 to 30,000 years ago, the Very Smart Monkey, Homo Sapien Sapiens, became the dominant species. Genetically, this is modern man. Clean up and educate the average Cro-Magnon, put him in a suit, and he could get a job on Wall Street or Madison Avenue. Archaeologists and anthropologists would have us believe that it took the better part of those 20,000 or so years for this Very Smart Monkey to invent sophisticated cultures. The evidence, on a global scale, points to at least one previous planet wide civilization of a very high level, perhaps even by galactic standards.

About 13,000 years ago, this planet wide culture disappeared in a vast and almost incomprehensible cataclysm. For thousands of years, the surviving Very Smart Monkeys struggled simply to exist. Culture fell to a level even lower than the original Smart Monkeys had possessed. It was very dark period.

Fortunately, there were places on the planet where a measure of galactic culture survived more or less intact. The Nile River Valley, which now emptied into the new Mediterranean Sea instead of the Indian Ocean, was one of the most fortunate. The ancient Egyptian historical records tell us that first Hru the Younger, son or reincarnation of Osiris, acted as ruler, then Hru Or, an ancient Light God, and then the Hru Shemsu, or the Followers of Horus, who in turn helped Aha-Hor, unify the country. Somehow, the Egyptians retained their sense of historical identity. Knowledge of this past “other world” connection was never lost. Possibly, the Pyramids of Giza and other monuments remained to remind them of that golden age.

ONE: Sentience, Free Will and Self-Determination

What makes a hairless ape a human being?

Three million years ago, four species of hominid, proto-human monkeys, roamed the veldt of East Africa. One of these, Handy Monkey or Homo Habilis, became the first true human ancestor with a sudden and mysterious expansion of brain size. The next and two and a quarter million years saw an unusually rapid evolution in both brain size and complexity. It has been called the fastest advance recorded for any complex organ in the whole history of life, on this planet.

The evidence, biological and fossil, clearly points to the fact that man is descended from primate ancestors not notably different from modern primates. However, Homo Sapiens, the Smart Monkey, is clearly in a class apart as a species. Three million years ago, Handy Monkey was a higher animal; 100,000 years ago, Smart Monkey emerged from the African incubator as a species of conscious, self-aware individuals. Since that point, mankind has changed very little, physically, leaving modern evolutionary biologists without any model or theory to account for the amazing proliferation of cultures and civilizations that Smart Monkey and Very Smart Monkey have created.

“Thinking about human evolution ultimately means thinking about the evolution of human consciousness,” as Terrence McKenna notes in Food of the Gods. The human mind arises out of a complex series of inter-related developments. Our unique linguistic and symbolic ability requires a large brain with lots of space devoted to linguistic processing, storage and retrieval, along with the associated motor skills of writing and tools use. This larger brain makes it necessary for our children to be born earlier and cared for longer outside the womb. These are not trivial developments, in an evolutionary sense. For all of them to happen at the same moment to produce the Smart Monkey is not only unique, but incredible. Thinking about the evolution of human consciousness ultimately means thinking about evolutionary intervention.

The proto-hominids, such as Handy Monkey, had been around for at least six million years before the beginning of the sudden brain size expansion. There is no evidence for a “missing link,” and no explanation for the sudden developments. Calling it an accident or a coincidence is simply not helpful.

However, Smart Monkey was in no doubt about the source of this “consciousness.” He saw it as divine, that is completely Other, and connected somehow with the invisible world around him. The first thing Smart Monkey did with his new ability to store information epigenetically, as stories, songs, myths, and so on, was to describe the numinousity of the natural world. Religion, that is the desire to relate to an “other” world or presence beyond the material locus, arose naturally from Smart Monkey’s growing linguistic gifts.

This awareness of the spiritual nature of language led to the creation of Smart Monkey’s original religion, shamanism. Those who could inhabit, and describe, the other world became the transformative nexus around which a culture and eventually a civilization might grow. The shaman is primarily an ecstatic technician, a master of the art of inducing trance states and deriving usable information about the way the world works from them. Ecstasy, in its purest expressions, creates a harmonic resonance cascade that can become the laser-like coherence of enlightenment.

What makes a hairless ape a human is his ability to generate and sustain this kind of ecstasy. When the harmonic resonance of ecstasy reaches a self-sustaining level, then the being can be said to have attained “free will,” that is, choices are personal, ethical and aesthetic and are bound only by the limits of compassion, which are infinite. Instead of being limited by the constraints of imagined duty or obligation to an external ideal, true “free will” partakes of infinite sharability, infinite resonance.

Self determination, individually and as a species, can only be achieved as a result of free will.

Now, suppose that all those years of explosive growth in human complexity had as its object the development of a species capable of this type of free will self determination. Three million years ago, someone or something tripped an evolutionary switch, shunting a large brained primate species onto the fast track toward sentience. Even if we postulate that the switching mechanism is inherent within the very pattern of our DNA, that is, whenever certain evolutionary tags such as brain size, thumbs and binocular vision coincide the process automatically shifts toward sentience, then we are left trying to explain the intelligence of the process. Perhaps sentience has a self-regulating mechanism that guides evolution toward the optimum choices. We apprehend this mechanism as God, or fate, or even as extra-terrestrial biologists when it intervenes to re-direct us toward sentience and self determination.

Again, taking the minimalist view that this sentient evolution is entirely DNA hard wired, the fact remains that if it happened here, on Earth, then it must have happened elsewhere. It is more incredible to think that it only happened once, here, and nowhere else, than to think that it must be somewhat common on a galactic scale. Even with this idea, the possibility of helpers from species who have undergone this transformation themselves remains. The probable emergence of a new self-determined species would be of great interest to a galactic community composed of such species.

With this in mind, the question becomes: How can we consciously align ourselves with the evolutionary mechanism? What are the Visitors, our galactic rescue squad, trying to tell us?

TWO: Answering the Question in Egypt

Around 20 to 30,000 years ago, the Very Smart Monkey, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, became the dominant species. Genetically, this is modern man. Clean up and educate the average Cro-Magnon, put him in a suit, and he could get a job on Wall Street or Madison Avenue. Archeologists and anthropologists would have us believe that it took the better part of those 20,000 or so years for this Very Smart Monkey to invent sophisticated cultures. The evidence, on a global scale, points to at least one previous planet wide civilization of a very high level, perhaps even by galactic standards.

About 13,000 years ago, this planet wide culture disappeared in a vast and almost incomprehensible cataclysm. For thousands of years, the surviving Very Smart Monkeys struggled simply to exist. Culture fell to a level even lower than the original Smart Monkeys had possessed. It was very dark period.

Fortunately, there were places on the planet where a measure of galactic culture survived more or less intact. The Nile River Valley, which now emptied into the new Mediterranean Sea instead of the Indian Ocean, was one of the most fortunate. The ancient Egyptian historical records tell us that first Hru the Younger, son or reincarnation of Osiris, acted as ruler, then Hru Or, an ancient Light God, and then the Hru Shemsu, or the Followers of Horus, who in turn helped Aha-Hor, unify the country. Somehow, the Egyptians retained their sense of historical identity. Knowledge of this past “other world” connection was never lost. Possibly, the Pyramids of Giza and other monuments remained to remind them of that golden age.

The so-called “Palette of Narmer/Menes,” showing the King unifying the Two Lands and dated to around 3,000 BC, clearly depicts a pyramid in a sacred enclosure on the Lower Egypt side. This first King of the Ist Dynasty’s Horus or royal name, Aha-Hor, means “living breath of Hru,” or more simply, “Essence of Horus.” We can never be sure of Aha-Hor’s motives in unifying the Nile Valley — he may simply have been an opportunistic strong-man — but we can speculate on the importance this Essence of Horus placed on the continuity with the long past golden age. Not only is the pyramid enclosure on his commemorative palette, but on a clear day the Giza plateau, and its structures, would have been plainly visible from the walls of his new city, Memphis. Whether or not he knew he was reviving a fragment of an ancient culture, he was right on time.

The Mayan astronomers of Central America, cultural descendants of the original South American civilization, noted that around 3100 BC, an evolutionary shift occurred. They thought of it as the origin point for a 5200 year cycle of sentient evolution, one that culminates in 2012 AD. Curiously enough, within 400 years, one baktun to the Mayans, eight great cultures had sprung up around the planet. Egypt was one of the stars of this original cultural explosion, as were the cultures in the valleys of Mesopotamia and the Indus River. Other origin cultures, such as the North American Serpent Mound or Adena people or the Mekong Delta culture, played out their evolution in isolation and eventually faded away. Others developed descendent civilizations, as happened in China along the Yellow River and to the Chavan South American culture. The Harappan culture along the Indus River was conquered by nomadic barbarians, as were Mesopotamia and the Northwestern Atlantic coastal megalithic cultures. Only Egypt survived, more or less intact, for over three thousand years.

Egypt then, and to an extent Mesopotamia, (as Z. Sitchin has shown in his 12th Planet series of books) offers us evidence of our non-local origins. Standing as the connective thread between the destroyed high civilization in the past and the new evolutionary cycle, ancient Egypt preserved the basic components of galactic resonance within its mysteries.

However, a counter-force, a type of anti-evolutionary isolationist and materialist undercurrent, existed from the very beginning of Egyptian civilization. Its adherents rallied around the god form of Sutehk, or Set. In the IInd Dynasty, they even became Kings in his name, as the preceding Kings had ruled in the name of Horus. These political maneuvers mirror the deeper conflict between Horus and Set that Egyptian tradition held as the cause of the great cataclysm that destroyed the previous global civilization. In the long history of Egyptian civilization, whenever the political balance shifts in favor of Set, decline sets in. We see this first during the IInd Dynasty. Writing, architecture and art in general declined sharply under the Set Kings, while the restoration of the Horus Kings of the IIIrd Dynasty led to the brilliance of the Old Kingdom, culturally the high point of Egyptian civilization.

During the IIIrd and IVth Dynasties, a city on the eastern rim of the Delta, On or the “City of the Sun,” which the Greeks translated as Heliopolis, achieved an amazing level of spiritual and political influence. This preeminence seems to have been attained with the aid of a group of sages known as the “Assembly of the Shining Beings.” These shining beings, the henmemet in Egyptian, were said to live solely on light that furnished all their needs. They introduced the idea of the solar god, Ra, who sails through the heavens in the boat of a million years. This concept soon incorporated the major shamanic current, the mysteries of Osiris, and, by the Vth Dynasty, replaced Horus as the divine antecedent of the King.

This represented more than a shift in political power. The Ra Cult of Heliopolis supported the older Horus Cult of Edfu, but Ra became the source of divine power and inspiration, in a sense the tutelary deity for the function of Kingship itself. It held this role, with ups and downs and a few judicious mergers, throughout the rest of Egyptian history. Even when combined with the hidden god, Amon of Thebes, or distilled into the Atonist heresy, the Heliopolitan Cult of Ra survived. Christian tradition tells us that the Holy Family, fleeing Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents, hid from Roman patrols in the orchards of Heliopolis. In 640 AD, when the Arabs rode into Egypt on their way to conquer the Byzantine fortress of Babylon, they camped in those same orchards. Heliopolis, where the last remnants of the Priesthood of Ra continued their spiritual activities, fell the next day, ending three thousand years of religious continuity.

Under the guidance of the Sages, the henmemet, Egyptian culture blossomed. We need only look at the art of writing hieroglyphs to see a clear example of the clarification and expansion the Ra Cult brought to Egyptian civilization. The Egyptian language in its hieroglyphic form appeared just before the unification of the Two Lands. The early inscriptions are crude and ill-made, but the language they use is complex and completely formed. There are no developmental stages in hieroglyphic Egyptian. Inscriptions from the IIIrd and IVth Dynasties show no development just a progression, an expansion that includes archaic terms and foreign cultural perspectives within a clearly defined pre-existing language. During the Vth Dynasty, the hieroglyphic form reached its ultimate expression. The Vth Dynasty hieroglyphic inscriptions, such as those in Unas’s pyramid tomb, display an incredible level of artistic mastery as well as creating a symbol/language form that is almost unique on the planet. Only the Classical Maya used anything similar.

Viewed from a distance of almost five thousand years, these facts suggest that the Egyptians learned their unifying language from an incomplete or archaic source. Then, just as they mastered it, they came in contact with the same language, but in a much more advanced form.

