A Prophet's Conference was being held in an old navy outpost in Port Townsend, located on the outskirts of Washington’s Olympic peninsular. We stayed in these rustic cabins all with white-shingled wall with green wood shake roofs, very 1940’s, which I guessed was fitting for a UFO conference, because the whole idea of flying saucers began with sightings and possible crashes in 1947.  However the slick auditorium,  dining room, bookshop and all the new age vendors, firmly place us at the end of the 20^th century.

The speakers at the conference are split into two schools of thought about UFOs: more leaning towards the negative, some positive; not much in between. The speakers either recount horrifying tales of nasty abduction procedures by aliens or contact with higher dimensional enlightened beings. Most of the evidence for either side is anecdotal and difficult to prove. Barring the old cliché about landing on the White House lawn there are some there in the scientific community willing to go on the record for the cause.  Edgar Mitchell is one of those happy few. He was an astronaut, sixth human being to walk on the moon. Mitchell got interested in metaphysics when on his way back to earth he experienced “a sense of universal connectedness,” which sounds very similar to the Sanskrit term, ‘samadhi.’ He felt that everything, the other astronauts, planet earth, and the rest of the cosmos were all part of a conscious plan. He founded the Noetic Institute, an organization dedicated to the investigation of science and consciousness.

Dr. John Mack, a Harvard psychiatrist, was bridge point between the two worlds of hard science and other realities. John was unique in that he has studied countless people who have been abducted with the novel idea of documenting their experience instead of assuming that they are crazy. It’s so easy for us to jump to conclusions and not look at the evidence. And maybe they’re not crazy; maybe they’re just telling what they experienced. With so many accounts following such a regular pattern it does seem odd to me that over 100,000 could all be wrong. Needless to say this caused an uproar at Harvard and they unsuccessfully tried to strip him of his tenure.

At the opening of the conference, Alan, Jonny, my brother who is totally into these things (he produced the NBC special, Mystery of the Sphinx, proving the that ancient monument is way older than any one could imagine) and myself are event in the auditorium to document the historic event. My brother operates the camera on the tripod, Alan is shooting handheld to get cutaways, and I log notes on my laptop.  We wait in eager anticipation as Mack sits down at the long table on the stage. He looks the part of a Harvard professor, alert and confident, as he peers over his half glasses looking ever so professorial. He is in command of his material and presents it in a most scientific way, without drama or fanfare. He just lets the evidence speak for itself.

In the first part of his lecture John relays the typical abduction experiences with all of the grisly probing procedures, implants and the like, and subsequent hybrid offspring. The more he talks about hybrids I notice that John too has big almond shaped piercing blue eyes and he has an unearthly quality to him, could he be a hybrid or is this conference getting to me? All of a sudden I’m seeing hybrids everywhere. There is the theory that modern man is a hybrid experiment and without conclusive evidence of that elusive missing link it does make you wonder.

And just as I am slipping that into a world where everything is suspect John Mack’s words bring me back as he tells us that, “This all sounds very literal as if this is happening in our three dimensional reality and that is not a conclusion that is altogether warranted by the data. We really don’t have a vocabulary for a multidimensional universe as you often find in Sanskrit, or other eastern religions, who have words for many levels of reality.” I find it interesting that Eastern mystics seem to be on to something on so many levels. Even my father, an old school scientist from Dupont, once said, “Why do the Buddhist mystics speak like the quantum physicists?” to which I replied, “Maybe because once you tap into the source, you access the same information.”

What really strikes me is when John Mack says, “It’s not simply the content of the experiences. The skeptics fail to take into account the extraordinary authenticity and emotional power of what people go through as they relive these experiences. They literally vibrate on the couch as they go through this.” When he says this you can feel the immense compassion he has for his patients.

As I am listening to his lecture what disturbs me more than all the traumas people have suffered, is when John says that “Many experiencers are told, ‘Your planet is dying, you are on the edge of extinction, this planet does not belong to you, you have no right to destroy it, and you are one species living out of harmony with all the other species on the planet.’” The sad thing is that I agree with him and yet so often I feel helpless to do anything about it and wonder why the ET’s won’t help us out. I can’t believe that the Star Trek non-interference policy really holds water in the real world.

