UFOs
Mainstream scientists and other intellectuals generally consider cross-cultural historical accounts of unidentified aerial phenomena as superstition. But the similarity of the mystic tales of ethereal beings found within the Vedic and other ancient traditions, with details reported in numerous contemporary accounts, gives Thompson pause. He suggests the possibility that aspects of modern Western cultural transmission inhibits the experience of subtle levels of perception.
TRANSCRIPT: UFOs. San Diego - August, 1992 / (069)
So, some preparatory remarks, namely, what is this all about! Why should one take interest in these subjects such as UFOs and so forth. So to preface that, I am going to just read a little bit from a conversation between a scholar and a devotee about the Ramayana and I think this is important because it indicates one of the basic issues we are dealing with here. So I’ll just say, call these persons A and B. So,
A: Yes, and then you enter into the third khanda.
B: Hiranya khanda
A: Hiranya khanda. That's when you enter into what I call a kind of Walt Disney world, truly another world altogether.
A: (laughter) I see.
B: What I mean is in it there are talking birds and talking animals and demons and witches and all sorts of wondrous, wonderful things.
A: Seems like Walt Disney would be envious of some of those things.
B: Well I think he certainly missed the boat not making it into an animated spectacle.
Then there’s a little bit of discussion of that. So then further comment from B.
B: All right, and so they go off into the forest and run into all kinds of goblins and witches. They show heroism, love, compassion, chivalry and things of that nature and so on.
So this is a discussion of the Ramayana and you can see in the discussion there is a basic problem here, namely that the position of the scholar is that the Ramayana is a sort of Walt Disney fantasy, something along the lines of Pinocchio and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and so forth. And in fact that’s what comes across in the conversation, and no other point comes across in the conversation. Basically that's what you’re left with, because after all what can you say. It looks as though the Vedic literature is a sort of fantasy of the kind that Walt Disney might make a camp cartoon about or something like that. That is the position of scholars in universities.
So why do they think that way? And what can be done about that? So the reason that scholars think in that way is that they believe that the world is a certain way based on their education and conditioning in this modern society. So, and of course, this basic education and conditioning is there for many different people, not just scholars in universities. So according to that view of the world, the people are trained to accept that all these wondrous, wonderful things that you find in the Ramayana or for that matter in the Bhagavatam, Krishna Book, any of these different literatures just couldn't exist; these things aren't part of the real world. They are part of some old fantasies that people used to believe in, in the days when they were superstitious, and they didn't have modern scientific knowledge. So that is a basic problem.
Now what can you say about that? You can say, “Well, these sastras are the absolute truth and you should accept them. But then someone may be reluctant to accept them if they think that the world is a completely different place. That the kinds of things described in the sastras on practically every page just don’t happen in the real world. These things are unreal. So that’s a basic problem. Well, that's what this lecture is all about, that actually we do live in the sort of world described in the Vedic literature. And there is a great deal of evidence indicating that that is so.
[5:10]
So basically the world described in the Vedic literature is one in which you have living beings with remarkable powers. Now of course even ordinary living beings as we know them, including living beings like ourselves, do have remarkable powers. But familiarity breeds contempt. The very fact that we’re living and walking around and talking and doing all these things, that's quite amazing in its own right. If you study physics and chemistry, learn about covalent bonds and electron orbitals and the periodic table and all that kind of thing, and then you ask, “Could it be that those atoms and molecules would come together and create human beings that walk around and do all these things that we do everyday?” You know that's actually quite incredible. But we’re accustomed to this and so we take it for granted. And of course science has the theory of evolution to explain where we came from and so forth.
So the Vedic literature very briefly is describing a world in which you have 8,400,000 species of life. And of these, 400,000 species are human in form, and most of them are endowed with various mystic powers which are described in the Vedic literatures. In particular there are the eight siddhis. There is the laghima siddhi, for example, which is the power to become lighter than the lightest; you can float through the air. Many different living beings within the universe customarily do that. For example in the Bhagavatam there is that painting of Narada Muni speaking to Vyasadeva. So Vyasadeva is standing on the ground before Narada Muni and Narada Muni is just hanging in midair in front of him. So this is a very standard thing in Vedic literature, laghima siddhi; people can levitate. There is a vasita siddhi, it’s the power of mental control. If you have this vasita siddhi you can exert great hypnotic influence over other persons. This can be exploited in various ways by bogus yogis who pretend to be incarnations of Visnu and so forth. They can fool people into thinking that they can have all kinds of divine qualifications and so on.
So the basic picture of the world in the Vedic literature says the world is full of intelligent living beings, many of them have human form, they’re endowed with all kinds of mystic powers, and on a somewhat deeper level, the Vedic literature is saying that we don't see all of reality. We only see certain limited aspects of it. The whole viewpoint of modern science is that gross matter is everything. Of course science has some aspects which are of things that are not directly visible, for example neutrinos. You can't see a neutrino, but basically science is saying gross matter as we see it is the sum and substance of total reality. Whereas in the Vedic literature it is saying that there are subtle energies and there are forms of living beings composed of subtle energy; and beyond that, there are spiritual energies and forms of living beings on the spiritual level; and in fact the subtle type of energy came from the spiritual and the gross energy that we know came from the subtle energy by a process of controlled creation ultimately under the control of the Supreme Personality of Godhead.
So it turns out that if you look at available evidence that is out there in the world, you can find a lot of support for this basic picture that is presented in the Vedic literature, which I was just briefly outlining. You can find a lot of evidence that supports this Vedic picture but which actually is quite contrary to the accepted scientific picture of reality. So one subcategory of that evidence is this evidence concerning UFO’s, which I am talking about today. There are other categories also but that will have to be discussed in other presentations. So anyway, now, just downstairs I heard somebody reproducing the theme music of Twilight Zone. This is customary when UFO’s are mentioned. It will happen practically every time. So the idea is that, well this is really a pretty kooky subject. Obviously something for the National Enquirer and crackpots and so forth. No serious person would want to get involved with this kind of weird subject matter. Well that is a widespread idea, but a lot of very serious people are getting interested in this subject, especially within recent times.
[10:42]
Many scientists have been concerned with the whole question of UFO’s starting as far back as about 1947, or even earlier, but 1947 is when things really got going. More recently there has been this whole phenomenon of UFO abductions which I am going to talk about. Just to show you the kind of people that are taking this subject matter seriously, this is a book that just came out; it’s by David Jacobs, who is a professor of history at Temple University in Philadelphia. By the way, that's where Ravindra Svarupa got his PhD. So he has written a book on UFO abductions – now those are rather far out stories. The typical UFO abduction account very briefly, and I will say more about it later, is one in which a person is carried away into a UFO by strange looking little beings, usually have very big heads and big eyes but short and spindly bodies and so on. So they carry the person off into a UFO, put him on a table, paralyse him physically so that he can't move and then poke things into his body, scan him with machines and do all kinds of rather frightening and horrifying procedures, and then take him back so that he lives to tell the tale.
