Page Content (OCR)
Let us start with a simple fact: man has always been aware that he is not alone. All the traditions of mankind carefully preserve accounts of contact with other forms of life and intelligence beyond the animal realm. Even more significantly, they claim that we are surrounded with spiritual entities that can manifest physically in ways that we do not understand. This chapter summarizes some of these traditions and draws a close parallel between the ancient accounts and modern cases of contact with 1 similar entities. I started work on this book during a business trip to Paris. A few hours of free time between two meetings gave me the opportunity to pay a visit to one of the most extraordinary artistic achievements of all times, the Sainte Chapelle, which is located inside the Palace of Justice, a block away from Notre Dame. It is an incredible feeling, one which can only be compared to a trip within a jewel or, rather, an entire treasure chest of jewels. There is almost nothing inside the chapel itself: a few sculptures, painted wood. But the walls are made of stained glass, and the various lights of Paris shine through to create a mood, a perception, which is totally alien to the rest of human experience. One of the stained-glass panels of the Sainte Chapelle shows the abduction of the prophet Ezekiel by an object that came as a whirlwind. He saw wheels within wheels and four strange creatures. He was carried away to a remote mountaintop, where he found himself in a state of wonder and confusion. In my many years of UFO investigations, I have spoken to numerous witnesses — people I could hear and touch and look straight in the eye — who told me they had been caught in a whirlwind, had seen strange creatures, and had been left wondering and confused. They looked to me to dispel their confusion. All I could offer them was the assurance that they were not alone, that many others shared the same experience, and that I believed future science would eventually accept and understand it as an important source of new knowledge. The people I interviewed would not someday be represented as stained-glass figures in the chapels where kings and queens bend their knees and bow their heads in worship. They were ordinary people with all the hopes and weaknesses of human beings. But their stories, nonetheless, are worth listening to. My first meeting with the woman I shall call Helen [Out of concern for the privacy of the witnesses mentioned in this book, their names have been changed unless they had already been published in the media.] took place after she called to tell me about a particular motor she wanted to build. Tall and fashionably dressed, she could have been a model or an executive secretary behind a big desk. Instead, she told me she was bent on solving the energy crisis by building a new type of engine. During our interview, Helen confessed that the motor idea was triggered by an abduction aboard a UFO. It seems that she had seen the UFO with a group of musicians coming back from Lompoc, California, to Los Angeles in the summer of 1968. "We left after the last performance on that weekend," she told me. "We probably packed up the gear by 2:15 A.M. We must have been on the road half an hour to forty-five minutes, it might even have been an hour. At that point, we were on a flat stretch of land. There were hills on the right-hand side, and we were going south. Out of these hills came a white light, and it moved up and began to come in our direction. An airplane couldn't have turned the way it did, so we figured it was a helicopter. Then it began to do very erratic things and twists, go very far out and come closer very quickly." I interrupted her to slow down her excited recollection of that episode. I wanted to get the step-by- step account of her perceptions. "How did you all react to this?" I asked. "What did the others see?" Her reply was forceful: "All four of us were very aware of it," she said immediately. "We talked a 1. Ancient Encounters The Abduction Experience