In my second book “Calliope O’Callahan and the Dowsers”, Callie befriends a Brazilian healer by the name of Isabelle. Brazil has a long and tolerant respect for psi-related abilities with at least two parapsychology facilities studying the phenomena. What Isabelle practices is a form of healing called Reiki.
This is what the Google AI chatbot found:
What is Reiki and how is it done?
It’s a gentle, non-invasive energy healing practice that promotes deep relaxation and inner peace based on the belief that there is a universal life force energy that flows through all living things and can be harnessed to promote healing and well-being.
The philosophy of Reiki is rooted in the belief that we are all connected to a source of universal energy, which is often referred to as “Ki” or “Chi.” This energy is vital for our physical, mental, and emotional well-being, and when it is flowing freely, we are healthy and balanced. However, when our energy is blocked or disrupted, we can experience pain, illness, and emotional distress. This is often stated as having a blocked Chakra point in the body.
Reiki practitioners believe that they can use their hands to channel this universal energy to help heal others. By placing their hands on or near the recipient’s body, they can help promote relaxation, balance the energy flow, and support the body’s natural healing processes.
It is typically administered in a series of sessions, each lasting for around 60 to 90 minutes. During a session, the recipient lies fully clothed on a massage table or sits comfortably in a chair. The practitioner places their hands on or near the recipient’s body and uses gentle touch to help promote relaxation and energy flow.
Although psi-related healing practices are accepted in other parts of the world, especially in South America, the issue is how Reiki may be adopted into the current medical practices and hospitals in the United States. Since medicine in the U.S. is arguably a for-profit model, with the insurance companies paying the practitioners, and it is highly regulated requiring medical personnel to be educated and certified, Reiki is not easily accepted.
The Rhine research meeting had a Reiki practitioner discussing how the Cancer Center at Duke is integrating other forms of healing (acupressure, acupuncture, meditation) into its program for a more “integrated” healing experience. Before the Enlightenment, spiritual and natural healing practices were the norm, but scientific materialists removed those instead of scientifically sound medical practices. But humans are not machines and medical knowledge encompasses about 30% of what is going on in the human body, an integrated system.
What is frustrating for physicians and pharmaceutical companies is the human’s ability to spontaneously heal from a disease state, or to use natural functions to reverse a chronic condition. We do not understand the process because there is little money to be made in either of these situations so little money goes into researching them.
One of the arguments made during the research meeting is that non-medical healing techniques shouldn’t be part of the overall medical establishment and that it was never intended to be partnered with the for-profit medical model. I’m of two minds about this. On the side of keeping Reiki in the hands of the Reiki practitioners, I agree that if you have healing hands, give freely of your skill to those in need. On the side of regulating non-medical healing practices, some people are egregiously taking money from the desperate and those who are self-deluded into thinking they’re healers and advertise erroneously. The work that the Forever Family Foundation is doing might serve as a template for Reiki and other styles of non-medical healing techniques. They test the mediums that work with the bereaved friends and family of those who have passed on to make sure they are the genuine articles. It need not be as strenuous a certification as a medical practitioner requires, but at least provide a level of trust that is otherwise currently lacking.
Note: This blog post does not recommend that you forego medical treatment by a licensed medical provider.
My travels as an editor have led me to this book from the latest book to be released by White Crow Books in the series from New Thinking Allowed. Since the New York Times release of Naval video footage and a story by Leslie Kean, the discussion around UFOs (or UAPs now) has gone from fringe woo-woo to “Hey, there must be something to this after all.” As a result, the book I’m editing has come from transcripts by people Dr. Mishlove has interviewed over the years who know about “alien encounters”. Only one has to do with the physical close encounters of the name-your-number. The rest are about the experiences of the victims or, as we say in parapsychology “the experiencers”.
I am not a believer in the “alien visitor” hypothesis considering that we have so little data about the origins of these phenomena but I do think something is going on, and has since we branched off from our ape ancestors to begin the genus “Homo”. If I’m starting to sound like the ancient astronaut theorists from the History Channel, please continue reading so I may disavow this idea and explain further what I mean.
