(ABOVE: Is it REALLY a flying saucer? Wouldn’t you like to know! But hey, doesn’t that sun flare look great?)

…Why schlep a bunch of water around the Universe, or between the Worlds?

I inherited my interest in “the dodgy subject of UFOs,” as Jimi Hendrix so aptly put it, from my father, the radar engineer. He was a fucking brilliant man who could sit down with a mechanical pencil, a slide rule, a couple of yellow legal pads, a pack of Camels and a bunch of reference books and design the electrical circuits for your radar set!

This is an intellectual feat of which I am utterly incapable. My mind just doesn’t work that way, and to my regret it never has. I am not that organized, numbers do not speak to me and I have trouble visualizing (my way of understanding) how electricity works. The differences between voltage, amperage and resistance elude me. My talents lie elsewhere, and they are not those of my father. I shoot better photos than he ever did, and I’ve written three books, pretty good books I’d say, one of which may outlive me, which he never presumed to do. I guess he had no stories of his own to tell. Mine are clawing through my chest to get out.

When I was very young, my father, having served honorably in the U.S. Army Signal Corps in World War II operating a radar unit on fucking Iwo Jima, as soon as the Marines got done cleaning it up, continued to work for the Army as a civilian after the war. He helped design the Missile Master, the first radar-guided, computer-controlled anti-aircraft missile system in the world, and this was when computers that were only four-bangers filled whole trailers with their vacuum tubes, and another trailer with the air-conditioning system required to keep the vacuum tubes from melting under their own heat.

His name was Millard Maxwell Brenner. It had been Cohen, but he and his younger brother, on the advice of his professors at MIT, changed it because they warned him that with a Jewish name like Cohen he’d never go anywhere in the electronics industry, no matter what his skills. My father was a realist; he didn’t have an axe to grind, and gave in to what then must have seemed like the inevitable. It wasn’t like the government wanted to tattoo a number on his arm, after all!

When I was about 5 I became aware that on his bookshelf there were a number of books about UFOs, which were a much more interesting subject in the 1950’s or 60’s than they were in the 1970’s or 80’s. These included Edward Ruppelt’s The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, M. K. Jessup’s The Case For the UFO, and Sir Desmond Leslie and George Adamski’s rather more dubious Flying Saucers Have Landed, among others. And as I grew up I read them. My father had an open mind; he wouldn’t have been doing his job as a radar engineer if he hadn’t been interested in “angels,” as anomalous returns were then called. So he remained non-comittal about the subject, but he did acknowledge, years ahead of the scientific establishment, that the Universe was probably full of habitable planets and life. Earth, he assumed, must be run-of-the-mill for habitable planets; there probably wasn’t anything special about it, given the law of averages.

So that is how I came by my lifelong interest in the dodgy subject. I inherited it.

Most recently my thinking on the subject has evolved rather quickly, inspired by both the work of cybernetician and astronomer Jacques Vallee, and by the real-life events that led me to write my most recent novel, Mel-Khyor: An Interstellar Affair. Vallee is famous for having started his career as an associate of Dr. J. Allen Hynek, and writing his first two books in support of the extra-terrestrial hypothesis (ETH) as being the likely origin of the UFOs. That didn’t last long. He quickly developed not only a number of questions about the ETH, but a skeptical attitude toward the groups providing researchers with “channeled” information (expressed in the very memorable Passport to Magonia, which ought to be the title of a TV series based on Vallee’s life and investigations. You wouldn’t have to fictionalize it nearly as much as Project Blue Book does to Hynek’s!).

What Vallee had noticed was something that also attracted the attention of American folk-lorist and UFO researcher John Keel: The reported close encounter of the 3rd kind (CE3K) with a UFO was functionally identical to many of the tales of religious experiences, demonic encounters and visits to the land of the “shining people” or the Sidhi, as the Celts called them, one encounters in Medieval literature, and earlier writings. It raised a number of questions about the phenomenon and the encounter experience which the ETH utterly failed to answer. I will not detail them here, as Vallee has done a great job of that in his books.

