Other UFO encounters are even more surreal or dreamlike in character, and in the literature, one can find cases in which the UFO entities sing absurd songs or throw strange objects (such as potatoes) at witnesses; cases that start out as straightforward abductions aboard spacecraft but end up as hallucinogenic journeys through a series of Dantesque realities; and cases in which humanoid aliens shapeshift into birds, giant insects, and other phantasmagoric creatures.
(Talbot, The Holographic Universe, 1991)
But at least Talbot’s book provided me with a possible explanation of one thing that had bothered me since I read Hopkins’s Missing Time: why the aliens seem so inefficient at blotting out human memory. As noted earlier, abductees are often unaware that anything has taken place, but cannot understand why several hours out of their lives have gone missing. Then a few vague memories begin to return, and they often undergo hypnosis—or the memories return spontaneously—and recall that they have been kidnapped, subjected to medical examination, then returned to their cars or bedrooms.
Talbot begins The Holographic Universe by describing Karl Lashley’s attempt to locate the source of memory in the brain by training rats to perform certain tasks, and then surgically removing various parts of their brains, in an attempt to eradicate the memory. But, no matter how much of the brain he cut away, he was unable to destroy the memory.
To explain this baffling result, his student Karl Pribram came up with a fascinating and plausible explanation: that the memories are stored in the brain like a hologram.
Everyone knows that a hologram is a three-dimensional figure that looks quite solid, but which turns out to be a mere projection of light, like an image on a cinema screen. This is done by passing two beams of laser light (light in which all the waves march in step, like a platoon of soldiers) through a photographic plate creating a kind of ripple pattern.
The ripple pattern is made when two beams of laser light interfere with each other. It is rather like throwing a stone into a still pond, and watching the ripples spread outward, then throwing in another stone, and watching the two lots of ripples interfere.
Imagine now that the two beams interfere with each other on a photographic plate, and one of them has just bounced off some object, like a human face or an apple. The pattern on the plate does not look in the least like a face or an apple—merely like rings of ripples—until a direct laser beam is passed through the plate or bounced off it, making the face or the apple suddenly appear, hanging in space, and indistinguishable from the real thing.
That pattern on the plate is actually the hologram. But it has a strange quality. If you break the plate in half, and shine a beam through it, the result is not half a face, but the whole face, only slightly less distinct. You can even break off a small corner of the plate, and the result will still be the complete face. The only difference is that it will now look far blurrier than the original made from the whole plate. In other words, every part of the plate contains the whole hologram. And if, when we learn something, the result of that learning is somehow photographed in the whole brain, then it would explain why Lashley could not eradicate the rats’ memory—to do so he would have had to destroy the whole brain. So long as there was even a small part of the brain left, the rats remembered.
Which would seem to explain why aliens cannot totally eradicate the memory of the abductee—they only seem to be able to block it, rather in the way that a hypnotist can block a memory by suggestion. But, when a hypnotist does this, another hypnotist can unblock it, and hypnotists can apparently do the same with the abductee.
The books arrived a few days after I returned to Cornwall, and were soon cluttering up my bedroom floor. I always get up between 5:00 and 6:00 in the morning, so that I can get a couple of hours’ reading before it is time to make breakfast for my wife. I plunged in head first, taking books virtually at random: Hynek’s The UFO Experience, Linda Howe’s Alien Harvest, Charles Bowen’s The Humanoids, Jacques Vallee’s Messengers of Deception, Hans Holzer’s The Ufonauts, Michael Craft’s Alien Impact, Timothy Good’s Beyond Top Secret, Arthur Shuttlewood’s The Warminster Mystery, Whitley Strieber’s Communion, Kevin Randle’s The UFO Casebook, Ralph Noyes’s The Crop Circle Phenomenon, and more than a dozen others.
