DIMENSIONS UNMEASURABLE, by Trevor James Constable
A man who has bought a theory will fight a vigorous rearguard action against the facts. —JOSEPH ALSOP
Mechanistically-minded humans have accepted uncritically the theory of interplanetary spaceships as the fundamental explanation of UFOs. This theory has dominated the subject from the modern advent of the phenomena down to the present day. Involving only a linear projection of extant earthly technology, and doing no violence to the mechanistic cosmo-conception, this simplistic theory has paralyzed the thought processes of several generations of human beings interested in UFOs.
Acceptable as one theory relevant to certain types of UFOs, the ships-from-other-planets approach was elevated irrationally to the status of a foregone conclusion for explaining every UFO sighting. The bankruptcy of official science in the empirical phase of the UFO field is due to its having sought to prove this foregone conclusion. The time has come to establish a more rational perspective, from which we will allow the phenomena to tell us about themselves in their own way. Manifestation is a language of its own, and one we must learn. Compulsively demanding that phenomena respond to mechanistic criteria has been barren of results.
The ships-from-other-planets concept was the bedrock upon which an “establishment” in ufology was erected. Immature notions of cosmic workings characterize this approach, together with overconfidence in the current crop of mechanistic scientists. Habile and pitilessly efficient at perfecting engines of destruction, these men have drawn blanks on UFOs. The charm of the ships-from-other-planets notion lay for years in the expectation that UFOs could be understood with existing scientific knowledge, or with linear extensions of such knowledge that were deemed imminent. The approach least likely to disturb the neurotic weltanschauung, ships-from-other-planets therefore became automatically the most popular, despite its irreconcilability with a large corpus of observations.
Subscribers to this theory as the primary explanation for UFOs exhibit a marked blindness in connection with UFO propulsion. Ships-from-other-planets as they have impinged on earth life, command a power source impenetrable to official science. Energy in some arcane form is being used for propulsion in a way that earthmen do not yet understand. Since extensions of existing technology in no way approach UFO propulsion capabilities as observed, native common sense suggests, with much evidential support, that progress may be made by taking a wholly new approach.
Ships-from-other-planets devotees usually recoil from this idea. Common sense suggests a possible beginning in offbeat, borderland areas of investigation and thought, where human beings of novel bent have always labored outside and usually beyond official science. The mavericks of this borderland include many qualified scientists who explore the field avocationally. These scientists tackle phenomena that do not square with mechanistic concepts and methods, or which seemingly spill over into the methodologically forbidden realm of faith. Such individuals are increasing in number, and they are true to the ideals of science.
Since UFOs stand outside mechanistic concepts, and have also evoked a powerful mystico-religious response among humans, this borderland area of original, untrammeled work and thought might be expected to yield valuable indications to any UFO project mounted by official science. No such approach has been made. On the contrary, scientists who had studied UFOs avocationally—sometimes investing thousands of hours of their leisure in this way—were ruled out of the Colorado University project for fear that their objectivity would be adversely influenced. Organized ufology has also been unable to extend itself even to the fringe of the borderland.
Evidence that punches holes in mechanistic conceptions—such as the multitudinous examples of materialization of UFOs—is papered over or shunted aside in favor of evidence considered “harder”, that is, more accessible to mechanistic method. When the UFO subject began to take on an inevitable mystical and occult aspect, establishment-type UFO organizations responded by elevating ministers and rabbis to their boards and committees. They have proved themselves as helpless as the official scientists. The main idea in all these machinations was to maintain comfort and avoid tackling the invisible.
Contact stories were dismissed as unworthy of scientific consideration, and every establishment-type UFO organization has a list of such “cranks.” The irrationality of these organizations seems incredible, since they obviously conclude that UFO intelligences should communicate only with two groups of earthmen:
1. Scientists already beaten by the phenomena, which had torn the fabric of Mechanism to rags. 2. Political leaders who were using the full machinery of government to suppress UFO evidence and discourage its discussion.
This irrational bias toward an orthodox, thoroughly safe approach to the subject has barred the way to the comprehensive theory that the facts—be they welcome or unwelcome—demand out of their own stuff and substance. A comprehensive theory of UFOs cannot evade what has been observed, experienced and recorded by human beings in connection with UFOs, nor may it exclude the mass-psychological factors that militate against free discussion of the subject. Many dimensions of the UFO problem are indeed immeasurable.
The UFO mystery is intimately involved with the whole question of how human beings perceive phenomena, and how their perceptions are bioenergetically and biopsychiatrically distorted. In short, we confront the inherent errors of man’s natural philosophy. The idea that UFOs and their technical principles can be adequately dealt with by unaided physicists, engineers and aerospace specialists, supported by ministers of religion—is recklessly naive. The days when we can delude ourselves that we are investigating this subject when we run deferentially to panels of physicists for approval of our findings, or when we try and get Congress to act, are gone forever for all realists. The experts of this earth are experts in what this subject—these phenomena—are not.
