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

questions, but science was busy looking for the answers . . . And suddenly, I was confronting a question that had no answer. It was as if the ground beneath my feet had collapsed. I left the class that day with a sense of dizziness, and a deep-seated fear, as if some terrible disaster had occurred. It was suddenly horribly clear to me that the apparently solid, normal world around us was a very thin facade, and that what lay behind it might be very disquieting indeed. We had no idea of who we were or where we came from or where we were going.
    I had no way of knowing at the time, but this insight was just about the ideal preparation for looking into the problem of UFOs.
    From that point, my universe went on crumbling; new cracks appeared all the time. I could see that the pleasant securities of childhood, all of those warm little human emotions, all of those trivial aims and purposes that we allow to rule our lives, were an illusion. We were like sheep munching grass, unaware that the butcher’s lorry is already on its way. I got used to living with a deep, underlying feeling of uncertainty that no one around me seemed to share. It was rather like living on death row.
    Even so, periods of intense depression were interrupted by flashes of the feeling I called—after a phrase of G. K. Chesterton—‘absurd good news’. It often happened early on a summer morning, when I set out on a long cycle ride, with a bag of sandwiches and a bottle of lemonade in a knapsack: the feeling that the world was infinitely rich, and that the problem lay in the limitedness of consciousness itself. In this state, the feeling that all our human values are illusions seemed unimportant, for our values are part of our ordinary state of consciousness. And these moments seem to offer the possibility of a far richer form of consciousness. Even in my states of deepest depression, I could recognise that depression is merely another name for low pressure, and that our inner pressure depends, to a large extent, on our assumptions. If we wake up feeling today is going to be futile, it probably will be.
    These, it seemed to me, are the really interesting questions: how we could raise the intensity of consciousness, how we could cease to be what Nietzsche called ‘human, all too human’. It seemed obvious that the feeling of happiness and expectation is a state of mind, which has nothing to do with the actual circumstances of our lives. You could feel it as easily in a rubbish tip as standing on top of Mount Everest. In that case the great riddle lay inside us, not in what happens around us.
    All of which explains why I was totally uninterested in news items about flying saucers. If they were visitors from another planet, no doubt they would finally make themselves known. But I could not really believe that they were Martians or Venusians. And, to tell the truth, I didn’t care much.
    I felt rather the same when my grandmother had talked to me about spiritualism. As a child, I had taken an interest in ghosts and spirits; now they seemed absurdly unimportant in comparison with this question about the meaning of human existence.
    A few years later, when I read George Adamski’s claims that he had been taken to Venus in a flying saucer, I was confirmed in my belief that people who believe in flying saucers must be idiots.
    In due course, events caused me to broaden my perspective. In the late 1960s, I was asked to write a book about the paranormal. As soon as I began to look into such matters as telepathy, precognition, second sight, out-of-the-body experiences, it became obvious to me that they cannot be shrugged off as delusions. I remained convinced that most people are interested in the paranormal for the wrong reasons—out of a kind of escapism—but felt nevertheless that the evidence for ghosts or poltergeists or precognition is as strong as the evidence for atoms and electrons.
    Towards the end of The Occult, I felt obliged to include a section on