Contact

After a period of travel that seemed "interminable," the machine landed with a jarring sensation, and the little men unfastened Jose Antonio. They put a bandage over the eyeholes in his helmet and carried him with his knees dragging on the ground. He heard footsteps and the sound of many people talking. Finally he was placed on a backless seat and the bandage was removed

Jose Antonio found himself in a large quadrangular room, thirty by forty feet, about fifteen feet away from a robust dwarf who stared at him "with apparent satisfaction..."

Other beings of similar appearance began arriving until about fifteen dwarfs were in the room. The soldier assumed there was a door in the back beyond his field of vision. The three walls he could see had no window and no door. To his left was a low shelf with the corpses of four men, one of them a Negro. He thought they had been killed by the homunculi. The whole room seemed to be made of stone, and at one point Jose Antonio was given something to drink out of a cubical stone glass, and the cavity containing a dark green liquid was in the shape of an inverted pyramid...

The leader of the dwarfs began a strange conversation with the soldier. It was conducted entirely through gestures and drawings and revolved around the concept of weapons. (Jose Antonio thinks that they must have perceived that he was in the military and illustrated this by their actions.) At one time, a little man shot a beam of light against the stone wall. The communication seemed to be a request that Jose Antonio help the little beings in their relations with earth. Was he to be their guide among men? This is what Jose Antonio understood. He gestured his refusal and began praying, fingering the rosary he always carried with him:

The leader stepped towards him and, displaying irritation for the first time, seized the crucifix and snatched it from him. One of the beads rolled onto the floor and was picked up by one of the little men, who showed it to the others. The crucifix was passed around in the same way, arousing the curiosity of all of them.

While this discussion took place among the homunculi Jose Antonio had a vision of a Christ-like entity, "his eyes clear and serene," barefoot and wearing a dark robe. The figure made some revelations to Jose Antonio, who now refuses to disclose them. The apparition vanished, the irritated dwarfs blindfolded him again, and he was transported back. As the machine landed, he felt that he was being dragged and he lost consciousness. He woke up alone near the town of Vitoria in the state of Espirito Santo, two hundred miles away from the spot where he had been fishing. He had been way for four and a half days.
Dimensions, Jacques Vallee, pgs. 189-190

The previous account describes a UFO abduction that occurred in May of 1969 during a fishing trip to a Brazilian enlisted man who served in Brazil's Guard's Battalion (a security force for the President of which not just anyone would be allowed to join). Of course there are many surreal aspects of this account, least of all being the description of a stone flying saucer inhabited by dwarfs. No, the true high weirdness of this encounter has to with the remarkable similarities between the abduction and the initiation rites of a secret society. Vallee goes on to state:

Initiation rituals are characterized by the following phases or general scenes, often combined or developed into complex themes:

1. The candidate is confronted by members of the occult group wearing a special costume.
2. He is blindfolded.
3. He is led by the arm through a rough and difficult route.
4. He is taken into a specially designed chamber with no windows and is placed in such a way that he can only see part of it.
5. He is brought in the presence of a "Master."
6. He is given a test and made to answer questions.
7. He is shown a variety of symbols designed to remind him of death.
8. The situation suggests that he may not survive the ordeal.
9. He is given ritual food or drink.
10. He is blindfolded again and led outside. 

All of these elements are present in the case of Jose Antonio. To this we must add that everything in the room appeared to be made out of stone. The drinking cube with the inverted pyramid cavity is an exquisite last touch.
Dimensions, pg. 191

Vallee has hardly been the only researcher to note the secret society overlap with UFOlogy. Another common connection between the two are Men in Black and other mysterious figures, such as gypsies, that may appear in an area either shortly before or after a major wave of UFO sightings.

John Keel notes:

...Numerous other witnesses have also reported visits from men in big black cars, usually Cadillacs, with peculiar purplish glows lighting their interiors. There are even a number of witnesses who claim to have been temporarily kidnapped in such automobiles. They have described strange psychedelic lights on the dashboards which caused them to fall into hypnotic trances.