One of the interviewees brought up this book called The Nine during their discussion with Dr. Mishlove and I thought it would be worth checking into. This is the book blurb:
Stuart Holroyd, skeptical, open-minded, and well-informed, became
Observer to a remarkable U.S. group of psychics headed by a famous American scientist and an English aristocrat. They claimed that they had made contact with galactic intelligences and their “evidence” was astounding…
– Did three “selected” minds help to avert world disaster?
-Was the group in constant communication with extraterrestrials?
-Was it possible for these alien intelligences to effect a landing on Earth?
-Had they, in fact, already visited Earth in previous centuries?
-Did the group’s meditations avert Kissinger’s assassination and a Middle East holocaust?
from the book’s back cover
This is a pretty good summary of what I read. You’re probably wondering why Henry Kissinger is involved. This book was written in 1977 after the Middle East was having fits about Israel. Yes, I read this book just before Hamas invaded Israel in October 2023 taking prisoners, killing Jews and anyone else they came across which included Americans. The synchronicity is not lost on me.
The writer, Stuart Holroyd, is a British author famous for being one of the original “Angry Young Men” in the 1950s before it gained popularity in the 1960s. He went from being angry to looking into the paranormal and esoteric. The American scientist was Andrija Puharich who had over fifty patents, primarily medical, one of which involved hearing aids. He studied several very powerful mediums, healers, and Uri Geller, the Israeli famous for spoon-bending and other psychokinetic feats. The aristocrat was Sir John Whitmore, a racecar driver who had a near-death experience, which caused him to sell his pile in England and use his fortune to bankroll Puharich’s work for a while. The third was a trance medium named Phyllis Schlemmer, the Transceiver of the Nine. Several other people were tangentially involved with the project including a young man named Bobby who was to be an important addition to the group but opted not to stay.
Andrija Puharic and Uri Geller (1972)Phyllis Schlemmer Sir John Whitmore
The Council of Nine, as they called themselves, spoke through Phyllis while Whitmore and Puharich listened, sometimes using a tape recorder to capture what the Nine said. The author treats these events in chronological order and determines, from the many interactions the three principles had with The Nine, those communications he deemed were coherent and important. Interspersed throughout are reality checks. Holroyd pulls the reader through the fourth wall to say, “Hey, yeah, this reads like fiction, but I promise you, this stuff happened.” And, “Yeah, I bet you’re thinking ‘pull the other one’ right now, but if you look at it, it could just be nine super powerful dudes talking to these three humans.”
Puharich took these communications in stride since this wasn’t his first rodeo. He had worked with a transceiver and a healer and had received similar messages. However, the three principles frequently squabbled and their egos interfered with the plan on occasion. It is fun to read The Nine rebuking three accomplished adults over their issues with one another, but that’s where the fun ends and the explosions go off in your mind as you continue to read. Taking what The Nine say at face value as the author recommends, a series of messages peeking into their reality unfolds that would make Philip K. Dick freak. Like the President of the United States has several members of the White House Press Corp, The Nine used several spokes-entities as liaisons to speak through Phyllis, primarily one named Tom.
The primary reason The Nine were in contact with the three was to avert a devastating possible World War III with Israel as the center of the conflict. Whitmore, Puharic, and Schlemmer together apparently made a perfect “human” to work through and with to achieve these goals. Bobby would have been a better transceiver but, according to Tom, he forgot what he came here to do. When asked why they didn’t force him, manipulate him, or use other tactics to convince him of the importance of his task, they replied that we humans have free will and The Nine cannot interfere, even if humans made the choice before coming to this planet. The message here is that we come to this life on planet Earth with a plan for our lives, but our memories get wiped and we may not achieve our goals. We also have free will to do with our lives as we want. It’s not all candy on Halloween though. If we don’t achieve our goals here, we get to go through remedial school when we leave our lives here and before we can progress to higher planes.
