In his 1993 book The Holotropic Mind, Stanislov Grof posits
that the whole course of a child's life is more or less permanently set
the moment he twists free of the womb, takes a quick look around and, based
on the evidence he has gathered during his one brief excursion through
the birth canal and out into the light, forms an opinion: Is the
world friendly? Is it hostile? This first naive judgment, according
to Grof, will for-ever color the child's attitude toward the world he is
entering and the possibilities it contains.
I was born with an attitude. The mysteries of this
world did not wait for my head to reach the stirrups to begin their revelation.
I entered the world with apriori knowledge, my Tabula Rasa already emblazoned
with four inexorable words:
WE ARE NOT ALONE!
It seems likely that, for most people, that first Grofian
impression of the outside world takes the shape of an open hand delivering
undeserved pain (the doctor's necessary slap) or, more gently, the embrace
of those legendary Freudian mother-mountains gloriously overshadowing the
new-born's child-sky. But my own first worldly impression, burned
indelibly into my brain while still sunk deep in the enveloping darkness
of the womb, came in the form of an image two silvery dinner plates fitted
lip to lip, hovering silently over a stark desert landscape a visual
impression I absorbed in-utero by way of some mysterious memory osmosis,
an experience transferred directly from my mother's racing adult brain
to my as-yet-undiscovered developing fetal mind
"There it is! Let's go!"
One of the personal peculiarities that drew my parents
together was a shared love for chasing UFOs. This was the early Sixties,
before the New Age had twisted the sport into an expensive tourist attraction.
In their day, it took guts. There was no cruise director holding
your hand, no air-conditioned tour bus to protect you from the blistering
desert sun, no security guard to warn you when you were getting too close...
A squeal of tires as the open convertible veers from
the pavement. A grinding moan as the engine adjusts to the floored
accelerator. The steady clatter of rocks pelting the undercarriage,
zinging up into the air as the car rockets across the open sand.
"Get a picture! Quick! Before it moves!"
The camera is already in my mother's hands, raised to
the horizon. But the jagged terrain gives no quarter. The car
heaves and bounces, sending the camera ricocheting off the textured vinyl
of the dashboard, pushing its lens aimlessly up to-ward the cloudless afternoon
sky.
"Here it comes!"
WOOOooosssSSSHHH!!!
Click.
It was pure luck that got them the photograph; they knew
this and were grateful. UFOs are rarely so obliging as to pass through
the field of an arbitrarily-focused camera lens. As a rule, they
usually possess an uncanny sense of when they are being observed, and are
notoriously resistant to the collection of hard evidence of their existence.
A cloud of dust spews into the still desert air as the
car spins to a stop. Waves of heat pour off the hood, giving a mirage-like
quality to the oscil-lating disc as it hovers momentarily on the far horizon,
then fires straight up to disappear into the glare of the open blue sky.
Stunned silence.
Most UFO encounter reports would end here, or perhaps
lead on to the photo lab where the film is finally developed (and usually
discredited), or even to the inevitable visit from black-suited government
agents seeking to confiscate evidence and silence witnesses. But
the powers that be were not content to leave me with such a tantaliz-ing
partial glimpse of life's mysteries. While Mom clings gleefully to
her camera containing its celluloid prize, while Dad carefully guides the
convertible back to the distant highway, the UFO is still hovering out
there, unseen, setting its navigational systems for a speedy return.
"Wow," Dad whispers, breaking the tense silence.
"Yeah, wow."
The car eases onto the smooth pavement, turns back toward
Phoenix. The oil light flashes briefly, then fades. The car
picks up speed: the city is visible ahead; maintenance can wait.
"That's the closest we've come," Mom says.
She is laughing now, leaning on my father, the camera resting neatly in
her lap. "My God! I could feel it touch my hair! It was
right on top of us!"
"Right there!" Dad agrees. He stretches an arm
forward, palm about a foot from his face. "It was right there!
This close! And we've got a picture to..."
It was really at this moment, while resting quietly and
as yet unnoticed in my mother's womb, that I acquired my apriori attitude
toward all thing extraterrestrial and my high personal tolerance for the
mysterious and strange UFOs, Bigfoot, ghosts, psychic powers all the
phenom-ena at which our society clicks its collective tongue in pragmatic
disapproval. A character on an episode of TV's The New Twilight Zone,
the ghost of a pool shark and barroom philosopher, neatly summarized the
lesson I was about to learn this way: "Anything is possible, kid.