The VIth dynasty ended with the long and feeble reign of Pepi II, and the decline of Heliopolitan influence. Egypt fell into a two hundred year period of anarchy. The local gods and goddesses developed followings in this period, giving Egyptian religion forever after the air of a carnival side show on the astral. Worship of Set re-appeared, but was not able to gain any political power. A revival of the Horus faction of Upper Egypt supplied the momentum for a reunification by Mentuhotep II, founder of the XIth Dynasty and The Middle Kingdom.

This 350 year long period can be considered a tribute to the power and cohesiveness of Old Kingdom traditions. Egyptian civilization revived by returning to the ancient canon of life and art. Tombs and pyramids were built, the capital was re-located to Thebes, for the first time, and even foreign trading excursions were revived. This cultural renaissance strengthened the central authority of the state, and Egypt seemed secure until the tragedy of Queen Nefer-Sobek.

The XIIth Dynasty, and the Middle Kingdom, ended with the death of the Queen and her son. The XIIIth Dynasty declined rapidly under a series of sickly royal cousins and venal regents, until another group of cousins started their own dynasty, the XIVth, in the western desert. Both succumbed quickly to the onslaught of the Set worshipping Hyksos.

These “Princes of Foreign Lands” conquered the Delta and began to extend their power up the Nile. For 150 years these “Princes” ruled all of Egypt except for the Upper Nile. The early XVIIth Dynasty of Thebes tried to co-exist with the invaders, but was finally forced to fight a long and bitter struggle to the death. Kamose, last King of the XVIIth Dynasty, brought the war to the very gates of Avaris. It fell to his son, Amose I, to finish them off and found a new dynasty.

In many ways, the New Kingdom of the early XVIIIth Dynasty was the watershed of Egyptian history. The New Kingdom did not merely copy the past, as the Middle Kingdom had. By destroying the Hyksos, (Amose I, not satisfied with conquering Avaris, followed the retreating Hyksos into Lebanon and destroyed their home base) the Egyptians became the greatest military power in the ancient world. The next two Kings completed the process, creating a vast empire that stretched from the swamps of the Tigris and the Euphrates to the Mountains of Ethiopia.

This is the stage on which Tutmose III and Hatshepsut played out their grand opera tragedy of lust and intrigue. Tutmose III would go on to stabilize the borders of the Empire and begin the building spree that would turn Thebes into simply “The City,” wonder of the ancient world. His son, Amenhotep II, would complete his father’s military triumphs and bring the Empire to its zenith.

And, at this crucial moment in ancient history, the Sages of Heliopolis chose to re-appear.

***

A younger son of Amenhotep II camped near the Sphinx one night after a hard day hunting lions on the Giza plateau. In a dream that night the Sphinx appeared and announced that if the prince would clear the sand from around the Sphinx and restore it to its former glory, the prince would become king. Tutmose IV did eventually become king, and left a memorial stele between the Sphinx’s paws recording his prophetic dream. Giza, of course, was the necropolis of On, and restoring the Sphinx meant restoring the prestige of On, or Heliopolis. This spiritual and political shift would have profound significance.

Tutmose IV solidified Egypt’s imperial position and passed to his son, Amenhotep III, a vast and wealthy empire at peace both internally and externally. Amenhotep III had no need or desire to wage war. He turned his talents toward answering the question of human evolution. His grand monument, Luxor Temple, attempted to unify all of human knowledge in a single structure designed to quickened the growth of human sentience. He also realized that a universal state needs a universal religion to support it.

From one of the titles given to the Heliopolitan sun-god, Ra-Harakte or Ra of The Two Horizons, Amenhotep extracted the concept of the Aton, or the power of the sun’s disk. This Aton worship, in Amenhotep III’s vision, would unify all other beliefs into one framework. Not a monotheism, but a unified multi-theism where all the gods and goddesses are but extensions of the one visible source of light, heat, energy and information — the sun’s disk. In this view, the sun then becomes very similar to the light on which the henmemet lived.

From his mummy, Amenhotep III seems to have been a normal Egyptian of his age. Given to his pleasures perhaps, but certainly normal. His son, Amenhotep IV, is a different story. The images we have of Amenhotep IV, or Ahknaton as he is more commonly known, suggest that some type of abnormality had occurred. That it was genetic seems clear. His children appeared to have suffered from the same abnormality. Perhaps the old king’s experiments in evolution had been at least partially successful.

Ahknaton represents an attempt at conscious evolution, one that was unfortunately unviable in the long run. An isolated childhood, the pressures of running the state, the mental disturbances brought on the genetic abnormality itself all contributed in driving Ahknaton into madness. The empire dissolved while Ahknaton conducted elaborate open air rituals to deepen his identification with the sun. In the ruin of his kingdom, after his death, the death of his son and his half-brother, there was no one left to pick up the pieces but a politician and a general.

Ay, an elderly statesman left over from Amenhotep III, tried to hold things together for a few years after the death of Tutanhkamon, but with Ay’s death the general Horemheb became king. Horemheb was not related to the now non-existent royal family in any way. As his death approached, he groomed the prince of a powerful Set worshipping Delta family for the role of founder of the XIXth Dynasty.

Rameses I ruled for a short time and his son Seti I completed the re-conquest of the empire. His son, Rameses II, became the Great Pharaoh, rebuilt the country and carved his name in any blank spot he could find. He ruled for 66 years and when he died Egypt looked mighty, but was actually far gone with decay. Two elderly sons succeeded him, fighting off invasions and accomplishing little else. The New Kingdom, like the Middle Kingdom, ended in a tangle of intrigue and treachery involving a Queen.

The XXth Dynasty started with another Set worshipping adventurer, Setnakht, whose son became the last great king of Imperial Egypt, Rameses III. After 31 years of rule, and a grisly death by black magic and treachery, he was succeeded by a dismal collection of failures all of whom had Rameses in their name.

The Empire fell apart, and Egypt was conquered by the Libyans, the Nubians, the Persians, the Greeks and the Romans. The ascension of the Set worshippers to the kingship was the death knell of Egyptian civilization, although it took a thousand years to die.

The long history of ancient Egypt provides us with some very important pieces of evidence. At the beginning of Egyptian civilization, we catch a glimpse of both the high culture of the distant past and what can only be called a contemporary non-earthly culture of great sophistication. This non-earthly culture, in its local form as the Ra Cult, guided ancient Egypt for two thousand years. Twice, it used a form of direct political and religious intervention to re-orient the culture. In both instances, it neither failed completely nor quite succeeded.

Keep in mind that the Ra Cult itself rode out all the different political and religious upheavals and survived for 700 years after Egypt itself became the property of a foreign power. The wave of Islam swept away all the old forms, pagan and Christian, only to find them re-appearing within the body of the faithful as the many different varieties of Sufi sects. Information of this magnitude will find a way to survive, no matter what form it must take.

In Egypt, we can see the effect of direct contact with that non-earthly higher culture. The secrets however did not become common knowledge; they were hoarded and used as tokens in games of political intrigue. In this we can also see the work of the anti-evolutionary Killer Monkey counter-force among the Set worshippers.

There isn’t space in a work of this type to follow the global pattern of intervention. Egypt will have to stand as our best and clearest example. Given that, let us think for a moment like a member of that non-earthly culture. If the mission is to aid the sentient evolution of this domesticated primate species, then the secret must be simple enough to be understood by any being following the directions. Sort of like the universal picture language found on the emergency instruction cards that international airlines use.

In the first intervention, the IVth and Vth Dynasties, the nature of hieroglyphic writing solidified into a subtle and sophisticated magickal language. The glyphs in Unas’ pyramid tomb were meant to be read by the dead man, pronounced and visualized to create a laser-like coherence of consciousness that led to eternal life. From this, we can begin to extrapolate the nature of the secret; the answer to the question of how can we align with the evolutionary mechanism?

Our use of language and our ability to visualize complex forms, such as glyphs or letters, our ability to relate sound and symbol, allows our thoughts to achieve a coherence, a gravity, that is attainable in no other way. Sentience, on a galactic scale, may be measured in just this fashion.

Other than Egypt and the other origin cultures, can we find more direct evidence linking language, symbol coherence and consciousness expansion with non-earthly, non-local intelligences? Can we find a documented case of contact between these non-local intelligences and an individual or group that involved language and symbol use as a main component of the contact?

The answer is yes, and it happened to the leading scientist of the 16th century, Dr. John Dee, Queen Elizabeth’s court astrologer.

THREE: Dr. Dee Meets the ETs

During the spring of 1581, John Dee had a close encounter with an angel. He was praying in the chapel of his Mortlake home when a sharp rapping sound drew him to the curtained windows. Throwing aside the drapes, John Dee came face to face with a shining being floating a full 12 feet off the ground. The being gestured for Dee to open the window. When he did, the shining figure handed him a smoky quartz egg about the size of a baby’s head. Dee took the quartz egg, and the figure vanished.

It is easy, from a modern perspective, to dismiss this incident as a superstitious legend, but the crystal still exists, on display in the Manuscript Room of the British Museum. Dr. Dee kept careful records and made notes almost obsessively. We have notes on the construction of his other scrying glasses, as these types of crystals were known, but nothing, except the above incident, about the smoky quartz egg. Even Dee’s first biographer, Meric Causabon, who was anything but sympathetic, simply reports the origin of the crystal without comment.

However strange this encounter may be, it is the use Dee made of his angelic gift that is the crux of the story.

John Dee was born in 1527 and his formative years were colored by the religious turmoil brought on by the Reformation. Dee’s family, through which he would later claim distant kinship with Queen Elizabeth, arrived in London in the wake of Henry Tudor’s coronation as Henry VII. His father was a gentlemen’s gentleman for Henry VIII, and John Dee’s character was molded in a climate of religious protest and reaction. By the time he went up to Cambridge at fifteen, he was searching for a resolution to the problem of religious authority, seeking a type of spiritual science that could supply insight into the workings of nature by infusing the natural world with mystical meaning.

After studying at Cambridge and Louvain, Dee achieved the status of renaissance celebrity in 1550 with a lecture on mathematics and the spiritual aspect of number at the University of Paris. During the reign of Edward VI, Dee became involved in the political maneuverings around the throne and by the summer of 1555 found himself in prison on an unspecified ecclesiastical charge. Catholic Mary, “Bloody Mary,” had succeeded the young Edward and times were tough for Protestant mathematicians and magicians, especially for those known to have cast horoscopes of the Queen. Dee spent three months in prison. His cellmate went to the stake, as did over six hundred others, for witchcraft and heresy.

Dee survived his trial and lived to joke about it with his new patron, Queen Elizabeth I, who was also accused in the plot. Soon after her coronation, he was proclaimed the Royal Astrologer and given, specifically, freedom from ecclesiastical harassment. Dee settled in at his family home, Mortlake, which would eventually house the largest library of its time in all of Europe. Only the great national collections of the next century surpassed it. In the early 1580’s Dee listed over 4000 thousand volumes, 3000 printed books and over 1000 in manuscript. The libraries of Oxford and Cambridge together numbered less than a quarter of that total. Mortlake acted as the Elizabethan equivalent of a university research center, and it was said that the library contained the whole of renaissance thought.

At the end of 1562, Dee departed on an expedition to the continent proposed by Lord Burleigh, Queen Elizabeth’s chief minister, and Sir Francis Walsingham, the head of Elizabeth’s intelligence service. The exact reason for this intelligence gathering venture remains unknown, although Lord Burleigh thought the “Monas Hierogliphica,” which Dee published later during the trip, “of the utmost importance for the security of the realm.” In a letter to Sir William Cecil, written in February 1563 from Antwerp, Dee announced that his quest had been successful already. Apparently, he had made contact with a group or society that taught him more about recondite philosophy, Dee writes, than he had dared hope possible. In the letter, Dee summarized the important points of the “Radical Truths” he had discovered. Rather than wade through several pages of Elizabethan prose, we can paraphrase:

*All is unity, created and sustained by God through his Laws.

*These Laws are predicated upon Number.

*There is an art of combining Hebrew letters and equating them with Number so as to perceive profound truths concerning the nature of God and His dealings with Man.

*Man is of divine origin. Far from being created out of dust, as in Genesis, he is in essence a “star-daemon:” a spirit connected with the stars.

*As such, he has come from God, and must return to Him.

It is essential to regenerate the Divine essence within Man, and this can be done by the powers of the Divine intellect.

*God manifests by means of ten progressively more dense emanations; and man, by dedicating his mind to the study of Divine Wisdom, by refining his whole being, and by eventual communion with the angels themselves, may at last enter into the presence of God.