There are a lot of accounts like this now. This Professor Jacobs has studied about 60 different individuals and so he’s written a book on this subject. He thinks that these abduction experiences are physically real. In other words, his thesis is that this is really happening. And he thinks that beings are coming from outer space in some kind of flying machines that we call UFO’s, for lack of a better word, because ‘U’ means ‘unidentified’, and they’re doing these things. So the point is, he is a professor of history. Now there is a foreword to the book by a John Mack, who is a professor of psychiatry at the Harvard University Medical School. So that’s another person with quite good qualifications and he takes this very seriously also. Now it's interesting to see some of the ideas that he comes to here. A basic theme of modern science is that we can basically handle everything using our own intelligence and our own powers. Basically, apart from us human beings here on the earth, there are lower animals and plants and inanimate matter. So we are the most intelligent beings around; we have different problems – we get sick, we die, and so forth – but by learning to manipulate matter using our intelligence, ultimately we can solve all those problems and create a perfect world for ourselves. That's the basic picture of modern science. Unfortunately in their attempt to do this, the results haven't been too good for the world thus far. It’s been a bit of a disaster.
So what then is the relevance of the UFO phenomena? One thing, whatever the cause behind the UFO phenomena may be, one impact that it has is that it conveys to people that there are intelligences within the universe, and in fact intelligences active here on this earth, which are not under our control. This tends to give one the idea that we’re dependent. Now the ultimate conclusion that you can derive from that is one should surrender to God, because if we are basically the highest beings around and there is no God, there is no soul, and so forth, then the program of figuring it all out by ourselves makes sense. But if there are other beings around who are more powerful than we are, then one has to give second thoughts to that program. So a natural conclusion is that one should perhaps turn to God. In other words, if there are more powerful beings, you should turn to the being that has your interests at heart. And who would that be? And also you should turn to the most powerful being. In other words, why try and make a deal with someone who is a bit more powerful than you; they may cheat you, or who knows what! So the logical thing to do is to seek out the highest power.
[15:34]
So just in pursuance of that idea, it's interesting that this Mack comes to conclusions like that in this foreword to his book. He says here:
Virtually all peoples throughout history, with the exception of the Western culture of the Newtonian Cartesian era, have experienced the universe as possessing some sort of intelligence or consciousness in which human beings participate with other animate beings and inanimate things in an enterprise that has meaning, purpose, and direction, however unfathomable these may be.
So he is recognising that our present Newtonian Cartesian culture is an exception, and he says:
In the West we seem, for reasons perhaps as mysterious as the abduction phenomenon itself [which he is talking about], to have cut ourselves off almost totally from an awareness of any form of higher intelligence. But let us suppose that such an intelligence did exist, and what is more, that it was not indifferent to the fate of the earth, regarding its life forms and transcendent beauty as one of its better or more advanced creations.
In other words, maybe God has a plan for the earth. So he says:
And let us imagine that the imbalance created by the overgrowth of certain human faculties, a kind of techno destructive and fear driven inquisitiveness, were diagnosed as a basic problem. What would be done as a corrective?
So he suggests that, well one thing he suggests, is an invasion of our consciousness with transforming images of our self destruction. Actually that's the whole theme of the whole UFO phenomena. People always report being told by the UFO entities, “You are destroying the earth. Stop the nuclear testing,” and all this kind of thing. So anyway, I don’t want to go on in too great a length, let’s see if I can find where, so yeah, where does he really say it? Yeah, well he’s talking about the possibility that humankind has broken the harmony of being, that this planet does not exist just for our pleasure and so forth. “But in order to arrest the destruction of life and to make possible the further evolution of consciousness, or whatever the anima mundi has in store, these phenomena are taking place.” Anima mundi means ‘soul of the universe’ in Latin. So in other words, this Harvard psychologist is not only taking the UFO phenomenon seriously, but it is causing him to think about God. And that in itself is unusual from a Harvard professor of psychology, or psychiatry. After all, you may know Sigmund Freud kicked out God completely.
So that is the, a bit of a preface as to the import of what I am going to discuss. So what I am going to do is present some of the evidence regarding the UFO phenomenon and I’m going to, I have some short video clips that I’ll show (let’s see, this is going to be a bit extemporaneous. Let’s see what happens here. Is it going to work?). This talks about some sightings in Belgium. I’ll say a little bit more about them (let’s see, push play, okay). This is an object that has been sighted over Belgium for over a year; hundreds of different sightings have been made. There is also a circular one.
[video is played]
Narrator: These are exclusive, never-before-seen pictures of the UFO that is amazing Europe. They were shot by a Belgian family on their way home from a picnic. Hundreds of witnesses, including air force personnel, have seen a triangular object flying through the skies over Belgium. Sometimes there is a bright red halo around it. They can fly as slowly as 15 miles an hour in total silence, then accelerate to twice the speed of sound in two seconds. Others have seen in photographs a disc-shaped object. Military officials have seen it climb and descend through thousands of feet in altitude in just seconds. It makes right angle turns. It accelerates at an estimated rate of 40 g’s – a rate that would instantly crush a human pilot. So no one knows what it is, or what they are, if there is more than one.
Twice so far, strange acting, inexplicable blips on military radar scopes, followed by a rash of phone calls from citizens, forced the Belgian air force to scramble American made F16 fighter jets to chase the UFO. Pilots at first refused to talk, then later confirmed that they had made contact, but were unable to keep up with the strange object. Even senior Belgian officers had admitted they cannot explain what is happening.
Pilot: What’s the most troubling is that the sightings on the ground were exceptional – there were about 20 gendarmes. At the same time we detected action on the radar screens that was very unconventional.
[21:30]
RLT: Okay. Just to make a brief remark about that case. I attended about an hour lecture specifically on the recent Belgian sightings. There are hundreds of cases in which very respectable people have given their testimony; there are also photographs. The typical object is about as big as this building basically, triangular in shape, with lights at the corners of the triangle. And I have also seen photographs and many different drawings by different people all of which show basically the same thing. The Belgium military people have been unusual in that they have been open in admitting that these things are actually there and inexplicable. And I saw a video tape of the radar scope of an F16 that had locked in on the thing and was chasing it, except that it took off, as they said there, at an acceleration of about 40 g’s. That would crush you to a thin film of jelly if you were inside a vehicle; it was like that.
So there are many different cases like this. The next thing that I was going to show here is an example of a photograph taken by a guy in New Jersey. I just have a few examples. This is the guy who took it with his little brownie box camera. This is a whole category of evidence. There is a lot of testimony along these lines. This is a photograph taken by Ed Walters in Gulf Breeze, Florida of the object. To this day many different sightings are being made in Gulf Breeze, Florida. I have seen some recent video tapes showing what people are seeing there. Not just this one man but many different people are seeing, videotaping things. This is something photographed over Wanaque Reservoir in New Jersey.
