UFOs, Cryptids & Ghosts: Branches of the Same Tree?
This article appeared in the January/February 2015 edition of UFO TRUTH Magazine.
Budd Hopkins was there to talk about aliens and I
was there to talk about ghosts. It was the 2003 West Virginia Paranormal
Conference in Parkersburg, and we were so intrigued by what the other
had to say that we found a quiet corner to talk. The prominent
alien-abduction researcher brought an album full of photos illustrating
bruises, scoop marks and other physical traces on the bodies of what he
believed were abductees.
“Budd, these marks are exactly what I’ve seen in
many poltergeist* cases!” I stated. We talked about doing some
collaborative research, but Hopkins was overtaken by his tragic illness
before we could begin.
The questions, however, remain. Are there
connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena within the broader
paranormal realm? Do the labels we place on paranormal experiences and
entities depend on the context in which we experience them? Is there a
single “tree” of which all paranormal phenomena are “branches”?
More specifically, why do so many ghost and
poltergeist cases – once one thinks to look beyond a single home or
family – sometimes involve large areas, many homes and many people? Why
do so many – again, if one thinks to look – turn into UFO cases that
often enough involve “grays” and cryptids? Perhaps most importantly: Why
does the military seem to take an interest in such areas?
Or is it all just coincidence?
To even ask these questions, never mind answer
them, one must somehow get past the mob of assumptions that derive from
the modern epistemological paradigm, and which I feel stand squarely in
the way of progress in paranormal understanding. Among these virtually
unquestioned assumptions:
● UFOs are
nuts-and-bolts craft from other planets.
● Being
“advanced” means having more and better technology, as opposed to being
advanced morally or spiritually.
● There’s a
material world and a spirit world.
● Ghosts
are spirits of the dead. But they can walk, talk, dress up, think,
remember and drive cars even though they don’t have bodies or brains
anymore.
● Nasty
spirits are demons and very good theologians because they know all about
God and are afraid of holy water.
● Cryptids
like Nessie and Yeti are just really good at playing hide-and-seek.
●
Paranormal entities, including aliens, have the same motivations we do
and can be understood from our own anthropocentric framework of
knowledge.
● UFOs,
cryptids and ghosts are entirely separate phenomena.
Additional
assumptions include:
●
Eyewitnesses have bad eyesight.
● The
paranormal can be made acceptable to mainstream science.
● Our
science and the materialism on which it’s based can fully define
reality. Anything “supernatural” must therefore be undiscovered
materialistic science.
And the
most fundamental assumption of all:
● The
Island Theory. Within our bodies and brains, we are totally
self-contained life-forms. Few of the assumptions above can be embraced
unless we first accept the Island Theory.
I’m not
saying that “none of the above” are true. I’m suggesting that some may
be untrue (or at least misinterpreted), others might be partially true,
and none are complete explanations for anything.
*
I first began researching ghosts in 1970 while,
believe it or not, studying for the priesthood. As early as my very
first case in the field, involving ultra-bizarre doings at an abandoned
and overgrown village in northeast Connecticut, it became
disconcertingly obvious, at least to me, that the classical explanations
for paranormal events just didn’t do it. Somehow, the theology, the
spiritualism, the fumbling attempts at science, the superstition, and
certainly the assumptions, simply weren’t good enough.
Even the “experts” at the time seemed mired in the
assumptions. I was working with Fr. John Nicola, a Jesuit priest who was
the technical advisor for the film
The Exorcist, and one of the Roman Catholic Church’s leading experts
on the subject. He couldn’t get beyond the theology. It was all about
the devil and demons, with some psychology thrown in beforehand to make
sure the victim wasn’t bonkers instead of possessed.
Then there was Dr. Louisa Rhine, the renowned and
pioneering parapsychologist at Duke University, with whom I
corresponded. She and her colleagues were straining and sweating to make
paranormal phenomena fit the materialist scientific paradigm, the
“square peg in the round hole” if ever there was one.
Among my other mentors were the grandparents of
modern “ghost hunting,” Ed & Lorraine Warren, now household names
because of the 2013 film The
Conjuring. They couldn’t get beyond pop-theology mixed with
spiritualism.