On the positive side John talks about how some experiencers feel, “A sense of connection with the Ultimate Creative Principle that is luminous, ecstatic, overwhelmingly magnificent, so much so that once they’ve opened to that experience, the chore of living on planet becomes odious and difficult.” This hits a chord in me. Sometimes I feel like I have gotten sucked into being here on Planet Earth under false pretenses, as if I hadn’t read the small print on some unscrupulous intergalactic travel brochure that has lured me here with false advertising.

John says that one of the hardest things he does is “to hold the tension between their desire to be only with the one, or with the intermediaries between the earth and the one, and that there is a task for them on earth of some sort, and I may not know what it is, and I certainly can’t become an advocate for life on earth because perhaps I might prefer to go with them to the Source as well.” John looks up and smiles wistfully as he says this.  I know how he feels.  As he closes I look over at Alan and give him the thumbs up. This conference is all that I anticipated.

John has brought with him one of his patients, a one-armed guy in his early forties with sandy hair and a goatee who he looks like he could be my ex-husband’s brother. Just like my ex, he has a manic quality to him that is very charismatic. However, unlike my ex, this poor guy jumped off a roof trying to elude his abductors and fell on a power line. His account lurches from hilarity to rage to sadness, but the bottom line is he is extremely sincere and real. He puts it all out there.

John introduces Will who opens with a funny thing that happened to him last night in his cabin. He tells us:  “There’s a light coming up the stairs and I’m thinking, ‘Here we go. This is going to be fun.’ And a voice booms out, ‘How did you get here?’ And I said, ‘How did I get here?”

Will pauses and looks perplexed. “’I came in through the door!’ It turns out it was a park ranger. You see the house had been double booked. Thank God for Karen. She shooed them away.” We all laugh at the absurdity of his predicament. How do you explain to a Park Ranger that you thought he was an alien?

Then Will gets serious. He looks straight at us and asks, “Do you have any idea what it’s like to be on the receiving end of this kind of shock?” To me this is deep. John Mack talks about ontological shock, but to actually experience ontological shock, i.e. your world being shattered, like when your body being seriously violated, is a different matter. Will tells us that, “This stuff is happening to you whenever they want.” He pauses. “But that trauma doesn’t stay,” he says quickly as he looks away. “I still hate them in a very modified way.” He laughs and makes light of it but you can see it still hurts. “The tremendous thing that I learned from it all is that you are not just a body. Of course now at age 46 I like to joke, and I say, I have a human and his name is Will and that gives me a much better perspective.” I often feel like the ghost in the machine so I understand what he is talking about.

He tells us about how it all started when he was five. “There’s a part of me that hates them. And I really don’t like the one that I trusted that left me in the room on the table with the others that have a big head and no heart. That’s the key phrase. Because when I am with the other one the connection is out of this world. The connection is so unimaginable that you would do anything to have that window open up in your mind. Anything. The next thing I know I’m on this table with these ones and there’s no connection. They’re like little frickin’ mechanics going about their business, and you’re a little boy, and they are about to put something up your penis.” He looks at the crowd with conviction, “You cannot be touched by that stuff and be who you were before. It just is not possible.” I look around at the audience and they are hanging on his every word.

“Every stinking time I hear the sentence, ‘You’re lucky to be alive,’ I want to strangle them. I want to reach out and say, ‘What do you know what it’s like out there?’ Do you have any idea how much I hate being here sometimes?” His vulnerability adds to his credibility.

“Sometimes I have those feelings of ‘I want to go home’ and this is not just escapism, I mean I’ve experimented enough with that.” He looks mischievously at us and the crowd laughs at the implication of drugs and alcohol. “And John used to egg me on, although he recalls it differently, so this is only how I would have heard it,” Will smiles impishly as he says this. John looks up expectantly waiting to hear Will’s version of the story. Will impersonates John, “If you don’t want to be here, why don’t you just leave? And of course I’m thinking, gun in the mouth or step in front of a truck.”