Now this, this, can you see this? I think it will be very difficult, there is an object there. This is a video tape made in Gulf Breeze by a guy with a Sony camcorder. Even standing right here it is difficult to see. You see that thing there; I don't know how well you can see it. Shortly, this runs for about a minute, and what I am going to do is show a computer enhanced picture of what the object looks like. There it is right there again. So basically this object was flying back and forth out behind his home at a distance. It appeared to be several hundred feet away. In typical fashion, when it finally goes away, it blinks out, it just disappears. This is a standard feature of these UFO’s. So a Navy physicist named Bruce Maccabee tried to see if this videotape could have been hoaxed; that's always a question with regard to these things. And so he experimented with models in which you suspend a lighted model on a pole and have a person try to videotape it. He found that it wasn't possible to produce a convincing duplicate of the object. This is a computer enhanced thing that you will see. That's the object there, can you see that? These are repeated shots of the same thing. It's one short segment of the videotape which was then enhanced using the computer. Here it's made to stand still in one place. So there are a series of segments of videotape there. So professional people are involved in investigating this subject. And this is a smooth version – I used an image smoothing technique on it to give a better idea of what it looks like. This is finally an attempt to get a better magnified view of what the thing looked like (so, let’s just see here, unfortunately I just have so many frames on here). That's another photograph that was taken of this object. That's the famous road shot right, right.
[27:15]
Now this is a movie that a guy made in Switzerland. Notice the tree carefully. At a certain point we will see the tree move, right now. The indication would be it wasn't a fake. I will discuss the question whether this was faked or not in just a little bit. It would be quite difficult to fake this (I’ll just stop this and talk a little bit about this). That last thing that you saw was the path that the thing was following. I used a computer to figure that out. Basically in order to fake this, what you would have to do is use a model suspended from a string, and you could try and swing a small model on a string. However if you look at the quality of the image, you’ll see it has the same degree of blurriness as the tree in the background, which is a large tree. So a small model held close up would not be like that. It would be sharper. So in order to make the image blurry to the same degree as an object of the distance of the tree, you’d have to edit each image. Now you can do that in Hollywood frame by frame. I am not saying that it couldn't be faked. Hollywood can do it, no doubt about it. But it's an expensive proposition. I’ve done some work myself with video and it would be very difficult to create this kind of image. In fact I couldn't do it with the facilities that I have got. So then when it flies over the tree at a certain point the tree moves suggesting that wind from the thing has moved the branches of the tree. You can try to fake that by maybe, you can imagine somebody, having a rope and pulling on the tree at just the right moment when the model is swinging. That would be difficult too!
Another point is that the swing, you might say, is pendulum like; it's going around like this. You can experiment with a hand held pendulum and see if you can duplicate that. The basic movement pattern you can duplicate if you move your hand in rather large arcs. You can experiment with that. There is one problem though, namely that the rate of swing of a pendulum gets faster the shorter the string is. You can calculate that for this rate of movement in this picture the string would have to be over 20 feet long. So to swing a pendulum and move the upper end of the spring through considerable arcs when it's twenty feet long is not an easy proposition if you are going to do it that way. Furthermore there are additional features of the way the thing wobbles and moves and so forth, that you can't duplicate with the pendulum. You’d have to have some other strings attached in order to have those movement features. So anyway, that's just some observations on the question of a hoax. Actually photographic evidence is the weakest type of evidence due to the possibility of faking of photographic evidence. Yeah briefly?
Q: Is there a [unclear]
A: I don’t think it was spinning around an axis but it does have some movement like this that is unusual also. If you swing something with a pendulum…
[audio break]
[31:10]
A: ...flying machines which they couldn't identify. And there have been reports of UFO’s that crashed and wreckage that was recovered. Now this may seem like a really remarkable claim because if the UFO crashed and left wreckage, you would think that would be very strong evidence. But the claim is also made that the military people have recovered all that wreckage and are keeping the whole thing secret. This is a whole subject about which a great deal has been written. It sounds at first glance like a very fantastic sort of story, but in fact there’s a lot of evidence indicating that such things really have happened. I am going to play here just a brief tape in which a former military officer is giving testimony about how he was involved in the recovery of unusual wreckage in New Mexico. This is the Roswell, New Mexico crash. Yeah?
Q: Who was he testifying to?
A: He was testifying I think to Stanton Friedman, who was a fellow who has been investigating UFO’s for many years.
Q: No kind of court of law…
A: You see him on the camera, so you see his face. It can definitely be shown that that was that man and he is talking. So unless you say that some actor was very cleverly duplicating him and he never complained about that, then you would have to agree that this is his testimony. He was a major in the US Army Air Force intelligence in the 509th bomber wing. This was back in the late 1940’s based in Roswell, New Mexico. So he is an authentic person. I would think that if they are faking him then surely that would have been exposed. So not only this man has testified but they have testimony that is videotaped, that I have seen personally, of about 15 other people who give corroborating testimony regarding this particular event. And they have transcribed testimony of quite a number of other people. So it's a case which is actually quite remarkable for the amount of evidence that's behind it, if you consider what a fantastic claim being made. Let’s see if this works.
[video played]
Narrator: They were astonished by the vast amount of wreckage.
Major Jesse Marcel: One thing I was certain of... not a weapon, nor aircraft, nor missile. It was something else of which we didn’t know what it was. There were fragments strewn all over the area, an area of about three quarters of a mile long and several hundred feet wide. So we proceeded to pick up the parts… there was something with symbols, to me I called them hieroglyphics… little numbers with symbols, from something that meant something. These little numbers could not be broken, could not be burned. I even tried to burn them – they would not burn. They would not bend. We did all we could to bend it – it would not bend. We even tried to make a dent in it with a 16-pound sledge hammer – there was still no damage.
RLT: And the whole story of how the military suppresses this...
Announcer: ...New Mexico started to transmit on a news wire the story of Major Marcel’s recovery of fragments of a crashed flying saucer. The NPI interrupted that communication with this statement: “Do not continue this transmission.” ...and the official… press release was put out announcing the capture of a flying saucer. Major Marcel escorted the wreckage on a B29 to Carswell Air Force Base. The press was waiting for him, but he was told not to say anything by his commander General Ramey.
Major Jesse Marcel: ...they wanted me to tell them about it, but I couldn’t say anything. When the General came in he told me not to say anything, that he would handle it.
Announcer: The reason that this story has...
[36:15]
RLT: Okay. So this is a very elaborate story, but basically what happened was that initially newspaper stories went out announcing the discovery of the flying saucer. Then the next day a press conference was held in which pieces of the weather balloon were shown. That's what you saw on the photographs there of the General holding up this thing that looked like tin foil, and they said it's just a weather balloon. And that was the end of the story. As you can see the man testifying, that's this Major Marcel, who was quite old, he was testifying just recently. It seems that many of these people as they got old decided that they would reveal the story before they passed on. So there’s a great deal of material along these lines.
Now I am going to show you another thing here on a different line. This is highly scientific. In France there’s a study group sponsored by the government with a long French name; the initials for it are GEPAN. But it's a scientific study group for studying UFO’s. So one famous case that they studied occurred in a place in France called Trans-en-Provence. Basically what happened was that there was a farmer there who was out in his fields one day and he saw this disc-shaped object come flying through the air and land in his field; and it was there for about 2 or 3 minutes he said. He was just staring at that thing. And then it took off. That's all that happened. So when he went to the spot he found that the earth had been dented in and blackened. So there was a very noticeable mark there, and all the plants where that thing had landed had been burnt. So he went to his neighbours and they came and saw it and they called the police. And eventually the study group was brought in.