Some things are just a little less likely than others..."
"... prove it!"
The laughter stops. Confused eyes seek mutual assurance
as the landscape suddenly and dramatically shifts. The question What's
wrong with this picture? becomes a palpable presence in the car, filling
the space between the now separated bodies of my parents like a third passenger
riding the gear shift. The accelerator is released and the car rolls
to a gentle stop on the highway's wide shoulder.
"What did you see?"
My father is already holding the small note-book he always
brings on these excursions. My parents are not pie-in-the-sky, touchy-feely
New Agers. They are fearless explorers, meticulous cartographers of reality's
fringe.
My mother is pointing. "The sun moved from there...
she indicates the spot, "... to there. Just like that. Boom!"
"Right," Dad says. He is busily writing in the
notebook, describing the phenomenon in lucid detail, quickly filling page
after small page. "We both saw it, then. If it was a hallucination,
it was a shared one, which would be strange enough in itself."
He completes his written account of the event, dates
the entry, then glances at his watch to note the time. He stares
at the watch for a long mo-ment, eventually raising it to his ear.
It is still working.
"Two hours," he says, the watch again before his eyes.
"Two hours?" My mother checks her wrist.
Their watches had been synchronized before setting out from Phoenix.
The times still match. Two hours have passed between the time Dad began
his exclamation about photographic proof and the time he finished.
The sun has not leaped across the sky, as my parents'
senses at first led them to believe. The desert shadows have not
burst spontaneously into new configurations. The highway has not
jerked them suddenly closer to Phoenix.
My parents have lost time.
Again, the typical alien abduction "Missing Time" story,
as described in New York artist Budd Hopkins' seminal book of the same
name (and its many, many imitators) might well have ended here, but this
story continues.
They made it safely back to Phoenix. The film,
when developed, was blank. The news that they were expecting a third
child uprooted my folks and sent them packing to my mother's home town,
to be closer to family. The experience was forgotten in the bustle
of daily existence.
I was nine when I found the notebook. My parents
had split up when I was 18 months old. Dad had vanished from my life
without leaving so much as a forwarding address, and I con-sciously remembered
almost nothing about him. But his absence was pervasive, ever-present,
haunting me like a ghost lurking invisibly at the edge of vision, like
a saucer circling endlessly just beyond the unapproachable horizon.
It had become one of my secret daily rituals to dig through Mom's things,
seeking hard evidence of his existence.
My first experience of deja vu had come upon discovering
a newspaper clipping in one of my mother's old scrapbooks. I have
no recollection today of the article's contents, but I will never forget
how the grainy black and white photo accompanying the story cut through
me like a knife blade; even without a caption, I knew it was him.
My second deja vu was the notebook. There, in the
first sample I'd ever seen of my father's handwriting, was a narrative
of my own first memory. The recurring dream of a streaking saucer
and lost time that had confused and obsessed me since birth lay spelled
out before me in lucid, concrete detail. Amongst that detail was
a much-repeated term that would forever change my experience of reality:
UFO
The Public Library in the tiny, Midwestern town I grew
up in is a peculiar place, as small town libraries go. Among its
scant thousand or so book, it contained, back in 1973, twenty-seven on
the subject of UFOs. By my calculations that is roughly 3% of its
stock. This may sound like a meager percentage, but when you consider
the vast range of topics even a small library must cover, not to mention
the general conservatism of the town, this fact swells in significance.
This statistical fact was among the first notations I
made in the little notebook I began to keep, in imitation of my father,
as I began what would eventually become more than three decades of my own
research into the subject of UFOs, extraterrestrial contact, and all things
paranormal. Directly below this notation, and also concerning the
library, is recorded the equally odd fact that these twenty-seven books
were housed less than a block from my home, as if planted there by an unseen
hand, in antici-pation of the day I would discover them.
I tore through the library's UFOlogy books in the same
spirit with which I had previously pillaged my mother's closet. I
was searching for familiar faces, for family resemblances.