Other messages and information include:
“…more advanced technologies would help ensure the survival of the planet”
Bioengineering. Both Phyllis and Bobby were re-engineered to be better transceivers.
“…dark forces that try to prevent all this happening, and one of their ways is to insinuate false teachings in the communications. It is not so difficult for them for they are sly and under the guise of something fine, they can be misleading.”
They had different forms as if they were from different planets
Many different types of craft would land over nine days leaving teachers behind to help Earth evolve (this is a future event).
“To raise the vibration of the souls, to bring them out of darkness – and when we say darkness, we do not mean negativity but true darkness – for they do not see and do not understand the cosmic, and they also do not understand that when they hate and when they are angry, this creates a problem for the universe. Only by raising the level of the consciousness of this planet, and perfecting the love and the core that is inside each human being, can we go on then to perfect other planets in the galaxies. This planet is one of the lowest that the soul comes to learn a lesson. The tragedy of this planet is its density. It is like a mire; it is sticky, and these beings get trapped in this stickiness…we are going to raise the level of this planet, make it a lighter planet. The energy then coming from it will be sent into the universe and will help raise the levels of consciousness and the levels of other planets…”
“…this planet has lagged behind, it hasn’t progressed like it’s supposed to…beneath this planet…are other beings, other civilizations, that there are other people with more technology that can help raise it, but this planet is so bogged down in pure ego, and without harmony and out of balance, that it’s upsetting the master plan.”
The Nine are equivalent to the top cosmic governing council
There is no other planet like Earth and every being that exists in the Universe must take a turn here. If this planet fails, then all the souls that haven’t had a turn here will not obtain the necessary growth.
UFOs come from many places, including the place The Nine inhabit, but many are not physical, just appear to be.
“…[The Nine] are not God. All of you and all of us make God…Many of your physical beings deify other physical beings, when it is truly them.”
“Many souls when they die are trapped in the atmosphere and are evolved over and over on this planet, and seem to be going nowhere. This planet was originally created to teach a being balance between the spiritual and the physical world, and so these beings never evolve beyond the belt of this planet. Their desires hold them to this planet.”
The emissary, Tom said, “The difficulty we have in understanding the problems you have in this gross heavy density world that as physical beings you must exist upon…”
Dr. Puharich had worked with another transceiver prior to Phyllis named D.G. Vinod who had achieved contact with The Nine. He had also worked with, and wrote a book about, Uri Geller who, Puharich claimed, had abilities given to him from superhuman entities which he said were The Nine.
This can be taken at face value and be applied to the unknown experiences that humans have had even before the Roswell event’s flying saucers. This could also be a misinformation campaign if you are to believe those who think that Puharic was using mind control to test CIA tactics. Those people skeptical of Puharic tend to have a Christian philosophy and are against The Nine because they have been quoted as saying that Christianity is based on a false premise. Tom called Jesus of Nazareth the “Nazarene” and claimed he was simply human but given many superhuman abilities to guide humanity forward. Instead, we deified Jesus and created another religion. I guess you can see why Christians would be miffed and would want to debunk The Nine.
There is the issue of veridical data. None of the tapes that Puharic made exist and much of the experimental data has not been shared by the Stanford Research Institute researchers who looked at Uri Geller’s ability. Over and over in this book and the book “Uri”, Puharic claims that the tapes were wiped and the documentation disappeared. One has to wonder why that happened or even if it did. Why was a book about The Nine written but no proof provided? Is this another trick like the Scientology philosophy? Was it a CIA brainwashing program? Why were so many influential people involved? Why is The Nine still so pervasive today, especially amongst the wealthy and powerful? And, what happened to Puharic when he returned to the U.S.?
Curious people become scientists. Some people find their original path of inquiry will make a giant curve toward an unexpected journey simply because they had one experience. Dr. Julie Beischel had intended to become one of a plethora of biochemists looking at potential new drugs but an incident with a spiritual medium derailed that idea. She and her husband now run the Windbridge Institute in California where they study mediums’ abilities.