John smiles and protests. “Wait a minute, wait a minute. I was not encouraging you!” The crowd erupts in laughter. John and Will laugh at each other as well. Will grins as he points at John, “See what I mean? He’s always changing the rules on me.” The crowd loves their easy interaction about such a traumatic topic.

Will tells us how he lost his arm. He was up in a tree when he was fifteen, and he reached for a branch, and grabbed a wire by mistake, and electrocuted himself. What’s interesting is that when he and John Mack did a recall of the experience, the words were the same but the characters were different. Will says that, “I began to notice that those little gray things were around. And I said, ‘Hey fuck you!’” There are tears in his eyes as he says this. “You’re not going to do this to me, anymore! Watch this! What are you going to do about this! And of course they said, ‘We are not going to let you leave.’ And there have been other experiences where I have sort of beautifully put myself in harm’s way.” Will looks down and smiles. “So I guess we are all waiting for maturity to kick in.” The crowd laughs at his self-deprecating humor. “I know my mother is.” Now Will laughs as well.

Will explains that a couple of visits later when they did some more work about that fateful day and “right after grabbing the wire, the story was always, ‘Oh shit you’ve got to let go.’ And then I blank out. Well on this particular day the story went... Oh shit. You’ve got to let go. Oh shit. You’ve got to die.” And then Will says very matter-of-factly, “You’re dead. And then there was this extremely vivid exchange that took place between me and this one particular entity and in a beautiful way he says to me, ‘What the fuck did you do?’ And I’m above the tree and I’m kind of sheepish, and I’m saying, ‘I don’t know.’ And then there is this very vivid recall of watching the body just get fried, then watching it break contact, hit the branches, and hit the ground. And then the most important thing. Because there had to have been this moment where I was given a choice. There had to be. Because I will never believe that I am a victim of circumstances beyond my control. Never. There had to be a moment when I chose.” At this point Will pauses to reflect. To me this is fascinating because that moment of choice applies to all traumas, extraterrestrial or otherwise.

“There has to be a part of me that remembers the information that was given to me. The part of me that holds all the information that’s going to make it alright which is going to stop me from bitching and moaning and complaining.” He quacks to express his complaint and the crowd laughs. “And do you have any idea what I want to do when that part of me shows up? Just take a wild guess.” His menacing look makes the crowd laugh. “I’m going to kill him. And I’m sitting there with John realizing for the first time in my life that I am saying to the part that holds the memories, ‘No really come a little closer. I really want to hear what you have to say.’” Will beckons with his finger. “And in that moment I realize that I’m a stinking liar and that I’m so angry at being left here that I don’t want to remember.” He cries as he acknowledges this part of himself. Part of me realizes that I too want to kill that wounded part of me rather than hear what it has to say.

Will looks at us with pain in his eyes, “I want to kill that part of me, the part that holds the key that’s gonna make it all fit, that would love nothing more than to remind me who and what I am, is the exact same part that I wait and save all my anger for.” As I listen to this it reminds me that this is the paradox of healing for me. I say I want to heal but when I actually get to a place where the healing is done then I would rather live with chronic discomfort than face the possibility of excruciating pain that I might have to reexperience in order to heal. For example, I don’t know what the recurrent pain in my back is trying to tell me but part of me is too afraid to find out.

Will regains his composure and says, “And that’s sort of where I’m at right now. And that must have been a year ago when that came up and I’m actually getting more mellow.” There is laughter. He smiles and says devilishly, “You should see me on caffeine… So kudos to John Mack. If he hadn’t been there to give me the validity to have the feelings, to not have to judge, to not have to stop, I don’t know what would have happened. And very quickly, something else has happened just by being here yesterday and today, some of the things that I would really like to bitch about and complain about, I’m actually starting to have some rather incredible hope that things will change. Because something’s wrong here. Because it doesn’t have to be like this, and I don’t think in terms of demon or Satan, I think in terms of the beast, and for me the beast is the group mind that is driven by someone who’s not my friend, and I suspect he or it’s not your friend either. Maybe what I really do need to do is participate in my part of changing the driver of the bus.” I had never thought about Satan in those terms but I often wonder what steers us into such disastrous situations that in retrospect seem so obviously off course.

