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UFOs and LSD: The Secret Connection

(originally published May 2010)

Lysergic oversoul

 

The UFO phenomenon is so utterly mind-bending that the best way to understand it may be to go out of our minds. The role of expanded consciousness and access to the alien world is revealed in private conversations this author has had with eminent men of science. This includes talks with the now-late Harvard Psychiatrist Dr. John Mack and Harvard Professor Dr. Timothy Leary. They provide keen insight into the ultimate secret of the UFO. They uncover the hyperdimensional world in which the UFO traverses. They also detail the interplay between altered states of matter, altered states of mind and contact with the alien.

 

Other notable scientists have joined to divulge the role of expanded consciousness and communication with ET intelligence. They include ecologist Terence McKenna; physician Dr. John Lilly; psychiatrist Dr. Stanislav Grof and the father of space flight, visionary Jack Parsons. Their search for the answers to the questions about flying saucers have led to a telling conclusion: only if we open our "doors of perception" will we be able to understand this alien intelligence.

 

Because the UFO community is predisposed to a strictly mechanistic "nuts and bolts" interpretation of the UFO phenomena, they have ignored these learned men's revelations. They forget that the ability to travel through the cosmos must require an interdimensional component. The alien interstellar craft do not travel like our "pop can" Apollos that use outdated combustion technologies. They must morph the very fabric of "reality" and they must somehow bend space-time itself. And the UFO often creates states of "non-ordinary reality" for those who get too near them. Perceiving this other-dimensional reality may require altering our very abilities to perceive.

 

THE "OZ" FACTOR
 
Wizard of Oz, Yellow Brick Road, Emerald City

British Ufologist Jenny Randles has taken note of altered perceptions and realities when it comes to the UFO. She has named this "the Oz factor." It is a sense of timelessness and of sensory and spatial changes when in the presence of the unearthly. This is experienced particularly in close encounters such as reported at the famous UFO landing at Bentwaters in 1980. One of the witnesses to the landed craft at Rendlesham Forest near the Bentwaters military base had commented on an "otherworldly" feeling. He reports that he had entered a void where only he and the phenomena co-existed. Objects and shadows "bent" and changed shape and it was sensed that time had slowed. The craft changed its configuration and color. Cast shadows were not in synch with the motion of his body. Countless close encounters report very similar effects.


Randles posits that such "outworlders" are contacting humans using consciousness itself, rather than with simply sophisticated technology. But it is not all "paraphysical." In rare cases, Randles believes, the subjective impression of the experiencer is so strong that it manipulates "objective" reality. That is, a person who is caught in the midst of this "Oz Factor" may actually be able to

photograph a craft. Viewing something that is so far removed from their frame of reference, they feel as though they've entered a world of fantasy. But they have not – seeing the alien involves mental and physical interplay. Communication with the alien by mind, or telepathy, is even mentioned. It is at once physical and paraphysical. Other researchers such as John Keel and Dr. Jacques Vallée hint at this strange interplay in many other cases.

 

TIMOTHY LEARY
 
Psychologist and psychonaut
Dr. Timothy Leary

The late Timothy Leary is of course the controversial to-this-day futurist, writer and scientist. He was also a well-known researcher and vocal enthusiast of LSD and psychedelics during the 1960s. A psychologist, a Berkeley grad and a Harvard Professor – it is less known that Leary was also an enthusiast about space travel and contact with the alien.

In the 1980s, Leary began a program of study he called "SMI2LE." This was the acronym for "Space Migration," "Intelligence Increase" and "Life Extension." He believed that we will ultimately return to the stars from whence we came. This could only be accomplished by mastery of interstellar travel via the interdimensional path; the expansion of intelligence and consciousness that would be needed to communicate with the alien; and by implementing life extension technologies so that we be able to live to manipulate time. He developed this concept in 1980 and expanded on it in his 1993 book, "The Game of Life".


The documentary "Timothy Leary's Dead" clarified Leary's stance on ET. Leary felt that intelligent life exists throughout infinite space. But he felt that it was

less "literal" and "nuts and bolts" than Ufologists believed, and that it was more of a mental, spiritual and interdimensional phenomenon. He did not believe that spacecraft were the only thing that ET used to travel space. He said that it was unlikely that "ET packaged alien beings in spaceships and sent them hundreds of light-years through space so that they could land in farm pastures and rape little old ladies in Iowa." He believed that mind, matter and space were far more complex than that simplistic model. Leary, though, was a bit contradicted on this. When he passed, his own ashes were shot into space in a rocket.