Some of these phantom vehicles have a special insignia printed on their doors -a triangle with a bolt of lightning passing through it. In other cases witnesses said the symbol was the classic triangle with an eye -the ancient symbol for the deity -and the MIB identified themselves as "agents for the Nation of the Third Eye." Such stories are rarely given wide circulation and are almost never published. So it is quite interesting that so many far-flung witnesses manage to come up with the same identical details.

One of the first clues that UFO flap was about to break on Long Island in the spring of 1967 was a series of random reports describing strange Oriental or Gypsy-like entities parading across people's lawns in the middle of the night. One man living on an isolated farm near Melville, New York, said he saw a metallic disk hovering a few feet above one of his fields in broad daylight. A ladder was hanging down from it, he said, and as he watched, it was retracted into the object, and the whole thing flew off soundlessly. A few days later, he answered a knock on his door and was surprised to see a Gypsy lady standing there. She was dressed in a long gray gown and wore sandals. Her skin was a deep olive, and her eyes had an Oriental cast. She was about five feet, four inches tall, and her hair was long and "so black that it looked dyed."

"I have traveled a long way," she said in a low, accented voice. "May I have a glass of water? I must take a pill."

He gave her the water, and she took a round, green pill, thanked him, and left. He was puzzled that there was no car in sight. He lived on an isolated back road, and visitors, especially visitors travelling by foot, are very rare.

"I have traveled a long way" is an old Masonic pass phrase and is frequently used in these contacts. Sometimes the simple phrase, "What time is it?" or "What is your time?" is substituted. The pill-taking ploy is also a common procedure. When a most peculiar being visited a family on Cape May, New Jersey, early in 1961, he also took a pill. He too had "traveled a long way" and after conducting an inane interview with the family, he stepped into the night, got into a black Cadillac, and drove off with the lights out.
Our Haunted Planet, pgs. 96-97

Carnivals and things associated with them such as clowns and Gypsies, seem to be a reoccurring theme in many Fortean events as well as in psychedelic experiences. Secret societies seem to play a part as well, for according to James Shelby Downard in his epic King Kill 33 essay carnival workers have among the highest percentage of members involved in Freemasonry of virtually any other profession save for railroad workers and lawyers. The very first carnivals are suspected to have derived from pagan festivals such as the Greek Dionysia and the Roman Saturnalia, which intern were adopted into the Roman Catholic Church carnival of Mardi Gras or Shrove Tuesday. From there the traditions were preserved in Medieval Europe as various pageants, which intern were based on ancient pagan rituals. Many of these festivals were held of significant dates in which it was believed the barriers between our world and that of the Old Ones was weakened. In some case, possibly such as the Dionysia, psychedelic drugs were ingested by the participants to further break down those walls. In general many that have partaken of entheogens have described visuals closely resembling a carnival, including clowns, jugglers, etc. In general the carnival seems to be an attempt to mimic the effects of entheogens or some kind of mythological figure, such as Death who is prominent in most Mardi Gras celebrations. But I degrees.

The psychedelic experience has seemingly been essential to contacting this other zone, even when the drugs themselves have long since been suppressed, as in the case of Medieval carnivals. Another association from the Middle Ages with nonhuman entities and entheogens, which continues to this day with UFO phenomenon, is the fairy-ring.

Vallee notes:

Do I need to remind the reader of the celebrated habit of the elves, to leave behind these strange rings in the fields and prairies?

One Sunday in August, as he wandered over the hills of Howth, Evans-Wentz met some local people with whom he discussed these old tales. After he had tea with the man and his daughter, they took him to a field close by to show him a "fairy-ring" and while he stood in the ring, they told him:

Yes, the fairies do exist, and this is where they have often been seen dancing. The grass never gets high in the lines of the ring, for it is only the shortest and finest kind that grows there. In the middle, fairy-mushrooms grow in a circle, and the fairies use them to sit on (!). They are very little people, and are very fond of dancing and singing. They wear green coats, and sometimes red caps and red coats.