*An accurate understanding of the natural processes, visible and invisible, enables Man to manipulate these processes through the powers of his will, intellect and imagination.

*Whatever is in the Universe possesses order and agreement and is similar in form to everything else.

In addition to these truths, Dee was excited about a book, the “Steganographica” of Trithemius, the Abbot of Sponheim. He spent ten days copying a manuscript of this work and crowed to Sir William about its value. The “Steganographica” appears to be a textbook on codes and ciphers, all very valuable to spies and intelligence networks, but is really a hermetic text on angelic communication. Designed so that the codes and ciphers described in the first section of the book must be used to read the second section on angelic magick, Trithemius’ masterpiece works like our modern interactive games. The reader has absorbed the mind-set or world view of the book by the time the important information is reached.

This trip was the beginning of Dee’s quest for the direct experience of his “Radical Truths.” From Antwerp he departed on a year long tour of the great hermetic thinkers of his time. In the winter of 1564, he wrote The “Monas Hieroglyphica” in one long twelve day explosion of insight. In spite of its intentional obscurity, the “Monas Hieroglyphica” became the renaissance equivalent of a best seller and attracted comment from the best minds of the next century and a half.

At the center of the work is a talismanic diagram that resembles the astrological symbol for Mercury, but with some significant changes. From this symbol, Dee extrapolated a complex system of mystical geometry, which he thought embodied the underlying unity, or monas, of the universe. However, having no desire for a heresy charge, Dee left the application of this universal symbology rather vague.

His readers, who knew the code and could understand the meaning and implied practical applications, made Dee’s work into one of the cornerstones of Alchemy. They thought that Dee had discovered a universal symbol that, when engraved in the psyche, would allow man to experience the gnostic revelation. This revelation, in which all knowledge — gnosis — was received, then allowed one to operate as a lens or focus for spiritual activity. We can think of this idea as the basic definition of a shaman or a magician.

After 1564, Dee published only mathematical and scientific works. His edition of Euclid, with the “Mathematical Preface,” appeared in 1570, and in 1577 his “Perfect Arte of Navigation” was published. Virtually nothing else appeared in print in his lifetime. Apparently, during the 1570’s, his interest in the “Radical Truths” came to outweigh everything else. Dee had achieved earthly fame and had made significant contributions to the development of several hard sciences in his own time. Increasingly, it must have seemed that only non-local, non-physical intelligences could answer Dee’s ever more complex questions.

From 1563 on, Dee had the tools and the basic understanding to embark on an exploration of angelic communication, the idea that had led him to copy Trithemius with such excitement. His notes, however, record only a few attempts, done without much enthusiasm. That is, until the angel rapped on the window.

The logic of turning to supernatural forces for knowledge about the universe seems strange to our modern scientific sensibilities. This is a category of experience that “science” has labeled subjective and therefore suspect. To Dee’s contemporaries it seemed less unusual. The possibility of acquiring knowledge by revelation or inspiration was a vital component of the renaissance paradigm. In the “Mathematical Preface” to his edition of Euclid, Dee asserts that man “participates with Spirits, and Angels: and is made to the Image and Similitude of God.” He also notes that there are powerful precedents for angelic communication, the traditions of Enoch and Esdras, Abraham and Elijah and Moses, and “sundry others thy good angels were sent (to) by thy disposition, to Instruct them.”

John Dee’s encounter with the angel was the defining moment in his life. As if he had been waiting for just such a sign, some token of divine favor perhaps, Dee launched into a search for a way to use the quartz egg as a means of communication with the shining angelic beings. His first serious attempt, on December 22, 1581, involved a man by the curious name of Barnabus Saul, one of Dee’s servants, who acted as a medium or seer. Apparently, he was a better footman than a medium, for after a few sessions we hear no more about him.

By March 1582, however, Dee’s seer had located him.

***

“Mortlake: In the Name of Jesus Christ, Amen. In the year 1582, on the 10th day of March, before noon, Saturday.

“One Mr. Edward Talbot came to my house and he being willing and desirous to see or show some thing in spiritual practice. . .”

So begin Dee’s notes of his first scrying session with his new seer, Edward “Talbot” Kelly. At first, Dee was suspicious of the young man, and rightly so. He appeared unannounced, offering a fake name — he might have been a spy seeking information on Dee’s spirit conjurations — and even when identified proved to have an unsavory reputation. Dee soon resolved his doubts however; and, on an early spring morning roughly a year after Dee’s angelic visitation, they sat down to a trial run with the scrying stone. It is hard not to be impressed by the vivid quality of the quickly written notes of the proceedings. Kelly fell to his knees before Dee’s desk and began to pray over the stone; surprised, Dee took Kelly and the stone into his chapel, or oratory.

Within a quarter of an hour, Kelly began to see an angelic shape in the crystal. This being identified itself as the Archangel Uriel, accompanied by Raphael and Michael. Dee was hooked by this immediate success, and so began a long strange relationship between these two men and the angels. For the next seven years, they conducted almost daily sessions. Dee of course wrote everything down in his “Spiritual Diaries,” and reading them becomes after a while an exercise in applied surrealism. As an example of a dialogue with the deep unconscious Other, they are unparalleled.

At this first session, the Archangel Uriel revealed his sigil, a rather stylized energy signature, and gave preliminary instructions for a powerful talisman called the Sigil of Truth. Fashioned of wax, it was meant to be used in all future sessions as the base for the scrying crystal. This seal or sigil is at first glance similar to earlier ones by Aggripa and Reuchlin, but the version the spirits produced for Dee and Kelly is more detailed and aesthetically satisfying. Designed as an embedded heptagram/heptagon with a pentagram in the center, the Sigil of Truth theoretically acted as a template or pattern buffer for truthful communication.

The Sigil of Truth also functioned as a geometric foundation on which the rest of the angelic system grew. Around the outer edge of the Sigil is a series of letters and numbers. From these, the angels derived a series of great elemental names, which were said to describe the forces ruling each elemental tablet. The names of the angelic beings within the heptagon/heptagram were transmitted in the form of letters arranged in squares. These squares were then read in different directions to produce even more angelic names. This gives the impression of a vast fractal universe in which the nature of the intelligence consulted depends on the symmetry angle of your approach.

On March 26, Kelly was shown a great book with the leaves filled with squares. For the next 13 months, Dee and Kelly struggled to copy the contents of this angelic volume, despite interruptions and interference from the spirits. The records of these sessions are full of odd material, elemental distractions and strangely accurate prophesies. Some times the spirits wouldn’t appear at all. This behavior suggests that the spirits were of several types, with differing agendas, and that they had other things to do than wait for Dee and Kelly to show up for their lessons.

The vision of the book marked the first appearance of material concerned with the angelic language. Since our Mayan origin point for this evolutionary cycle, 3113 BC, there have been something like seven thousand natural languages recorded. Human ingenuity has created perhaps another thousand languages, mostly for religious and magickal uses. But we have no record of any language stranger than the one that emerged from these scrying sessions. Dee and Kelly’s Angelic or Enochian language is unique. Even now, it is impossible tell if it is a natural or invented language, or whether it is, indeed, the language of the shining angelic beings.

The alphabet appeared first; twenty-one special characters each with its own title. The titles are odd, with little relationship between title and the phonetic value of the character, and were dictated in three groups of seven totaling 64 characters in all, which suggests another magickal square arrangement. It also suggests the I Ching, the codons of DNA and the Tzolkin calendar of the ancient Mayans. As an added bit of strangeness, 21 is exactly the number of symbols needed to transcribe phonetic English without confusion.

These characters were then used to dictate the first texts in the angelic language. On Good Friday, March 29, 1582, the angels began with a slow deliberate method — the angel spelled each word, letter by letter, and then Dee wrote out the English and read it back — to fill in a large 49 x 49 square, where each square was a word and each line a text. After two lines of text, Dee expressed a desire for a simpler method. Annoyed at the request, the angel departed. By the following Tuesday, when the session reconvened, the angels were prepared with a completed square from which Kelly could read off the text. Kelly however had not memorized the letters given the previous week.

Annoyed again, the angel intervened.

A voyce — Read. E.K. — I cannot.

: You should haue lerned the characters perfectly and theyr names, that you mowght now haue redily named them to me as you shold see them.

A voyce — Say what thow thinkest. (Dee- he sayd so to E.K.)

E.K. My hed is on fire.

A voyce — What thow thinkest, euery word that speak.

E.K. I can read all, now, most perfectly, and in the Third row this I see to be red.

Palce duxma ge na dem oh elog. . .

(Sloane MS 3188, April 2, 1582)

What happened here? The angel said “What thou thinkest, every word, that speak,” and Kelly miraculously began to read. Perhaps he had notes hidden from Dee, but that “My head is on fire” comment suggests something very strange happened that afternoon. Did the angels, those non-earthly, non-local intelligences, force Kelly’s consciousness into resonance with a language pattern coded into our very DNA?

The answer seems to be yes. The texts which Kelly generated from the tables shown to him by the angels resemble the vast literary mandalas of Tibet, and like them are full of phonetic patterning, repetition, rhyme and alliteration. This type of verbal patterning is not found in normal speech, but is characteristic of poetry and magickal charms as well as “speaking in tongues,” or glossolalia, that is language produced under trance conditions.

There is no question that Kelly was in some kind of trance during these sessions. Dee notes many occasions indicative of a deep trance state on Kelly’s part. However, this does not mean that the “language” produced in these sessions was meaningless gibberish. The phonetic patterning is also similar to verb tense and other grammatical drills. Perhaps Kelly was constructing, in a trance state, the linguistic links his unconscious needed in order to receive a more complete form of the angelic language, one that developed from these original text filled squares.

The squares of the Liber Logaeth, or the “Book of the Speech from God” as Kelly called the great book of his vision, did indeed form the basis of a new series of 49 invocations dictated in the spring of 1584, while Dee and Kelly were in Cracow, Poland. Unfortunately, the details of how this version of the Enochian language developed from the squares is very unclear. All we can be sure of is that it was generated somehow out of the previous tables and squares, and this time a translation was provided right from the start.

With these translations, we begin to find a real language emerging. The grammar and syntax are similar to English, perhaps because of Kelly’s unconscious linguistic processes, but vocabulary elements, roots and prefixes and case endings, are not directly derivable from English, Greek, Latin or Hebrew. Some words suggest Sanskrit and ancient Egyptian roots, languages completely unknown to either Dee or Kelly.

In fact, in the earliest sessions on the Sigil of Truth, we find that the name of the elemental king of fire, generated by following a symbolic pattern around the letters and numbers on the rim of the seal, is a perfectly good phonetic rendering of an ancient Egyptian phrase. Following the pattern, which was dictated several years after the Sigil itself, we produce the name Oheooaaatan, pronounced Uh-heh uh-ah-ah ah-ton.

In hieroglyphic Egyptian that becomes uha uhah aton, the very phrase in one of Ra-Harakte’s titles, translated as “the penetrating and destructive power of the sun’s disk,” from which Amenhotep III took the word Aton and turned it into a new definition of divinity. Before we dismiss this as a coincidence, we should note that the elemental king of earth, derived by the same method, renders as Tha-ha-oo-teh, or simply Tehuti, or Thoth to the Greeks.

This is simply astonishing. Phonetic Egyptian did not even exist as a concept. Athanius Kircher declared in the 17th century that all hieroglyphs were symbolic rather than phonetic, and no one thought otherwise until Champollion in the early 19th century. Where did Dee get these Egyptian words and phrases?

We are left with a deep mystery.

The sessions continued until 1589, when Dee returned to England. They produced a vast quantity of material, including the Elemental Tablets ruled by the Great Kings named on the rim of the Sigil of Truth. Kelly remained in Europe and died in 1595 while trying to make his escape after a failed alchemical scam. Dee survived until 1608.

Hard as they worked to produce this mountain of magickal material, Dee and Kelly seem never to have done anything with it. Kelly used some formulas given to him by the spirits in his alchemical “research,” but beyond that no further work was undertaken until Elias Ashmole in the next century. Perhaps it was enough just to have received the information.

What are we to make of all this? From the evidence of Egypt, we have speculated that our use of language and our ability to visualize complex forms, such as letters and glyphs, allows our thoughts to attain a degree of coherence. Dee’s “Radical Truths” demonstrates that these precepts survived the millennia, perhaps as the secret intellectual property of some descendent of the Ra Cult. Dee revealed much of the secret in his “Monas Hieroglyphica,” as if to say to the world, or other worlds, “Here it is, we still remember.”