J.B. Rhine and his wife Louisa were botanists having both received their degrees at the University of Chicago when they attended a lecture by the author Arthur Conan Doyle. Not only did Doyle write the wildly popular stories about Sherlock Holmes, but he was also an avid believer in the afterlife and the abilities of spiritual mediums to have access to those who had passed on. At that time, in 1922, the Society for Psychical Research studied spiritual and physical mediums, but not using lab-oriented, blinded, and reproducible experimentation. Botanists of the early twentieth century utilized the most robust statistical methods of the time and Rhines decided to apply these to study supernatural abilities.
Since the SPR was a relatively new organization and focused mainly in the United Kingdom, it was difficult for J.B. Rhine to find an academic position studying anomalous abilities in the United States. He continued to teach botany and Louisa to teach Latin until, when they had nearly given up hope, J.B. found a home in the newly formed Psychology department at Duke University with like-minded chairman William McDougall — a past president of both the American and British SPR. By 1935, Rhine presided over the Parapsychology Laboratory and worked tirelessly to create rigorous experiments to show the statistical existence of extrasensory perception, a term he made famous in his book “Extrasensory Perception” published in 1934.
Along with developing experiments with her husband, Louisa Rhine became the unofficial curator of the numerous letters sent to the Rhine after J.B.’s bestseller gave those who had experienced anomalous events hope that they were not alone. She published several books about the anecdotal events explained in the thousands of correspondence they received. By 1980, Louisa became president of the SPR, the same year J.B. passed away.
The Rhine Research Center is the oldest parapsychology laboratory in the United States and the Rhines’ methodologies and experiments have been utilized and replicated in labs around the world. It holds the Alex Tanous library filled with hundreds of books on the various subjects parapsychology encompasses. Though it has not been associated with Duke University for many decades, it is located near the campus and attracts many academics from the University.
Sally Rhine Feather
I have had the distinct pleasure to have met and befriended their daughter, Sally Rhine Feather who, in her nineties, is still very active at the Center and who inspired me to write the Calliope O’Callahan novels. The Psy Syndicate is an amalgam of several parapsychology research centers like the Rhine, but I consider the Rhine my classroom filled with very smart, lovely people.
My history with parapsychology began when I walked into a weekly research meeting at the Rhine Research facility just off the Duke University campus (please see my post about J.B. and Louisa Rhine). A group of mostly retired psychologists was discussing the most recent article in the Journal of Parapsychology as I sat down at the table. I was unemployed and working as a volunteer at the local museum so I was wearing the volunteer T-shirt at the time. I told the group that I was not a researcher, nor was I interested in being one, and that I wanted to write accurately about parapsychology. Thus began my journey into the deep and vast ocean of books, research papers, and websites involved with the subject.
I spent as much time as I could in the Alex Tanous library reading from the hundreds of books it has, I took courses and participated in research studies, but I still wanted to learn more. Of course, I surfed the net and landed on the “New Thinking Allowed” YouTube channel where hundreds of videos on subjects ranging from aliens to meditation can be found. I tried to stick to videos on telepathy, dowsing, remote viewing, and mediumship, but the other titles tantalized me enough to delve further into related subjects.
Jeffrey Mishlove is the current host of the channel and he’s been the public face of parapsychology since his original public television show “Thinking Allowed” began in 1986. He migrated to YouTube with the “New Thinking Allowed” in 2015 where he has posted both taped interviews and live stream events several times a week.
Dr. Mishlove is the only parapsychologist to have received his Ph.D. from an accredited American University migrating from an anomalous psychology interest that had him working with people incarcerated in prison. He wrote two books “The Roots of Consciousness” which was his doctoral dissertation and “The PK Man” about Ted Owens, a talented psychokinetic whom Jeffrey researched. He won the Bigelow Institute essay contest in 2021 with his piece “Beyond the Brain” about survival after bodily death which brings many concepts together into a “bundle of sticks” creating strong evidence for life after death. He is not your run-of-the-mill researcher, rather he is a most knowledgeable and patient interviewer who brings out the most in his guests.
