Life with the aliens - part five

Dear readers

It is a relatively cool Adelaide summer's day today, forecast is for a maximum of 27 degrees Celsius. There was a refreshing drop of rain yesterday. In one day we had the whole average month of February's rainfall.

"Life with the aliens - part five"

The subject of today's post is part five of a series of articles by UK UFOlogist, Jenny Randles. This series appeared in the UK Fortean Times magazine, number 269, dated January 2011, pages 28-19. I have detailed parts 1-4 in previous posts.

"In part one...we found that an interpretation of an incident is filtered through the personal perceptions or beliefs of the witness."

"In part two ...we discovered that witnesses often suffered severe migraines, blackouts or memory disruption, and have even been diagnosed as suffering from medical conditions such as temporal lobe epilepsy..."

"Part three...revealed the fact that alien contact witnesses often have atypical childhoods..."

"Last month...we examined evidence that such messages might be received in an altered state of consciousness..."

Jenny then takes us through the case of "Jayne." "Her dreams were also vivid and at times lucid-so real that they were often hard to distinguish from reality." Jayne had "...many psychic experiences, including precognition and out-of-body experiences. And she had a phenomenal memory of her very early life."

Jenny then reviews the work of Dr John Lilly, and his visionary experiences.

"Over the years, several alien contact witnesses have, by chance, been seen by third parties during their adventures. In nearly all cases the observer saw the witness as if 'asleep', 'drunk' or simply 'away with the fairies.' In other words, they were in an altered state of consciousness but had 'gone nowhere.'"

Alien reality:

Jenny then lists the pro and con arguments:

Pro:
1. Consistency of alien contact stories.
2. Evidence of pattern repetition.
3. Small residue of alien knowledge.

Con:
1. No physical evidence proof.
2. Little new science or philosophy passed on.
3. Taxonomy of aliens not what we'd expect.

Conclusion:

"Much of what we see within the alien contact story says more about ourselves than another species 'out there.' It emerges like a global dream being dreamt by visually creative people who are skilled at entering altered states of consciousness. Here, via waking lucid dreams, they receive a messages that comes from within, perhaps via an alien intelligence beamed like a Galactic Open University programme for the benefits of anyone with the right 'equipment.' It may operate long term, in evolutionary timescales, and help us evolve. But it sells itself to the witness by imposing a dramatic encounter narrative, accepted as real but in essence a vision that distorts senses, sounds and images of the real world to temporarily adopt what is perceived."

"The evidence suggests that no spaceships are visiting us. No little grey men are stored in government freezers. But an alien influence could exist, and have consequences for the witness-a drive to evolve through enhanced intelligence, apparent ESP, increased creativity, spiritual or philosophical development. Any physical consequences are side effects, perhaps of the trauma of contact, or of the medical condition that a opens up the witness to having these experiences in the first place."

Jenny closes with the case of "Shirley." She reported seeing a UFO, waves of energy came from it. She had a rash and nausea. In 1986 Jenny interviewed her and found a history of ESP, vivid dreams,and alien contact. Beings fed Shirley information. "Maybe other races have discovered a better way of bridging the cosmos, using the one thing all intelligent species probably share-the power of consciousness."

Comments:

My co-blogger, Keith Basterfield, investigated Australian abduction accounts back in the 1980's and 1990's. Like Jenny, he found that abductees had an above average incidence of paranormal experiences, were often creative (artists etc); and had above average early life memories. This was documented at the time in a series of articles in the International UFO Reporter (click here for article list) and in Keith's second book, published in 1997 (click here.) One of Keith's catalogues also documents some of this data (click here.)