So the people involved with this study group were highly placed scientists in France and they did a biochemical investigation of this area where this indentation formed. And they observed all kinds of strange biochemical changes in the plants that varied as a function of distance from the center of this mark. So they had quite elaborate investigations. So I have a small film clip here in which you see one of the scientists giving some testimony. So, we’ll try this one.
[plays video]
Actor: If someone wanted to create this, they would need more years of study than we have together. And they would also have to have a greater knowledge of toxic compounds than exists anywhere.
Jean Jacques Velasco: ...in time and in direction, all the biochemical findings are consistent with the descriptions given by the witness. It is probably the first time, to my knowledge, that such a complete set of data has been obtained in such cases of UFO landings.
Actor: ...we were in the presence of an unidentified phenomenon that had been witnessed and had left traces in the soil and surrounding environment.
Narrator: The conclusion: After the case in Trans-en-provence, one cannot have the same perception about the UFO phenomenon, for one can no longer debate whether or not it happened. One cannot say, “Do you believe in UFO’s or don’t you believe in UFO’s”...
RLT: Of course you can say that!
Narrator: ...for now we are aware of phenomena which we cannot control.
[41:40]
RLT: So, okay, so that case, by the way, did I bring it? I don’t know, let’s see - yeah, I got it. In case anyone wants to know, here’s a scientific paper on the details of that case written by the second guy who spoke in French, Valasco, wrote this paper, gives all the details of the analysis and so forth. So these kinds of things are going on. So what I’m going to do a little bit later on is talk about, or actually I guess I’ll start that now, is talk about sightings and encounters with living beings connected with the UFO’s. So thus far I have shown some indications of the craft that are reported, at least they seem to be craft, that's how these people interpret these phenomena. Of course Valasco, by the way, never says anything like that. He just says ‘an unknown phenomena’, so he is being very scientific.
So in any case, since the 1940’s people have reported meeting strange looking beings in connection with UFO’s. Now it was only in the 1960’s, in fact the late 1960’s, that this became acceptable for discussion even among people who study UFO’s, what to speak of anyone else. Back in the 50’s and 40’s even people who studied UFO’s thought that it was just crazy when people reported seeing these little men. The beings that people report seeing typically have basically human form; there are different basic types of beings described. One type consists of beings that are quite short with very large heads, they are said to have very large eyes, but the other features of the face are somewhat vestigial. The mouth is very small – it's described as being like a slit, usually – the nose is undeveloped and so forth. But at the same time they do have a mouth, they do have a nose, they have all the basic human features. It's just that the proportions are unusual from our point of view. So this is one basic type of entity which is reported. They wear clothes, very often they are described as wearing one piece suits. In other cases though, they are described as wearing rather outlandish outfits with funny collars and insignia with serpents and things like that. So in some cases they have been known to wear capes and jewelled pendants.
Audience: Star Trek!
A: Ah, right! So in any case there are other types of beings described also. There are tall beings described that are said to look quite beautiful and have unusual eyes. The eyes are usually described as being slanted and sometimes as being pink in colour. In other cases the eyes are described as having cat like pupils, vertical slit pupils.
There is another category still, these tend to be short, uglier looking ones. [comment - unclear] Well very few of them are described as green. One or two reports are like that. Basically their skin complexion is described as being greyish, very often. Very often it's pointed out also that they don’t have hair typically, these short ones that is, and they don’t seem to have veins or anything like that. It’s very unusual looking. So in any case these were being reported way back in the late 40’s. Yeah?
Q: What percentage are handsome or beautiful…..
[45:53]
A: It's hard to say what the percentage is because you have sampling errors. It's a question of how many things get reported and what reports people select out in order to present to the public Because of this kind of problem it's difficult to get a real idea of the proportions of different kinds of sightings. I think you have to accumulate a lot of data before you can really get a feel for that.
So as I was saying, in the 40’s and 50’s this data was mainly censored. For example the US Air Force ran this project Blue Book for investigating UFO’s for many years but they just automatically threw any of these entity reports into what they called the ‘crackpot file’ which is circular and sitting next to your desk.
So, however starting in 1961, in 1961 there was a famous case of Betty and Barney Hill. This was a bi-racial couple who were travelling home from a vacation trip through New Hampshire. It was about midnight, because they were very late getting home, travelling at night. So they maintained that a UFO came down and they had this experience of seeing entities on the UFO, and they got in their car and drove off in a state of fear. And the next thing they knew they were about a couple of hundred miles down the road without any memory of what had happened in the interval. At first they didn't think too much about it. When they got home they found they were a couple of hours late; they couldn't account for that missing period of time. But they began having nightmares and Barney Hill began developing ulcers, and so they finally went to a psychiatrist to try and figure out what went wrong, to a Dr. Simon in Boston. So the psychiatrist used hypnotherapy to try and recover any memories that they may have had of some traumatic experience that may have been the cause of their problems.
So these accounts came out of what later became a classical UFO abduction. That is to say, they remembered that they were driving along in their car. For some reason they pulled off the main road and went up a narrow road out into the woods, even though they had no reason to do it. When they got to the end of the road this UFO was parked there, these strange little men surrounded their car, took them out of the car onto the UFO, and subjected them to a kind of medical examination which involved a whole series of different procedures and then took them back. So that was their story – that was the first famous story of this kind of thing. Since then there have been many stories like that.
[49:16]
So I brought us one exhibit just to talk a little bit about this. This is a write up that one man made, this isn't published, this is privately circulated. He’s spoken about this in public lectures however. So I attended a lecture that he gave and then I talked with him later on for about a good hour. So I have personal experience of what this man was like, what sort of person he was. So this fellow, his name is John Sulter, he is a sociology professor at the University of North Dakota and also he was involved in civil rights movement with Martin Luther King and in other social justice type causes for many years. So that's his background. So I talked with him for some time and he’s a very level headed practical sort of person. He is not some kind of nut.
And his story was that he and his son were travelling to Mississippi from North Dakota and for some reason they went off into some back country roads – they couldn't quite figure out why they did it – and they had a time lapse. That is, they suddenly found that it was several hours later, and they were several hundred miles down the road, and they didn't know what had happened. So there again there was one of these abduction type experiences. They said that, well, what happened was later on the man remembered the events and he (is everyone... I don’t, I kind of lose my train of thought when everybody keeps getting up and down. So in any case...). So in this case also he reported that later on he spontaneously remembered, without the aid of hypnosis in this case, that they had gone down this little dirt road into the woods, some little men stopped them and took them out of their car, took them down the path into a clearing in the woods, and this UFO was parked there. And they were taken on board and given the examination, so on and so forth. So that’s an example of the kind of testimony that is there.