This made a lot of sense, and up until 1993, when I met the woman I identify as “Susie Louise McGonagall” in Mel-Khyor, I was convinced that UFOs were as much paranormal as mechanical. Susie’s story of a crashed alien spaceship and its humanoid occupant, who was very much flesh-and-blood (to the point of having consensual sex with her several times during his stay), landed with a lot of weight, partially because I was familiar with the person who told it.

And, as the years passed and different opportunities presented themselves to check aspects of the story out, I did. The decision tree always broke in Susie’s favor, but I could never prove anything; I just couldn’t disprove it conclusively! Nothing ever contradicted her memory of events, and that story is told in Mel-Khyor. It is so much a nuts-and-bolts event (pardon the pun) that it seems to argue strongly for the extra-terrestrial hypothesis. So I found myself examining it in the light of Susie’s reported case, and the evidence for the origins of UFOs to be paranormal, or, more specifically, multi-dimensional. It may be that we are limited in what we can accept is “normal,” but I really doubt the existence of the supernatural. There are simply realms of nature with which we are as yet strikingly unfamiliar.

What do I mean by “multi-dimensional”? Nothing woo, nothing about “vibrations” or “higher awareness.” Time for some geometry! We inhabit what is commonly referred to as a 3-dimensional world, because you need a minimum of 3 coordinates to locate an event or object in space: width (X), height (Y), and depth (Z). But this description is incomplete, because our universe contains an extra dimension, but one in which our movement is restricted to one direction only!

I refer, of course, to TIME. You can’t leave that out of the description, because in addition to an object’s coordinates in space, you also have to mention when you’re talking about, because if you forget to specify what time, you end up in an episode of Dr. Who, where one time is as likely as any other!

So we seem to live in a 4-dimensional universe, but is time really an extra dimension? It has the unique property that it’s the only dimension in which we have no freedom of movement. Our trajectory, if not our destination, is determined at conception. We move from young to old, from life to death, from low entropy to high, from now ’till then. Perhaps time is not fully a dimension, but a fraction of a dimension intruding into the matter universe. One can imagine a creature that is as free to move about in time as we are in space, but as many science-fiction writers (notably Robert Silverberg, see The Masks of Time and Up the Line) have mined this vein to death, I’ll let it lie.

So when I write about a multi-dimensional being, I mean one from a universe where more than 4 reference points are needed to locate an object or event. That’s all… it sounds simple, but think about it for a moment. If you move a line at right angles to itself you get a plane, and if you move a plane at right angles for itself you get a cube. But how, in our space, do you move a cube at right angles to itself? It already has all the angles that fit in our universe!

I guess you move it in time, but I have no idea how to do that, other than waiting.

What does this have to do with higher dimensions? Just this: UFOs behave in our world not as if they were real objects, but as if they were merely 4-dimensional projections out of a higher dimensional world. As projections, they don’t have to obey the rules of our universe, just appear to at their discretion! They can accelerate instantly, decelerate the same, turn upside-down or any direction, shrink, expand, appear, disappear, change shape or penetrate solid matter because they have no mass, and no inertia. It is not until they choose to interact with us that they become “solid,” as we understand the term, i.e. where all the electron probability shells in all the atoms of this world remain intact when objects meet.

Because UFOs seem to have this ability of themselves, I believe humans are the victims of sleight-of-hand on a cosmic scale. Since the beginning of time we have been dealing with the occupants of the UFOs, in all their multi-species glory: the Annunaki and the Greek Gods, the Grays and the Nordics, the Reptoids and the Mantis Beings, etc. These sock puppets have distracted us from the real intelligence behind these multiple masks: THE VEHICLES, THE UFOS THEMSELVES!

Consider this: human beings and all life forms on Earth are made of protoplasm, and protoplasm is 70% water. Is protoplasm a good repository for memory? Well, until we developed electronic memory, it was all Nature could come up with! That doesn’t mean it’s ideal. Compared to solid-state memory, the central nervous system, brains and all, is delicate, over-designed, fussy, demanding, requires a complex support system (the body) and careful programmatic instruction (we call it education) to yield optimal results. Even when it’s operating right, it’s subject to subjectivity, the limitations of its evolved senses, environmental influences and distractions, disease, aging and ultimately death, if senility doesn’t wipe it out first.