On a final note he explains, “I have come to realize that the bulk of my difficulty is because wearing the glasses of fear is where all the damage is done.” He slowly repeats this for emphasis, “Wearing the glasses of fear is where all the damage is done. And I know I can’t go home until I find little Billy and tell him he didn’t do anything wrong.” He cries as he remembers. “Snatch him, hop on the bus, and we’re out of here.” He stops for a moment to recover his composure. “So, it’s been interesting. I wore a tie today to try to give me a little more… John tells me that I’m not crazy. Right?” John smiles and everybody laughs. Will looks at us and says, “He promised me that I wasn’t. There really is a block of time that you go through when you absolutely, positively want the authority to tell you that you are kind of crazy and here’s why. There’s part of me that wanted to hear, ‘You know what this is, Freud wrote about this,’ and then I could go ‘Ahh, phew.’ There is a part of my humaness that would like to say, ‘Nah, this didn’t happen.’ Isn’t that weird? Now we’ve got people sitting out here who are petrified of the implication. They would rather honestly be told and come to believe that I’m crazy. And John E. says, ‘I’m not.’” Will laughs as he looks at John and John looks almost stern. Once again it’s easier for us to have a convenient slot for things even if it’s a negative one than to create, dare I say, a new reality.

“And if you bump into me out there, right now I’m just a guy, a nice guy. Just don’t see me on caffeine. And don’t come storming into my house at 3 o’clock asking me how I got there.” John smiles, everybody laughs, and then the applause is thunderous.

After the lecture there is a feeding frenzy of media and groupies all crowding around the stage wanting to connect with John and Will. Alan’s skills in pushiness come into play par excellence. Now instead of being irritated by this quality I am cheering him on from the sidelines. Johnny and I watch with amused admiration as Alan goes where angels fear to tread. I spur Alan on by telling him to, “Go invite him out for dinner.” Over his shoulder he answers, “I think he’ll come since Paula donated $1,000 to the cause.” Good to know. Johnny tells Alan, “Go on. We’re right behind you.” Johnny turns the camera on as Alan launches into the fray, microphone in hand, pushing his way up to the front of the pack. When Alan’s qualities are properly channeled he really shines.

Next thing I know we are all out for dinner in a real restaurant, forget the commissary, this is a once in a lifetime chance to hang out with the one and only John Mack who is equally as affable and funny offstage as onstage and promises to give us an interview. His assistant comes as well and she is a riot. We hammer out the details and meet back at John’s house the following afternoon.



THE INTERVIEW:

Johnny and I scramble to get the lights and cameras set up. We only have John for a limited time during the lunch break and in record time we are ready. Johnny has the luxury of shooting “A” camera with a tripod whereas I have to shoot the cutaway shot on Alan’s hand held, which I know will test my endurance to the breaking point. John arrives and settles into his chair. Alan begins by asking, “What was your position about UFO’s and ET’s before you actually started investigating the field?” John explains that originally he was a friend of astronomer Carl Sagan, who was noted for his skepticism of the idea that aliens visit earth. It seems that Sagan is open to the idea that there is other life in the universe just not here, not now. So John took Carl’s opinion as gospel until many years later when he heard experiencers give testimony firsthand.

Alan conjectures, “Your first response was maybe, ‘Oh these people are hallucinating?’”

John: “No, not at all. They sounded very plausible. Everything was plausible except what they were saying.” Alan laughs at the paradox. I can only imagine what that moment must have been like, a veritable Zen koan that bends your mind.

Alan asks, “So what’s your conclusion? Is it what people say? What do you make of it as a psychiatrist?”