So what I want to do right now is say a little bit about the relevance of the reports people make of these entities to the Vedic literature. So it turns out that the features that people ascribe to these entities are all described in the Bhagavatam. So I am going to give a series of examples here indicating this kind of thing. I have these in a sort of random order. One feature is quite unusual. Well, just to start with something a little less unusual, the beings float through the air. This is typically described. For example, here is the testimony of an Air Force Sergeant named Charles Moody. Now he was part of the US Air Force human reliability program and the point was made that candidates for this elite group are carefully screened by psychiatrists for emotional disorders. But just to become a member of that group you had to be screened by psychiatrists and so forth. So there’s a whole elaborate story that he has, but the key point was the following thing: He said, “It's going to sound ridiculous, and I hope nobody sends me a straight jacket, but these beings did not walk, they glided.” So this is one example It's a very standard thing that these beings can float through the air, but that is a Vedic phenomenon also. It's a very standard thing for different personalities in the Bhagavatam to float through the air by virtue of laghima siddhi. So that's an example.
Now there’s more involved than just floating through the air. It’s typically described that these beings can go through walls, which seems a little bit unusual. So in other words, you might be sitting here in this room, and then this fellow comes through this wall. That will be a bit shocking if that happened. So there are many accounts like that, however.
Q: [unclear]
A: There are not too many descriptions of what exactly what happens. I know of one case where it’s described that they seem sort of vaporous when they come through, then they seem to solidify within the room, but I don’t know too much in the way of details there. But the main thing is, a lot of people report these things. Now having mentioned such an outrageous point, I should go back a little and discuss the psychological profiles of some of these people. I have also documentation, for example, of a blind study done by a psychologist named Elizabeth Slater on nine people reporting these kinds of experiences. Now they were sent to her with no mention that they had anything to do with UFO experiences. And they were told not to tell her anything about that. So as far as she knew these people were being sent to her for psychological evaluation for some reason. So she did a study with all kinds of tests and so forth. She concluded that the people were completely sane, there was no trace of psychosis or schizophrenia, nor epilepsy nor any of these various disorders that could cause a person to hallucinate. They did show signs of post traumatic stress syndrome, which is something connected with rape victims, Vietnam veterans, and other people who have been through a traumatic experience.
[55:53]
So that was the profile. So then she was told, well, what these people have in common is that each one of them was captured by strange beings and carried on board a UFO. So, and she was astonished by that, because she said that obviously you would think that only, well, she had some amazing psychological jargon, but ‘hysteroid characters subject to fugue states and dissociative’ etc etc. Only such people would tell a story like that you would think. But they weren’t like that. So anyway, that’s there. Here are examples of the entities floating through walls. Now I will make it a little bit worse. People have testified that the entities have picked them up and carried them through the wall. Now what is going on there? There’s a lot of testimony like that. I can give you a whole list of cases. I could give you ten very easily. With some scraping I could get up to fifty, I bet. So anyway, this also is a Vedic phenomena. Now we find this in the Krsna Book amongst other places. And Srila Prabhupada has a very disarming way of talking about it, because he talks about flying through outer space. For example, you know the story of Usha and Aniruddha. So in that story, actually that's an amazing psychical story. Usha has this dream of this beautiful young man who she feels very attracted to and, of course, she’s a princess who is in the inner chambers of Banasura’s palace. So she is very protected. So she has a friend, though, Chitralekha, who is a mystic yogini.
So anyway Chitralekha uses a pretty psychical method to try and figure out who the young man is. And he turns out to be Aniruddha, Pradyumna’s son. So Chitralekha flies through outer space to Dvaraka, picks up Aniruddha who is sleeping in his bed, doesn't awaken him, carries him through outer space back to Sonitapura where Banasura’s palace is, right into the inner quarters where Usha is sequestered, and then they have a whole affair together. So this involves traveling through walls and traveling through the air even, in such a way that it doesn't wake up Aniruddha. And the whole idea of traveling through outer space, actually, what that means is travelling through the ether, and the basic idea there is that everywhere where there is matter there’s also ether, it's right there. It’s possible to just interact with the ether, so you don't interact with the matter that's there. Then you can go right through walls, or whatever it may be, traveling through the ether, and then you come back into your normal state and then interact with matter in the normal way. So that is a Vedic thing. So that you find with the UFO reports and Vedic literature.
Now another thing is invisibility. Now apart from this matter of being able to travel through a wall or something like that, the UFO’s give evidence that they can become invisible. And also the entities connected with them can become invisible even though they’re still there. Now an example of that there was a case of a man named Maurice Masse, just to give an example, this again, it was a French case. Masse was a farmer; he was growing lavender, so he had a big field of it. So this UFO came down and a little man got out; the man levitated in the air. He was one of these big headed guys with large eyes and so forth. Then he got back in his UFO, the UFO moved a few feet and vanished from sight – just blinked out, suddenly it wasn't there. This was broad daylight, so he could just see it wasn't there anymore. But the track that it left as it flew continued across his field for about 400 feet, so, because the lavender crop was pushed down leaving a track for about 400 feet, so the indication is that the UFO blinked out. It became invisible but it was still there moving and producing wind. So that's also a Vedic thing. This is known as antardana.
One nice example of that is the case of Krsna’s battle with Saubha, the airplane of Salva. Of course you know that story from Krsna Book and that's in the Tenth Canto of the Srimad-Bhagavatam. Of course, briefly the story is that Salva acquired this airplane. Srila Prabhupada calls it an airplane, but actually it's not like any airplane that you normally see. It's described that it could appear and disappear, sometimes multiple images of it would appear, that is, there seem to be several of them in the sky. Other times you’d see it hovering somewhere and so on and so forth. In one part of the description in Mahabharata, of Krsna’s battle with the Saubha, it says that the Danava soldiers on the Saubha vehicle were laughing and shouting all kinds of insults at Krsna in harsh voices. And it also said they were very disheveled looking. So and then the whole thing vanished from sight, it disappeared but still you could hear them shouting… [audio break]… all the Danava soldiers were slain upon the Saubha. Anyway, that's invisibility.
[1:02:25]
Let’s see. Now of course another thing is telepathy. Telepathic communication is a very standard thing in Vedic literature. In fact the Bhagavad-gita is even communicated that way to Sanjaya, by the mercy of Vyasadeva. So in these UFO cases these beings very often communicate with the humans that they contact, but in almost every case it is said that this is telepathic. There are a few cases where it is said that ordinary vocal language was used and a translating machine was used. There are a few cases like that, but generally speaking telepathy is used.
Now another aspect of this which I have already briefly mentioned is the idea of control through hypnotic power. This is a Vedic thing. There is what is called the vasita siddhi which is, Srila Prabhupada describes in the Nectar of Devotion, as being the power of hypnosis which you can use to control a person and bewilder them in various ways. So as I mentioned, in these UFO abduction cases, typically what happens is the person will be guided so some remote spot where the actual encounter takes place, and they don’t understand why they went there. They just feel impelled to go out and drive to some particular place.
So it's interesting that apparently people can do that also. I did some research on that. People can cause a person to go and travel to a certain spot. There are two cases of research along those lines that I know of. One was in Russia in about the 1930’s There was a professor named Vasiliev who did research on remote hypnosis. He was able to show that you can influence a person in Leningrad from the city of Sevastopol. Leningrad is up near the Baltic Sea and Sevastopol down near the Black sea. So someone in Sevastopol could give a hypnotic command to someone in Leningrad to go to sleep. And they had their watches synchronised and people were observing and so forth and they found that you could give good statistical evidence that it worked. In other words, measure when the person went to sleep, when the command was given and so forth. So these studies were done with all kinds of statistical protocols and so forth.
