Strange Encounters. Part 2. By: Daniel Blair Stewart, CAW for Green Egg magazine

DBS: Where are they coming from, if not from outer space?

JV: Let me try to separate what I think I can prove from personal speculation. I would feel comfortable standing up in front of a scientific committee and I think I could argue convincingly that the UFO phenomenon is a real, unrecognized phenomenon; that it is physical and that it can manipulate space and time in ways that we don't understand.

Beyond that, my own personal speculation which I could not prove is that the phenomenon represents a form of consciousness that is nonhuman. There's a big distinction here. A lot of people might agree that there are unrecognized phenomena in nature, but wouldn't necessarily agree that they are conscious even though they are nonhuman. If UFOs represent a form of consciousness then obviously it could originate in outer space, but not with the first level, nuts-and-bolts extraterrestrial hypothesis. It would have to be a lot more sophisticated than that. There could be a form of consciousness out in space that can manipulate dimensions. But it could just as easily be here on earth. It could be using the Earth as its home port.

It could also be tied to human consciousness. The Collective Unconscious could be doing this to us, projecting images that are important during the current crisis we are going through. It could also come from a form of creature that has always lived on Earth with us and is not an alien consciousness, in the sense that we usually think of aliens. This goes back to the traditions about the faeries and gnomes and Little People: what I have called the Magonia tradition, that in fact there is another Universe right here. Perhaps most of us just don't see it, but it's here.

When I started "Passport to Magonia", I gathered all the old books about the faeries and the Good People, the Good Neighbors. This is a wonderful body of literature. These beings did approximately what the UFO beings do today. They would fly at night in strange cone-shaped luminous craft, they would abduct human beings, they even had little pins that would paralyze you. This is centuries ago, okay? And it matches reports from people who see UFOs today.

So I think that parallel is very interesting. It's still one of my favorite theories but there could be others! You could argue that there are natural phenomena that play a role in all this. For instance, Paul Devereux has written several books about "Earth lights" which he has shown to be tied to several megalithic sites. Whether the megaliths have anything to do with UFOs, or whether those sites tended to have strange lights so that over the years people used them for their temple and put a rock there, is open to question. Perhaps it was a natural phenomenon all along. That's a possibility, but it really does not explain all UFOs.

The other possibility is that there may be forces within the Earth tied to some old traditions. There may be unrecognized telluric currents, forces within the Earth that could manifest in the form of electromagnetic phenomena that could become luminous and float through the air. Usually those things we don't think of as being intelligent but who knows? Maybe it could be a form of consciousness.

There are other way-out theories that I find entertaining. We could imagine superconductive clouds moving through the galaxy taking any shape they want. Say, if you were a superconductive hydrogen cloud ten times the size of the solar system and you wanted to look like a Volkswagen, who could stop you from looking like a Volkswagen? You could do anything you wanted to! There is a book called "The Black Cloud" by Fred Hoyle, who is one of our greatest living astronomers. It is a science fiction story about a conscious hydrogen cloud. Now, of course if there was such a cloud we'd presumably see it as it came closer to the Earth. But there may be forms of plasma that we don't know how to detect yet, or maybe we're simply not looking for them.

Now, I don't specifically believe all that, but these are fun theories that should be looked at. Paul Devereux's hypothesis of the Earth Lights is a very important one.

Geologists today are beginning to reassess the descriptions by people who said they saw lights before an earthquake: "I saw this globe of light and it flew down the canyon and ten minutes later there was an earthquake!" Geologists used to say those were ignorant farmers who didn't know their physics. Now they are beginning to realize that before an earthquake the friction forces within the Earth could well create plasma or electromagnetic discharges that could become visible. In fact, scientists like Dr. John Derr at the US Geological Survey have found a correlation of these lights with fault lines and earthquakes.

DBS: Do you think our awareness of UFOs has been detrimental or beneficial?

JV: In "Confrontations" we report on a trip Janine and I took to Brazil where there seemed to be evidence of UFO hostility. Objects would literally zap people with beams. In several cases it seemed that it killed them. It certainly injured them. We couldn't really prove a direct cause-and effect relationship in the cases of death, but there was a cause-and-effect relationship in the cases of injuries. People were, in fact, injured by those beams.

The phenomenon really doesn't seem to care at all whether it's perceived as good or bad. It does seem to have an influence on our culture, but we may not be able to detect it because our view of it is so short. Historically, we're only aware of things for a few months or a few years. We don't tend to get the big picture of contemporary events. If we did, the science of economics would be in much better shape than it is!

It is very difficult for us to deal both with transient and slow-changing, long-term thing like the UFO phenomenon. It seems to be a control system. If it is a control system, then it affects our culture. We probably would be unable to detect whether it is doing good or bad to us. In fact, it may be beyond the level at which humans would define good and evil.

