Flying Saucer to the Center of Your Mind: Selected Writings of John A. Keel (38 page)

Two months later, the trawler
Silvero
collided with an unknown underwater object near Halsingland, shortly after the helmsman observed a mysterious light on the water. Again, a search failed to discover the source of the collision. The trawler went into dry dock for repairs and was found to be badly damaged below the waterline. Another ship, the
Insulanur
, collided with an underwater object near Sydosbrotten on Nov. 19, 1969, the day before the
Silvero
incident. That collision was equally mysterious.

In the past two years, six submarines belonging to Israel, France, England, and the U.S. have all disappeared without a trace. Three of these vanished in the Mediterranean Sea. Very thorough searches by air and sea have failed to reveal their fate. No oil slicks or debris have been found.

The French submarine
Eurydice
and its crew of 57 was the latest to vanish on March 4, 1970. A Tunisian tanker,
Tabarka
, collided with an underwater object around the same time, but authorities discounted that it could have been the
Eurydice.
In February 1970, the
Angelino Lauro
, an Italian liner, was damaged when it ran into something in the Mediterranean.

Again, the metallic objects involved in these collisions have never been identified. Modern submarines are well equipped, with Sonar and other detection devices, and are not likely to crash into surface ships so frequently. If they did, they would suffer extensive damage themselves, spewing out great quantities of oil and debris, and would have to surface.

As with UFOs, our mysterious submarines have a history going back more than forty years. A group of fisherman in Morecambe Bay, England reported one such oddity in March 1938. “I saw a sudden scurry of seabirds rise off the water,” witness William Baxter told the Liverpool
Echo
(March 29, 1938), “and I looked at a spot nearly a mile away. Out of the water there rose something large and black, like a big post. It was at least eight or nine feet high, and it rose and fell three times, then disappeared. I’ve been all over the world, but I have never seen anything like this!”

There were more than 40 reports of non-existent airplanes crashing into the sea in 1938, mostly in the northern latitudes around England and Scandinavia. As usual, searches failed to locate debris or survivors, and no planes were reported missing. First Mate Robert Wake of the collier
Birtley
described one such “airplane crash” in April 1938.

“When it struck the water, there was a sudden burst of flame that lit up the whole sky. The mass of flames rapidly dwindled to three small patches of light, and in another minute there was complete darkness. We steamed ahead with all possible speed, but there was no sign of wreckage,” Wake said (
Daily Telegraph
, April 7, 1938).

Meteors do not explode into flames when they hit the water. What was it? We’ll never know.

These “crashing airplane” reports continue to come in at a steady rate. Many are now accompanied by mysterious radio signals that clearly indicate that an intelligent technology is involved in these incidents. Radio signals also accompanied the “ghost fliers” over Scandinavia in 1934. Many people picked the signals up on their home receivers.

In the past year, divers operating off the coast of England have been puzzled by the strange sounds they have been hearing underwater (water is an excellent conductor of sound). They have reported hearing voices and even music, and have been unable to determine the source. Fish in the same areas have been meeting untimely ends, some appearing to have been burned!

The evidence is mounting, and it becomes more and more perplexing. Our world is not only haunted by all kinds of bizarre aerial objects (many of which have demonstrated their ability to dive into the water and apparently turn into submarines), but we are also plagued by a wide variety of ocean-based mysteries. Somebody or something seems to be collecting people in the Bermuda Triangle. Now it looks as if they – or it – may be collecting conventional submarines as well. All of these incredible events refute the popular belief that flying saucers represent friendly visitors from outer space.

Instead, the history of the phenomenon and its multifarious activities point to an even more illogical conclusion. The phenomenon seems to be terrestrial, and it seems based, in large part, under our oceans and seas. Are we dealing with some phantom navy from some secret underwater world? Is this why the U.S. Navy has spent more money on UFOs than the U.S. Air Force?

In 1967, the Navy reportedly spent $5 million on a project to “search the Bermuda Triangle” with planes and special research submarines.