One that's interesting from a sort of storytelling view point is the case in France in which some psychical researchers were trying this. So Dr. Gilbert, this was in La Habra, France, decided that he would call a certain woman, who was a patient of his, to his home hypnotically. So it was agreed that he would do this at a certain time, and the woman was not told anything about this plan, but the other scientists who were involved with this hid out near her home in order to see what would happen. So sure enough at the designated time when he began giving commands for her to come to his place she, in a sort of somnambulistic fashion, walked out of her home and started sort of going down the street in an unsteady fashion as though she was sleepwalking. And so in due course of time she went to his place. So that's an example.
So there is this vasita siddhi. That’s an element of the UFO cases, but also there is even indication that human beings can do these kinds of things. So let's see – various items.
[1:06:30]
I thought I would also mention the case of the abduction of Duryodhana. (So how are we doing for time here?) So on the subject of abductions, it’s interesting in the Mahabharata it's described that King Duryodhana at a certain point was abducted. Briefly the story there is that he had decided to commit suicide by fasting unto death. He had become quite disturbed. What happened was that he had gone to the Pandavas, who were in exile, in order to humiliate them. And so his idea was that he would parade in front of them with all his finery and they were there in the forest wearing bark clothes and so forth. And thus he would totally lord it over them. So on the way there he ran into a group of Gandharvas which were occupying a certain section of the forest and they wouldn't let him through. So he was accustomed to having his way. So he said, “All right, I am coming through anyway.” So a big battle took place and the Gandharvas completely defeated Duryodhana and Karna and so forth. They were just totally beaten by the superior forces of the Gandharvas.
So Duryodhana was captured by the Gandharvas. So the news came to the Pandavas and immediately Bhima said, “Great! Serves the guy right! At last he is getting what he deserves!” And then Yudhisthira spoke up and you can imagine what he said, “No, we must save Duryodhana! It is our duty because he is a human being. He has been captured by these nonhumans. So according to the law of dharma it is our duty to come to his aid. Besides he is a family member!”
So Arjuna, as it happened, had some political pull with the Gandharvas due to the fact that his father was Indra, which is very helpful for political pull. So he spoke to the Gandharva chieftain and Duryodhana was released. But he was totally humiliated by this. Here his enemy had arranged for his release. So he decided he would fast unto death. So meanwhile down in Patalaloka the Danava’s got wind of this and they sent a mysterious woman named Krtya to get Duryodhana and take him to Patalaloka. So sure enough Krtya appeared before Duryodhana, grabbed hold of him and carried him to Patalaloka. Now this is another example of carrying a body through matter because to go to Patalaloka you go through the earth. So he was then brought into the presence of the Danavas and they talked things over with him. And they explained that they had actually engineered his body. They were involved in his very birth. Actually he was part of a very long term plan that they had to take over the world. In fact they specifically mentioned that they had arranged for the upper part of his body to be as hard as diamonds and to be invulnerable to any weapon. However they had not arranged this for the lower part of his body.
So in any case, there is an interesting feature of this involving mind control which I thought was interesting. This is how the Danavas described what would happen in the battle of Kuruksetra. Mind control would be used in order to win the battle. They said, “Other asuras will take possession of Bhisma, Drona, Krpa and the others, and possessed by them they will fight your enemies ruthlessly. When they engage in battle, O best of the Kurus, they will give no quarter to either sons or brothers, parents or relatives, students or kinsmen, the young or the old. Pitiless, possessed by the Danavas, their inner souls overwhelmed, they will battle their relations and cast all love far off. Gleefully, their minds darkened, the tiger-like men befuddled with ignorance will say to each other, ‘You will not escape from me with your life’.” So this was the idea – the Danavas would control the minds of Bhisma, Krpa and so forth and turn them against the Pandavas.
Q: [unclear]
[1:12:00]
A: Yes, in other words, if you have an evil errand to perform you summon one of these entities and they will do it for you. [unclear]... Well yeah, they summoned her up. Well, I will have to tell you the Whitley Strieber story. He has the same story. (Let me see, I’ve got that here someplace, Oh, here it is, okay) This is what he reported. I don’t know if he read about Krtya. But he said that he woke up in the dark of night and this strange female being was there, not too human looking, with the big eyes and spindly limbs and the whole thing. But anyway, she controlled his movements and floated him out of the room. He said, “If I walked everything was normal, but if I stopped I began to float along. I could feel her pushing from behind. I had no control over my direction. I was not moving, I was being moved.” So that's how he described the experience.
So according to his story he was moved through the rooms of his house. So it seemed normal, looked like the regular rooms. He was floating along until they came to the door of his house. Then he said, (do I have that here. Oh, yeah, here it is), “We moved again and this time I entered a profoundly different situation. No longer could I see normally. There was a glittering blackness before me. I could feel the Sadie [?] in my arms.” He picked up his cat from the sofa for reality testing, he said, in order to prove this wasn't a dream. So he grabbed his cat. “I could feel the Sadie in my arms. I was very glad for her companionship. The next thing I knew I was standing in a room” and he said “there were three other beings in the room, an ordinary looking woman, a six foot six or taller blonde man, and someone with a ridiculous toupee who looked like something from another world wearing the clothes of the 40’s.” That was his account, but the basic theme there, actually this comes up fairly often, that a strange looking female entity will come and take the person and carry them off. And then the question is how do they know that they are female? They say, well, it just sort of feels as though the quality of the person was female. They can't tell really from the appearance.
Let’s see. Oh, well, here’s another Vedic parallel that I thought was kind of interesting. In this one, there’s something one researcher called the Oz effect that is associated with UFO encounters. And this is when the encounter begins, everything becomes quiet, mysteriously. The crickets stop chirping, the leaves stop rustling, it's like there is a deathly stillness. So this comes up in one report after another. There are many different examples of it. So you find the same thing in Vedic literature. For example when Ravana came to kidnap Sita, it's described in the Ramayana that the leaves stopped rustling, the birds stopped chirping, the river Godavari stopped – you couldn't hear the rippling sound anymore, it became silent – and so forth. So there are different examples like that.
[1:15:52]
So okay, little interlude here. (where am I? Okay) Just to give you another example of the kind of testimony that exists.
[video played]
Announcer: ...fearing that this might compromise the privacy and security of himself ...noted radio and television columnist who took the photographs. After a lengthy discussion, [?] assures the witness that his identity will be cloaked...
Witness: ...those pictures were taken, some by the gentleman you’re talking about, and some by his mother...
Announcer: Did they ever see the spaceship on or near the ground?
Witness: Just flying. There’s a lot of pictures here. As far as I know, no one has ever seen these photographs except for the people I described. Here, like this one is flying directly over the house. Here it is at the top of the... you’ll see in this one there’s no top to the thing, in front of the house... he took another picture as it got over the house.