UFO phenomena are all around us, unseen. This basic fact has been established by radar and further demonstrated by my pioneering photography. Accurate understanding of such phenomena requires the New Knowledge, in which formal qualifications may well run second, third, or worse to actual participation. Cosmic tides wash strongly against the ivory towers of mechanistic science, and will tumble those ivory towers just as soon as old ways and methods are transmuted by the brilliant young men and women already entering upon careers in science. They are a new and different breed of human, and formal education lags far behind the exceptional powers and capacities that they have brought with them into the world.
Native common sense, activism, unblocked perceptions and a free human being’s understanding and acceptance of his own basic life processes, are the primary qualifications for facing UFOs on their own ground. The new young scientists have these faculties and capacities. Their diligent scientific labors in years to come will codify what is merely broached and indicated in this book—in short, they will make it into the science of tomorrow. By summarizing here the tradition-wrecking aspects of UFOs, we can illustrate strikingly the need for a fundamentally new thinking—strong and vital enough to break man out of the straitjacket of the past.
The role of radar in demonstrating the invisibility of many UFOs has already been described, and its role in provoking the phenomena broached for later elaboration. Subsequent to the large-scale development of radar, UFOs also appeared as visible, physical objects, and they have been with modern man ever since. Atomic explosives and atomic power are also interwoven with the nexus of electrical events already cited. The mode of this atomic implication will be clarified when the discovery of orgone energy is elaborated in later chapters.
A comprehensive theoretical approach to UFOs must provide an acceptable explanation, preferably with experimental support, for the visible manifestations as well as for electronic sightings of invisible UFOs. Scientific honesty requires that nothing observed should be evaded. Since UFOs have been seen to appear and disappear on numerous occasions, we must be prepared to deal with transitions of substance from physical to invisible-physical. In my personal experience, I have never once seen a UFO in the normal physical state that did not vanish while I had it under observation.
Since I could not follow these objects with my sense apparatus, my adventures stem largely from following them with my thinking. External apparatus was then used to objectify and verify what my thinking commended to me as being truthful and lawful about their disappearance. By their mode of manifestation, UFOs are inviting us to follow them. That is what they are “saying” when they disappear before our eyes.
The facts as they have unfolded in the UFO field force us to go much farther than understanding even such seemingly incomprehensible happenings as materialization and dematerialization of flying discs. Ignoring the evidence of his scientific instruments has brought into question the methodological and epistemological basis of man’s modern science. We have been forced into mass-characterological considerations of a dimension and complexity almost as staggering as the UFO phenomena that have thrown these considerations into relief. Errors and inadequacies to date lie less in scientific instruments and materials than in the character structure of those using these tools of investigation. The instrument is worthless in the hands of the man who cannot tolerate biophysically and biopsychically what it records.
Railing against a dying but still powerful order in science is of no value. Mechanism is there. We are dealing with a definite psychophysical structure in Mechanism that can be understood, but not changed in the mass sense, other than prophylactically. Children raised in accord with New Knowledge principles and emerging into healthy, nonneurotic adulthood, will not easily accept the mechanico-mystical splitting of the human psyche to which prior generations have been forced to succumb. The youth revolution has its roots in the new, healthy wholeness of the coming humanity. This is another of the numerous immeasurable dimensions to the UFO problem.
The mechanistic scientific mind has been oriented for generations to denial of the invisible. This mind has accordingly been unable to approach UFO phenomena that beckon human attention to invisible strata of energy and substance, wherein lie the roots of life. That invisible UFOs suddenly appear to our gaze, and that conversely, visible UFOs suddenly disappear to our gaze, simply tells us that the invisible and the visible are functionally unified. The structural tendency of the mechanistic mind to split apart functional wholes—to shatter to fragments and then bewail the complexity of nature—is well illustrated in this aspect of ufology.
As this book proceeds, the reader will be made aware of what has already been achieved, although not officially accepted, in exploring our invisible-physical borderland and its denizens. My experience has taught me the futility of seeking formal recognition for any of these findings, because such a venture reduces itself always to a hopeless battle against character structure—against modes of reaction and behavior inculcated since infancy. One is forced to choose between continued quiet work and exhaustion in the labyrinths of scientific bureaucracy.