The angels came looking for Dr. Dee, much as Michael Rene, the space visitor, sought out Sam Jaffe, the brilliant physicist, in “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” What they communicated was a geometrical, symmetry based, DNA coded language pattern capable of producing a rapid expansion of consciousness and an increase in symbol coherent cognition. This unique language form also appears to have Sanskrit and ancient Egyptian roots. Dr. Dee understood the information’s importance, but the rest of the world, in the late 16th century, was very much not interested.

In many ways, Dee and Kelly’s experience is similar to nineteenth century spiritualism and the modern UFO contactee phenomenon. Even the types of prophecies, Mary Queen of Scots’ execution and the Spanish Armada, are familiar to us from their modern versions. To most historians, Dee’s work is the dividing line between medieval superstition and modern science. Dee is indeed a turning point, but, rather, it is one between intervention and non-intervention. In the four hundred years between Dee’s time and ours, one Mayan baktun, the secret has never completely disappeared. Faced with the approaching 5200 year deadline of the Mayan Calendar, the level of intervention has reached a frenzied pace in the last hundred and fifty years. Had Kelly and Dee been born in Victorian England instead of Elizabethan, they might have achieved fortune and fame, or at least notoriety. With the spirits’ help, of course.

FOUR: Spirits of the Dead, Phantom Airships and Flying Disks

The discovery of the planet Neptune in 1846 functions as a convenient reference point. Neptune is the planet of the mass mind created by technological advance. As such, its discovery heralded the dawn of a new era, the age of popular culture.

Within two years, populist revolution, fed by newsprint and a literate underclass, would sweep Europe forcing its liberalization, and another revolution, this one with spiritual implications, would sweep through the drawing rooms of the middle and upper classes around the world. The spirits of the dead seemed to have returned and demanded a dialogue with the living. Astounded, organized religion went mute in the face of the miraculous. The dialogue, taken up by an enormous variety of voices through the years, created a type of experiential spirituality unknown since antiquity.

And it all started in America.

***

Hydesville, New York, in the spring of 1848, was a sleepy little township not far from Rochester. A Methodist farmer, James D. Fox, had recently moved his family into a small frame house on the outskirts of town. The previous tenant had been disturbed by various loud knocks for which he could find no cause. The Fox family were also bothered by banging and thumping sounds that kept them awake at night. They were not overly concerned. The house was old and it was a windy March.

On Friday, March 31, the family went to bed early. Before retiring, Mr. Fox checked the shutters and sashes, and the children, particularly the two girls Margaretta 14, and Kate, 12, noticed that the knocking seemed to echo Mr. Fox’s random shutter banging. When the knocks started again in the bedroom, Kate called out “Mr. Splitfoot, do as I do,” and snapped her fingers. The raps immediately imitated her. Margaretta tried it, saying “Do as I do” and clapped. The sounds imitated her claps.

Mrs. Fox, eager to end the prank, asked a question of the spirit. “I then thought I could put a test that no one in the place could answer. I asked the noise to rap my different children’s ages, successively. Instantly, each one of my children’s ages was given correctly, pausing between them sufficiently long to individualize them until the seventh, at which a long pause was made, and then three more emphatic little raps were given; corresponding to the age of the little one that died. . .” Truly frightened, Mrs. Fox asked the big question: “Are you human?” No response. “Are you a spirit?” Two thunderous bangs, loud enough to shake the house, was the reply.

The dialogue had begun. The Foxes called in their neighbors as witnesses, and one of them, William Duesler, took up the questioning of the spirit. Establishing a code of knocks, it was soon learned that the spirit was a man who had been murdered in the house five years earlier, a peddler by the name of Charles B. Rosma. A maid of the former tenant, a Mr. Bell, reported that a peddler had spent the night at the house, as the spirit said, and had either left or disappeared under suspicious circumstances.

Imagine for a moment the scene. Late into a blustery spring night the small house, filled with anxious and frightened neighbors, resounds and shakes with the intensity of the dead peddler’s communication. The crowded bedroom, lamps and candles flickering with each drafty blast and ghostly thump, fairly crackles with the tension. Gasps and cries of reassurance sweep through the rooms full of curious onlookers as rap by the rap the story emerges. The dead have returned to tell their tale. To these Bible drenched Methodists, it must have seemed like a portent of the end of the world.

In the days following the first manifestations, a committee of local citizens formed to collect the statements of witnesses. Not everyone was convinced that the phenomenon was supernatural. Yet no one quite suggested that it was a hoax or that the Fox family was responsible. It was soon noticed that nothing happened unless the children were in the house. Three committees investigated without finding any fraud or coming to any reasonable conclusion how the sounds were produced. They searched the girls for devices, then made them stand on pillows with their ankles tied. The knocks and raps continued.

The children were separated, sent to stay with older siblings in different towns. The spirits followed both of them and the manifestations continued. Rapping noises were heard and invisible hands brushed people and threw things. Interestingly enough, these spirits had nothing to do with the old peddler; he was back at the Hydesville house making terrible gurgling noises punctuated by the sound of a body being dragged across the floor. Mrs. Fox’s hair turned white from the strain. At sister Leah’s house, Kate was now conversing with a dead relative. Soon Leah discovered her own mediumistic ability, as did another girl who visited Margaretta in Auburn.

This points to the most curious aspect of the phenomenon: it seems to have spread much as a bacterial or viral infection does, by contact. Visiting a medium and being exposed to the phenomenon produced a reaction in certain sensitive individuals; they became mediums themselves. Spiritualism developed like an epidemic, spreading from parlor to parlor as more and more people were exposed.

The Fox family, reunited, moved to Rochester. The spirits again followed, and so the sessions continued. One day a visitor began to ask a question but was suddenly interrupted by a barrage of knocks. By means of an alphabetic code, the spirit tapped out a message: “Dear friends, you must proclaim this truth to the world: This the dawning of a new age; you must not try to conceal it any longer.” The message ushered in a new wave of manifestations. Tables tipped and tapped out messages, musical instruments played by themselves and ghostly objects floated around the room. The believers heeded the spirits’ call to proclaim this truth. The first Spiritualist meeting took place on November 14, 1849, at the Corinthian Hall in Rochester. In the next year, over a hundred mediums appeared in the Rochester area alone. A local contemporary historian, M.A. Richardson, remarked: “Were we to draw an inference from the number of cases of reported visitation from the invisible world that have been made public of late, we might be led to imagine that the days of supernatural agency were about to recommence, and that ghosts and hobgoblins were about to resume their sway over the fears of mankind.” This ghostly eruption had been predicted by a young American shoemaker, Andrew Jackson Davis, in a book written under hypnosis and published in 1847. He announced that “the truth about spirits will ‘ere long present itself in the form of a living demonstration, and the world will hail with delight the ushering in of that era when the interiors of men will be opened.”

By 1850, spiritualism had spread to England and the continent of Europe. Even Queen Victoria and Prince Albert tried it. The table moved so convincingly that the Queen had no doubt of the phenomenon’s reality. She speculated that animal magnetism or some form of electricity must be involved. Later, after the death of Prince Albert, the Queen would turn to spiritualism for comfort and guidance. On the continent, the French, with their experience of Mesmer, agreed with the Queen’s assessment and embraced the phenomenon enthusiastically.

*****

Dee and Kelly were simply ahead of their time. They would have been much more successful in the nineteenth century. Indeed, it is a French convert to spiritualism that most reminds us of Dr. John Dee. A celebrated educator, the fifty-year old Denizard Hyppolyte Leon Rivail, discovered automatic writing in the summer of 1855. In the trance produced works of two sisters, Rivail recognized an impressive inner consistency. He asked his friends for more automatic material and received over fifty notebooks. From this, he produced The Spirits’ Book, which became a classic of Spiritualism. The message of this book from the spirits — that man is a spiritual being whose destiny is to evolve towards perfection — matches that of Dee’s “Radical Truths.” Dee would certainly have approved, and been astonished at the book’s popularity. In 140 years, it has never gone out of print.

If mathematician Rivail echoes Dee, then it is in society wizard Daniel Douglas Home that we find a reflection of Kelly. Home, born in Scotland of a Highland “seer” and an unknown father in 1833, seems to have grown up with the phenomenon to become its most extravagant example. At age nine, he moved to America with his aunt. Daniel was a sickly child, the model of the “sick sensitive” type prone to mediumship. A boyhood pact — whoever died first would contact the other — with his friend Edwin bore fruit in the summer of 1846 when Home was thirteen. Edwin appeared to young Home and drew three circles in the air, indicated that he had died three days before. This proved correct.

Four years later, Home had another vision. This time it was his mother who had died. Soon he was being harassed by the usual knocks and rapping, which caused his aunt to throw him out. He became a medium, looked after by the spirits and kindly acquaintances as he wandered through New England. With everyone in the United States, it seemed, talking about spirit communication, Home could hardly have chosen a better time to launch himself on the world.

Or perhaps the spirits chose it for him. Home would never claim any credit for his incredible feats. It was all the doings of the spirits. Later, they even stripped him of his powers for a year. Objectively, it looks as the spirits were using Home to make a point or communicate a message.

What could that message have been? Why table turning, levitation, talking with the dead, materialization and the rest of Home’s conjuring tricks? Nathaniel Hawthorne, visiting Florence a few years after Home, collected dozens of accounts of Home’s phenomena and observed that “these soberly attested incredulities are so numerous that I forget nine tenths of them. . . they are absolutely proved to be sober facts by evidence that would satisfy us of any other alleged realities; and yet I cannot force my mind to interest itself in them.”

With this comment, we come face-to-face with the basic problem of spiritualism. In the antics of Home, the Fox sisters, the Davenport brothers and all the other Victorian mediums we encounter nothing of any intellectual depth, except the experience itself. No information of substance was transmitted by the spirits, with the possible exception of Rivail’s The Spirits’ Book. When asked why he wouldn’t attend a seance, T. H. Huxley, the very model of a Victorian major scientist, exclaimed, “If anyone could endow me with the faculty of listening to the chatter of old women and curates in the nearest cathedral town, I should decline the privilege, having better things to do.”

The message then lies within the experience itself. Exposure to table turning and ghostly music and long dead Aunt Tillie’s travelogue of the Other Side creates a shift in consciousness, minor in most people, but so radical a shift in some that they become capable of producing the phenomenon themselves. The banal quality of the information offered by the spirits assured the indifference of those who had not had the experience. To the person attending a seance, it is not what Aunt Tillie has to say so much as the fact that Aunt Tillie is communicating at all.

The spirits, seemingly, made a vast and concentrated effort to convince the Victorian public of their existence. It failed, for the most part, among the scientist and intellectuals and other leaders of public opinion. They attempted to destroyed spiritualism by ridicule — which wasn’t hard considering spectacles such as that of the Davenport Brothers doing vaudeville turns in between jugglers and dog acts — and when that didn’t work fell into a sullen silence. It was obvious that Victorian science, like organized religion, had no explanation for the phenomenon.

If, to quote McLuhan, the medium is the message, then what did this outbreak of spirits actually signify? The discovery of Neptune marked the emergence of a new kind of mass consciousness just at the moment when the breakdown of old perceptual models, such as Christianity and the one-pointed cultural perspective of the Renaissance, left western consciousness in dis-order, or chaos. During this “midnight” of materialism, there occurred a primary rediscovery of the unconscious fueled by spiritualism’s eruption of phenomena. This rediscovery happened at a popular level, in a moment of individual experience. It was not guided by dogma or orthodoxy but by the internal logic of the phenomenon itself.

Herein lies the importance of spiritualism. The intrusion of the spirits distorted the hard-line edge of material reality. Vast perceptual gray areas suddenly opened up in the collective unconsciousness. These areas of miraculous possibilities were soon filled with the shadowy projections of the public’s hopes and desires. Victorian scientists, such as Huxley, were fixated on the external; their consciousness diffused through the material realm like Blake’s image of Newton drawing diagrams at the bottom of the ocean. Even when exposed to the phenomenon, they proved for the most part to be immune. The scientists who did happen to become interested, and there were more as time went on and the evidence continued to mount, often ended merely trying to pin a label — such as fraud, bio-electric telekinesis, etc. — on a phenomenon that ingeniously defied definition.

FIVE: Spirits of the Dead, Phantom Airships and Flying Disks (continued)

To understand the connections between the mid-nineteenth century eruption of spirit communication and the problem of non-local evolutionary intervention, we must briefly examine how the idea of life elsewhere in the universe developed. Early in the seventeenth century, not long after the death of John Dee, there occurred a significant revival of interest in the possibility of other life in “our” universe. Kepler had dreamed of an inhabited Moon, but the Right Reverend John Wilkins, in his That the Moon May Be A World (1638), proposed that “it is probable there may be inhabitants on this other world; but of what kind they are, is uncertain.”