And in my unabashedly nine year old way, I found them,
constructing from myriad sources, from a thousand disparate stories, theories
and boyhood fantasies the following personal myth:
My real father had been kidnapped that long ago afternoon
in the Phoenix desert and spirited off to outer space. The being
who accompanied my mother home that day was an alien whose appearance had
been carefully refigured to resemble Dad's. The The Man Who Fell
To Earth-like alcoholism that "officially" explained my father's absence
from the family was a mere pretense healthy and strong, he had been called
back to the Arizona desert, back to his waiting saucer, back to the sky.
Lying in the womb on that fateful Phoenix afternoon, I had been genetically
altered. I was the world's first interstellar half-breed (the term
"hybrid" had not yet come into common usage in the UFO world), and I would
grow up to be the savior of both races.
And someday, when the experiment of my life was complete,
both my fathers would surely return
Sadly, neither one ever did, but I still sometimes wonder
about that strange, clear memory which predates my own birth the saucer,
the photograph, missing time. Is it a real memory, or just a story
I heard so many times as a kid that I couldn't resist placing myself, imaginatively,
in the middle? If it is a real in-utero memory of a real-life event,
might it go some distance toward explaining the peculiar life-path I've
traced here on Earth, a planet I dearly love, but which, at best, less
than half the time feels like "home?"
Over the course of the now more than thirty years
since my discovery of Dad's notebook and, with it, that fateful acronym
UFO I have become, as an adult, an accomplished paranormal historian,
as well as an experienced first-hand investigator of contemporary extraterrestrial
con-tact encounters. My The Golden Age of Flying Saucers UFO history
kids' book series is well on its way to international best-seller status.
Between early 1997, which was the 50th anniversary of the famous 1947 UFO
crash in Roswell, New Mexico, and Halloween 1998, I wrote, edited and published
nine fun and informative issues of The Golden Age of Flying Saucers Newsletter,
a bi-monthly exploration targeted at grownups! of the earliest years
of the UFO phenomenon. For many years, I ran one of the Internet's
most popular databases of ET contact information and resources, a site
whose accompanying e-mail newsletter, at its peak, had more than 3,000
loyal subscribers. All of the essays that comprise this book were
originally composed as editorial ruminations for one or the other of those
news-letters. Packaged together like this, they pack a substantial
collective wallop I hope you enjoy them!
Three decades following in the footsteps of my parents'
paranormal legacy has led me down many strange and narrow byways, making
for an unusual life, indeed a life I have, so far, enjoyed immensely.
Thirty-some years later, I still think about flying saucers a lot, pretty
much every day.
And sometimes, when I'm entertaining such thoughts, those
awe-invoking words so long ago impressed upon me in the womb rise again
before my adult mind's eye:
WE ARE NOT ALONE!
No, I can't help thinking in such moments, that's not
quite right. If I allow myself, just for the moment, to again embrace
my childhood fan-tasies, to accept once again my once-naively-cherished
responsibility as avatar to two races, I find I must revise this human
statement of mystery and hope, and hand it back fulfilled:
No, you are not alone... WE ARE HERE!
* * *
NOTE:
The essays that follow were written for subscribers to
two established UFO newsletters, so they assume, going in, a certain familiarity
on the reader's part with the world of UFOlogy Roswell, Area 51, Grey
Aliens, the contactee phenomenon, etc. If all such concepts are new
to you, I recommend boning up on some UFO history before plunging ahead.
A good place to start might be my own The Golden Age of Flying Saucers:
Classic UFO Sightings, Saucer Crashes and Extraterrestrial Contact Encounters,
Volume I: 1943-1953, which is available from New Paradigm Press.
While, ostensibly, written for kids (ages 9 to 13), The Golden Age of Flying
Saucers
is full of solidly-researched information, relayed in an entertaining
format suitable to even the most discriminating of adult readers!
Check it out at www.lulu.com/newparadigmpress.
Also, since the majority of these essays were composed
in 1997-1998, some of the "math" may be a bit outdated regarding such pronouncements
as "50 Years After Roswell!" and the like when it has now, of course,
been almost 60 years. But, beyond such calendar-keeping, the content
of each essay is timeless, so please disregard any temporal inconsistencies!
Not only are they irrelevant to the points being made, to my mind, they
add a certain "remember when?" nostalgic charm to the reading experience.
I hope you agree!