My choice was the former, seeking to demonstrate as conclusively as possible that the invisible is upon us, and to illustrating and illuminating the cognitional impasse in which mechanistic science has landed itself at the time of its greatest triumphs and highest influence. The immeasurable dimensions of the UFO mystery include this constant pressure for change on the old, classical scientific order. Youthful attention turns inevitably toward functionalism—the ability to follow with the mind the perpetual dynamic changes of the living. A cosmo-conception backed by nearly two centuries of continuous academic and cultural support is now under fire through UFOs. We are already a long way from mere ships-from-other-planets.
Tied in with the chronological breakthrough of UFOs came the “foo fighters” of World War II. Scientific non-results in dealing with this phenomenon demonstrate many of the inadequacies of existing cognition and method. To this day the foo fighters have not been satisfactorily explained.
These elusive, seemingly intelligent small objects played luminously around warplanes toward the end of World War II in Europe. Allied reaction was to classify them as a new German weapon under tests, since no casualties resulted from their presence. The Germans thought they were a new Allied invention. After the war, both sides found their evaluations incorrect. Foo fighters belong to no one on earth. During the Korean War, they were seen again.
Harvard University’s Dr. Donald Menzel opined that they were reflective eddies created around battle damage to Allied aircraft, but Dr. Menzel didn’t carry out his usual comprehensive research. His assertion in his book Flying Saucers, that battle damage to Allied bombers was greater in the final stages of the war is historically insupportable. In the Korean War furthermore, U.S. aircraft suffered little battle damage, due to the lack of consistent enemy air strength.
Foo fighters should be amenable to explanation by the kind of comprehensive UFO theory of which mankind stands in need. Ad hoc theories to cover specific, isolated instances can usually be formulated by specialists when the phenomena appear within the scope of their disciplines, but rarely are such theories useful beyond the specific instances. An approach is needed that can help break down the compartmentalization of knowledge—in itself a consequence of man’s propensity to split apart and artificialize phenomena that are functionally unified.
The UFO theory needed should permit an understanding not only of the determinism of foo fighters, but of the functional relationship they bear to all the other invisible objects encountered in ufology and to the more conventional flying discs. Now if we take a highly sensitive Super 8mm camera to 30,000 feet in broad daylight in an airliner, load that camera with standard Ektacolor 160 film and cover the lens with an 18A filter, we have an experimental arrangement that can record evidence. An 18A filter is scientifically designed to absorb all visible light and color. Don’t let that worry you. Shoot a few rolls of such color film, with a filter designed to block all color. You’ll find the whole gamut of UFOs are out there, and you’ll record them in color. Impossible? Don’t even discuss the matter until you have acted, until you have been there and done it.
A vista of staggering portent beckons with the use of digital camcorders, similarly fitted with an 18A filter. This equipment was not available when this book was first written over thirty years ago, but now offers those willing to use it a number of amazing possibilities. From a technological standpoint there is no better time in history, for looking straight into this invisible world, than right now.
This is cited to illustrate how, by sometimes going 180 degrees against conventional theories and ideas, objective evidence of UFOs may be acquired. The man to beware of in this field is the narrow scientific specialist. He will be the first man stretched thin by the sheer width of the ufological spectrum. Only activism—work and participation—count in this field.
Solidly verified concomitants to UFOs include interference with electrical systems. Such UFO interaction with man’s electrical works date from World War II. The late Harold T. Wilkins reported an early incident involving suspension of an aircraft’s electrical system in his Flying Saucers Uncensored, a 1955 opus from Citadel Press of New York. Writes Wilkins on page 209:
“In 1944 an American pilot, flying over the Burma Road, said his plane was held motionless and propellers stopped, while far aloft a mysterious disc appeared to be putting a sort of immobilizing ray on his plane. After this seeming ‘inspection’ his power came on again, his propellers resumed turning and the mysterious object disappeared into the far blue.”
Since that time, the world has seen numerous instances of commercial power failure, suspension of auto and aircraft ignitions, and a variety of magnetic and electrical interference indisputably connected with UFOs. Such happenings must fit into a comprehensive UFO theory, and not be split off for study as discrete phenomena.
Caution towards the narrow specialist is enjoined by the occurrence of such phenomena within the much wider body of UFO phenomena in their totality. In earth science we cannot yet duplicate this ability to paralyze electrical activity. Ford Motor Company tried it unsuccessfully on automobile engines. The theorist concerning such paralytic activity should be asked to account also for kindred and connected UFO phenomena. If we apply this principle practically, we soon learn, practically, that much of our so-called “hard” knowledge is illusion. Here again, it is the orgone energy—the ether—with its demonstrable antagonism to electromagnetic energy, that provides the technical break-in.