Wilkins goes on to agree with Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, a late medieval author and a favorite of Dee’s, that the inhabitants of a planet would reflect the nature of that planet. In this, he is using the esoteric attributions concerning the nature of the angelic intelligence of a planet to determine the nature of the imagined physical inhabitants. He also speculates on travel through space; recognizing many of the actual obstacles, such as the vast distances, the incredible speeds required and the length of confinement for the travelers. While the Reverend occasionally lapses into the mystical, his overall grasp of the problem is impressive.

Christian Huygens, in his The Celestial Worlds Discover’d, 1722 edition, sketched out the possibilities of extra-terrestrial life. He thought it likely that the inhabitants of other planets have “reason. . . not different from what it is here.” Huygens’ universal world seems much like the utopian speculation of the late 19th century Fabian socialist or the science fiction author, but he is very modern and practical in conceding that such inhabitants would not necessarily resemble us physically and would have “odd ways, and. . . strange methods of living.”

In the early eighteenth century, one of the giants of English literature, Jonathan Swift, tweaks us in Gulliver’s Travels with images of flying islands hovering like UFO mother-ships. The inhabitants of the floating land, Swift informs us, “have likewise discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve around Mars.” He then proceeds to give the reader accurate sizes, distances and orbital periods. Of course, no one knew they were accurate until 1877, when Asaph Hall discovered Phobos and Deimos and found that the reality closely matched Swift’s estimates.

Even Voltaire tried his hand at speculative interplanetary fiction. In Micromegas, he described a voyage to Saturn by a visitor from Sirius. Voltaire used his science fiction for his own brand of ironic moralizing. His younger contemporary, Emanuel Swedenborg, not only speculated on extra-terrestrials, he described them in terms more unequivocal than most modern contactees.

With Swedenborg, the spirits and the ETs collide. Along with angels, devils and the dead, Swedenborg often conversed with inhabitants of other planets. Most of his contemporaries dismissed him as a madman or a liar, but we would do well to remember that his psychic abilities seem genuine. There are many documented cases of his psychic skills and his sincerity is beyond question. What then are we to make of a volume such as Earth in the Universe? Swedenborg informs us that most planets have inhabitants, then describes them in images that suggest a painting by Hieronymus Bosch: Moon men speak through their stomachs with a belching noise; Martians have parti-colored faces and dress in robes of tree bark; Saturnians are exceedingly humble, feed on fruit and refuse to bury their dead.

The importance of Swedenborg lies in the essentially religious perspective of his doctrines, his insistence on individual determinism rather than predestined judgment, for example. He had a powerful but indirect influence on Spiritualism, which tended to provide independent support for his views. The inner consistency of this range of material, the point that shocked Rivail, is truly remarkable. Given that Spiritualism grew up independent, for the most part, of Swedenborgian thought, we are led to conclude that spirits, of the dead and other visitors, are real inhabitants of an archetypal realm of internal experience.

Both William Blake in the early nineteenth and Carl Jung in the early twentieth century rediscovered the basic truths outlined by Swedenborg. Blake, as an artist, used Swedenborgian fragments to create his epics of psychic conflict. Jung, using a very Swedenborgian technique of active imagination, made contact with various autonomous archetypal entities. He used this almost shamanic knowledge to help others heal and grow toward a new level of human-ness. Blake and Jung, like Swedenborg, sustained an on-going dialogue with the spirits of the dead. Jung’s Seven Sermons for the Dead, a gnostic tract written at the spirits’ insistence during the depths of World War I, begins, “We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought.” Like Swedenborg, Jung concludes that heaven and hell are mental states, and that it is the living who have much to teach the dead, not the other way around. After Swedenborg, the psychic intrusion, the invasion of the spirits, was simply a matter of time. The framework was in place, awaiting only the eruption of phenomena to animate its belief system. The question of extra-terrestrial life blurred and merged with the idea of spirits. As spiritualism expanded the mental horizons of the Victorians, the issue of other life in the universe gained a whole new level of meaning.

Thomas Paine, author of The Rights of Man — a contemporary of William Blake and ahead of his time as usual — neatly summed up the change in attitude: “To believe that God created a plurality of worlds, at least as numerous as what we call stars, renders the Christian system of faith at once little and ridiculous, and scatters it in the mind like feathers in the air. The two beliefs cannot be held together in the same mind; and he who thinks he believes in both has thought little of either.” By the mid-nineteenth century, even T. H. Huxley would have agreed with him.

However the scientists, particularly the astronomers, had their share of strange encounters and sightings. They may not have been ghosts and spirits, but the astronomical journals of the early nineteenth century are filled with unexplained reports: octagonal stars in the London skies; great fiery shapes over Switzerland; hurtling globes of light maneuvering above Florence; an immense luminescent form sighted by the inhabitants of Portugal; a strange satellite in the vicinity of Venus; spherical unknowns crossing the face of the moon.

One of the most striking sightings occurred on June 18, 1845, off the island of Malta in the Mediterranean. An object five times the diameter of the moon slowly cruised the island, taking over an hour to complete its passage. It was described as indistinctly seen, giving the impression of two large objects linked or joined together. Malta, interestingly enough, is the origin point of the North Atlantic Coast Megalithic culture, one of the eight original cultures from the beginning of this 5200 year evolutionary cycle.

***

By the mid-1850’s, as the spiritualism movement attained a global status, a wave of books, led by Sir David Brewster’s More Worlds Than One, appeared on the possibility of life on other planets. Most were inspired by the seventeenth century work of Bernard de Fontenelle, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, a fantasy, without serious scientific or literary intent. As such, it can considered the first popular work of science fiction. Its nineteenth century admirers, such as Sir David Brewster, thought it a “singular work, written by a man of genius. . .”

These works, by Brewster, Robert Knight and William Cronhelm among others, helped to form a new paradigm, one in which it seemed inevitable that there must be other worlds with intelligent life. The strange sightings continued; snakes in the sky above Texas; fireballs and strange lights in New Jersey; enigmatic auroras on the moon. Schiapereli found channels or canali on Mars, as did Percival Lowell. These were highly competent and respected scientists. Other astronomers continued to witness and report curious sightings; a glowing object was seen from Virginia to South Carolina; in western New York, home of spiritualism, a vast number of round blackish objects darkened the sun as they passed overhead in an endless seeming procession to the East; a similar event was noted in Kattenau, Germany; an observatory in Zacatecas, Mexico, observed luminous objects passing between the earth and the sun, and even took photographs of them.

In 1917, for the five hundredth issue of Observatory magazine, astronomer E.W. Maunder recalled the most striking thing he had seen in 43 years of observation. It happened 35 years earlier, on November 17, 1882.

Two hours after sunset, as Maunder stood watching an aurorial display from the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, he observed that “a great circular disc of greenish light suddenly appeared low in the E.N.E., as though it had just risen.” It moved swiftly, its form lengthening as it passed over head. “When it crossed the meridian and passed just above the moon its form was that almost of a very elongated ellipse. . . Various observers spoke of it as ‘cigar-shaped’ or ‘like a torpedo.’ ” His readers in 1917 would have immediately identified the object as a Zeppelin, a German airship familiar from years of bombing scares. Maunder declares that it was “a definite body,” and that it took less than two minutes for it to pass from horizon to horizon, noting that “nothing could well be more unlike the rush of a great meteor or fire-ball. . .than the steady — though fairly swift — advance of the ‘torpedo.’ ”

Fourteen years later, something like this unknown cigar-shaped object would reappear in the skies over America, triggering a panic, the first UFO hysteria, or flap. For a time, it would rival the level of popular interest generated by spiritualism.

***

San Francisco, California, began to see airships in late October 1896. Walking home one night, a Miss Hegstrom spotted a light floating in the autumn sky. Her report was ignored for a few weeks until more sightings occurred. On All Saints Day, November 1, 1896, a mountain man by the name of Brown spotted an “airship” floating in the morning sky above Bolinas Ridge, just outside the city. The encounter so un-nerved the man that he walked back into town and told his story to a newspaper reporter, then turned around and left, never to be heard from again. This is the first record of the mysterious airship. There would be many more.

On November 17, fourteen years to the day after Maunder’s sighting, the airship descended on Sacramento, California. A bright light, attached to some rather solid structure, was seen by hundreds of witnesses. The consensus was that the object was large, had an oblong shape, with flattened ends, and sported large fan wheels for propulsion and a tiny cabin suspended underneath. Some witnesses claimed to hear voices, even laughter, coming from the craft as it cruised through the twilight. All of this was reported in the local papers and the flap was on. Rumors flew, and any interesting theory found plenty of news space available for its discussion.

Meanwhile, the airship had moved south, appearing over Oakland, California, on November 20. The response from the hundreds of witnesses ranged from fright to delight and once again the newspapers reported every sighting and every theory. As the flap grew, tales reflecting uncontrolled imaginations, and some outright hoaxing and spoofing, crept into the more serious reportage. Given this, the consistencies of the reports are truly remarkable. Weeding out the obvious intrusions, we are left with the image of a propeller driven craft on a wavy flight pattern equipped with a brilliant searchlight and suspended gondola-like cabins.

The airship(s) continued for several days to cruise nightly over the San Francisco area. Various people emerged claiming information about or contact with the occupants of the airship. These contacts proved spurious, though interesting, and the sightings continued all over northern California. In one night, airship sightings were reported from San Francisco, Oakland, Redding, San Jose, Alameda, Tehachapi and Los Angeles. Within another 48 hours, the sightings had spread from Tacoma, Washington, to southern California.

The first true contactee story appeared on December 2, 1896. Two Italian fishermen were offshore from Pacific Grove, just north of San Francisco, when a medium sized craft swooped down and landed on the white sands of the beach. Three occupants emerged and proceeded to carry the light craft into the woods. The fishermen headed their small boat into the shore and started after the men with the craft. One of the occupants turned around and stopped them. When they argued, the man returned to his comrades for instructions. It was finally agreed that the fishermen could approach, but only so far. They glimpsed a sixty foot long cigar-shaped craft with retractable wings, but could not stay to watch it depart.

The following evening, it was reported that a similar craft had crashed near Twin Peaks. Witnesses noticed a release of foul-smelling gas from the balloon-like upper structure and that some of the propellers were bent and twisted. Apparently one of the occupants, a J. D. de Gear, claimed that this was the airship’s initial flight and was in no way connected with all the other sightings. Yet none of this in any way explained the mystery of the airships. It merely obscured the real riddle.

Compounding the confusion was the attitude of the newspapers, particularly the William Randolph Hearst organization. His San Francisco papers downplayed the sightings — “The Result of Beer” read one headline — while his New York paper supported the sightings by announcing that a successful airship had obviously been built, since it was now flying all over California. At the same time, Hearst was trying to use this flap as another means of promoting war between the US and Spain — “Airship to Bomb Havana” read another headline. The influence of the newspapers turned another enigmatic sighting, one of many in the nineteenth century, into the first true Unidentified Flying Object hysteria.

Despite all that, something was happening in the skies over California. Where would the airships turn up next?

***

On April Fool’s Day 1897, Kansas City, Missouri, found the airships wandering through its early evening skies. The performance began around eight o’clock when a powerful searchlight swept the air, the streets, the housetops and bluffs around the town. Naturally, this attracted attention and the streets were soon filled with people watching the show. The light sped across the city, about 45 degrees above the horizon and moving in a rolling or wavy motion. For more than an hour it hovered and wobbled, flashing its light beam along the horizon, then finally it lifted off, growing smaller as it climbed swiftly and vanished to the Northwest. A few minutes later, it was sighted over Everest, Kansas, sixty miles away.

There were thousands of witnesses to the Kansas City sighting, including the governor and many other officials, professionals, and ordinary citizens. All agreed that the unknown vehicle had made abrupt changes in direction and indulged in other strange acrobatic maneuvers. Once, for a few moments, it had extinguished its light and hung over the city as a dark, motionless mass. Then finally, after almost ninety minutes of aerial display, it was gone.