As I read, I began to find all this research unexpectedly exciting and satisfying. This is because I had started out with memories of the scepticism inspired in me by Andrija Puharich’s Uri, and Stuart Holroyd’s Prelude to the Landing on Planet Earth, and I more than half expected to find all this reading an exercise in ‘believing six impossible things before breakfast’. But I very soon began to feel exactly as I had when researching the paranormal in 1969: an intuitive conviction that this all made sense, and that it rang true. I found my feelings expressed in a book called Tapping the Zero-Point Energy by Moray B. King, a systems engineer who remarks: ‘It was in the summer of 1974 that I had the misfortune of reading Beyond Earth, a book about UFOs. I picked it up just for fun, to read like science fiction. But what impressed me were the witnesses. Many were credible, such as airline pilots and police, who had everything to lose by reporting what they saw’.
And it was the sheer credibility of witnesses, and their testimony to the ability of UFOs to make hairpin turns at incredible speeds, that led King to wonder about the possibility of antigravity.
Now I found myself reacting in exactly the same way. Whatever else they were, these people were not liars. Their total honesty and normality came over again and again.
And, as with the paranormal, this not only rang true, but it all seemed to fit together. This could not be explained away as hysteria, or some kind of misunderstanding. There might be huge pieces of the jigsaw missing, but you got a feeling that the puzzle made sense; you could see a half of it, and you knew there must be missing pieces that would make up the rest.
Not long after the Los Angeles visit, I discovered a bookseller in Sidmouth who specialised in second-hand flying-saucer books, and picked up such classics as Edward J. Ruppelt’s Report on Unidentified Flying Objects and Harold Wilkins’s Flying Saucers on the Attack. I bought these solely for the sake of reference, suspecting that they would now be too out of date to provide any interesting ideas—then quickly realised that this was a naive error. For reading some of these early works not only brought a sharp sense of perspective, but made me clearly aware of basic facts that should be the starting point of any investigation of UFOs.
For example, Ruppelt—official head of Project Blue Book—describes an encounter of May 1952, when a Pan American World Airways DC-4 was flying towards Puerto Rico. Over the Atlantic, about six hundred miles off Jacksonville, Florida, the copilot noticed a light ahead, which he took to be the taillight of another aeroplane.
That was odd, since they had just been advised by radio that there were no other planes in the area. He glanced down at the controls, and, when he looked up again, was horrified to see that the light was now directly ahead, and was much larger. As he and the pilot watched, the huge light closed in on a collision course. Then it streaked by the left wing, followed by two smaller balls of fire.
The pilot said later that it was like travelling along a highway at seventy miles an hour when a car from the opposite direction swerves across into your lane, then swerves back so you miss it by inches. ‘You know the sort of sick, empty feeling you get inside when it’s over? That’s just the way we felt’.
Which raises the obvious question: why should the UFO have set out to give them a scare? For it certainly looks as if it changed course for precisely that purpose. What point was there in behaving like a juvenile delinquent in a stolen car? There seems to be only one obvious explanation: to get themselves noticed, and to add one more to the hundreds of reports of such encounters that were pouring in to the air force.
The same suspicion seems to fit another case described by Ruppelt. Soon after the DC-4 episode mentioned above, Ruppelt was called to Washington, D.C., where a crowd of top military brass had witnessed a UFO incident. One
of the most senior officials in the CIA was throwing the party at his hilltop home in Virginia, with a panoramic view of the surrounding countryside. While he was engaged in conversation, he noticed a light approaching in the dusk. At first he assumed it was an aeroplane until, as it came close, he realised it was soundless. It began to climb almost vertically, and he drew the attention of other guests to it. It climbed farther, levelled out, then went into a vertical dive, before it levelled out again and streaked off to the west.
They began to argue; one thought it was a lighted balloon, another an aeroplane, another a meteor. They made some telephone calls—and, Ruppelt adds, their rank was such that they got swift results. Radar said there had been no aeroplane in the past hour, and the weather station said there were no weather balloons in the air. The station also checked on high-altitude winds, and discovered that none were blowing in the right direction. The light had been in sight too long to be a meteor—and, in any case, meteors do not climb and dive.
After Ruppelt had checked the story, he agreed that they had seen an ‘unidentified flying object’ and left it at that.