Deftly treading the razor’s edge John says, “It’s neither purely in the internal world nor is it purely in the external world, but it is something in another realm, another dimension.” And although he doesn’t come out and say it’s real, John points out that, “If we define reality by agreement around experience, then it’s real. The so-called scientific method, where something is only real if you can measure it, is really not the way most of the people throughout history and our time have determined what’s real. What’s real is what the community agrees is real.” And here I thought that we lived in a world dictated by science.

“And if enough people like myself are saying, ‘Yeah, these people are talking the truth and they are describing something as best they can, this really happened to them.’ So an agreement grows around the phenomenon. And when agreement grows around described experiences that’s how we determine what is reality.” This may sound like semantics until you realize that our worldview keeps changing with each generation and outmoded ideas seem absurd now but at the time they were facts. For example, once upon a time germs were not thought to be the cause of infection and surgeons would wipe their scalpels on their shoes to prove their point. So even with the scientific method available there has to be a certain amount of agreement within the society for new ideas to be accepted.

Alan takes this in and postulates, “So if we take this new understanding, this new accepted reality, along with the other phenomena that people are reporting: near death experiences, out of body experiences, telepathy... How do you start to reformulate a new idea of consciousness and the value of the personal experience of reality?

“If you have an agreement, say that reality is limited say to that which can be measured, then the way that you would change that agreement is to change the method of knowing. Then you would have a new reality.” I am impressed that we even have John Mack telling us about a new reality on “New Realities.”

“It’s not enough to simply have the fact that somebody records an experience that nobody ever had before. But for something new to be considered real in a culture, whether it’s apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary or near death encounters or UFO’s, the definition of reality to be expanded and there has to be a kind of agreement around the method of knowing.” I wonder what that new method would be.
Alan is not to be deterred by the biases of our western culture and asks, “So if all these people have had these experiences and something real is happening, how come it’s not on the front page of the newspaper? How come everyone doesn’t want to know about this? What is it in our culture that’s so afraid of the dark?”

“The deepest resistance to it has to do with...” John pauses as he ponders this weighty topic and proposes that, “It’s more of a gender matter, it has to do with the whole western enterprise of the past millennium which has been to separate us from nature, to create nature as the adversary, to conquer nature, to demonstrate masculine prowess with weaponry, to gain control of the world, through conquest but also through science, through the sense that there is a finite conquerable, masterable universe before which we need not quake, we need not feel afraid, we need not surrender, because we can master it.”
To me this may seem very male but this delusion goes beyond gender, this is the human dilemma in a nutshell, we have an illusion that we could be in control of our destiny if we were just smart enough.

John calmly points out that, “This phenomenon above all challenges that notion. It tells us that we are not in charge, that we cannot conquer nature. If anything it shows we are one of the dumber species in the cosmos as a whole and certainly not masters of our own destiny and not even able to protect ourselves from funny looking little beings that can come and whisk us off, or show up in any form they want. And this pierces the arrogance of the ego and most resistance has to do with the ego’s wanting to maintain its own value to itself. And when that’s challenged the reaction is really rage and if the weaponry is there, rage and murder.” He is oddly serene as he ends on such an ominous note.

This to me encapsulates the crisis of modern man: the fear of being some meaningless pawn in a random universe where nobody cares what happens to us. At least in the bad old days, those superstitious dark ages, we had our place. We could have a modicum of control by appeasing a vengeful God or basking in his praise through good works even if it meant the sacrifice of a few innocent victims.

Alan smiles at John’s assessment but he’s not buying into the dark side at all and says, “Well you said that the ET’s are designed to blow the western mind.”

John says with a certain glee, “Yeah they’re perfect.” His leftist leanings are showing. Alan laughs and John continues, “It’s perfect. The ET’s are perfectly designed. This whole ET abduction phenomenon is perfectly crafted by the ultimate creative principle to shatter the arrogance of the western mind. If you had to design something that would piss off the military industrial ego, the masculine ego, you couldn’t have done it better.”
I love his perspective. I had never been able see any possible purpose for how all this could fit into the big picture and this is a good a reason as any. “Here is something, which seems to come in high-powered craft that can run circles around any kind of technology that we have in the transport area. Also because of the telepathic communication, which is instant and total, it runs circles around any communications technology that we have. And most of our investment in our pride is in technology. So it makes a mockery of every pridefulness we have around any technologies that we’ve created and shows these to be primitive at best. And that is really a terrible blow to the ego’s notion of its collective successes in the science and technology area.”