I applied to the New Thinking Allowed foundation to be a volunteer beginning with editing the closed captions on the YouTube channel. Since I suffer from hearing loss and tinnitus, I find accurate subtitling to be important for those in the hearing-impaired community and worked on many videos along with a team of four others. Jeffrey put out a request for editors to work on a book he wants to publish (and hopefully will be) called “Psychic Liberation”, a compilation of a few dozen YouTube transcripts. We worked on this for over two years meeting once every few weeks with Jeffrey to discuss our progress and assignments. I got a chance to look at the first draft of “Beyond the Brain” and found the arguments compelling as did the judges from the Bigelow Institute. I recommend that you go through this multi-media essay for one of the most definitive and thorough arguments for the survival of consciousness that I’ve ever seen.
Amongst his many distinctions, Jeffrey also managed to win a libel case against The Amazing Randi who had made claims in the Journal of Psychology that Jeffrey did not have a degree in parapsychology and that, if he did, he was obviously incompetent. Had he not won that court case, he would not have been inducted into the various scientific associations that have benefitted from his membership. Although I have great respect for Jeffrey, you will not see a character based on him in my novels (yet). That being said, if you want to watch some really cool, mind-bendingly informative videos about the esoteric, sign up for the weekly newsletter at NewThinkingAllowed.org.
The New Thinking Allowed Foundation has just released its maiden periodical called “New Thinking Allowed” magazine for Spring 2023. You can find it here. For future releases and interviews, join the New Thinking Allowed newsletter.
Imagine being Hermione Granger, or Harry Potter or even Merlin from King Arthur’s court, now throw all that out of the window, it isn’t like that at all. Humans really don’t have a huge effect on reality, which is good if you think about it. For instance, you wouldn’t want to be turned into a ferret because you mouthed off at the wrong magician. Doing real magic takes a great deal of effort and practice at being brainless. It turns out that our brains tend to interfere with our ‘minds’ which are the conduits to the data stream that gives us magical ability. Most of us wouldn’t be very good at it even if we spent a lot of time meditating while firmly grasping a crystal shard. Just like any other skill, it’s a combination of genes, talent, and practice. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that we do have a measurable effect on our reality, albeit a small one. Experiments done for over a century have shown that intention and attention can somehow manipulate the probabilities to our favor if we spend time dwelling on it. Our ancestors knew this quite well though it freaked out people in positions of power. Nostradamus, the famous precog, hid his ability from the Catholic church which was really quick to toss people like him into a fire or drown them for their own good. Not all psychically skilled people feared for their lives. The Oracle of Delphi was a highly regarded figure in antiquity providing useful information to seekers. Shaman or healers in small communities helped their people find food, avoid danger and healed them of their infirmities. Psychic mediums provided solace to grieving mothers and widows after the Civil War. Remote Viewers sought information about Soviet maneuvers during the Cold War. Police have found missing persons or solved crimes using information gleaned from the psychic realm.
Real magic can be classified into three different aspects: divination, force-of-will, and theurgy which have been reclassified using modern terminology. To divine information is to pull it out of the air so-to-speak which parapsychologists call Telepathy, Clairvoyance, Remote Viewing, Precognition, etcetera (please refer to my posts on each of these subjects). Anyone who reads tea leaves, Tarot cards or palms of hands are also classified as diviners. Theurgy is the utilization of spirit entities for information which includes but is not limited to spiritual mediumship and shamanism. Force-of-will can be classified as psychokinesis which is a big word for manipulating things without physically touching them. New Thought may also fall under this classification because you can manipulate your own fate.