The hysteria began again. The California sightings had faded away in mid-December of 1896. No new sightings had been reported in the intervening months, although speculation had continued as to the source of the mysterious airships. Now, suddenly, it seemed as if the middle section of the nation, its heartland, was under siege by an aerial armada of searchlight equipped airships. The first week of April saw hundreds of reported sighting in Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri, then the phenomenon spread northeastward to Sioux City, and Burlington, Iowa. Following a large wavy pattern across the continent, the airships returned to Nebraska, then turned east through Missouri and Illinois, turning up in Chicago on April 10. People watched the flickering green and red lights from the top of a skyscraper in the Loop.

While the local populace appeared ready to welcome the airships, the scientific community tried to stem the tide by announcing that the lights had been a bright star in the constellation of Orion. Practical Chicagoans who had witnessed the lights snorted at this suggestion. During the April 10 fly-by, photographs had been taken of the mysterious object. A newspaper dealer by the name of Walter McCann snapped two photographs with his son’s box camera around five thirty that morning. The photos were examined by independent experts provided by the newspaper and found to be genuine. They clearly showed that the upper portion of the object was an elongated ovoid with something like the fabric texture of a silk balloon.

As in California, a large variety of deluded fools and confidence tricksters emerged claiming contact with the airships. Inventors appeared briefly, then faded away. The airships sailed on, roughly toward the East, putting in appearances at Kalamazoo, Michigan, (where one airship may have crashed) Oklahoma, (a slower than average airship perhaps) Illinois and Indiana. By this time, the airships’ fame was international.

The Parisian newspaper Figaro picked the story up on April 14, 1897. Noting the thousands of witnesses and the photographs, the paper concludes that “the news seems to be more than a canard.” However, the writer admits that acceptance of the speed and flight characteristics of the airship would require a complete revision of prevailing scientific knowledge and the admission that a new source of power or motive force had been discovered.

By mid-April, a new element appeared, letters from the occupants of the airships. These were just as confusing and contradictory as the other inventor and official representative stories. April 15 saw the airships return to Chicago, where thousands of people filled the streets to watch. Reports also came in from Ripon, Wisconsin, Elkhart, Indiana and Lake Forest, Illinois. In Lynn Grove, Iowa, the airship made a spectacular daylight appearance, cruising above the town and landing a few miles away. A report came in from Cleveland, Ohio, where an airship had been spotted taking off from the waters of Lake Erie. On April 15 alone, additional sightings were reported in St. Louis, Missouri; Birmingham, Iowa; Clarksville, Tennessee; Louisville, Kentucky; and several small towns in Texas.

A few days later, on April 18, the airships appeared over southern Ohio and West Virginia. On April 20, the first cattle abduction and mutilation occurred in Le Roy, Kansas with the farmer a helpless observer. The skin and bones were found a few miles away. The farmer, Alexander Hamilton, happened to be a congressman and an emphatically honest man. His affidavit was witnessed by every significant official in the town.

The sightings continued moving to the East. The climax came on April 30, as the airships glided over Yonkers, New York, at 3 a.m., then sailed out to sea and into oblivion. As suddenly as they had appeared, the airships were gone.

***

The Scientific American, a month after the Yonkers finale, dismissed the whole vast catalogue of sightings with just fifty well-chosen words. Everything, each of the thousands of observations, could be attributed to “creations from the brains of imaginative persons.” Unfortunately, this official attitude persists to this day.

What had happened? Like spiritualism, this wave of airship mania was experience driven. Unlike spiritualism, all one had to do to be exposed to the phenomenon was to go outside and watch the show. A wave of undefined sensory experiences had swept the country from end to end; the undefined nature of the experiences, however, did not make them any less real. Something happened to Congressman Hamilton’s cow, something more concrete than the “creations. . .of imaginative persons.”

For six months, the continent had been criss-crossed by an armada of airships flying in a pattern of coordinated aeronautical activity, which had been witnessed by thousands of reputable citizens and even photographed. The event had featured nearly every form of phenomena that would become commonplace fifty years later in the UFO era, including ridiculous official explanations. Hoverings, landings, observation of and contact with occupants along with tantalizing glimpses of hardware developed as the encounter evolved. Curiously, no one suggested that the airships came from another planet. They seemed so solidly futuristic in an earthly way, only slightly in advance of our own developments, that an other-worldly origin was never considered.

Perhaps the public, of this country and the world, were not tuned in to whatever it was that had happened, and what it implied. The airships appeared, cruised across the continent to the Atlantic Ocean off Yonkers, New York and vanished into legend. It would be fifty years before their kind would be seen again. And this time, the country would be ready.

***

H. G. Wells published The Time Machine in 1898 and War of the Worlds in 1910. With these novels, modern science fiction began. In its way, the phenomenon of science fiction is just as important as that of spiritualism. Between the disappearance of the airships and the arrival of the flying saucers, science fiction mutated into a new rather religious and mystical expression. The religion of course was Science, pronounced with a very capital S. The mysticism came from the unusual degree of imaginative freedom the art form offered.

On Halloween Eve, October 30, 1938, Orson Welles dramatized the War of the Worlds on radio, setting it in real New Jersey towns. Half the East Coast went into a panic; an instant wave of hysteria, greater than any since the airship flap, jangled along telephone wires and country backroads. By morning it was all over, and Welles apologized sheepishly for his pre-Halloween prank.

Something had changed. Armadas of airships had flown over most of the country and no one suggested that they came from another planet. Thirty-one years later, a radio play convinced millions that not only are visitors from another planet real, but that the invasion had started. The reason for this change of attitude can be found in science fiction.

The century opened with the publication of an astral voyage. From India to the Planet Mars, written by Swiss physicist Theodore Flournoy and based on the psychic exploits of Helene Smith, a famous English medium, reminds one of Swedenborg in its alien fluency, while its Martian adventures conjure up images of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom. Meanwhile, professional astronomers were also interested in Mars.

In 1906, William Pickering published an article in Technical World Magazine entitled “Are There Men on Mars?” Noting the work of Huygens, the first to map a dark area or sea on Mars, and Schapirelli, the discoverer of the channels or canals, the article concluded that “there is little doubt now that Mars possesses vegetable and perhaps animal life; but the question that interests humanity is, Are there intelligent beings there?” Percival Lowell, founder of Lowell Observatory, definitely thought there was, and said so in a book published in 1908. Mars as the Abode of Life completed the picture, originally sketched by Flournoy’s account, of a dying world struggling to exist as its water disappears and the red sand of the planet-wide desert threatens the remaining centers of civilization. This romantic vision would inspire Burroughs and Bradbury and many other science fiction authors, including H. G. Wells.

War of the Worlds, on its original publication in 1910, touched a deep current of fear and cultural paranoia. Europe hovered on the brink of a continental war, something it had not experienced for a generation. The novel reflects this feeling of impending disaster, foreshadowing the death of Victorian complacency in the industrialized slaughter of World War I. The most compelling moment in the book comes as the narrator realizes that all of mankind’s works, the dreadnoughts and locomotives, rapid-firing guns and suspension bridges, are ineffectual and ludicrous when confronted by a vastly superior culture. In the end, it was the common bacteria that lay the mighty Martians low, not any amount of human heroics.

The airships returned to Massachusetts and Tennessee in 1909 and 1910. The flap this time was minor and local. The armadas did not return, but a bizarre series of meteors did appear on February 9, 1913. They were seen from Canada to the Caribbean and described as luminous objects with brilliantly glowing appendages. This unique display confounded astronomers; in the Journal of the Astronomical Society of Canada, W. R. Winter noted that “the general behavior was more like that of a semi-gaseous object than that of an ordinary meteors.”

The outbreak of World War I produced religious apparitions, such as the Angel of Mons and the Fatima “miracles,” and a new type of undefined sensory experience. Combat pilots began to report phantom airplanes and ghostly airships flying above the Western Front. The Fatima sightings of the Blessed Virgin Mary contained elements that would later suggest an extra-terrestrial influence. On October 13, 1917, almost sixty thousand people saw a silvery disc swoop down from the sun and hover over the crowd for twelve minutes. Miraculous healings occurred, some of which were thoroughly documented.

In the 1920’s, radio got in on the act. Marconi, in 1921, claimed to have received radio messages from Mars on his experimental yacht the Electra while sailing in the Mediterranean. Interest in talking to Mars by radio grew all during the ’20’s. Signals were received in Newark, New Jersey, Vancouver, British Colombia, and South Hampton, England, where A. M. Low monitored weird musical effects on the ultra-high frequency bandwidths.

The most fascinating sighting of the 1920’s can be found in a travel diary published by Russian explorer Nicholas Roerich. Traveling from Tibet to Sinkiang province of China, Roerich and his companions observed a large black eagle flying over them. As they stopped to watch, they noticed another object, far above the eagle. It was “something big and shiny reflecting (the) sun, like a huge oval moving at great speed. . . We even had time to take (out) our field glasses and saw quite distinctly the oval form with the shiny surface, one side of which was brilliant from the sun.”

In 1926, Hugo Gernsback created the science fiction magazine, and a whole new era began. Within ten years, news stands would be crowded with magazines sporting titles such as Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Planet Tales, Galaxy, and Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine. H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapleton wrote for an intellectual and literary audience. The authors of pulp science fiction were professional writers, working for a per word rate. Their output democratized science fiction by reducing it to its lowest common denominator. This deluge of extra-terrestrial adventures prepared the way for Welles’ alien invasion prank, as well as creating the mind-set necessary for the dawn of the modern Unidentified Flying Object era. The origins of the “flying saucers” lie in the pulp fiction of the twenties, thirties and forties.

***

The discovery of Pluto, planet of unconscious forces, in 1931 signaled an eruption of the darkness at the core of humanity. Fascism, world depression, totalitarian revolution, war in China and Spain — the world lurched along toward another even more violent and prolonged outburst of mechanized horror. World War II erupted in 1939, and the phenomenon went to war along with the rest of the world. Just as airmen in WWI had reported phantom aircraft, so too did the flyers of WWII report strange glowing objects in the skies above war ravaged Europe.

They were first publicly referred to in early 1944, although they seem to have been around since the beginning of the war. Called foo-fighters, these eerie glowing lights were said to appear from nowhere, pace their target for considerable distances at three hundred miles an hour and then vanish abruptly. The New York Times for January 2, 1945, carried an interview with an army flier, Lieutenant Donald Meiers of Chicago, Illinois, in which he described his encounters with the pesky foo-fighters.

“There are three kinds of these lights we call foo-fighters,” Lieutenant Meiers commented. “One is red balls of fire which appear off our wing tips and (others) fly in front of us, and the third is a group of about fifteen lights which appear off in the distance — like a Christmas tree in the air — and flicker on and off.” The sightings, some quite spectacular, continued until the end of the war in May.

The foo-fighters seemed to take a year off, then they returned in the summer of 1946 as ghostly rockets maneuvering over Sweden. The ghost rockets attracted some attention, then faded away by August. The Swedish military eventually reported over 200 unknown sightings between May and August. German flying disc research, stolen by the Soviets, was generally thought to be the solution. Who knew what those wily Russians were really up to? No conclusion was reached by the Swedish military, and no one had, yet, said the magic words: “flying saucer.”

SIX: Spirits of the Dead, Phantom Airships and Flying Disks (continued)

We have seen how spiritualism and the belief in extra-terrestrial life grew up together in the nineteenth century, their belief systems entwining at times. Ishmael Reed, in his classic novel of voodoo in Harlem in the 1920’s, Mumbo Jumbo, defines a living mythology as the proper union of the text and its host. In this sense, we can think of spiritualism as a host, or phenomenon, in search of a text. Swedenborg, Rivail and Madame Blavatsky all attempted to produce a “text” for spiritualism. None were truly successful because the value of spiritualism is in the experience, not in any information derived from it. Spiritualism became an alternative form of religion, grafting a mythology onto its experience from both Eastern and Western sources.

With the beginning of the UFO era, a truly modern mythology emerged. The text came from science fiction and blended seamlessly with the host phenomenon to create a reality altering mythos of threatening and/or redemptive things in the sky. Myth, in its simplest form, can be considered a symbol and language construct that points to the deeper meaning beneath the surface of events. Myths are created by shaman, traditionally, and acted out in a ritual setting by the shaman’s culture. Despite all the unusual objects, including the airships, seen in the nineteenth and early twentieth century skies, no myth developed to explain them.

The shaman midwives at the birth of the new and very modern “flying saucer” myth were a magazine editor and a paranoid schizophrenic welder. Most studies of the UFO phenomenon ignore its ignoble beginnings as an occult fascination for morbid pulp fiction fans, preferring instead to focus on Kenneth Arnold’s initial sighting on June 24, 1947. After all, Arnold was a pilot, a reputable and responsible individual, while Ray Palmer and Richard Shaver were obviously cranks. But, at the time, the line between crank and serious observer was thin and indistinct.