“Well...” Alan tries to interrupt but John is on a roll and doesn’t notice. “That’s just one thing that it does. The other thing it does is we also have this idea that we can protect ourselves. The whole notion of private property, which is built into the law and goes back thousands of years. There’s no privacy here at all.  We don’t own anything. They come take us. They can land whenever they feel like it. The sanctity of the home, they violate that. The sanctity of the body, they violate that, anything that we take pride in as being special about us. The body-ego is the first ego that the infant develops. It violates that ego. It violates everything that the ego is attached to. It shows that to be absurd.”

John’s words may sound like the perfect solution for those who want to attain enlightenment and fast-track their stay here on earth, but to me, this is one of the most terrifying aspects of the abduction phenomenon, or frankly life in general, for it indicates how helpless we are in the big picture. And yet this is where enlightenment could be helpful. Enlightenment as defined as the relinquishment of ego, a letting go of control. Ultimately we can’t control what we are experiencing, only our attitude towards it. If one can be like Christ when he endured Crucifixion with equanimity, then one can never be victimized.

Alan brings the topic back to earth. “And the most sacred thing that you’ve come up against at Harvard is the intellect. Could you talk about how they gave you a hard time?” (Mack was investigated for 14 months in what he described as “Kafkaesque” as the nature of the complaints constantly shifted but eventually lost their validity since there was clearly no ethics violation or professional misconduct. Although in the end he was declared free to study as he pleased, tensions are still simmering.)

John says evenly, without emotion, “Well, there’s the Dean at the medical school, who I’d known very well, who said very soberly, not realizing the implications, that I wouldn’t have gotten into trouble if I hadn’t suggested that this requires that we think about reality differently. Well what that implied was that they knew what reality was. That they knew, scientifically, or biomedically, what the world was like. So maybe that’s another arrogance. The arrogance of knowing. The idea that we know something. We don’t know anything.” To me this is the mark of a real scholar, and mystic for that matter, that ability to pursue knowledge to its logical end and yet realizing that no matter how far you go there are always deeper layers and that ultimately we may never know the complete truth.

Alan adds wryly, “It’s funny because this is coming from the institution where William James spent his whole life; the guy who said that ‘our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness,  is but one especial type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.’”
Alan say to me later, because he didn’t want the conversation to go off in another direction:  “The William James quote came as a response to James’ nitrous oxide experience…This suggested a foreshadowing of Timothy Leary’s LSD experiments at Harvard.  My point being, Harvard, whether they like it or not has a long history of being at the cutting edge of consciousness.”

Frankly it doesn’t surprise me that Harvard is still having a reaction, we all like the idea of independent thinking until we are confronted with actual independent thinking.  Back to our conversation, take a swipe at the future, Alan adds: “There’s seems to be a shift right now within the mind of western civilization to a more spiritual understanding of who we are.”

This seems like a benign statement to me and I am surprised when John rejects this notion of progress. “Well you see that this is where I get into an argument, not with the principle of what you are saying because I certainly think that shift, which is long overdue, is happening. I just don’t accept that it has gone nearly as far as you would think. And being in a conference like this you’d have the feeling that if you only stayed for a week or so in this environment that everything was kind of solved. That the military industrial complex had flipped over. That they’re not destroying the rainforest at an accelerated rate throughout Southeast Asia and Brazil. That species are not dying off at an accelerated rate. You’d think the whole thing was turning around and it isn’t turning around. It looks like it ought to turn around. The ingredients are there to turn it around. But to simply speak to one another like it’s all done and sing together, which is wonderful, but it hasn’t happened. You’d think it was to listen to ourselves here.” This is when that hopeless feeling creeps back in and I think that it’s absurd to think that one person can have any impact.