In 1969, we quietly launched the NR-1, a nuclear submarine that carries a 7-man crew and cost $100 million. This sub is cloaked in secrecy, but the Navy says it is designed “to explore commercial and military possibilities of the ocean floor.”

Have all the UFO enthusiasts been looking in the wrong direction?

CHAPTER 21

WAS PHILIP K. DICK A FLAKE? –
NEW FRONTIERS
MAGAZINE, 1987

Some readers might complain that the following article is written in the manner of a
New York Times Book Review
piece. That is, the book reviewer usually devotes eight thousand words to telling what he knows about the subject at hand, thus proving that his knowledge is vastly superior to anyone else’s. Then, if the book author is lucky, the reviewer devotes the last paragraph of the review to the book (usually sniggering, sneering, and dismissing it altogether).

In my book
The Eighth Tower,
I quote the following story:

It was after midnight in the spring of 1872, and a hansom carriage moved slowly through the fog of Sherlock Holmes’ London. Young Richard Maurice Bucke sat erect in a quiet, meditative mood, his shoulders rocking with the uneven movements of the carriage wheels over the worn cobble-stones. Suddenly, as he would recall later, a flame-colored cloud seemed to sweep over him. At first, he thought the city was on fire. Then the luminous cloud seemed to enter his body, and lightning bolts crackled in his brain. For a brief moment, he felt he was one with the universe, and all knowledge – past, present and future – ricocheted in the corners of his mind, and he felt different. Changed somehow.

Dr. Bucke went on to become one of Canada’s most distinguished psychiatrists. And he was the first to attempt a study of the strange phenomenon that had engulfed him in that London fog. Then, in 1901, he slipped on the ice and bashed in his head. But not before he produced the classic book,
Cosmic Consciousness,
which is still in print.

Now we skip ahead to the year 1948. An l8-year-old boy, fresh from a farm, is living in a cheap furnished room a couple of blocks from Times Square in New York City. In the middle of the night, he is awakened by a weird feeling. His room is filled with an indescribable light – a pinkish glow that leads him to think the building is on fire. Before he can move, his mind is flooded with a torrent of information. Miraculously, he understands everything. All that has happened, all that will happen and the total meaning of it all! Excited though he is, he falls asleep again. The next morning he remembers the event vividly. It is seared into his mind. But the information is all lost. He can’t remember any of it. As the years pass he will realize that it was entered into his subconscious mind and small portions will bubble to the surface from time to time.

I was that 18-year old boy. For many years, I never mentioned the incident to anyone, although the incident was so resplendent that I thought of it often. It wasn’t until the 1960s that I discovered other people had shared the same experience. In fact, it is probable that it happens to millions of people in each generation. It is known under many different names: enlightenment, mystical illumination, cosmic illumination, etc. Many modern percipients are misled into thinking it is about being “born again.” Others think of it as “the call,” and they join priesthoods.

Still others, often people of humble station, quit their jobs, dump their families, and adopt a whole new way of life, becoming famous leaders in the arts, politics, and religion. The one thing that becomes clear when you study this process is that a fairly large percentage of the human race is overtly manipulated by this “Illumination,” and that they lead the rest of humanity into future events – often calamitous in nature – that seem
pre-planned.

Religion makes a feeble effort to explain this manipulation. Men have been aware of it since they sat in caves and whittled calendars on bones. Whole civilizations have risen and collapsed because of this awareness. The source of this manipulation seems to be unknowable and indefinable. So, mankind has devised a long series of anthropomorphic demons and gods to share the blame. Since earliest times, we have chopped out living hearts and waged horribly brutal wars as part of this manipulation. At this very moment, several religious wars are raging on this pathetic mudball of ours.

Victims of Illumination often suffer “static,” and the whole process misfires. Those who deliberately seek to communicate with “the Force,” as George Lucas dubbed it, usually end up as suicides, or they get hit by a truck. Those who draw circles on the floor, light black candles and wave swords around
always
come to a tragic end. The lamas in the Himalayas discovered that it takes many years of effort to attain Illumination. The successful adept becomes a zombie in much the same way religious fanatics everywhere become totally consumed. They sacrifice their individuality for a state of happy mindlessness.

