Noise In The Channel

My anomalistic research has been almost entirely in the field of UFO history, particularly using the U.S. government documents gained through the Freedom of Information Act to base it upon solid evidence. Rarely has this research cross-fertilized with my interest in the psychic and spiritual, but occasionally the two unlike paths do intersect. One such instance relates to today's post. Early in the history of the UFO subject [1950s] there arose a group of persons claiming to be receiving direct messages from people "flying" the disks. These persons got the nickname "contactees" and had a large and negative effect on the general public's willingness to take the UFO concept seriously. It was completely understandable. The Contactees claim to converse with people from every known planet plus many unknown ones. Although the messages often had themes of love and anti-war [even early pro-environment ideas], most of the "transcripts" were vague platitudes, and "scientific" nonsense bordering on gibberish. Almost all these Contactees got their messages by "trance-control" methods--so they claimed. I know for certain that this, in some sense, is true. It is true, because, some years ago, I decided to preserve the archival files of one of the most famous of these people, a man named George Hunt Williamson. GHW was a very influential person in this early "new age" movement and easily the most creative. [he's the fellow at the upper left]. My rationale for preserving his files was not that he could tell you much about UFOs, but he was an extreme case of an intellectual and behavioral response [for better or worse] to them. I've never regretted spending the money on this preservation as the files are endlessly entertaining if nothing else.
GHW got his contacts from outer space by Ouija. Several other of the contactees used Ouija or derivative methods to receive their messages as well. GHW believed that what was happening in Ouija was that one gave oneself over to the board and spiritual entities, not really "dead persons", took over your own body in order to communicate. [so, in some sense, "you" DO push the planchet; it's just where the "other" wants it pushed]. GHW would, at the drop of a whim, whip out a large sheet of paper, draw the requisite letters et al, and grab a glass and off he would go spinning the glass so rapidly around the make-shift "board" that a transcriber could barely keep up. When that became too cumbersome, he graduated to just "going into an altered state" and simply vocalizing what his spiritual contact had to say. Thus, in GHW's and most other "space brothers" contactees minds, Ouija and Trance-control Mediumship were exactly the same thing.
How true were the messages? To my reading of them, and given the advantage of 50 years of objective evaluative distance, they were utter nonsense. Take this bit of a trance reading as an example and you can make your own evaluation: Question-Is there a space group working under the name [of Ashtar] that's on the Black side? Answer-" There is a particular group that is nothing but a group of beings that operate a gigantic mechanical brain or computer, to which I believe you have heard your friend to the south refer [reference to another channeler]. It is one of the computers that was left after the collapse of the Galactic Administration, or Galactic Empire. Now Ashtar is then a code name for this great computer, and these many beings that operate it will pass through certain questions desiring answers. It is not infallible. There is a reason why it has the name Ashtar, which I will not go into at the moment, but it is also in connection with Astarte. In other words, it is the cause not the effect--it is the cause from which came the name Astarte in the first place (or "Ashtaroth") because the Ashtar computing system or the Ashtar computer was used primarily for the computation of sexual and physical problems of fertility, both in crops or plants, animals, and man. Is that point clear? Are you beginning to get the picture?"...actually I think that I am.
Now, I hope that it strains your credulity that anyone could take this sort of "revelation" seriously; but they most certainly did. That reading is taken from a book of trance readings compiled by GHW and a group of U.S. citizens who decided to call themselves the Brotherhood of the Seven Rays [no, I'm not kidding]. This was NOT a scam. These people believed all this completely. How do I know? These people quit their jobs, uprooted their families, and moved to the Peruvian jungles to outlast the coming Earth cataclysm and find the lost Temples of the Ancient Brotherhood and rejoin our long-lost Atlantaen forebears, still hermetically present waiting for those of us advanced enough to find them. This combination of Earth "doomsday-ism" and finding the lost super-civilization of Paititi in South America was a message begun by Dorothy Martin of Chicago, who, taking the name of "Sister Thedra", channeled various ascended masters who told her all this. [Thedra is at upper right]. This wowed Michigan State Professor Charles Laughead [lower left], who began warning the rest of us that doomsday was imminent. Michigan State was not amused and fired him. Undampened by this, since Michigan State and Michigan itself would be "gone" in the cataclysm soon anyway, Laughead, Thedra, GHW, and several others went first to New Mexico [to get precise directions from their Ouija masters] and then on to "rural", to put it mildly, Peru. Shockingly, the world did not end, nor have any easily recognizable cataclysms occurred [you may object by filling in the names of certain politicians if you insist, but I don't think that's what GHW et al were talking about]. The whole affair is chronicled in "When Prophecy Fails ", a book which uses only their aliases, but these are the real folks.
Part of the bottom line in this for me has been: don't underestimate the ability of some of us to fall for almost anything; and make life-changing commitments based on fear or wishful thinking. But I will not just leave this at that [foolish people fooling themselves]. The "evidence", anecdotal as it is, points, to me, towards the view that often the Ouija, or the "channeling", or the "automatic writing", truly contacts something. That contact may not always be deceptive, but it often is. In fact, deception seems to be the majority behavior in these stories, when taken as an aggregate. Young people are easily deceived. Fearful people and people with little "foundation" are easily deceived. What's behind that deception I can't claim to know, but it seems to require a certain degree of real spirituality to avoid turning you towards a personal "bad place". In UFO history, we also saw a somewhat similarly "led-astray" group [Heaven's Gate] mass-suicide on the basis of this deception. Is it all based on similar evil intent? No. I have a good and very spiritual friend who contacts his "spirit guide" through automatic writing, whatever that really amounts to. He thrives in this, I believe, because he is already a depth-spiritual and loving person. Are you?