 

I once saw Timothy Leary at a lecture in Boston. But it was in the late 1980s – by extreme chance – that I happened to actually personally meet Dr. Leary. While casually strolling down the beach on vacation in Puerto Vallarta, I noticed a white-haired, wild-looking wiseman. As I approached nearer, it became very clear that the face was familiar. The man was gazing over and through the Mexican ocean with intense contemplation. As I passed by, I was compelled to ask: "Dr. Leary?" The reply: "Yes, that's me." And it was. But I tested him, having seen him before: "I once saw you a few years ago doing stand-up comedy at a club when I lived in Boston." He said: "Oh, no kidding. I remember that club on Commonwealth Ave, The Paradise." In fact, Leary had a small "Evening with Timothy Leary" tour of clubs during that time period. His "act" was a semi-lecture offering his take on history and on current events. He was incredibly entertaining and irreverent with his razor-sharp wit and cerebral humor. Satisfied that it was indeed him, we began small chit chat about the big universe:

 

I told Leary about my interest in other worlds, as we both stood there before the endless expanse of blue sky and sea. Leary told me that he knew that there was other intelligent life in places "that we do not know about because we are too dumb to see them." I asked him if he meant that we do not yet have the telescopes to view them. He replied no, that is not what he meant. He meant that "we do not open up our minds to those whose minds are far more vast and open than our own." He explained that the interstellar dynamic requires the interdimensional dynamic. To deal with the bending of space-time, we must "bend" our minds. He echoed Arthur C. Clarke that their technology to us would be indistinguishable from magic. We are not yet prepared to enter the world where the physical and the paraphysical intermingle. Until we change our very minds, we cannot go to a such a malleable place where space, time and the very structure of matter are manipulated. It is not a physical limitation, he added. It was a limitation of consciousness. ET works beyond our framework of reference.

 

Realizing we were on vacation and that we shouldn't be talking about so many deep things, I said goodbye and walked on down the beach, my head hurting from the chance meeting.

 

JOHN MACK
 
 
Psychiatrist Dr. John Mack

The late Dr. John Mack was a Pulitzer Prize winner and a Professor and Psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School. Mack advocated for the reality of aliens and UFOs. His controversial approach to the phenomena led him to be subjected to an official, fourteen-month long peer inquiry of his techniques and beliefs. It was the first time in Harvard history that a tenured professor was investigated in such a manner. Mack was ultimately found to be in good standing in the academic community.


Mack was also a researcher of the history of "visionary" human experiences, and was interested in the transformational aspects of alien encounters. In the Winter of 1969-70, Mack was studying under the tutelage of British psychiatrist Dr. R.D. Laing. It is believed that this is when Mack began his personal quest for spiritual understanding by using LSD. An associate of LSD therapy

researcher Stan Grof (see below), Mack is believed to have been inspired to take the journey by Dr. Grof.

 

In the late 1980s, when living in Boston, I joined the New England Skeptics association. Though a "believer" in ET, I enjoyed the input of "critical thinkers" and a dialog with those who were not "believers." We met every couple of months as a small group loosely affiliated with the national CSICOP organization. On one occasion, I decided to invite Dr. Mack to one of our meetings. These took place in Cambridge where Mack lived and worked, and we would offer him a complimentary meal at a highly-rated Asian restaurant off Mass Ave, where the group often met. He graciously accepted our invitation. He was willing to "go in with the lions" in discussing the ET reality. He also showed that he believed what he said, and that what he says on the UFO subject he appreciates that many cannot yet accept.

 

But what struck me most about Dr. Mack was his insistence that the way that we think about reality does not apply when that reality is not ours. He said to me that visiting aliens are so alien to us in their dimensional and mental capabilities that they can even curl the very fabric of space and time. We cannot deal with them unless we place ourselves in a state of altered reality. He said that we must expand our minds – not just our technology – to reach the stars.

 

TERENCE MCKENNA
 
 
Ecologist Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna was a Berkeley-trained ecologist and ethnobotanist specializing in the study of psychoactive and psychedelic plants. He was also a modern-day science philosopher who gained cult popularity in the 1990s with his books Food of the Gods, The Invisible Landscape, True Hallucinations and The Archaic Revival.

 

McKenna was very direct about his belief in accessing the alien reality by "changing" our perception of reality. He said that when one consumes the psychedelic mushroom containing psilocybin "that you see entities." He continues, "You encounter beings who can be described as self-transforming machine elves. They are the denizens of another planet and another dimension. It is a hyperdimensional universe teeming with aliens intelligences that can be contacted by consuming plants containing certain chemical compounds."

McKenna explained that "nothing can prepare us for its crackling, electronic, hyperdimensional, interstellar, extraterrestrial, science fiction quality. It is a complex space filled with highly polished curved surfaces, malleable machines undergoing geometric transformations and thoughts that condense as visible objects." He adds that the UFO somehow "evokes a strangely mechanistic, but at the same time spiritual, future." Their world is difficult for us to begin to comprehend – or even to describe – due to the limitations of language itself.

