Voices from Beyond: Notes on a "Contactee"

--> by Michael Grosso

In my last post, I spoke to the concept of human singularities, and used the astonishing case of the Brazilian healer, Arigo, to illustrate.  My plan is to report on related cases that qualify as human singularities.  My model for this is Joseph of Copertino, a case of voluntary possession producing a spectrum of psychophysical marvels. Giuseppe definitely scores as a singularity—in the strong, paradigm-smashing sense.

There are, like Joseph, other extreme expressions of the phenomenon, like Milarepa, Jesus, Joan of Arc, Franek Kluski, and the like.  If we look and listen closely, this phenomenon expresses itself in varying degrees of its potential.  Nobody knows the extent of that potential.

I’m intrigued by partial, inchoate thrusts toward full-blown “singularity”--as in reports of “contactees”—people who claim being contacted by aliens, angels, extraterrestrials, or interdimensionals.

For example, I wrote an account of HD’s experiences, a 28-year-old man who lived in Santa Maria, California.  He was a printer with high security clearance and worked for Northrop Aerospace.

HD was on the job when he first heard voices in his head; it seemed at once like a mental communication.  Then he heard a high frequency sound in his head that oscillated from left to right ear. Looking out the window, he  saw a silent UFO hovering in the air.

That was the beginning.  Because of the voices clamoring inside his head, he couldn’t concentrate and was forced to quit his job.  Majoring in forestry at college, he hoped one day to work where the voices couldn’t interfere.

He had a few jobs such as working in a library, but was unable to hold them down for long.  The voices were addressing him constantly now and had done so for five years.  When he wakes up they say, “Good morning!”  They monitor his day and seem to know everything about him.  To communicate with them he has only to quiet down and listen, and he hears the voices.

HD was 15 years old when he first heard “high frequency tones” in his head.  He was on his way home from school when he had this disorienting experience.  At 18 he began to have vivid dreams of UFOs; in one of these dreams, he was shown a rather impressively detailed star-map.

About this time, HD, conservative and believing in a strong military defense, began to worry about nuclear war.  He felt the UFOs were warning him about nuclear war.  Later, the Entities declared to him that they sometimes communicated with people by dreams, and seemed to be priming him for later communications. 

When the Entities began to communicate, he resisted and got into a “battle” with them. The more he battled them, the sicker he felt, especially in the stomach.  (Arigo got terrible headaches when he resisted “Dr. Fritz.”)  HD had various uncomfortable sensations such as being stuck with many fine needles and a kind of numbing frostbite.

On the mental side, the Entities made him sick because they attacked his religious beliefs.  They declared there was no God, but after five years of wrangling, he settled down and agreed the Entities were part of his life who in turn agreed that for now it was best for HD to believe in God.

In addition to voices, he saw vivid pictures televised in his head.  “Movie screens,” he said, flashed away.   Also, the Entities caused objects to appear and disappear right in front of him.  They said they could “manifest” anything.  Once while driving on the California thruway, he observed a red car levitating in a perpendicular position.  This disoriented him and he became unsure which cars were real or unreal.  The Entities were tricking him and trying to rearrange his reality.

So for a while he copied down the license plate numbers of cars he wasn’t sure about.  One day a man in a black leather jacket and dark sunglasses appeared out of nowhere and told him not to copy down license plate numbers any more.  That was intimidating, but the Entities could be funny and once drove him to uncontrollable laughter by flashing cartoons in his head for four hours.

Now we come to the X-rated part of the story.  A blond woman in a purple robe named Dian fully materialized before him in his living room and gave him an experience of extraterrestrial fellatio.  After ejaculation, he heard a voice: “How did he react?”  “Normal,” came another disembodied voice.  HD (believe it or not) didn’t feel violated and told me he enjoyed the sex . Moreover, after the sex, Dian made the sign of the cross on his head. (This sounds like a script from Alfred Jarry, the inventor of Pataphysics.)

After the voices began, HD began to go back to church and one day while in church he encountered a woman that resembled Dian.  Then he heard loud voices screaming and arguing, and the woman was shouting obscenities and blasphemies.  This was an affront, and HD broke down.  He spoke to a priest about his experiences who recommended he visit a psychiatrist.  HD went to two different soul-doctors who pronounced him “normal,” apart of course from his freakishly odd experiences. He offered to take a lie detector test and convinced his parents that he was telling the truth.

In sum: He believed the Entities were “exterior” to him, and were “intelligences from another dimension.”  He felt the purpose of these visitations was to open him up to a new perception of reality.  His story describes what seems to me a nascent singularity, pressing its way toward self-realization.  Unfortunately, I fell out of touch with HD, but his experience was a variation on a theme—stories that take us to the edge of known realities, as described in John Mack’s Passport to the Cosmos (1999), the late Pulitzer-prize-winning psychiatrist who took stories of people like HD seriously.