DBS: How vast might this phenomenon be?

JV: My impression is that it extends to every culture, every race, every religion on Earth. I really have not found a single place that doesn't have a tradition about this phenomenon. What is fascinating is that most of the anthropologists have completely missed it! You have to look at the footnotes in their books to find any mention of it. It's never mentioned in the mainstream. It's a peripheral vision effect, you know? Something that's just off to the side of your intellectual vision.

DBS: Tell us about your trip to Russia.

JV: In Russia I had a chance to talk to a number of groups who are actually doing UFO research. One of the groups was even interested in New Age pursuits, astrology and a number of other topics. We were amazed because when we went there we had no idea that this sort of work went on.

These people were also interested in natural healing and herbal medicine. They had an entire storehouse of primitive plant remedies that obviously came from a long Russian tradition. So we asked them, "How come the Russian culture has preserved all this with the kind of regime you've had all these years?" And they answered, "It's very simple. In this respect we are ahead because you have had all these so-called 'rationalist' thinkers in the West. The Russian tradition has always preserved some of the ancient ways, even under Communism."

So I said, "Why do you think there is such a difference between these two cultures when it comes to these traditions about nature?" And they answered: "Well, you killed all your witches! So you've eliminated the genes from the gene pool. We've had an orthodox church here for centuries but they never killed the witches. Neither did the Communists. They did many horrible things, but only the Western church slaughtered the witches."

Oddly enough, parapsychology research went on in the Soviet Union even under Stalin's regime. They never stopped doing that kind of research and they never stopped natural healing and natural medicine, side by side with the official medicine. Don't get me wrong, this wasn't approved officially by the Academy of Sciences and all that, but they didn't kill these people. They didn't send them to labor camps.

I had never thought of that. The east European countries never eliminated those abilities from their gene pool.

We went there because there were a series of sightings in Voronezh, which is a city a few hundred miles south of Moscow. Some of the UFO sightings were reported in the Western press, but in a very superficial way. We found that there were many more witnesses than had been reported. There were not only Close Encounters but also things seen in the sky by up to 500 witnesses at the same time.

Very active research was being done by several official commissions and by private scientists. I was impressed by the number of people doing research and by the quality of the research.

DBS: Many books depict the UFO phenomenon as benevolent and peaceful. Your descriptions of UFOs in "Confrontations" make it appear sinister. How would you account for this discrepancy?

JV: I can understand why the expectation has grown that this could be helpful and benevolent. It's a very complex, unexplained phenomenon and we always tend to project our own human fantasies into every such thing that comes along. It would be nice if somebody came down from the sky and told us how to stop wars and how to cure cancer. Unfortunately the phenomenon itself, when you look at it objectively, doesn't seem to care about us at all. It seems to be benevolent in some cases and hostile or at least harmful in other cases.

Notice that we could say the same thing about electricity. We couldn't live without electricity, but if you put your fingers in the socket it could kill you! That doesn't mean the utility company is hostile to you, it just means that there's a very powerful force out there and it doesn't care if it kills you or not. Electricity really doesn't give a damn one way or the other, and I think that, to some extent, the UFO phenomenon is the same way. It does whatever it has to do according to a pattern we haven't detected. When people get in the way they get zapped.

In Close Encounter situations there is often a profound long-term psychological behavior change in the witness. Sometimes it's for the better and sometimes it's for the worse. You occasionally meet people who seem very enlightened, who have a very positive attitude toward life, who think they have psychic abilities, and when you ask them when they first became aware of this they will trace it to a time when they saw a UFO.

Some witnesses have actually described to us being healed as they were caught in the beam from a UFO. There is a case like that in "Confrontations", a doctor in France who had been blown up by a mine in Algeria. He had a form of paralysis that was gone after he was exposed to light from the object.

There are also numerous cases in which the reverse happens. People are confronted with a UFO and their whole life changes for the worse. When they tell their story, the local people don't believe them. They are ostracized, they get fired from their jobs, their wives leave them, they go through a tailspin, they sometimes end up as bums.

That happened in the '60s and '70s to several American cops. The phenomenon tends to happen away from towns, between, say, 1 and 4:00 in the morning. Who is going to be away from a town between 1 and 4:00 in the morning, but the highway patrol! So, very often in places like Nebraska, North Dakota, Minnesota, there are cases of Close Encounters at night involving highway patrolmen. In numerous cases their lives were destroyed or broken; they had to leave the force because people wouldn't respect them anymore. They were suspected of seeing things, maybe of drinking.

DBS: In your book "The Invisible College" you stated that matter might have three aspects: substantial, energetical, and informational. Could you elaborate on this and show how it applies to UFO phenonmena?

JV: We learn in school that energy and information are two sides of the same coin, okay? That you can translate energy into information and vice versa. And yet, the only physics we learn is the physics of energy! The physics of energy should have a little sister, the physics of information, but nobody talks about it! It's interesting to ask what might be in that physics.