Compared to solid state memory, hardly ideal.

So, if you are a race of beings with the power to control what we laughingly refer to as “reality” in all the ways the Visitors (to use Whitley Strieber’s term for them) do, it kind of begs the question:

WHY SCHLEP AROUND A BUNCH OF WATER, WHEN YOU CAN JUST SCHLEP AROUND ITS MEMORIES AND THE INFORMATION IN IT?

What we should assume, then, is that after we sight a UFO, any interaction with it occurs in an altered state of reality where the usual laws of physics appear to be suspended. But does this reality have to be our reality? Are abduction experiencers really transported through closed glass windows, even solid walls? Not if, like a stage magician, you don’t have to break the laws of physics if you can simply convince someone that you have.

This doesn’t mean that the Visitors are, in any sense of the word, unreal, or that the abduction experience is in any way distinguishable from a real event. “In the province of the mind, whatever one believes true either is true or becomes true, within certain limits. These limits are to be determined experimentally and experientially,” said Doctor John, the Night Tripper — I refer to Dr. John C. Lilly, M.D., of course, the bastard father of interspecies communications.

What it means is that any interaction with the UFO or its occupants can be interpreted as being manufactured on the spot to order. It’s the UFO itself that’s yanking our chain, not the aliens it disgorges. They’re just so much window dressing, like all the hangars, workshops, control rooms and operating rooms inside UFOs are. Whether they are real or not is a moot point in investigating the experience, because the abductee is convinced by the immediacy and weirdness of what she sees, hears and feels that everything is real, from the cold steel table under them to skinning their knuckles punching an alien jaw.

When the abduction event is over, the interior rooms disappear, and the Visitors themselves are debriefed and sucked back into the UFOs memory, to be recalled as necessary. Thus, the UFO can be entirely solid-state when traveling between stars, or when it interpenetrates our universe. The needs of a crew constructed of bone and protoplasm need not be considered, greatly simplifying the requirements of the vehicle-operator!

This realization, that UFOs are themselves a multi-dimensional solid-state intelligence capable of manifesting all the physical events of the UFO encounter or abduction experience (at least in such a way that the abductee is overwhelmed by them), is, I think, as far as I can carry my analysis. Having reduced the CE3K encounter to its simplest explanation, I can go no farther, unless some other idea comes to mind.

Well, there it is, but what does it mean? It means we can disregard the multiplicity of alien species appearing on our planet and look at the experience itself, on the common factors between all UFO encounters. Perhaps the use of lights, which UFOs use in the same manner as bioluminescent squids: to attract their prey! There is no reason why UFOs cannot approach someone without giving away their presence, as indeed they often do, but the colored lights hanging in the sky silently command our attention in a way nothing else can.

Where does this leave me with regards to Mel-Khyor? I’ve always said that in our observations of the UFO, we are probably confusing several phenomena, like really unusual ball lightning, sprites and cold plasmas, secret government black-ops recon projects, alien spaceships and perhaps even multi-dimensional beings. One hypothesis doesn’t rule out the others! Susie’s story about Mel-Khyor may be true, or it may be an elaboration or a complete fantasy, but if she made it up she was lucky, and struck the truth without meaning to an unusual amount of times.

I think this elaboration gives us a handle to understand CE3K events, and especially the abduction event, in a new light. Once we accept the established fact that the UFO itself represents an intrusion on our reality, it becomes wise to carry the thought to its logical conclusion, which is what I’ve tried to do. I hope I’ve made myself clear, even though my expression of the ideas here is somewhat clunky or clumsy… if I had more time, I would have made it shorter!

Have a nice day, keep one alligator length apart for social distancing, and, in the immortal words of Kevin McCarthy in 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, “KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES!”

(Oh, and that photo at the top of the article? It’s a Frisbee I painted silver and threw in the desert with one hand while I snapped the camera with the other. Sorry, when I get a picture of a real UFO, you’ll be the first to know it!)