Much of the book “Real Magic” is filled with experiments that prove that we can manipulate reality and even see probable futures. This throws those who believe in the mechanistic dogma for a loop. According to mainstream science (e.g. classical physicists) magical ability is impossible. Ask a Quantum mechanic and they’ll say they aren’t sure what’s making this car run but they CAN see that causality and time don’t really work the same in the subatomic world as it does in the visible one. Psychologists and Neurobiologists are still holding fast to the belief that the brain creates our self-awareness but cannot find where it is happening. Materialism is hitting a wall so in comes Idealism. Where Materialism sees self-awareness as a manifestation of the brain, Idealism says that self-awareness, or Consciousness, is a fundamental part of reality that sits below physics, chemistry, biology and all that we know of reality. This subatomic realm may not just be a data field but part and parcel of who we are.
I recommend this book as a primer for those interested in the field of parapsychology and for those whose minds just can’t quite wrap themselves around the concept of psychic ability. It is a comprehensive, comprehensible and at times comical look at supernatural abilities but also a treatise on how parapsychology has been ignored at best and demonized at worst. It argues quite eloquently for the existence of the magical but does not apologize for the century of strict laboratory experimentation on the subject. If you want to learn how to become a wizard, play an online game instead… this is not the book for you.
When I was growing up, there was a fantastic show on our PBS station called “Connections” by James Burke. He would begin the show with the unlikely connections one thing had with another such as what chimneys had to do with romantic love. He would methodically chain the degrees of separation from the one to the other. This is what Mitch Horowitz has done with “The Miracle Club: How Thoughts Become Reality” between the New Age movement and psychic ability. What connects the two is positive intention and how it works is still a matter of conjecture.
J.B. Rhine studied psychic ability, calling it Extrasensory Perception, for decades and wrote about something he called the decline effect. Eventually, those he tested would get pretty bored trying to guess which card was next in the pile causing their once-positive results to fade. It’s like a tired baseball pitcher starting to throw home runs. If the baseball coach knows precisely when to pull the pitcher, they won’t give up a base to the opposition. Knowing when this decline effect occurs can prevent negative data from skewing the positive results the researcher has obtained thus far. Skeptics include the tests where decline effect has occurred to show that there is no statistical effect at all.
Helmut Schmidt found that his subjects testing for psychokinesis fared much better when he recognized how psychic ability truly manifests in people: “it is neither egalitarian nor available on-demand”. He chose to study subjects who already showed promise in the psychic arena rather than study a pool of unknown subjects who might, once again, skew the results to the negative. Here comes the baseball analogy again: If a beginner picks up a bat, they might hit a nice soft pitch to the infield if they hit the ball at all. Every once in a while, that beginner will get lucky and hit a home run. An aspiring baseball player might spend years of hard work and still not get 200 hits out of a thousand pitched balls. Then there is the one amazing hitter who gets above 400 hits out of a thousand. I promise you those remarkable baseball players have some sort of mental ritual they go through to succeed while they’re at bat.
Schmidt also recognized that even the talented psychic needed to be comfortable in their surroundings to have the greatest psychokinetic outcomes. He would come to their homes with a random number generator and wait until they were “psyched” for the test. He was patient and upbeat with everyone and his results showed positive hits well above the average. Those scientists who attempted to replicate his results fared far worse. Why? They didn’t understand that psychic ability is mercurial and techy. They put subjects in uncomfortable labs and gave them no incentive for success, just a few dollars for participation. That’s like giving every little leaguer a trophy because they showed up to games.
In “The Miracle Club” Horowitz spends several chapters discussing, in detail, how to reach a desired goal. He explains the methods of Émile Coué (a psychologist who used autosuggestion for psychotherapy), and Neville Goddard (who used autosuggestion to make things happen in his life) which correlate quite nicely with the methods employed by successful psychics. I had participated in an experiment at the Rhine Research Center testing whether a meditative state would increase my psychic ability. We spent a couple of hours a week learning autosuggestion during meditation to obtain a goal (one of our choosing). We were tested in the ganzfeld room before we were taught this method and then again soon thereafter. Up to that point, I had been using a form of Transcendental meditation that I had learned from taking Aikido classes, but this one was more focused and intentional. This type of meditation is shallower and does not involve completely clearing one’s mind of all thoughts, rather it allows to focus on a desired effect in a very relaxed state like when you start to fall asleep (hypnagogic state).