My speculation is that that physics of information exists and that it is what people through the ages have called magic. The magical tradition asks, how does the mind deal with information structures? And how does it relate to the rest of Nature?

DBS: Tell me what perhaps idealistic changes you might make in our present that would improve our future?

JV: By idealistic, what do you mean? If I could change human beings, I would make them more loving, more open, but I don't know how to do that. So I'm going to take your question on a different level: if I had the power to make changes in the way things are in the world, what would I change without changing human nature? I have to assume human nature is a given.

DBS: We'll have to assume that. But now we're going to give you temporary control of the world.

JV: Good! (Laughter, a long pause.) The reason I am silent is that it's so easy to come up with idealistic things. Jesus Christ did it, every prophet has done it, and usually they ended up with the exact opposite of what they wanted. The prophets say: "Let there be love!" and people say, "Yeah, let there be love, but of course it has to be my way and not this other guys's way!" and they end up fighting.

I do wish that the impulse to search, to question reality, to search beyond the obvious face of reality, became more widespread. I wish that people had more of an interest in the mysteries around them.

I also wish that there was a simple, medical way for all of us to experience what goes on in the moment of death without dying. I think that if people had that simple experience once, the rest of their lives would be very, very different. I have a few friends who have had a near-death experience, usually under very traumatic circumstances like a head-on collision. They changed radically the way they thought about their careers, their relationships, their life, their view of death. In some cases it eliminated their fear of death completely. When you don't fear death anymore your life is going to change radically. So if there was one thing...

You cannot wish for people to have head-on collisions! I'm just wishing there was a way for people to have the experience of dying, to take it with them into the mainstream of their life without going through the trauma of an accident. Of course, that's what initiation does, in part, with a lot of work. A head-on collision gives you that instant initiation, assuming you survive it. To some extent the UFO Close Encounter has the characteristics of a near death experience.

DBS: In quantum physics and biology scientists are considering models that no longer resemble the mechanistic models of the 19th Century. In particular, quantum physicists speculate that the observer influences the phenomenon observed. In biology microbiologists are examining relationships to determine if Earth qualifies as a literally living thing. How do you respond to these models? Will breakthroughs in these fields apply to UFO phenomena?

JV: In both of those cases you have an example of the relationship of information with energy.

What we seem to be discovering in genetics is that what's important is information storage. DNA is essentially a machine to store a lot of information. When you alter the information you alter the whole being. Essentially you are dealing here with software, not hardware. There may be other ways of representing it, other than DNA. It just seems to be an extraordinarily efficient way of storing information perfectly and duplicating it perfectly.

I'm not a physicist, but I do talk to a lot of physicists who are very puzzled these days. When you draw information out of an experiment, theoretically you're drawing energy, because energy and information are related; in fact, they are identical. So if I observe a certain phenomenon at the quantum level, the answer is translatable in terms of energy. That energy had to come from somewhere! So I've actually had an impact on the experiment. It might not have happened the same way if I had not been observing it.

That's another mechanism in which you see information and energy being related and unless we take that equation into account we don't have a real picture of the Universe. That leads to the question of what is the role of consciousness in the Universe. This also relates to magic, because in magic you are manipulating information structures that have a relationship to the material world around you. So I think that both of those examples are very relevant to the question of information versus energy. Increasingly we may find that information is the more important of the two.

I think UFOs are a special case that forces us to question what we call reality. In Close Encounter cases there is a point at which the witness seems to enter a different reality. There is an English researcher named Jenny Randles who calls this "the Oz Factor." There is a point where all of a sudden reality has split and the reality of the observer has been replaced by another reality. If we could measure that, if we could instrument the witness, we might be able to learn about what we call physical reality. But that also raises the question: how do we know that this reality is the real one? How would we prove that it's the real one? This reality is merely a human consensus.

There are interesting experiments that have been done where a newborn cat is given goggles that have vertical slits, and the cat can't take the goggles off. It's known that visual reality is created in the first two weeks in the life of a cat. So, after two weeks they remove those goggles and the cat has a vertical reality! The cat could not think of horizontal structures. The cat would never jump on this bench, for example. She would negotiate her way around a vertical structure, but she has no concept of horizontal things. If the goggles had horizontal slits, then that cat would have a horizontal reality.

The point is that we all have goggles over our minds and that's where the UFO phenomenon comes in. It challenges these goggles! Our goggles are called culture, education, tradition and so on, and these are the things through which we see the world! We're incapable of seeing the world through a different set of goggles. One of the opportunities that the UFO phenomenon is giving us is to look at reality in a much larger context.

Whatever UFOs turn out to be, the opportunity is here. Simply by stretching our minds and forcing us to look at the Universe in other ways.