 

He believed that "our own future is almost as unimaginable as these 'future' beings are unimaginable. The transformation that leaving our planet will bring necessarily involves transformation of our consciousness. That is the only way that we will be able to take it." He said that "We are not going as 1950s style beings – we are going to have to transform our minds before we are going to be able to leave the planet with any amount of grace. The very idea that as a species we would leave the Earth behind us must be as rending an idea as that a child would leave its childhood home." He said we must fundamentally change the way that we perceive space and time itself to make the leap to the stars.

 

JOHN LILLY

Dr. John Lilly is a pioneering researcher in psychoanalysis, inter-species communication and in the use of isolation tanks, LSD and other psychedelics and meditative techniques to study the dynamics of mind and enhanced consciousness. Lilly is perhaps most well known for his research attempts in man-dolphin communication.

 

Little known is that Lilly's interest in "interspecies communication" and altered states extended not only to terrestrial non-humans like dolphins, but to the extraterrestrial alien as well. Many years ago, Lilly developed a model/metaphor describing an extraterrestrial higher intelligence which may influence life events. He called this ECCO or Earth Coincidence Control Office. The alien's inherent ability to warp space/time to traverse the cosmos may mean that they can also alter our own "reality" and the way that we perceive it. If they can warp the "fabric of reality" to get here, they must be able to warp our "fabric of reality" when they arrive here.

 
Psychoanalyst Dr. John Lilly

 

STANISLAV GROF

 
Consciousness researcher
Dr. Stan Grof

Stanislav Grof is a renowned transpersonal MD and psychiatrist who pioneered the use of psychedelic psychotherapy in the 1960s to resolve issues of identity, birth, personality, and death. When LSD fell out of government funding favor, he spearheaded the development of alternative routes to altered conscious, including a breathwork technique known today as "Holotropic Breathwork." Grof dialogued with John Mack at Harvard about the UFO:

 

"Conventional approaches to this area are characterized by thinking in terms of a simplistic dichotomy: real material events involving extraterrestrial spacecraft and alien visitors from another part of the physical universe versus hallucinations of the psychotic person." Grof continues that the discoveries of modern theoretical and experimental physics have "dramatically changed the understanding of the physical universe and the relationship between consciousness and matter." Grof said that the research done to establish the physical reality of UFOs is greatly important, but that it is not sufficient for understanding these phenomena. He speaks of our "limitations to things alien" that are imposed by our outmoded model of reality.

In researching non-ordinary states of consciousness to contact the alien, Grof stated: "the UFO flies in through the hole of my psyche that was opened up by transformational experience."

JACK PARSONS, ALEISTER CROWLEY & THE ALIEN
 
Crowley's alien "Lam"
in 1918
 
A Grey in 2000

 

Aleister Crowley was a famed English occultist and ceremonial magician. A 2002 poll lists Crowley in the "Top 100" of most influential Britons of all time. He was associated with many noted philosophers, writers and artists during his life. Like Arthur C. Clarke, Crowley believed "magic" to be indistinguishable from advanced technology.

 

Crowley was also associated with scientists of the day, including the gifted rocket propulsion scientist Jack Parsons from Cal Tech. Parsons was a genius engineer who was co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Aerojet. Werner von Braun acknowledged Crowley's friend Parsons as the "true father of space flight." Crowley shared an interest with Parsons in consuming peyote, mescaline and hashish to "contemplate the cosmos" in a larger way than just rockets.

 

In 1944, Parsons headed the California Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), which was Crowley's "mystical lodge." The organization was dedicated to shattering the confines of three-dimensional space. Concerned with Parson's recklessness when dealing with "higher energies," Crowley eventually thought Parson's to be a "mad scientist" who dangerously tested extremes and who lacked the "balance" and "art" of a mystic.

 

As far back as 1918, Crowley had initiated a quest to contact and capture the image of the alien. While in New York City, over a period of three months, he repeatedly invoked an other-world entity that he called "Lam." Pictured above, the creature bears a startling resemblance to aliens that we picture today. Both share a large hairless head, elongated eyes, mouth slit, vestigial nose, no discernable ears and smallish bodies. Crowley – like his science ward Parsons – believed that by "working" a combination of ritual, intent and mind alterants, they could create a "portal" by which extra-cosmic influences could enter the known world. Crowley died in 1947, the year that the "portal" of the modern UFO phenomena opened – and the year that many believe ET fell to Earth.

 

INNER SPACE TO OUTER SPACE

The UFO is ultimately physical, but it is also amorphous, luminous, morphing and shape-shifting. It operates in different dimensions and at different levels of "existence." It utilizes energies and frequencies known and yet to be discovered. To perceive them fully, we must change and expand our very powers of perception.

 

If we open ourselves to the unique insights provided by these non-UFOlogists, we begin to understand the true nature of the UFO. Valuable information on the alien is imparted to us by those who walk life as psychiatrists and psychonauts, ecologists and experimental scientists. It will require a multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary approach to get to ET. It will mean that we must conquer both Inner and Outer Space.

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