Michael Cremo - Human Devolution - A Vedic Alternative To Darwin's Theory

Mack then conducted his own interviews with several of Hopkins’s subjects. Mack (1994, p. 3) concluded: “None of them seemed psychiatrically disturbed except in a secondary sense, that is they were troubled as a consequence of something that had apparently happened to them. There was nothing to suggest that their stories were delusional, a misinterpretation of dreams, or the product of fantasy. None of them seemed like people who would concoct a strange story for some personal purpose.” He then began research with his own subjects. By 1994, he had accumulated studies on 76 subjects that satisfied his “quite strict criteria,” which included “no apparent mental condition that could account for the story” (Mack 1994, pp. 3–4).

Mack got into trouble with his Harvard colleagues for his research on alien abductees. A report in the Boston Globe says, “After a yearlong investigation the Harvard Medical School has decided not to censure psychiatrist John Mack. . . . Mack had become a cause célebrè at Harvard after the 1994 publication of his best-selling book abduction. In countless television and newspaper interviews, he was inevitably dubbed ‘the Harvard professor who believes in UFOs,’ causing considerable anguish to many of his colleagues” (Beam 1995, p. 1). A special faculty committee at the medical school carried out the investigation. The Boston Globe reported, “The Medical School committee’s preliminary report . . . chastised Mack for ‘affirming the delusions’ of his many patients who claim to have been abducted by aliens. The committee also found Mack to be ‘in violation of the standards of conduct expected by a member of the faculty of Harvard University’” (Beam 1995, p. 1). There were suggestions that Mack’s tenure should be revoked. After mounting a vigorous defense, Mack escaped any punitive action by the University.

Paranormal aspects of alien encounters

Many abductees report paranormal phenomena. Betty Andreasson provides one example. In 1975, Andreasson wrote a letter to J. Allen Hynek, head of the Center for UFO Studies, and former director of the U. S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book. In the letter, she told of an encounter with aliens that took place in 1967. Hynek referred the letter to the Humanoid Study Group of the Mutual UFO Network. Investigators connected with the group looked into the case.

Andreasson’s experiences began on January 25, 1967 in South Ashburton, Massachusetts (Clark 1998, pp. 86–89). She was at home with her seven children, ranging from three to eleven years old. Her mother and father were also there. At 6:35 in the evening, the lights in the house went out. Andreasson, in the kitchen, saw a pinkish light coming in through the window, from the dark, foggy back yard. When her children entered the kitchen, she turned away from the window and took them back into the living room. Meanwhile, Andreasson’s father, looking through a pantry window into the back yard, saw several humanoids. One of them looked at him, and he felt strange.

The next thing Andreasson remembered was waking up the next morning, feeling uneasy, as if something strange had happened. Her oldest child Becky, eleven years old, felt as if she had had a nightmare. Over the next few years, Betty Andreasson herself would from time to time experience brief images of beings and places not of this earth. After contacting UFO researchers, she underwent hypnosis, and recalled what happened after she saw the light coming through her kitchen window.

Everyone in the house except her was overcome by a kind of paralysis, in which time seemed to stop. Five humanoids passed through the closed front door of the house, and came into the kitchen. They were typical “grays,” small in stature, with large heads, and large eyes. Betty, who was a fundamentalist Christian, believed they might be angels. They communicated with her telepathically. The leader of the entities was called Quazgaa. She handed him a Bible. In return, Quazgaa gave her a blue book. (Under hypnosis, Betty’s daughter Becky said she could see her mother standing with little men, one of whom was holding a blue book.) Then Quazgaa waved his hand over the copy of the Bible he was holding, and several Bibles appeared. Each of the other humanoids took one and started looking through it. Betty noticed that each of the pages was a luminous white. When Betty looked at the blue book that Quazgaa had given her, she saw the first three pages were luminously white, and that there were strange images on the other pages.

The humanoids said they had come to help save the world from selfdestruction and asked Betty to follow them. Quazgaa told her to stand behind him. Then Betty and all the humanoids passed through a closed door and then floated through the hazy air to a craft shaped like a disk. The craft became transparent, and Betty could see inside some rotating globes made of a crystalline substance. Betty and the humanoids then floated into the craft. Betty was then taken to a room, for an examination.

After the examination, which involved some intrusive investigation with strange instruments, Betty was taken on a tour by two humanoids. They floated through a black tunnel, and passed through a glowing glass wall at the end of the tunnel into a realm in which everything was of a glowing reddish color. There she saw creatures that were not humanoid. They had eyes on the ends of long stalks coming from roundish bodies with thin arms and legs. Betty, still accompanied by the two humanoids, then entered a green world full of plantlike entities. Then she entered a crystalline world, where her strange experiences continued. Betty was thinking she had been led into this realm by Jesus or God Himself, although there was no specifically Christian imagery. She then journeyed back through the other two worlds to her starting place.

There Quazgaa told her that the humanoids were friends and well wishers of the human race. They hoped humans would try to get knowledge through spiritual means. He then said he would send her back to her home. She would forget her experiences for some time, but secrets would remain locked in her mind for later retrieval. Two humanoids led her out of the craft, through her backyard, and into her house. There she saw her children and parents standing motionless. The humanoids directed them into their respective bedrooms. One of the humanoids, named Joohoop, told Betty she could keep the blue book, still in her hands, for ten days. Then Betty was led to her bedroom, where she was put to sleep.

Hynek wrote in a foreword to one of Raymond Fowler’s books on Betty Andreasson: “Here we have ‘creatures of light’ who find walls no obstacle to free passage into rooms and who find no difficulty in exerting uncanny control over the witnesses’ minds. If this represents advanced technology, then it must incorporate the paranormal. . . . Somehow, ‘they’ have mastered the puzzle of mind over matter” (Fowler 1979, p. 9).

There are many cases similar to Andreasson’s. These have led to a major split in the UFO research community. One group wishes to focus on the purely “scientific” evidence for extraterrestrials visiting the earth in craft superior to our own but still operating according to known physical laws. Another group, like Hynek, says the totality of evidence suggests that we might be encountering in the UFO phenomenon not just extraterrestrial beings, but extradimensional beings, with connections to the kinds of beings normally called supernatural. I favor this latter interpretation of the reports of the UFO phenomenon.

One of the earliest paranormal interpretations of the modern UFO phenomenon was offered by N. Meade Layne, founder of Borderland Sciences Research Associates. He called the UFOs “ether ships.” In 1950, Layne wrote about UFOs: “The aeroforms are thought-constructs, mind constructs. As such, they are in effect, the vehicle of the actual entity who creates them. Just as our own terrestrial minds rule and become identified with our bodies, so does the entity of the Etheric world make for himself a body or vehicle out of etheric substance. This body may be of any shape or size, any one of a hundred mutants —such as the indefinite and changing shapes reported by observers of flying saucers throughout the world.