I look up and see my brother smirking at John’s comments. I have to laugh at John’s hilarious cynical attitude but I also see sadness in his eyes as he relates this unfortunate truth. This is where I really connect with him. He grounds all this lavender talk in the grim reality of where we are and shows that we still have to do the hard work of taking these fine thoughts and making them happen in the real world. I am still banking on that silver lining of the hundredth monkey that will achieve critical mass and the pendulum will swing in the opposite direction. It would be so much easier if the ET’s would just step in and save us from ourselves.

Alan sidesteps the obvious jab at the Pollyanna attitude of the conference and keeps it on the positive and what we can do, by asking, “What do you feel like your basic role is in this transformation?”

John explains, “I think my job is to be a witness and a bridge.” He feels that by hearing people’s stories impartially he can help them work through their fear of humiliation if they speak publicly. “Because I can go on and on about this, but it does not have nearly the power as a person who’s had these experiences who comes to audience clearly with passion of sound mind and cannot be dismissed as a kook or somebody going through walking sleep paralysis, or something weird like that, which is what the mainstream science is trying to say.” And the fact that he has never been abducted helps him because it means he is more objective.

Alan beams as he thanks John for all his great work. Alan is truly sincere in his appreciation and I don’t always see him this connected to his subject. I also feel like this has been a privilege to be with John Mack in the flesh. It takes courage to step out from the herd in such a dramatic way. It’s so easy to buy into the mass hallucination without ever taking time to analyze it with any kind of objectivity.   
Alan would say to me years later that his favorite John Mack quote is, and one that he uses to get a laugh and make a point at his lectures is that Mack said: “UFOs/ET are like a wake-up call from the cosmos for the consciously impaired.”

The end of the weekend comes sooner than I would have liked and we find ourselves at the afterparty savoring one last group hug before we go back to the other world.  Will is there and is acting so much like my ex-husband it is uncanny. His hilarious manic humor has me under its spell. We flirt and I laugh to myself when I think of what would my family think if I brought home a one-armed, UFO abductee who looks and acts just like my ex.  Life can just be too wacky for words.

I also meet a guy who claims he was telepathically in communication with some ET’s from Mars. Apparently there is life on Mars, just not life as we know it. Ever the journalist I am never one to pass up an opportunity and ask, “Oh really, what did they say?”

“They said they had lost their permission to travel at light speed and asked if I would help them travel to earth telepathically.”

“It sounds as if there is some cosmic DMV out there who revokes permits.” He laughs at the thought and I realize maybe ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ was right after all when it proposed that earth was being demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. I have a theory that often humor offers a door into the true nature of reality because it is allowed to be absurd and by suspending the rational mind, creative thought can happen. One psychic moment in the classic comedy show, “Laugh In,” in the 1960s was during the skit, “News of the Future” when Dan Rowan uncannily predicted that in 1989 Russia would become a democracy, which seemed so unlikely at the time.

Even though the conference has ended, I still feel like my mind is literally expanding from the steady stream of heady information. It feels as if my brain is pressing against my skull. My mind has been in expansion for a while now, starting soon after I arrived in Harbin for the gathering with Paul Lowe.
All I know is that I like the feeling. I like stretching my mind, shall I dare say it to “new realities” and then grounding it in science. I like John Mack’s work because he follows a rigorous protocol while keeping an open mind. Just like the Sphinx project, confirmation is key. One tragic footnote is that little did I realize that this would be the last time I see John. A few years later a drunk driver killed him while he was crossing a street in London. My immediate reaction was that this was no accident and that the ‘Men in Black’ had succeeded in knocking him off. If it had been hit and run and the guy hadn’t gone to trial I would have been really suspicious. Regardless of the cause, his death seemed premature because I feel like he still had so much to give but maybe he had earned the right to a little rest since he had given so much or maybe when you tangle with such volatile energies it can catch up with you, who knows.