Announcer: That’s interesting.
Witness: Then when it went out in the field it elevated this little thing on top.
Announcer: That accounts for some of the changing shapes we get.
Witness: And here’s one in an open field, just over a cornfield way out over the trees... these are just photographs you can take pictures of... and because of his wife I don’t feel like he’ll ever do anything as long as he lives because she is so terrified... and they’re very nice people, and they’re very rich people… he said eventually these people are going to contact you...
[video ends]
RLT: Okay, that’s one case. Let’s see what we got.
[starts next video]
Witness: I was awakened by a sound, I thought it was a helicopter in my backyard. I woke up and the whole entire inside of my house was lit up real bright, outside real bright. I finally got to the window, bedroom window, and looked out. I didn’t see any sign of a helicopter – I seen the most perfect flying saucer you ever did see! I never believed in them, but after I seen that one, I believe in them now. It was over the whole structure of these pine trees here now... about 70 foot in circumference, approximately two stories high. I viewed it for possibly 3 minutes. I have a broken leg, I grabbed one of my crutches, finally got to... she got to the window. She said, ”Oh my gosh, how beautiful.” It was sitting there, hovering over these pine trees, and it was... floating up and down motion, clockwise, just like that. And when it got ready to leave, it turned up, flipped up on edge, and just went off like a streak of light. The saucer landed in his front yard, came down in his front yard, they went to his house, and he drew this sketch here. And about an hour and a half later the Easley sheriff department called me and asked could I come down and draw a sketch... officer here in the backyard. And I said, “Sure.” I came down... I drew this sketch here of the saucer, and not even seeing this, I drew mine, they compared it, and you can see how close they are. I didn’t even know they had a sketch, didn’t even know anyone else had seen it.
Announcer: The UFO bore a striking resemblance . . .
Q: [unclear]
A: Seven foot grasshoppers? Well... Some of the descriptions of these beings say that they look exceedingly emaciated, so people compare them to insects. The basic account that you get is that you have a human form, but the arms and legs are very stick-like in many cases. That’s one aspect. Yeah?
Q: [unclear]
[1:22:33]
A: Well, ah, we won’t get into the bids [?] here. Anyway, we’re doing this for Krsna Consciousness. So, in any case, let’s see, so where I was here? The basic point that I was getting at is the nature of the entities – the kinds of powers that they exhibit, the traits that they have and so forth – have parallels in the Vedic literature in terms of the nature of the living beings that are described, the kinds of powers they have, or siddhis, so on and so forth. So there are considerable parallels there. I’ll mention one other parallel that I always thought was kind of interesting. This is the creation of illusory animal forms; that is connected also with the UFO’s. Now one case I have in the UFO domain would be the case of a girl given the pseudonym of Virginia Horton – not her real name – who was lured through the woods by a deer she said was very fascinating, it was like a conscious deer, and later on under hypnosis it was revealed that she had a UFO encounter out in the woods, typical thing with different entities and so forth. So I thought that was interesting if you consider the story, for example, in the Ramayana, of the deer which lures Laksmana and Lord Ramacandra away from Sita. In that case of course Marici, the Raksasa, was assuming the form of a deer, but significantly, when he was shot by Lord Ramacandra, the dead body that wound up there was that of the Raksasa. So in that case that was an illusory form that he was projecting and as soon as he died he went back to his normal form.
Some of the demons in Krsna’s pastimes however did a different thing. They actually assumed a physical form and then when they died the dead body that they left was that of a physical form. For example Aghasura, his body was left drying up for a year, actually. So there seem to be two different ways of doing it, but in any case, the projection of the illusory forms is another thing that you find in the UFO phenomena.
[1:25:00]
So, let’s see. There are two additional areas to discuss. There is the heavy, negative material. Then there is the more positive encouraging material. Let’s see, I guess, to be perfectly honest, I should go into some of the heavy negative material also. So there are cases in which in these UFO encounters, people are quite thoroughly traumatised and there have been cases where people are attacked, it would appear, with some kind of weapons. Very often they get zapped with a beam of light. For example, in Brazil this seems to be more common than in this country. But there are cases there, for example there is the case of the Raimondo Souza, I believe was his name. He was a fellow who used to go hunting out in the forest, back when they still had forests in Brazil, and so the technique of hunting was interesting, because what they would do is set up a hammock up in the tree and they had a flashlight and a rifle. When a deer came along they would shine the flashlight in its eyes and the deer would freeze. That's what it does in the dark when flashlight... and they then would shoot it with a rifle.
So it's interesting that these same hunters are being hunted apparently by a similar technique. What happens is that this object comes flying over, local word for them is ‘achupa’, so the object flies over and shines a very bright light at them and then zaps them with a beam, and there’ve been deaths associated with this. It's not completely clear if the cause of death is directly the beam that strikes the person. It seems in some cases the person dies of a heart attack at the point when he’s struck by the beam. But of course that may be due to the shock of that experience. But in any case, deaths have been reported – this Raimondo Souza died. That was witnessed by his hunting companion.
A rather well attested case of something similar is this Travis Walton case that occurred in Arizona. There there were some men doing wood cutting out in the forest and they testified that they were going home from work on this road through the woods. They saw this UFO hovering, blowing thing hovering in the air. One of them named Travis Walton got of out of their truck and walked towards it out of curiosity. And the others were frightened and they stayed in the truck and were shouting at him, you know, “Don’t go near that thing!” So he went right up to it and suddenly he was struck by a bluish beam of light. He didn't know that himself; in his experience suddenly he just was knocked out, but the other men testified that this bluish beam of light came out of the craft, hit him in the chest, and knocked him over, for several feet in fact. So they were scared at that point and they drove off very fast. And then they began to think, “Wait a minute. We’ve abandoned him and what could be happening, he could be laying there dying or something.” So they got up their courage and drove back to the site but nothing was there. They couldn't find him or anything. So in due course they contacted the sheriff, there was a big police search, it went on for five days, and they couldn't find any trace of the body. And the men were suspected of murder. The idea came up, well, they killed the guy and this was their story, somewhat strange story. So they were given polygraph lie detector tests and one man was judged to be too agitated to take the test. The others passed the test, that is, as far as that test is concerned they were telling the truth as they understood it. That's always the thing to keep in mind about these tests. It doesn't prove that the person is telling the truth. It gives you evidence suggesting strongly that he’s telling the truth as he believes it, because the test really measures how anxious you are about what you are saying. The idea being that if you are deliberately lying it’s betrayed by some physical symptoms that they can measure. So it was considered unusual in the case of a phoney story for five men who, I think, took the test to pass it. So there’s pretty strong testimony that that event did occur.
In that case Travis Walton appeared after five days. He just came out of the forest area, to a phone booth, called up his brother, and his story was that he awakened to consciousness on board the UFO. In other words, he remembers walking towards it, seeing it and then suddenly with great pain he woke to consciousness, and he was in the UFO. And these strange looking entities were standing around him and they had some kind of apparatus on his chest. So then he gave a whole story of what happened on the UFO. His experience there lasted for about an hour and a half and the rest of the five days was not accounted for, and, to my knowledge, he never did find out what happened during the rest of the time. Anyway, that's another case of violence.