Science-fiction writers have dabbled with all this for many years, grinding out half-baked books loosely based on scholarly misinterpretations of phenomenological literature. The sword and sorcery stories form a complete genre. Modern fantasy pays grudging acknowledgement to a very real period in early history, when men understood the magical forces surrounding them – a time when magic was the true science of its day.

Even some science-fiction writers have been zapped by that big searchlight in the sky. The late Philip K. Dick (PKD) wrote extensively and obsessively about a mind-widening experience. His cult novel
VALIS,
one of his last works, published by Bantam in 1981, described how a rather unlikable hero named Fat wandered through the Twilight Zone.

I tell you these things for what they are worth. They are true things; they happened.

In fat’s opinion, his apartment had been saturated with high levels of radiation of some kind. In fact, he had seen it: blue light dancing like St. Elmo’s fire.

And what was more, the aurora that sizzled around the apartment behaved as if it were sentient and alive. When it entered objects, it interfered with their causal processes. And when it reached Fat’s head, it transferred not just information to him, but also a personality – a personality that wasn’t Fat’s, with different memories, customs, tastes, and habits. (
VALIS,
p. 94)

The question before us is simple. Was PKD a flake? He spent the last eight years of his life talking and writing about his “religious experience.” He had learned the true meaning of the ancient phrase, “He has seen the light.” Was he just a plain nut? Had he been reading my books and articles? Was he into drugs?

God, he told us, had fired a beam of pink light directly at him, at his head, his eyes; Fat had been temporarily blinded, and his head had ached for days. It was easy, he said, to describe the beam of pink light: it’s exactly what you get as a phosphene after-image when a flashbulb has gone off in your face. Fat was spiritually haunted by that color. He lived for that light, that one particular color.

However, he could never really find it again. Nothing could generate that color for light, but god. In other words, normal light did not contain that color. One time Fat studied a color chart, a chart of the visible spectrum. The color was absent. He had seen a color that no one can see; it lay off the end. (
VALIS,
p. 12)

It does sound as if PKD may have had personal experience with the dazzling light that has now been reported by countless UFO contactees, angel witnesses (there are thousands of reports of angels each year), and chimera sighters. The visible spectrum goes from red at one end of the scale to purple at the other end. Beyond these we have infrared and ultraviolet. Some humans are able to perceive those “invisible colors” and peek into the edges of a whole universe that is hidden from the rest of us.
That
may be the universe that gleefully manipulates us into charging into battle to spew our guts all over the landscape. It is also a universe that grinds away endless propaganda like a broken phonograph to generation after generation of prophets, seers, contactees and, in the 1980s, channelers.

In a letter written on May 20, 1977, PKD reveals that his mind was picking up signals from that broken phonograph, like most contactees and spiritualists. “Meanwhile I was shaping my cosmology,” he wrote. “When it finally took form in March of 1974, I understood, noetically, that two opposing forces, powers, sides, or entities contended in our world, using it as a gameboard or battlefield. Intellectually, I could then identify these two absolute forces with the two forces I had formerly seen as mundane: my foe, which became identified with the Sons of Darkness, and my friends, the Sons of Light…to use Zoroaster’s terms. I had been part of a cosmic struggle acted out on our Earth. It was a struggle, taking place in the arena of human history. Evidently I was a Son of Light, who had come here, forgotten his origin, identity, and purpose, but regained memory and understanding of all this
after
I had done my work… I remembered who I was, why I was here, and I experienced my true father, whom I call the programmer.”

The programmer! Was PKD just ranting, or was he standing on the edge of one universe and peering into another with greater perception and lucidity than most contactees, channelers, and spiritual ding-a-lings?

Philip K. Dick lived a tortured, paranoia-filled life, hounded by the IRS and the other cruel forces of the 1970s. He may have also (wittingly or unwittingly) summoned up the Sons of Darkness. While I can find no direct references to it, his writings hint that he may have been flirting with pentagrams and sword-waving in darkened rooms.