So we have a light that flies until it is almost directly above the garden full of distinguished guests, and then performs some absurd manoeuvres to draw attention to itself, then flies away, having demonstrated to a large number of Pentagon officials that UFOs were more than a hysterical rumour.
Ruppelt tells how they—the air force—decided to subscribe to a press-cutting service, just to see how many UFOs were reported in the newspapers. For the first month or so the cuttings came in ordinary-size envelopes, then in large manila envelopes, and finally in shoe boxes. All this was between March and June 1952, and by June they were aware that there was a major ‘flap’ (which Ruppelt defines as ‘a condition . . . characterised by an advanced degree of confusion that has not quite yet reached panic proportions’). Project Blue Book—the official investigation—had only just got started, and it was immediately overwhelmed by hundreds of sightings. There was even a wave of sightings over Washington itself. Many flying-saucer enthusiasts predicted an imminent invasion from space; but nothing happened. It seemed that the flying saucers were merely occupied in an exercise to get themselves noticed.
Half a century later, this still seems to be the case. I did not have to look further than my own doorstep to find an example. My part-time secretary, Pam Smith-Rawnesley, told me that one of the first-year students at the local drama college where she works had seen a UFO a few days before, and I asked her to tape-record him describing what had happened. This is what Matt Punter said in June 1997:
I was travelling from my friend’s house in Liskeard, at a quarter past eleven at night, to where I live in Pensilver. After about three miles, I was passing a place called Rosecraddock, and as I drove up the hill, and—basically—four different-coloured bright lights came over the top of my car, so low that I instinctively ducked my head. My first thought was that it might be an aeroplane about to crash on top of me, or just in front of me. So I slammed on my brakes. Then—I had no stereo on, and I realised there was no sound to the thing—that’s when I thought: Mmm, it’s a bit weird. Then, after stopping, the four lights stopped about ten metres in front of me, and stayed there for a second, and for that second, it really did seem that whatever it was was looking at me, and I was looking at it. Then they shot off in the air—so quickly that I couldn’t see them once I looked up. But there were four different-coloured lights, blue, red, yellow, and white—there were possibly two white lights—in a shape of a—er—parallelogram.
Pam asks whether he could see metal above the lights—obviously wondering if they were on the underside of a flying saucer. He says: ‘No, I could actually see the road through them. All I saw were the four suspended lights in midair’.
After more questions, Matt goes on: ‘I got home, and I woke my mum up—I wouldn’t usually do that because she works early in the morning—but I woke her up and told her about it, and she calmed me down. She could see I was telling the truth, because I actually had tears in my eyes, my heart was going like nothing on Earth’.
It seems an oddly pointless event: four lights in the shape of a parallelogram swooping down over the car, and halting for a moment in front of him, so that he can see the road (he was driving uphill) through them. He feels as if they are watching him. Then they take off, so fast that when he looks up, they have already gone.
Matt Punter remarks that ‘the weird thing was, there was absolutely no traffic on the road’. This seems to be a curious recurring feature in UFO cases—empty roads, empty streets, and so on; it has been labelled ‘the Oz Factor’, after Dorothy’s journey down a yellow brick road apparently used by no one else. In Matt’s case, this meant that there was fairly certainly no other witness, no car going in the opposite direction, who might have seen lights rise into the sky.
But the Oz Factor does not always apply. On 4 September 1997, while I was writing this book, my wife went out into the garden at about 11:00 at night, to give the dogs a final airing, when she saw an orange globe, about the size of the moon, which moved in the direction of an orange streetlight on the estate below, then turned and went back the way it came. She had time to go indoors and call my son Rowan to come and see it before it vanished behind trees. Yet she was so little struck by it that she did not even bother to tell me for several days, when I happened to mention that a large number of UFOs are orange globes, and she realised that she had probably seen a UFO.