Other than some nods toward transpersonal
psychology and theoretical physics, most of today’s experts are still
married to the same assumptions in their respective fields, and from
what I can see they’re still getting nowhere.
By the beginning of the 1980s, I’d run into
poltergeists, ghosts of people both living and dead, phantom buildings
and vehicles, possession and exorcism, appearing and disappearing
animals and people, space/time displacements and, of course, UFOs. I had
worked in psychiatric hospitals as a seminarian and a student in
abnormal psychology, and I’d seen what appeared to be psychoses and
paranormal phenomena intertwined. Out went the assumptions and in came
the only possible solution I could discern: quantum mechanics.
I emphasize that I’m not a scientist, let alone a
theoretical physicist. My degree is in philosophy, with additional
postgraduate work in theology, psychology, history and law.
Nevertheless, philosophy is supposed to teach one to think, and to bring
together diverse facts and ideas to discover new facts and ideas, all in
the midst of a society whose supposedly great thinkers are wildly
overspecialized. And besides, I wasn’t born yesterday. I was seeing what
I was seeing.
For me, quantum mechanics all pointed to a single
explanation: multiple parallel worlds, an open system with relatively
free exchanges of energy and, at times, inhabitants. Couple this with
the contention of some physicists, including Hugh Everett and Bryce
DeWitt, that this “multiverse” contains all possible possibilities, and
the broader idea that all things, past and future included, exist
simultaneously, and we have the beginning of a more complete and less
naive explanation for the paranormal.
This suggested to me that “ghosts” weren’t dead
people but actual people living in parallel worlds that happened to
intersect ours at certain times, places and states. This explained why
many ghosts seem afraid of us, thinking
we are ghosts haunting
them, and why many have such
physical characteristics. “Spirits of the dead,” however, is the only
way our two-dimensional modern paradigm can deal with them.
It suggested that “demons,” whose action I’d seen
with my own eyes many times over, aren’t servants of Satan but
multiversal life forms, “parasites” feeding on the energy of other life
forms. This explains why I have occasional physical encounters with
them, why they don’t all respond to exorcisms, and why they leave their
victims drained, often with chronic fatigue. Our folklore explains them
as evil spirits, ghouls or even vampires because that’s the best we can
do.
Additionally, it suggested that UFOs and aliens
might be far more than beings in nuts-and-bolts craft from other
planets. We often scratch our heads about how they can travel such
enormous distances. If they have the ability, technologically or
otherwise, to traverse world boundaries to wherever or whenever they
want to be, distance doesn’t matter.
As for cryptids coming and going…there we have it –
maybe.
It should be made clear that, while most physicists
today acknowledge the multiverse idea in some form, not all interpret it
the way I do. But seeing, as they say, is believing, and I don’t know a
single theoretical physicist who works in the paranormal “trenches” as I
have for nearly 45 years.
So if there are entire regions where world
intersects are common or even semi- permanent, it might explain
paranormal “flaps” – multiple, seemingly unrelated paranormal events
taking place in profusion in the same area. Several of these areas are
legendary.
The “Mothman” affair in the Ohio Valley of the US
in the 1960s is associated with the appearance of one or more huge,
moth-like or bird-like creatures that terrified local residents. But as
journalist and author John Keel pointed out, there were a great many
additional and concurrent phenomena. These included nightly UFOs seen by
hundreds of people, “men in black” and other strange visitors such as
the self-styled alien known as Indrid Cold, ghosts, poltergeists, and
clairvoyance and heightened psychic abilities among some residents.
Local witnesses I interviewed in the early 2000s,
children at the time of the Mothman events, reported the above, along
with things like red eyes looking in their windows and something walking
heavily on their roofs at night.
More recently, Utah’s “Skinwalker Ranch” situation
has come to light, with teams of scientists supposedly witnessing
nightly UFOs, things coming
through holes in the sky and air, apportations of objects and animals,
ultra-bizarre cryptids, alien encounters, poltergeist activity, time
slips, ghostly encounters and more.
Since 2005, my son and partner, Ben, and I have
been studying other areas where we believe this sort of flap might be
taking place. These include a large section of Litchfield County,
Connecticut; Freetown State Forest and the Hockomock Swamp Wildlife
Management Area in Massachusetts (the so-called Bridgewater Triangle),
and Rendlesham Forest in the UK.