Every scientific specialist faces a stupefying spectrum of phenomena connected with UFOs that lies outside his discipline, in areas in which he is not qualified technically even to hold an opinion. That is why Dr. Wilhelm Reich was right to say that there are no “authorities” and no “experts” now that cosmic science—the New Knowledge—is being literally forced upon us. The rational approach is a sharpened awareness of the inadequacies of mechanistic science in dealing with Cosmic phenomena. We are all brethren in ignorance, facing immeasurable new dimensions.
Hostility on the part of certain UFOs is another factor that must find its place in a comprehensive UFO theory. Establishment ufology has a blind spot here. This aspect of the UFO problem has been steadily resisted, despite the evidence that aircraft have been destroyed in the air—and sometimes kidnapped complete with crew. In my 1958 book They Live in the Sky, the affidavit of a veteran French pilot, M. Pierre Perry, was presented. Perry recounted a shocking incident he had observed from the ground in the wilds of Arizona in 1943.
A USAF aircraft with two occupants was deliberately destroyed by balloon-shaped UFOs. The bailed-out crewmen had their parachutes set on fire by heat rays from the UFOs. The unfortunate victims of these weird entities from space were crushed to death by their fall to the ground. Few indeed are the ufologists who will look directly at such happenings and see them for what they are. So-called “objective” investigators have preferred to disappear into the mist of wishful thinking.
In the same book, I presented another sworn case from Paris, Illinois, wherein a USAF jet fighter was observed from the ground by Mr. Eugene Metcalfe to be abducted in flight by a large, bell-shaped craft of unknown origin. The jet was simply swallowed into the underside of the hostile vehicle. This was one more instance of seriously unethical acts by entities from space, but the establishment in ufology declines to see such acts in all their clean clarity.
There was also the abduction over Lake Superior on 23 November 1953 of a USAF F-89 jet fighter piloted by Lt. Felix Moncla Jr., whose aircraft was vectored to a UFO by ground control intercept at Kinross AFB, near Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan. Moncla’s fighter merged on the radar screen with the UFO, the two objects becoming one large blip 70 miles from Keweenaw Point. Moncla and his radar observer, Lt. R. R. Wilson, were never seen again, their aircraft was never found, no wreckage was recovered, and the pursued UFO also disappeared.
Major Donald Keyhoe gave a full account of this baleful incident on pages 13-23 of his Flying Saucer Conspiracy. Despite this and many other similar incidents, until the end of his tenure as Director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), Major Keyhoe believed there was no convincing evidence of UFO hostility. Lts. Moncla and Wilson had vanished from human ken, complete with plane, but even this is deemed unconvincing evidence of hostility. Again we find, in a new way and in another facet of the UFO subject, that same evasion of the essential that has kept ufology tied to the skirts of the mechanistic world conception.
There have been numerous cases involving hostility on the ground in encounters between humans and a variety of queer entities who have dismounted from spacecraft of various kinds. Humans have been attacked and clawed, their abduction attempted, and others have been knocked senseless by various ray weapons possessed by the intruders. These incidents have occurred year in and year out, in areas as widely separated as South America and Scandinavia, and have been verified by responsible investigators.
Some of these incidents will arise later in this book, in context with new findings, but the serious student of ufology desiring a steady flow of such information can do no better than subscribe to the Flying Saucer Review from England. FSR presents the stories of these vital incidents after investigation by its qualified representatives in foreign countries. The publication is produced avocationally by a group of scientists, engineers and physicians whose qualifications are beyond reproach.
Self-styled skeptics avoid looking at these unsavory, unwelcome and disturbing facts. Weak jokes about “little green men” constitute the maximum effort mounted by the media of the western world with regard to these epochal encounters. Any intelligent, alert, unblocked and discriminating individual can satisfy himself quickly concerning the validity and the increasing incidence of these landings and encounters. They are no joking matter.
The hostility of certain visitants must be woven into a comprehensive UFO theory. Since the incidents continue with the years, and apparently began with the war period, we should expect a functional connection to exist with the other complex and seemingly impenetrable aspects of UFOs. Once more we may note that the narrow scientific specialist in a technical discipline can bring little to bear on this serious and far-reaching problem of ethics and behavior. Conventional psychiatrists and psychologists who might assist here cannot deal with radar or electromagnetic interference. The discovery of the orgone energy—alone among all events of the past several centuries—gives functional access to all these riddles. A new epoch has opened.
The obverse aspect of hostility is the reluctance of most UFOs to make contact with humans. Most UFOs are elusive. In most cases, the objects make off at high speed from the vicinity of human observers, from aircraft or from happenstance encounters with humans. This instant readiness to conceal themselves from human beings is well established, and must take its place in any comprehensive UFO theory. There must be a reasonable basis for saying why these things happen so frequently as to be among the basic characteristics of most UFOs.