One of the first questions raised by sceptics is that of the credibility of witnesses. As the philosopher David Hume said, is it more likely that a miracle occurred, or that someone is telling lies? But the UFOs seem to have taken care to neutralise this objection by overwhelming us with sheer quantity. And, even without David Hume, I find it impossible to believe that Matt Punter and my wife were not telling the truth. And Ruppelt obviously felt the same about the pilots of the DC-4, and the CIA officials at the garden party—in spite of the fact that every one of them had undoubtedly been drinking.
But it is important to be fair to the sceptics. Those who accept the reality of UFOs tend to be harsh on them—particularly those with some official position. At best, they think that sceptics are stupid or intellectually dishonest, at worst that there is a sinister conspiracy.
This, I feel, is missing a vital point: that the sceptic is often a totally honest person who, for perfectly good, sound reasons, simply cannot see a case for belief. In fact many—like Courty Bryan—admit that they would like to be convinced, but find it impossible.
A case in point is an official investigator called Roy Craig, author of UFOs: An Insider’s View of the Official Quest for Evidence. Typically, it is published by the University of North Texas Press, for it is the kind of book that would not be taken on by a commercial publisher—they know that the public is not willing to pay money for books written by nonbelievers.
Craig was a member of the Condon Committee, hated and derided by all good ufologists. This was set up in 1966, after the termination of Project Blue Book, with the aim of studying all the available evidence for UFOs, and deciding whether the United States government ought to take them seriously. Two years later, their highly sceptical report was denounced as a whitewash, a cover-up, an attempt to let the defence establishment ‘off the hook’. The UFO Encyclopedia, edited by John Spencer—one of the most balanced and objective writers on the subject—comments, ‘There is some doubt as to Dr. Condon’s impartiality in respect of this (sceptical) conclusion, and in any case it appears clear that the conclusions of this report do not necessarily mirror the actual findings of the investigation’.
Craig’s book makes it clear that both these statements are disputable. It also makes it clear that the truth is far more fascinating, and far more subtle, than most believers in UFOs are willing to concede.
Craig tells how, in October 1966, newspapers announced that Dr. Franklin Roach would be one of the chief investigators for the Condon Committee, and how
, that same day, he happened to meet Roach at a party, and remarked that he envied him. Roach said that, if he was interested, he ought to speak to Bob Low, the coordinator of the project—another name that makes ufologists wrinkle their noses. As a result, Craig was appointed an investigator for the committee.
His first ‘case’ was in May 1967. Many people in Hoquiam, near Seattle, had heard strange beeping noises originating from above the ground, and there was no obvious explanation. Cattle seemed worried by the noise, dogs cowered, and frogs stopped croaking. Ornithologists said it was not a bird. The story reached the newspapers, and Craig went to investigate, together with camera, tape recorder and ultrasonic translator-detector.
He and five fellow investigators spent an uncomfortable night lying in damp vegetation. They had hoped the beeping would start early and they could go home to bed. But, although it started briefly, there was not time to turn on the tape recorder. They left, cold and hungry, at dawn.
The next night it was raining, and they sat in a car with the window open and tape recorder at the ready. Again, nothing happened. They were so exhausted that they left at midnight.
The next day they phoned the local sheriff’s office, and were told that a man who lived close to the site of the beeping had shot a tiny owl, the size of a sparrow, called a saw-whet owl. He had got sick of people trampling over his yard looking for the noise, and killed it with a shotgun.
After that, the unearthly beeping stopped. The lesson was obvious. Look around for a local countryman who knows what a saw-whet owl sounds like. The people who had reported the beeping were not countrymen, neither did they know it was the saw-whet owl’s mating season.
Craig’s next case was more significant, for it involved one of the most famous encounters in ufology.
On Saturday, 20 May 1967, a fifty-one-year-old Polish-Canadian named Stephen Michalak returned to his home in Winnipeg with first-degree burns on his chest, and complaining of nausea. His story was that he had been out prospecting—looking for quartz—in Manitoba’s Falcon Lake Park, when the local wild geese began to cackle loudly. When he looked up he saw two cigar-shaped objects descending from the sky, glowing with a scarlet colour. One of them remained in the sky, while the other landed on a flat-topped rock. The second UFO began to fly away, its colour changing from red to orange, then grey.