The myth began to take shape at almost the same moment the Air Force released the first stories on “foo-fighters” in January 1944.

***

By late 1943, Ray Palmer, 33 year-old editor of the oldest science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories — founded by Hugo Gernsback in 1926 — had discovered an important marketing truth. Stories with Atlantis or Lemuria in their title made sales soar.

Lost Continent myths go all the way back to Plato and form an important sub-stratum of the flying saucer mythos. That this should be the case is curious, until we remember that Plato heard, second hand, his lost continent yarns from Egyptian sources. Egypt, as we noted earlier, retained knowledge from a planet-wide civilization, one engulfed by a cataclysm around 13,000 BC. In the nineteenth century, Ignastis Donneally produced two large best-selling volumes on Atlantis that became a part of occult folklore, influencing even Madame Blavatsky. Also, James Churchward’s series of volumes concerning Lemuria attained a small but significant following.

Most of this information would have been available to Amazing Stories’ readers. However, they wanted more. In the January 1944 issue, a letter from a war-plant welder in Barto, Pennsylvania, promised just that. Richard Shaver asserted that modern English had embedded within it the residue of an incredibly ancient language, possibly Atlantian or Lemurian. The key was something Shaver called the “Mantong” alphabet, a type of cipher for translating English letters into symbolic meanings. Shaver also claimed that his welding machines were telling him about his previous existence as a Lemurian.

Palmer encouraged him, and in the next few months Shaver produced a manuscript of sorts, written on odd scraps of paper, entitled “A Warning to Future Man” that claimed to be recovered race memories of life on the lost continent of Lemuria. In search of greater magazine sales, Palmer seized on the idea, and re-wrote Shaver’s rambling letter-warning into “I Remember Lemuria,” and “Mantong, the Language of Lemuria.” These appeared in the March 1945, issue of Amazing Stories.

Interestingly enough, Palmer chose to present these stories as fact. Just why is unclear. Palmer knew of Shaver’s history of mental illness, (eight years in the Pennsylvania State Hospital) and had crafted the fictional elements of Shaver’s stories himself. Yet, as truth they appeared, and, as truth, they bored deep within the collective unconscious of thousands of impressionable readers, creating the final component of the emerging mythos. Eighteen months later, when Kenneth Arnold spotted the disks flying past Mt. Rainier, a large segment of the popular consciousness was prepared. The text had found its host.

***

Turning the brittle yellow-brown pages of Amazing Stories today, The Shaver Mystery, as the fans labeled it, appears, all too obviously, a crudely crafted fake. Yet, somehow, the power of the archetypes linger. One hundred years of undefined sensory experiences and expert speculation on extra-terrestrial life had produced a critical amount of “gray area” reality. This zone of ambiguous experience cried out, psychically, for an explanation. When it came, however, the only shaman available were the crazies. Dr. Dee was a noted scholar, the Einstein of his era; Ray Palmer was a self-educated pulp fiction author, magazine editor and occult publicist. While the comparison does justice to neither, it does point up the fact that twentieth century science had become merely applied materialism. Science, like religion, had removed itself from the discussion.

Richard Shaver, however, was somewhat different. His symptoms are indicative of paranoid schizophrenia; voices from machinery, vast conspiracy plots, evil rays that cause bad things to happen, all of these are classic paranoid delusions. Edward Kelly, while perhaps lacking in conscience, is almost spectacularly sane by comparison. Shaver’s delusions are the dark and cloudy glass through which we see the myths at the end of history; his obsessions mirror the concerns of us all, and as we look into his private abyss, our fears and hopes as a species emerges out of the emptiness. Shaver’s work is not fact, it is not even true; it is real, in the way only the right myth at the right moment can be real.

Basically, Shaver tells us that 12,000 years ago a global civilization of giants, the Atlans, inhabited the earth. Their major continents were Atlantis and Lemuria, and they were the source of all the gods and goddesses of all ancient cultures. These creatures originally came from a large variety of other planets throughout the galaxy. A solar or stellar catastrophe occurred, and the inhabitants fled, all except those who had begun to mutate from the disaster. Some stayed behind and became humans. Others delved deep into the earth’s crust to avoid the harmful rays. Some of these, however, did not fare too well and eventually became a sub-species of corrupted and distorted monsters.

The “Deros,” or detrimental robots, as these evil dwarfs were called, had the power to read minds and drive people insane. All the evil and misfortunes of the world were their responsibility. However, a few Atlans survived without being corrupted. Called “Teros,” or integrative robots, these cave-dwellers helped humanity and struggled unceasingly against the Deros.

This all-encompassing dualistic world view offered both hope and fear to Amazing Stories’ readers. Hope, because irrational events actually had causes behind them, which turned to fear when it was realized that those causes were the sadistic pleasure of evil super-beings. The readers also responded to the “us versus them” quality of the mystery, with its hint of “secret knowledge” and vast conspiracies. By the end of 1945, Amazing Stories was selling 250,000 copies a month. Letters to the editor surged from forty or fifty a month to more than 2,500. Many reported sighting strange objects in the sky and meetings with Teros and Deros and other alien beings.

Shaver continued to crank out stories. They were now called stories, but the information was considered real, taken from the Lemurian thought archives. One year before Kenneth Arnold’s sighting, in the July 1946 issue, Palmer, in the introductory blurb to Shaver’s classic “Cult of the Witch Queen,” announced: “If you don’t think space ships visit the Earth regularly, as in this story, then the files of Charles Fort and your editor’s own files are something you should see.” Space ships were real, Palmer insisted, then without missing a beat, went on: “And if you think responsible parties in world governments are ignorant of the fact of space ships visiting the Earth, you just don’t think the way we do.”

All of this would be just a curious addendum to the history of imagination, except for what happened next. Palmer claimed the Shaver material was true; space ships filled with evil Deros, beneficent Teros and returning Atlans were real, not fantasy or wish-fulfillment. And then, for an incredible few weeks in the summer of 1947, it looked as if it were really coming true. The space ships had arrived.

SIX: Spirits of the Dead, Phantom Airships and Flying Disks (continued)

In the spring of 1947, two years after the fall of Hitler’s Germany, the Western Allies and Soviet Russia glared at each other across “The Iron Curtain” of Churchill’s ringing phrase. The Cold War froze into place in March with the announcement of the Truman Doctrine pledging American aid, including military, to countries threatened by the communist menace. Behind all this lurked the planet destroying threat of atomic weapons.

Sporadic sightings had continued since the end of the ghost rocket flap, but the early months of 1947 were quiet. All that changed in late spring. In April, a professional weatherman, monitoring a balloon with a theodolite, tracked a disc shaped object through the skies above Richmond, Virginia. In May, a series of sightings, from Virginia to Colorado, briefly made the news. The first two weeks of June brought reports from Hungary of “silvery balls” hurtling through daytime skies, as well as sightings in Arizona and New Mexico.

Ten days before Kenneth Arnold’s sighting, a pilot named Richard Rankin spotted a flight of discs over Bakersfield, California. Rankin’s sighting did not make much of a news splash, but it is interesting because of the ambiguous nature of what happened next. Richard Rankin was one of the first people consulted by a pair of Air Force officers, Davidson and Brown, whose investigation and mysterious deaths added fuel to the fire of early UFO conspiracy speculation. Rankin was also an acquaintance of both Arnold and Ray Palmer. Just how all this fits together is only one of many mysterious loose ends running through this first month of the UFO era.

Next came the Maury Island affair. About two o’clock in the afternoon of June 21, 1947, a fisherman and his son spotted something unusual off Maury Island, near Tacoma, Washington. They claimed that six large doughnut shaped objects had hovered over the bay while one of the six spewed something like molten slag that damaged their boat, killed their dog and almost killed them. The fisherman, Harold A. Dahl, reported to his boss, Fred Lee Crisman, while his son was treated at the hospital. Crisman did not believe Dahl at first, but the samples of the space ship slag Dahl had collected helped convince him.

On the morning following his first bizarre encounter, Dahl was contacted by a man in a black suit, driving a black ‘47 Buick, who warned him not to talk to anyone about what he had seen. Also that morning, Crisman claimed to have visited Maury Island to check on the slag and to have seen another similar ship himself. These reports would have a delayed effect on public opinion.

***

The first major outbreak of UFO hysteria started with Kenneth Arnold’s June 24 sighting. Arnold, a 32 year-old successful businessman, was flying toward Mt. Rainier, Washington, at 9,200 feet when he spotted a bright flash off in the distance. Looking over, Arnold saw “a chain of nine peculiar looking aircraft flying from north to south at approximately 9,500 feet elevation and going, seemingly, in a definite direction of about 170 degrees.” They were heading for Mt. Rainier at a high rate of speed, and every few seconds, one of them would dip or change directions, causing a bright flash of sunlight.

At first, it was hard for Arnold to determine size or shape. Then the objects flew past the summit of Mt. Rainier, and were outlined against the snow. Arnold would later draw them with rounded fronts, straight sides and rears that curved to a blunt point. He estimated they were fifty-feet long by a little less in width, and only three feet thick. Edge-on, they appeared to be a thin black line.

Arnold timed their flight from one familiar landmark to another. Later, when he measured the distance on a map, he found that the five mile long chain of objects had been flying at roughly 1,700 miles per hour. This was almost three times the speed of sound, and at that point, no earthly airplane had yet broken the sound barrier. Back at the airport in Pendleton, Oregon, Arnold asked his pilot buddies what they thought of his sighting. The conversation roamed from “foo-fighters” to guided missiles and secret prototypes of new weapons. Arnold decided to report his sighting, and headed off to the local FBI office.

By a simple twist of fate, the FBI office was closed. Arnold felt an obligation to report his sighting to somebody. Looking around, he spotted the office of the East Oregonian newspaper. Imagine the scene: A dusty western newspaper office, dark paneling and framed photos of politicians and celebrities, where a lone columnist is working late; in comes Gary-Cooper-esque pilot Kenneth Arnold with a very strange story. Arnold’s Idaho twang resonates softly through the late afternoon quiet as he tells his story, saying that the objects “flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” Columnist Nolan Skiff, intrigued, writes up the story. The next morning, the newspaper’s editor files the story with the national wire service.

“PENDLETON, Ore. June 25 (AP) — Nine bright saucer-like objects flying at “incredible speed” at 10,000 feet altitude were reported here today by Kenneth Arnold, Boise, Idaho, (a) pilot who said he could not hazard a guess as to what they were.”

The story went nation-wide in the next few days. Front page stories appeared on the “flying discs,” or “flying platters,” and, of course, “flying saucers.” Arnold’s solidly reputable background helped the story gain credibility, and for a week the country wondered over the Mt. Rainier sighting. Then, other sightings began to appear in print, and the flap was on. The flying saucer era had begun.

***

Ray Palmer quickly embraced the flying saucers and linked them to the Shaver Mystery. In the October 1947 issue of Amazing Stories, which went to press in early July, Palmer exulted: “A part of the now world-famous Shaver Mystery has now been proved! On June 25. . . mysterious supersonic vessels, either space ships or ships from the caves, were sighted in this country! A summation of facts proves that these ships were not, nor can be, attributed to any civilization now on the face of the Earth.”

The sightings continued:

*June 28 — Five or more bright discs flying in formation are seen by a pilot flying over Nevada.

*July 4 — Two groups of nine flat disks are spotted by a commercial airline pilot over Boise, Idaho.

*July 4 — Silvery objects fly over Portland, Oregon; witnessed by police and large groups of witnesses.

*July 7 — Patrolmen witness another spinning and spewing act by whirling donut-shaped craft off Maury Island, Tacoma, Washington.

*July 8 — White metallic ovoids and one thin disc do aerial calisthenics over Muroc AFB and Rogers Dry Lake, California.

*July 9 — Flat black intricately maneuvering disc seen by a pilot flying over Idaho.

*July 10 — Bright light ellipse spotted by a noted astronomer and his family in New Mexico.

In all, 125 sightings were reported in the month of June 14 through July 15. Almost a third came from Washington, with Colorado and Idaho next in number. The sightings over Muroc AFB on July 8, along with the report that same day of a crashed flying disc from Roswell, New Mexico, forced the Army Air Force to take action.