Especially in the minds of UFO researchers,
Rendlesham Forest is associated primarily with the reported December
1980 sightings and landings at the twin NATO air bases straddling the
forest, RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge. Looking deeper, however, one
finds bizarre events in the area going back to Saxon times. These
include strange lights in the sky and on the ground, cryptids and, yes,
downloads of binary codes reported by local witnesses.
While researching the area after dark in September
2012, accompanied by 1980 UFO witness Larry Warren and several local
listeners to our radio show, Ben and I had a sort of “alien encounter”
before even leaving the parking lot to head toward the famous “East
Gate” of the erstwhile Woodbridge air base. Photos from that night
revealed odd lights among the trees.
Our most active investigation, now approaching 10
years in process, is the Litchfield County, Connecticut, flap. This
began in 2005 when rural homeowners contacted us after reading my 2002
book Footsteps in the Attic, saying that the multiverse approach was the
only thing they felt could explain the outlandish and seemingly
unrelated phenomena taking place in their 1793 farmhouse.
By 2009, we found that the entire area was
affected. Other families were reporting ghost and poltergeist activity.
UFOs were being seen by hundreds of witnesses, to the point where the
local media got involved. “Grays” were seen in people’s homes and there
were at least two Yeti sightings.
Mass changes in public behavior were reported as
well, such as people driving on the wrong side of the road to a degree
way beyond the statistical probability. When this was noticed in local
media, the behavior changed, and people reportedly began driving off the
road and hitting trees.
As in every other case mentioned here, there seems
to be a military component. In 2009 and 2010, there was substantial
military activity in the flap area. People reported taking walks and
being turned back at certain points by armed troops. Unusual aircraft
seemed to join the UFO sightings and continue to do so, including black
helicopters. It all seems to center on an “abandoned” farm along a rural
road a few miles from the farmhouse where our involvement began.
In November 2010, Ben and I joined a New York
producer and camera crew in the area to make a pilot for a possible
television show. We found no activity at the farm at that point, but the
entire property was well kept, and the fields mown. Since then, there
has been substantial vehicular activity, the central farm buildings have
been torn down and replaced with a huge, flat metal sheet of several
thousand square feet, visible only from the air. For some reason, the
two silos have been left standing and repainted.
The dirt road leading to the farm is sometimes
closed, and the unexplained aerial activity continues and includes
large, black, double-rotor freight aircraft. We have been unable to
obtain any official confirmation that actual military activity was or is
taking place, either by regular, National Guard or Reserve forces. And
we have never been allowed to see the footage from the pilot, which
produced no subsequent television show.
The question of the multiversal nature of
paranormal phenomena aside, why the military activity in flap areas? We
suspect a simple answer: Wouldn’t we just love to weaponize the
paranormal? That’s nothing new. It’s been going on since at least the
Stargate Project in the 1970s, and probably before. Why would the
research be centered in relatively populous areas such as the Ohio
Valley; Suffolk, England, or central Connecticut? Perhaps because the
researchers must go where the world intersects are.
So why the manic secrecy and the military muscle in
guarding such areas? Aside from keeping people guessing, throwing them
off the scent and simply keeping them out, there might be a more
visceral reason.
We live in a world where people long ago came to
grips with the Klingons, ET and the Planet of the Apes. Rather than
creating global panic and social collapse, the announcement of alien
life, even alien visitors, might very well be greeted with enthusiasm.
But only if that great assumption were confirmed: They come from some
far-off planet.
What if they don’t? Suppose these multiverse ideas
are true and the government, or some other powerful entity, knows that
our aliens – in every possible form and attitude – come from parallel
worlds that are right next to us all the time, that all the demons and
monsters of our darkest folklore are real in some form after all. That
would surely be cause for panic and ample cause for secrecy, in my
opinion.
Perhaps Ben and I are wrong. Perhaps everything
we’ve described above is as coincidental as it is circumstantial. Maybe
other, far more competent, UFO researchers than ourselves, such as
Richard Dolan, Marc D’Antonio and Robert Schroeder, who have approached
the multiverse idea in some of their own work, will shed further light
on it.
In the meantime, Ben and I, and people like us,
will continue to watch from the trenches.
Copyright 2014 by Paul F. Eno. All rights
reserved.