Another method of focused intention is taught by Bill Bengston called Image Cycling. The practitioner chooses twenty goals each with an associated symbol. For instance, if you’d like a particular car, you would write it up in a journal and then picture a steering wheel. The cycling begins slowly at first and then speeds up significantly until you are visualizing all twenty icons in less than a second. Bill claims that this gets the practitioner into a receptive state. His method is currently used as a psychic healing technique; however, those healing practitioners also get something off their list. My friend Susan got the car she wanted and had to replace that desire with another in her journal. Basically, it’s a win/win for both the healing practitioner and the patient.
Positive visualizations require two things. First, the imagined scene needs to be a completed task. For instance, if you want to get a certain number on the dice, you visualize the dice being thrown and ending on that number. If you want that job, you must see the supervisor shaking your hand. It’s not enough just to see these things, you must feel the handshake or hear the sounds of a casino when the dice falls. It’s like a total immersion fantasy that you believe with all your heart will come true. Secondly, the mind needs to be in a receptive state. Goddard and Coué both employed the hypnagogic state to employ their statement of intent. It also works when just waking up, during intentional meditation, or using Bengston’s image cycle.
No one knows how this works, though Horowitz does describe some possible hypotheses in the book, mostly having to do with quantum mechanics. I have a different hypothesis which several physicists (the number continues to grow) like Max Planck also consider as necessary to any physics equation, that of consciousness. If consciousness permeates all things, all things can be manipulated and our reality is not as fixed as we might believe. Back a decade or so ago, I enjoyed playing MMORPGs like Everquest. I had an avatar in the game that I manipulated to do my bidding. The software engineers made that place a reality for my avatar and they manipulated her reality while I took her places I wanted her to go. I think of life on planet Earth as avatars that consciousness inhabits in a reality that it programmed. With practice, we can manipulate that reality just a bit.
My favorite movie of all time is “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. On the surface, you might claim that that makes me an UFOlogist or heavily into alien visitations. Well, my eleven-year old self was, but then I grew up. “Close Encounters” is really a film about facing the scary unknowns and finding out that they are pretty amazing and magical when you find the courage and tenacity to explore them further. As an eleven-year old growing up in Kansas, I had no idea about alien visitation or what the three levels of alien encounters were. With no internet at the time and well before Mulder and Scully were on the search for the truth, I had to find books on the subject…in the library. The Roswell crash, of course, piqued the interest of those who believed that our federal government had been keeping alien encounters under wraps, but this was the cold war and they could have been keeping a Soviet plane crash quiet.
I was also alive during the first moon walk, the first space shuttle launch (and crash) and the Voyager missions. My generation got to watch astronauts and probes expand us beyond our little rock three spaces from the sun. We learned the extreme difficulties of launching people into the treacherous depths of our solar system to the point that we still haven’t sent humanned missions to Mars, Ganymede or any other suitable location forty years later. Our best and brightest, who lived for space travel, questioned whether aliens would be able, much less willing, to travel to our planet and why. They would have to be so far beyond our meager skills just to leave their own solar system and then travel for decades or centuries just to make it to our neck of the Milky Way (see Kardashev scale). Their reasons to travel here would have to be compelling and a few, just plain scary. To travel this far and not make official contact, not use our planetary resources, not try to supplant the dominant species on the Earth makes no sense. If you research further, you will find there is a progenitor claiming physical evidence of alien abductions, encounters and alien ships, the other UFOlogists are parroting his claims. The physical evidence simply isn’t there.
For a lark, I watched an episode of “New Thinking Allowed” with Joseph Burkes, an Emergency medicine physician who spent his youth as an activist and then later as a close encounter seeker. I was listening half-heartedly hearing much of what I’d heard for decades until the last ten minutes of the show when he made a claim that I hadn’t heard from xenophiles before: we aren’t being visited physically, we are being visited holographically. Dr. Burkes who had written a chapter in the book “Paths to Contact”, is now more of a proponent of psychic rather than physical alien visitation. Here are Dr. Burkes’ comments:
“…Experiencers describe over fifty different phenotypes of so-called ETs. (The term “phenotype” refers to category by appearance.) How is this possible? Where do they all come from?