On November 12, 1968, the Argentine press reported that near Necochea, 310 miles south of Buenos Aires, a civilian pilot had reported a strange pattern on the ground and investigated it with several military men. Walking to the spot, where a flying saucer was earlier alleged to have landed, they found a circle six yards in diameter where the earth was calcined. Inside this circle grew eight giant white mushrooms, one of them nearly three feet in diameter. In Santa Fe province, other extraordinary mushrooms have been discovered under similar circumstances.
Dimensions, pg. 64

Is the association of fairies and elves with wild mushroom rings a tradition that dates back to an era when peoples took mushrooms in order to contact the little folk? Or is it possible that they leave bizarre groupings of mushrooms to remind us how to contact them?

Contact with fairies and elves isn't the only thing entheogens have been reported to produce. Another would be with spirits of the dead, or ghosts. Consider the findings of Stanislav Grof, a chief of psychiatric research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center and assistant professor of psychiatry at the John Hopkins University School of Medicine. In the 1950s Grof conducted a series of experiments with LSD in Prague, Czechoslovakia at the Psychiatric Research Institute and made several startling discoveries.

A common experience various patients shared was reliving what it was like to be in the womb. Initially Grof believed that his patients were simply imaging these things yet their descriptions were often far beyond the patients' previous educational levels. Many patients went further back than just the womb, to the consciousness of their relatives and even distant ancestors. Patients were able to accurately describe moments from the lives of their parents before they had been born in exact detail and without any previous conversations with their parents about these events. Other were able to describe obscure historical facts and a knowledge at odds with a patients' education about long bygone ages. For instance one uneducated patient gave detailed descriptions of ancient Egyptian embalming mummification practices despite no prior study of such things. One woman even believed she had assumed the identity of a prehistoric reptile and gave a rich description of this beast right down to the portions of its body that were sexually arousing, all of which Grof later confirmed with a zoologist.

Michael Talbot, from who's description of Grof's research the prior section is based upon, writes:

In fact, there did not seem to be any limit to what Grof's LSD subjects could tap into. They seemed capable of knowing what it was like to be every animal, and even plant, on the tree of evolution. They could experience what it was like to be a blood cell, an atom, a thermonuclear process inside the sun, the consciousness of the entire planet, and even the consciousness of the entire cosmos. More than that, they displayed the ability to transcend space and time, and occasionally they related uncannily accurate precognitive information. In an even stranger vein they sometimes encountered nonhuman intelligences during their cerebral travels, discarnate beings, spirit guides from "higher planes of consciousness," and other suprahuman entities.

On occasion subjects also traveled to what appeared to be other universes and other levels of reality. In one particularly unnerving session a young man suffering from depression found himself in what seemed to be another dimension. It had an eerie luminescence, and although he could not see anyone he sensed that it was crowded with discarnate beings. Suddenly he sensed a presence very close to him, and to his surprise it began to communicate with him telepathically. It asked him to please contact a couple who lived in the Moravian city of Kromeriz and let them know their son Ladislav was well taken care of and doing all right. It then gave him the couple's name, street address, and telephone number.

The information meant nothing to either Grof or the young man and seemed totally unrelated to the young man's problems and treatment. Still, Grof could not put it out of his mind. "After some hesitation and with mixed feelings, I finally decided to do what certainly would have made me the traget of my colleagues' jokes, had they fund out," says Grof. "I went to the telephone, dialed the number in Kromeriz, and asked if I could speak with Ladislav. To my astonishment, the woman on the other side of the line started to cry. When she calmed down, she told me with a broken voice: 'Our son is not with us any more; he passed away, we lost him three weeks ago."
The Holographic Universe, pg. 69

Of course the dead are hardly the only thing people believe that they've made contact with during the entheogen induced state. For a more thorough description of these contacts I will now turn to Dr. Rick Strassman who conducted a series of tests on DMT, the most powerful of the entheogens, at the University of New Mexico during the early '90s. These experiments tie together many of threads we have discussed above. For instance, the bulk of Strassman's initial funding was given to him by the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, which I discussed in a previous article that can be viewed here.

