Ufology and parapsychology are two disciplines not on friendly terms with each other. But that’s a mistake. The two fields of research naturally converge into one, more interesting discipline than either operating on their own.
Full disclosure, I write about this because I’m trying to understand my own experiences. I am periodically befuddled by experiences that seem incredible and impossible. So let me begin with a report of my own experience: a UAP, an unidentified aerial phenomenon. My experience was more than a sighting. It was contact intending religious signaling of some sort.
It was 11:30 P.M. April 23, 1971. Relaxing together on the couch, Jane and I were listening to an intense piece of music by John Coltrane, “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” Impulsively, I got up and walked to the window, and looked up into a blue night sky, still grooving with the music. Suddenly, out of nowhere I saw a cluster of lights emerge from the sky. They began to dance back and forth, performing impossible aerial maneuvers, echoing the rhythms of Coltrane—a few hundred feet above our top floor apartment in Greenwich Village, New York, on Bedford Street, NY. I then saw in the sky an apparition of a man, human, smiling and gesturing happily, as if he too was part of our dance. His appearance was not visible like the moving lights, but mental, which only I saw. And I called Jane to the window who was immediately awed by the dancing lights.
Suddenly, the dance ended and the lights stopped whirling about. Instead, they turned right and sailed in a straight line uptown a short distance where they perched atop the dome of Our Lady of Pompeii, a Catholic Church for immigrants. There, it beamed several pulsations, as Jane and I watched from the sixth floor of our apartment. The lights then sailed straight back to where they first appeared before us. They resumed their dance for a bit, confirming the impression that this was a communication, not just an anomalous flash in the sky. Suddenly, the lights turned right again, but this time in a fraction of a second they shot zigzag uptown, vanishing as they passed over the Empire State Building.
Amazed by what we saw, Jane and I stepped out of the apartment and went one flight up to the roof where we met Louie, a neighbor, who said, his eyes popping with astonishment, “Did you see that?” Louie also saw and thought the lights had a pyramid shape. So, there was a third witness to what we saw.
Asking around in later days, there were no other reports in the neighborhood of strange lights in the sky. A layer of coincidences I should mention: It was Jane’s birthday and Shakespeare’s, and I was five days from defending my Ph.D dissertation at Columbia University.
The first comment I want to make. The intelligence guiding the lights certainly knew the music we were listening to. As often reported, UAPs communicate by telepathy or, in this case, clairvoyance. . The intention seems to have been to connect Coltrane’s music with a Church for emigrants. What that might mean I lay aside as unknown. It had to be more than an ad for Coltrane’s music. My guess it was so I could tell this story.
As the physical behavior of UAPs clearly transcend present human technology, so do their mental capacities seem to transcend ours. What about the blatant gap between our abilities, the psychic and the physical? One might suggest that the spectrum of paranormal capacities revealed by modern research represent human evolutionary potential. Ufology might plausibly be construed as the evolutionary complement of parapsychology. As for the so-called Grays, associated with cases of alleged abduction, it’s worth noting that they apparently have faded slits in place of mouths, a relic perhaps of the talking and eating phases of their evolution.
A second phenomenon helps us appreciate the link between the two areas of research—levitation. Abductees often report being levitated to the craft where they are subjected to medical operations. Further, the energetics of levitation may well be involved in alien forms of transportation. Apports are kin to levitation insofar as physical objects are observed to translocate instantly and appear to move through solid matter. This turns up in accounts of poltergeist phenomena that seem related to child psychology and ghost phenomenology—another point of convergence of ufology and parapsychology. I once heard David Grusch say, almost as an afterthought, that alien technology is mind-driven. If mystics like Joseph of Copertino for 35 years managed to defy gravity before innumerable witnesses, it is not hard to imagine a more advanced scientific culture having evolved vastly developed modes of transportation by tapping into the power Joseph had over gravity.
Grusch is a notable whistleblower with regard to the now infamous U.S. decades-long cover-up of all it knows about UFOs.[1] If unknown agencies have evolved somewhere in the universe an advanced mental technology, it would mean their operations might be independent of the constraints of time and space as we know them. The forbidding spatial distances between Earth and other viable planets around the universe might then cease to be an issue. We may be dealing with intelligent beings that travel from one perceptual scene to another though a ‘tunnel’ outside the normal constraints of time and space.