Is the entire galaxy sending representative to visit us, mostly at night, in our dreams, and in our fantasies? Are there dimensional portals allowing such beings to enter into our reality from other planes of existence? Why is there such a terrible paucity of physical evidence?
We are left with narratives and the rather simple-minded formula that for many goes. “If you remember it then it physically occurred.” Back in 1990 during a series of contact experiences I believe that I was actually shown by an intelligence associated with flying saucers how they create illusion. It was a kind of “show and tell” lesson that one might use to instruct children. Thus, I came up with the Virtual Experience Model. According to this schema the “ETs” can create hologram like displays that we interpret as “craft,” a Virtual Experience of the First Kind (VE-1)
2. According to an account in Dr Karla Turner’s “Masquerade of Angels”, they can create a virtual reality experience that is technologically mediated, a VE-2.
3. And according to Dr. Andrija Pucharich’s experience with Uri Geller in the 1970s the alleged aliens can create in us virtual memories, i.e. impregnated ones that don’t correspond to any physical event, a Virtual Experience of the Third Kind, VE-3.
One might ask, “So what if some of these different types of so-called aliens are just illusions? For all we know the assortment of phenotypes are created by some form of intelligent energy. They might be confounding us by produces visual displays that we interpret as physical beings, but in reality, are a kind of “masquerade of aliens.” If this is true then a radical reassessment of the entire field of UFO studies is in order. I imagine the resistance to this iconoclastic model is quite high. With not much success I have been promoting the Virtual Experience Model for nearly 20 years against what passes as “conventional wisdom in the UFO field. Despite my having to go against the current, it is my hope that understanding the mechanisms of contact will allow us to strengthen our investigations into “This Otherness That Experiencers Now Call ET.” This is one of my alternate designation for UFO intelligences.
The use of technologically mediated illusion can explain the confusing picture of close encounters with strikingly different phenotypes. Dozens of beings with radically different appearances might not exist at all, but rather we encounter them in a series of theater of the mind productions. With an ability to create virtual reality, or the technology to implant false memories that many recall as “abductions,” UFO intelligences could make it appear as if the whole galaxy is visiting Earth.”
Since I have been spending much of my free time researching psychic ability in its many and varied forms, this became a light switch moment for me. Apparitions, aliens, discarnates, animal spirits and other forms of communication coming at us when we’re not quite awake or alert may just be from a single universal consciousness. We may be generating a comfortable or desirable visage for the entity most of us long to communicate with. I brought this up at the Rhine’s weekly meeting and there were many nodding heads save one. We have a residential Carl Jung fan who sees these sorts of visions as originating within our own psyches. We can generate a self-inflicted hallucination if we want it badly enough just like the Lost Boys could bring Tinkerbell back by clapping. There are two places where this argument falls apart. First, there are people who have made claims of alien contact who were not actively seeking it, nor were they fans of aliens. Second, shared visions or mass hallucinations if you will, have occurred during Dr. Burke’s alien encounter sessions many, many times. Airplane pilots will agree about a UFO encounter and RADAR will pick up the rapidly moving blips. Sailors on ships will describe an event with incredible agreement, yet no physical proof exists. These people do not want to see anomalous events because their careers might be at risk for making a report to that effect. I doubt that their psyches were primed to see aliens. Mass psychic telepathy seems unrealistic as well. My hypothesis is like Dr. Burkes’ holographic projection that mimics a physical object somewhat like the projections on the holodeck in “Star Trek: Next Generation”. The other encounters during meditation, hypnogogic (just before sleep) or hypnopompic (waking) states, however, may be telepathic communication. Either way, to me this seems to be the most logical hypothesis for alleged alien contact.