Strassman describes the entities his patients encountered thusly:

When reviewing my bedside notes, I continually feel surprised in seeing how many of our volunteers "made contact" with "them," or other beings. At least half did so in some form or another. Research subjects used expressions like "entities," "beings," "aliens," "guides," and "helpers" to describe them. The "life-forms" looked like clowns, reptiles, mantises, bees, spiders, cacti, and stick figures.
DMT The Spirit Molecule, pg. 185

Already many of these figures, but especially clowns and aliens, we have seen have been associated with entheogens over the centuries. Reptiles, especially serpent-like beings, are another common manifestation that both aliens and entities from entheogen induced visions have appeared to be. Bees and the beehive (which several patients described the surroundings they saw in their visions as resembling) are a common symbol used in Freemasonry as well other secret societies. For instance the Bavarian Illuminati considered the beehive to represent the idea form of order for a society. Stick figures could describe the tall, thin beings people have taken to be elves over the centuries.

Back to Strassman:

There are surprising and remarkable consistencies among the volunteers' reports of contact with nonmaterial beings. Sound and vibration build until the scene almost explosively shifts to an "alien" realm. Volunteers find themselves on a bed or in a landing bay, research environment, or high-technology room. The highly intelligent beings of this "other" world are interested in the subject, seemingly ready for his or her arrival and wasting no time in "getting to work." There might be one particular being clearly in charge, directing the others. Volunteers frequently comment about the emotional quality of the relationship: loving, caring, or professionally detached.

Their "business" appeared to be testing, examining, probing, and even modifying the volunteer's mind and body. Sometimes testing came first, and after results were satisfactory, further interactions took place. They also communicated with the volunteers, attempting to convey information by gestures, telepathy, or visual imagery. The purpose of contact was uncertain, but several subjects felt a benevolent attempt on the beings' part to improve us individually or as a race.
DMT The Spirit Molecule, pg. 199

The connections with UFO abductions should be clear from the previous descriptions. Strassman as well as most of his test subjects describe these entities as loving and benevolent more often than not. But even the subjects positively dispossessed to them describe a kind of feeding frenzy on their emotions. Here's an actual patent's narrative:

I went directly into deep space. hey knew i as coming back and they were ready for me. They told me there were many things they could share with us when we learn how to make more extended contacts. Again, they wanted something from me, not just physical information. They were interested in emotions and feelings. I told them, "We have something we can give you: spirituality." I guess what I really meant was Love. I tried to figure out how to do this. I felt a tremendous energy, brilliant pink light with white edges, building on my left side. I knew it was spiritual energy and Love. They were on my right, so I reached out my hands across the universe and prepared to be a bridge. I let this energy pass through me to them. I said something like, "See, there I did it for you. You have it." They were grateful. I was coming down off the DMT, losing altitude. I would have to go back.

I was a little disappointed that experience was spent "giving" when what I wanted was spiritual enlightenment. Should I have asked for something to take back first? I guess I don't feel comfortable in my role as an earthly spiritual emissary. But I did my best. I always knew we weren't alone in the universe. I thought that the only way to encounter them is with bright lights and flying saucers in outer space. It never occurred to me to actually encounter them in our own inner space. I thought the only things we could encounter were things in our own personal sphere of archetypes and mythology. I expected spirit guides and angels, not alien life-forms.
DMT The Spirit Molecule, pg. 215

Here's account from a different subject with more disturbing implications about this energy transfer:

When I was first going under there were these insect creatures all around me. They were clearly trying to break through. I was fighting letting go of who I am or was. The more I fought, the more demonic they became, probing into my psyche and being. I finally started letting go of parts of myself, as I could no longer keep so much of me together. As I did, I still clung to the idea that all was God, and that God was love, and I was giving myself up to God and God's love because I was certain I was dying. As I accepted my death and dissolution into God's love, the insectoids began to feed on my heart, devouring the feelings of love and surrender.