Early in July, classified orders were issued to treat all flying saucer reports as real and serious. Information was routed to the Technical Intelligence Division, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. There it became the responsibility of two intelligence officers, Capt. William Davidson and Lt. Frank M. Brown. As reports began to mount up in the first two weeks of July, the situation at TID was one of confusion bordering on panic. Memos flew thick and fast, asking for information concerning secret Soviet projects, the Navy’s discontinued disc-shaped craft, the XF5U-1, and speculating on an extra-terrestrial origin for the objects. TID was indeed taking the sightings very seriously.

Davidson and Brown began to interview witnesses to the sightings, starting with Richard Rankin, who later intimated to Kenneth Arnold that the Army knew much more about the discs than they were letting on. The Army, however, wasn’t the only group investigating the sightings. Ray Palmer and Amazing Stories were also on the job.

Palmer wrote Arnold early in July asking for information on his sighting. Arnold had never heard of Palmer or Amazing Stories, so he sent off a copy of his original account. Palmer responded with a letter giving Arnold the details of the Maury Island event and asking if Arnold would be interested in investigating it, with expenses paid by the magazine. As Arnold thought this proposal over, the two intelligence officers arrived.

Capt. Davidson and Lt. Brown had been given exclusive use of an A-26 bomber to pursue flying saucer reports. They flew into Boise and took Arnold out to dinner, pumping him for details and claiming that they had no idea what the objects might have been. They were even more delighted when Arnold announced that another witness, Capt. E. J. Smith, a commercial pilot, would be making a stopover in Boise that night. They could get a report on Smith’s sighting before they left to fly on to California. At the airport, the group ran into another witness, Dave Johnson, who had attempted to photograph a disc from his National Guard AT-6 transport plane. The intelligence officers took complete reports from all three men, but Arnold noticed that the officers seemed to have the basic information already, and were merely looking to confirm details.

Davidson and Brown had also gone through the piles of mail Arnold had received in the wake of the news reports on his sighting. They were most interested in queries from “societies and organizations.” Arnold doesn’t mention, in his published account, whether the intelligence officers suggested that he co-operate with Palmer in investigating the Maury Island event, but something happened to change his mind.

On July 29, Arnold flew from Boise to Tacoma, Washington. Along the way, he had his second sighting of flying discs. These were much smaller and flew somewhat slower than the first group. Arnold took movies of the objects; they showed up only as blurry specks on the film.

Checking into the best hotel in town, where he found a mysteriously pre-paid room waiting for him, Arnold lost no time in contacting Harold Dahl. In addition to his sighting story, Dahl now related his encounter with the man in the black suit. He seemed hesitant, even as he sat in Arnold’s hotel room, to tell his story. Dahl at first suggested that they all just forget about the whole thing and go home. Naturally, this made Arnold even more interested.

After going through his story, Dahl took Arnold to “his secretary’s house,” where a piece of the debris had been stored. This turned out to be rather ordinary looking volcanic rock. Dahl explained that his boss, Fred Lee Crisman, had the other more interesting pieces. Arnold decided to visit Crisman the next day. Crisman, who did not witness the first sighting, appeared to have a very unusual role in all of this. For one thing, Crisman was an avid reader of Amazing Stories and a believer in the Shaver Mystery. The year before, Crisman had written a letter to the magazine describing an epic confrontation and struggle with the underground Deros in tunnels beneath Puget Sound. It was Crisman who alerted Palmer to the Maury Island sighting; this in turn prompted the request for Arnold to investigate. And so, on the morning July 30, the story came full circle as Arnold sat down to interview Crisman.

Crisman told his story and offered to take Arnold out to Maury Island to collect samples of the debris. Even though Arnold had accomplished his immediate task of interviewing the witnesses and collecting samples, he still felt in need of help in making sense of it all. Arnold called on his friend Capt. Smith, who flew in to help. Both investigators questioned Dahl and Crisman at great lengths, but no holes appeared in their stories, and no new ideas developed.

That evening, the two pilots analyzed everything they had assembled on the Maury Island affair. They also discussed their own sightings and the possible connections between them. Some of Dahl and Crisman’s story seemed confirmed by another sighting on July 7. Similar craft had spewed cinders and ashes along a Puget Sound beach not far from Maury Island. Even with this partial confirmation, the two pilots were uneasy about the whole affair. It seemed inconsistent somehow.

Late that night, as the pair were wrapping up the conversation, a call came from the UP Bureau Chief in Tacoma, Ted Morello. Someone, it seemed was leaking the contents of their investigation and even their private conversations to the wire service. This shocked Arnold and Smith because they had carefully avoided the local press. The information, or at least some of it, could have come only from Dahl and Crisman. Even more interesting, some of the information could only have come froma “bug” in the hotel room. Arnold and Smith spent a tense hour searching the room for microphones, but failed to find anything.

The next day, more debris arrived, as did the intelligence officers, Capt. Davidson and Lt. Brown. The extra debris seemed as inconclusive as ever, and so the investigators asked the witnesses if they minded talking to the intelligence officers. Their reaction was interesting; Dahl wanted no part of an Army investigation, while Crisman appeared jubilant. Davidson and Brown were on the way, as the result of a phone call from Arnold. While they all waited in Arnold’s hotel room, a call came in from Ted Morello. He had the mysterious source of the night before on the phone, and wanted to confirm who was in the room at that moment. As both Crisman and Dahl were present, it appeared they were not involved.

Dahl left before the intelligence officers arrived. When they did, they seemed interesting only in giving Arnold and Smith their own new information, including a drawing the officers said came from a photograph they considered authentic. This image jogged Arnold’s memory; one of the craft he had seen had had this configuration. Conversation then turned to Crisman’s rendition of Dahl’s story. The officers seemed bored, and gave the debris only a cursory glance. They were not interested, period.

Crisman offered to run home and put together a sample of debris for the officers take back with them. They agreed, and then called for a car from McCord Air Force Base. They were flying back to California, even though it was after midnight. Arnold thought their excuse was thin, and that they gave the impression they believed the sighting was a hoax.

Just the officers were about to depart, Crisman raced up with a box full of debris, which was loaded into the vehicle. Arnold caught a glimpse of its contents, noting that it was similar to what they had seen, perhaps a little thicker with a more rocky surface. Davidson and Brown took off for the airfield, Crisman went home, and the two pilot investigators returned to their hotel room.

But the night wasn’t over yet. A call was waiting from Ted Morello. The mysterious informant had called back with the gist of the conversation with the intelligence officers. Stunned, the pilots discussed the almost supernatural quality of the surveillance until they drifted off to sleep.

Next morning, the pilots were up early for the trip out to Maury Island to look at more debris. Around nine thirty, the phone rang. It was Crisman, shouting excitedly that a B-25 had crashed and that “I think you and I know who was aboard that plane!” Overwhelmed, Arnold collapsed into a chair, as Smith rushed in from the bathroom to take the receiver. He turned white, hung up on Crisman, then called the airbase for confirmation. McCord AFB confirmed the crash and Ted Morello was able to supply a few more details. Still shaken, Arnold and Smith dressed and started to leave, only to run head long into Crisman.

They returned to the hotel room, but found that they had nothing left to say. The deaths hung in the air, smothering speculation. Eventually, Arnold began to think more clearly, and his thoughts turned to Ray Palmer. From the hotel room, Arnold called Palmer in Chicago and told him that the investigation was off. Palmer took it calmly, and warned Arnold not to take any fragments of the debris with him in his plane. Sound advice considering the B-25 crash. Before the call was over, Crisman asked to speak with Palmer. They spoke for a few moments, which Arnold found disturbing since Crisman had claimed not to know of Palmer the day before.

The morning paper carried the news in a banner headline: “Sabotage Hinted in Crash of Army Bomber at Kelso; Plane May Hold Flying Disc Secret.” In the next few days, as Arnold and Smith waited for the Army to contact them, Crisman disappeared. The mysterious source called back to announce that he had been whisked off to Alaska in an Army transport. McCord AFB confirmed a flight, of the same type and at the correct time, that matched the caller’s information. Nothing more has ever been heard from Fred Lee Crisman.

Eventually, an officer from McCord, a Major George Sander, arrived to collect the leftover debris samples. He left Arnold and Smith feeling unsettled and unsure. Had it been a hoax? Or some kind of intelligence operation? Arnold flew home on August 3, and almost crashed himself on the last leg of the journey.

The first classic case of the UFO era ended in confusion. Almost all the components of the UFO mythos can be found in the events of the first six weeks of sightings. This strange intersection of pulp fiction, serious observation and intelligence operations produced a kind of matrix around which the myth grew, like a seed crystal in a super-saturated solution.

SEVEN: Spirits of the Dead, Phantom Airships and Flying Disks

(Seeing the larger pattern)

The time has come to step back and examine this forest of undefined sensory experience for its underlying patterns.

Some large patterns emerge immediately. The discovery of the trans-Saturnian planets, beginning in the late eighteenth century, clearly delineates periods of revolutionary change. The discovery of Uranus brought the political revolutions of America and France; Neptune produced the mass popular consciousness of spiritualism and communism; Pluto revealed the dark underside of humanity, its lusts and corruptions, such as Fascism, the military industrial complexes, and the release of atomic energy. These are useful signposts, but they are too broad in scope to be definite. Think of them as the greater wave front in which the smaller eddies of synchronicity are embedded.

It is these smaller currents, standing waves and dissipative structures we are looking for; their shape holds the clues to the meaning of human evolution. Let us label one such current, with a nod to Dr. Dee, “Radical Truth,” and follow it through the flow of time. In the beginning, this evolutionary current toward sentience appears stable — a dissipative structure like a whirlpool or a smoke ring — while the information flows freely from inside, subjective, to outside, objective, then back inside, and so on. The culture using this current would then be open to the astral world, their consciousness a permeable membrane for the spirit, and at the same time part of a greater, perhaps galactic, community of such stable-structure sentients.

When there is an interruption in the flow of self-verifying information exchanges, then, like a smoke ring in turbulent air, the structure collapses. We can see these patterns emerge in the long wave of Egyptian history. Coherence with the current “Radical Truth” creates little standing waves of sentience and civilization in time. We can also see the turbulence of chaos sweep them away. The current, however, and the flow of information contained within it, can never be completely disrupted. It is part of Nature, a component of our DNA.

So, the “Radical Truth” current continues to create ever more complex patterns as it accommodates each new influx of chaos. The length of each of these periods of stable sentience and chaotic isolation grows smaller over time. As the oscillation gets faster, the psychic “temperature” rises. When a certain critical level, a sort of fever pitch, is reached, phenomena begin to erupt into consciousness.

These phenomena act like self-regulating mechanisms, sort of an evolutionary thermostat. Their appearance indicates a period when sentient standing waves are appearing and disappearing so fast that the culture has no psycho-spiritual anchoring. The thermostat kicks in self-regulating phenomena, and a new paradigm or religious perspective takes hold; the smoke ring of sentience becomes stable.

Applying this line of thought to the broad planetary signposts, we can see the political revolutions of Uranus as destablizing institutions, monarchies, empires and religions, while the mass consciousness of Neptune destablized the individual. Each period of instability created the possibility of a sudden re-organization at a higher level; kingdoms into nations, religion into science and philosophy. The dance between chaos and order, sentience and isolation, is one of long slow arpeggios, punctuated with brisk allegros.

With the discovery of Neptune, signpost to the emergence of the mass mind and the destabilization of the individual, appeared the phenomenon of spiritualism. This experience offered the possibility of reorganization at a higher level of communal society and communal mind. Spreading on an individual level, from contact to contact, spiritualism offered hope for individual survival, life after death, at the same time that the phenomenon itself was creating a collective awareness of unexplained experiences. The growth of this “gray area” of undefined sensory experience produced enough psychic instability to maintain a belief system, but without a text, that is without a self-verifying mechanism, the structure remained incomplete.

Those portions of the spiritualist phenomenon that did generate a text, such as the Spiritualist groups of Brazil who follow The Spirit’s Book or The Theosophical Society anchored by the writings of Madame Blavatsky, managed to survive through time. These are exceptions that prove the rule. Brazilian Spiritualism is a major religion in South America, but the Theosophical Society is a marginal pre-cursor to today’s New Age Movement. Both have been swallowed up by the new mythos of the UFO era.

If we think of spiritualism as a change in the beliefs about human psychic abilities, then the growth of both speculation about life on other worlds and science fiction are changes in how we view the universe and our place in it. Naturally these evolutionary developments appeared as entwined motifs. They are part of the larger pattern that is slowly emerging as the current “Radical Truth