Sticking to what I know from the details describing saint Joseph’s flights, based on about one hundred and fifty sworn eye-witness reports, one fact is clear about his mental state. Ecstasy was invariably his mental state while levitating. This was the case, for instance, while saying mass; he would lift off and hover in the air inches above the ground. Other flights were more spectacular when he flew over people’s heads or aloft to a branch of a tree.
Surely the scientific challenge is to understand why and how a state of mind can serve to release a person from the physical grip of gravity. The only space where that can happen is in dream space. A solution to the enigma of levitation may open the door to a new and more sustainable mode of transportation on earth. Psychic technology may conceivably become part of the answer to reducing the consumption of fossil fuels. After all, the current climate crisis is based on fossil fuels whose energy use is heating up the planet. The challenge is to switch to new eco-friendly forms of energy like wind and solar. But what about mental energy? Parapsychology, psychical research, clearly hold clues to new forms of mental energy. New forms of psychic energy may then represent an evolutionary step toward solving the climate crisis. A new form of eco-friendly energy production would be part of the response to the climate crisis.
But there’s another more fundamental problem that has to be addressed—the malignant greed, the paranoid streak, and the violent propensities of the human animal. Again, the convergence under discussion contains the germ of a solution to this problem—the higher mystical forms of consciousness marked by empathy and emotions centered around the unifying force of love. The latter are features of near-death encounters, of certain psychedelic episodes, and of yogic and shamanic experiences. All kinds of data suggest that it may be possible to learn how to activate our extraordinary potentials, and train ourselves to use them for creative purposes—aesthetic, moral, revolutionary.
The question I’m asking—how can we actualize these higher forms of consciousness without having to undergo a near-death experience? One feature of this extraordinary experience may hold the secret to dealing with the darker side of human nature—the so-called life-review so often reported. People review their whole life and report seeing how their actions affected the people they interacted with. They feel, sense and know what’s going on inside others as clearly as they feel, sense, and know what’s going on inside themselves. One’s ego expands in a way that includes the consciousness of the other as well as one’s own.
So the question is, can we learn to evoke the life review process and experience a more comprehensive sense of human identity? If science and a new psychology could devise ways to induce periodic life-reviews in human beings as part of the education and liberation of their wider humanity, it might be a turning-point in the history of our species.
To function in a modern democratic society, you have to be able to read, and as a minimal intellectual achievement you must understand and honor the concept of factual truth, basic to all the higher notions of truth, such as aesthetic, social, scientific, and mystical. There is another reading skill without which democratic and social life rely on. We need to be able to read each other, that is, encounter each other with patience and receptivity, with awareness and sensitivity. The interesting news is that a capacity for remarkable intuition and empathy may very well be part of our untapped deep self. We know this in particular from modern studies of the near-death experience.
The importance of the life-review has been underscored especially by one of the American founders of near-death research, Kenneth Ring. Moreover, as far as I know, Dr. Ring has written the only book that aims to unite parapsychology and ufology, The Omega Project: Near-Death Experiences, UFO Encounters, and Mind at Large. This book, and others I could cite, point toward a new paradigm of scientific research that promises a more hopeful outlook for our human future. But there are also signs of danger.
Countries that have had encounters with UFOs are interested in acquiring their technology. This is borne out by a reading of Coulthart cited above. Any nation that did so most likely would be able to subjugate the entire world population before long. While such efforts are doubtless under way, I see no evidence of any major progress, i.e., aircraft that can make 90 degree turns at a thousand miles an hour. But this sort of scientific success would only exacerbate an already explosively violent human condition. Science needs to focus on research that promises to jump-start the evolution of human consciousness, at least to the point of palliating climate chaos and murderous human aggression.
Parapsychology and ufology, two outlaw intellectual disciplines, are avoided if not outright denied by most mainstreams of officialdom. Nevertheless, these two research domains have been covering stories about as big as stories can be. In the first story, beings not of this world are constantly interacting with us in all sorts of ways—beings obviously superior to us in ‘technology,’ if that’s the right word. Second story—a careful para-psychological look into human experience reveals a body of evidence that points to a possible breakthrough in the evolution of the human species. Just in time, some might say. For without some kind of drastic breakthrough in our collective spiritual life, the world process our species has set into motion since the Industrial Revolution is going to bring down world civilization.
[1] For a thorough back up of Grusch’s good faith, see investigative journalist, Ross Coulthart, In Plain Sight: An Investigation into UFOs and Impossible Science(2021)
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