...They were interested in emotions. As I was holding on to my last thought, that God equals love, they said, "Even here? Even here? I said, "Yes, of course." They were still there but I was making love to them at the same time. They feasted as they made love to me. I don't know if they were male or female or something else, but it was extremely alien, though not necessarily unpleasant. The thought came to me with certainty that they were manipulating my DNA, changing its structure.

DMT The Spirit Molecule, pg. 206

Again, one can't help but be reminded of the similarities with descriptions of sexual contact during alien abductions. It's also interesting to note that this subject, as well as the previously quoted subject above, were both practitioners of Wicca and knew each other through that community prior to the Strassman experiments. Further, there's some evidence that the subject, named Rex in the book, experienced some kind of physical change after the DMT trip. He contracted cancer:

Before one of his last pindolol days, he asked me to look at a festering mole on his leg. I urged him to immediately consult with a dermatologist, who diagnosed malignant melanoma. Rex could not be in any more studies until his cancer was worked up and treated.

DMT The Spirit Molecule, pg. 211

This subject was hardly the only one to experience some kind of negative real world fallout from the DMT experience. Another striking example is this one:

At 15 minutes he began describing his approach to the space station. More relevant to his terror, he described what he saw upon opening his eyes:

I looked at Cindy and she had incredible clown makeup on. It was not funny. It was malevolent. I was afraid to look at her face. I don't really know you, Cindy, but you seem real nice. It was the drug. I had just a flash of you, Rick -like a stainless-steel face, with intimations of protuberances and knobs. Cindy was bad enough. I couldn't look at you directly. It would have ruined your bedside manner forever.

...His truck broke down on the way home. His wife picked him up, and she spent the drive back to their house describing horrific memories of childhood incest that were emerging in her therapy. Two messages awaited them upon their arrival: a friend had shot his head off in a suicide, another friend was dying rapidly of cancer.

When we spoke the next day, he wondered, "What's real? What's not? It felt like a boulder was dropped into the pond, not a pebble, and the wake was being felt everywhere. The man who killed himself did so at just about the time I took the DMT. It makes me believe in synchronicity of some sort or another."
DMT The Spirit Molecule, pg. 259

Indeed. Cancer seems to be one of the most disturbing synchs of Strassman's research -even his own wife (and soon to be former) contracted cancer during the course of his studies. By the the end of his research Strassman would be divorced as well as ousted from the Buddhist monastic community he had belonged to since the 1970s. Several other patients would go through a divorce during or shortly after Strassman's research. The experiences some patients encountered were so intense that they eventually formed a support group to deal with the issues that emerged from these encounters.

To recap: The entheogenic state leads to encounters that have taken the forms of UFOs, elves, dwarfs, fairies, demons and other mystical beings since time immortal. These encounters have been recorded in our folk customs in the forms of carnivals, circuses and the initiation rites of various secret societies and ancient Mystery Schools even when the use of entheogens had been forgotten. In modern times scientist have made remarkable observations of what individuals under the influence of entheogens have seen and in some cases have even brought back real world evidence to verify these encounters, such as Grof's conversation with the parents of a deceased young man whom had contacted one of Grof's patients during an LSD trip. According to the traditions of different secret societies and Mystery School as well as the entities themselves, they are bringers of a higher evolutionary state.

But should we trust these claims? The reoccurring synchronicity of cancer in Strassman's experiments alone should give us pause. Just how trustworthy the claims of nonmaterial beings are will be examined in much greater depth in articles to come.