Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience Read Free Page A

to which the information communicated by alien beings to experiencers is fundamentally about the need for a change in human consciousness and our relationship to the earth and one another. Even the helplessness and loss or surrender of control which are, at least initially, forced upon the abductees by the aliens—one of the most traumatic aspects of the experiences—seem to be in some way ‘designed’ to bring about a kind of ego death from which spiritual growth and the expansion of consciousness may follow.
    He goes on to admit:
    But my focus upon growth and transformation might reflect a bias of mine. The people who choose to come to see me may know of my interest in such aspects of human psychology, and may be aware that I consider my work with abductees to be a co-creative process. In some cases Arthur, for example, the commitment to environmental sustainability and human transformation antedated contact with me.
    In other words, the fact that David Jacobs and John Mack can both be aware of the ‘threatening’ implications of the ‘hybridisation’ programme, but take opposing views of it, obviously offers us a choice. In this present book, as will be seen, I am inclined to accept Mack’s views.
    In fact, the reason will become clear to any reader of Mack’s second book, Passport to the Cosmos (1999). He emphasises that for many native peoples, like the Dagara of West Africa, the supernatural is a part of their everyday lives; and he quotes an American Sequoyah Indian, saying that his people are spirit, and live in a world of spirit and meaning, while whites live in a world of science and facts. The implication is that such a person as Credo Mutwa, spiritual leader of the Sangomas of South Africa (to whom Mack devotes a chapter), naturally inhabits a realm between physical and spiritual and is not troubled by the dichotomy.
    I had known John Mack before he became involved in abductee research, for he was the author of one of the best books on T. E. Lawrence, of whom I write in The Outsider , and in 2003 I would attend a UFO conference with him in Italy. Passport to the Cosmos makes it clear that he was becoming interested in the mystery of whether human beings survive death, which I had also come to accept as factual after writing a book called Afterlife . Another friend, Montague Keen, one of the world’s foremost psychical researchers, had also come to know Mack. Monty died of a heart attack in 2004 at the age of 80, and in no time at all, his widow, Veronica, was receiving ‘messages’ from him.
    One day in September 2004, my wife and I were invited to a séance at Veronica’s home in Totteridge, north London. John Mack was also due like us, he was going to stay overnight. John had been in central London having lunch with another mutual friend, the biologist Rupert Sheldrake.
    He never arrived. Emerging from Totteridge underground station late at night, he was knocked down and killed by a car driven by a man who had a record for careless driving.
    Yet typically, the next time I heard from Veronica Keen on the phone, she read me aloud an extract from an account of a séance in Berlin, in which both John Mack and Monty Keen manifested via the medium, and John said how strange he found it to be speaking to a sympathetic audience so soon after his death . . .
    Readers who are disinclined to accept the reality of ‘survival’ will also be inclined to dismiss this. But I think it makes clear why I prefer to accept John Mack’s conclusions to those of David Jacobs.

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    A PROBLEM WITH

TOO MANY SOLUTIONS?
    In March 1995, I spent a few days in a small town called Marion, near Boston, at a conference on Consciousness Evolution; my fellow speakers were Rhea White, Peter Russell, and Stanislav Grof. Marion is one of those old fashioned New England towns that looks as if it is still in the middle of the nineteenth century.
    I had met Grof in California in the 1980s, and admired his work. As a young man in