[1:30:56]
What I thought I would do, see if we have some time, I have here a section of a videotape which is testimony under hypnosis of a lady who observed a cattle mutilation taking place on board a UFO. Now cattle mutilation is another whole new topic one could discuss. But this has been happening at regular intervals in the United States and other countries. What happens is that farm animals such as cows and horses are found dead in the fields with organs cut out of them with surgical precision. Very often it's the genitals, or one eye will be removed, or the heart will be removed, and they observed that the cuts show signs of high temperature. If you look at the flesh under a microscope there are signs of burning around the cut which is very precise and also typically there is no blood found in the bodies of the animals. And to make it more interesting, the animal may be found in an area of soft ground where you would expect tracks leading up to it and away from it if somebody came up to the animal to do this kind of thing, but there are no tracks. So these are mysterious cases, numerous, very numerous cases, thousands of cases. And I could show you dozens of newspaper clippings, you know, about this subject.
Q: Do they have any explanation?
A: Well, the explanation people have offered, the standard explanation you will hear is, well, predators do it like….
Q: [unclear]
A: Well coyotes, but coyotes don't do that. No laser surgeons in coyotes. The next one is satanic cults. Satanic cults may do some things like that for all you know, but you would think that if this was being done by human beings then some of them would have been apprehended by now and if they were apprehended and brought to trial for doing this [skip in recording]... trial for such a thing. So why would the police turn a blind eye to that kind of activity. I can see with drug smuggling but this is another thing.
Q: [unclear]
A: Why the military would kill cows on farmer’s property is another question.
Q: [unclear]
A: Well I don't know, maybe they did, but that’s military operation. When you invade a country you do things like that. But anyway, in Colorado, I have testimony here of a woman seeing a calf being cut up on board a UFO. So that is a, I’ll just play a little bit of it. Yeah?
Q: [unclear]
[1:34:25]
A: That's been said. I researched that and it's phony, it's due to misquoting the work of a certain man named Womack who does studies of DNA of cattle. It's been reported that cattle DNA and human DNA are very similar. But I looked up his papers and corresponded with him and he said that he has been totally misrepresented about that, it's not true at all. So that's another aspect.
[video played]
Announcer: She and her mother, daughter Cindy, brother, and sister-in-law watched a strange bright light hovering in the sky. After that night she suffered terrible headaches and anxiety. In 1978 she underwent one hypnosis session which brought out a part of her unusual experience, but not all of it. She also had several psychiatric and personality evaluations – all the results in the normal human behavior range. The second hypnosis session with Dr. Spinkle occurred on March 13th 1980.
Dr. Spinkle: Now you’re standing outside your car, now you’re looking up, you can describe your impressions. What are your impressions?
Witness: It’s like a spotlight that’s shining down on the back of my car, and it’s like it has substance to it. I can see an animal being taken up in this... I can see it squirming and trying to get free, and it’s like it’s being sucked up. It’s taken into some sort of chamber, a little round tiny room... and I get nauseated at watching how they excise [?] it's parts.
Dr. Spinkle: The animal’s being cut up?
Witness: Yes.
Dr. Spinkle: How’s it being cut up?
Witness: ...it’s laid out flat and smooth, it glistens, and there’s needles in it, what appears to be needles – they may be probes, I don’t know. But it has a tube connected to it... and the same thing with what appears to be testicles.
Dr. Spinkle: Is anybody else around you?
Witness: I feel the presence of things, I don’t know what they are, I can’t see them.
Dr. Spinkle: Okay, now let yourself focus on what is happening inside the craft. Be aware of who is around you. It’s okay. Are you able to describe who is around you?
Witness: It appears to be two little men. Their hands are [?] , they have long claw-like nails, they have very large eyes, they’re very hypnotic, like they’re so big, and they don’t blink, the eyes do not blink... they were very snappy about their movements and they knew exactly what they were doing, and I felt a little better, that for some reason they projected it was necessary to see that.
RLT: So anyway, so that’s an example of that. Let’s see how we’re doing on time here. So in Vedic literature also we have heavy negative phenomena described. Of course that shouldn't be surprising to us because that's the basic theme of the Srimad-Bhagavatam and Mahabharata, is that demons were taking over the earth and so Krsna came to rectify the situation. So the heavy negative aspect is there. Of course that's what was going on with Duryodhana in that story that I mentioned. Of course the ultimate solution to that is to become Krsna conscious, because after all, it was Krsna who resolved the negative situation back then and it’s Krsna who can resolve all negative situations.
[1:39:28]
By the way, many people who discuss this UFO phenomena are very greatly disturbed by it Disturbance is the general response of the people who are serious about this. Here is what this Dr. Jacob said, by the way, at the end of his book. He said, “I am often asked how I would react if the entire abduction phenomenon should be proved to be the internally generated product of people’s imaginations. If there are in reality no abductions and no aliens and never have been, if that were true I would weep with joy. I want to be wrong.” This is what he writes.
So it looks like a pretty bleak picture when people investigate these things and they find it appears as though some kind of ghoulish entities are playing games with us and we have no power to do anything about it. That's the impression that many of these researchers have. I’d say that’s the predominant mood in many of these conferences in which the serious people discuss this. I am not talking about the new age type of presentation.
So ultimately Krsna consciousness, I would suggest, has the actual answer for that because the basic message, as I said, is that we are not actually all powerful. There are powers, intelligent beings and so forth that we cannot control, that's described in the Vedic literature. But over everything there is the Supreme Personality of Godhead, and if you become Krsna’s devotee, then He takes care of you and so forth, the basic message of Krsna consciousness. And as I mentioned earlier on, this fellow Professor Mack at the Harvard Medical School is also bringing up ideas, maybe the anima mundi, has something in mind here we should learn about, the soul of the world. So that's the negative side which could get a great deal heavier.
I’ll end with another report here. This was from the positive side. People have encounters of a positive, more spiritual nature. One of the best attested encounter phenomena of all time occurred in Fatima, a little town in Portugal, in 1917. Now this was a visitation of the Virgin Mary and one may say, “Well, that sounds like a Roman Catholic thing,” and it was. The people were all Roman Catholics. But the basic story there is that three children would once every month see the Virgin Mary, or at least a woman they took to be that, floating in the air, glowing effulgently, in this one little secluded place near the town of Fatima, which is way out in the country in rural Portugal. So this happened on the 13th of the month for several months in a row. And gradually crowds of people began to assemble there. Only the children could see the lady herself. However other people saw some rather interesting things. For example this one man Monsenhor J. Quaresma, he said, “To my surprise I see clearly and distinctly a globe of light advancing from east to west, gliding slowly and majestically through the air. Suddenly the globe with its extraordinary light vanished. But near us a girl of about ten continues to cry joyfully, “I still see it! I still see it!"
So apparently this globe would come and the Virgin Mary apparently would come out of that.
Q: What about collective hallucination?
[1:43:45]
A: So the testimony here gets considerably beyond that, because what happened, of course there are many confirming details and so on, but the real punch line of it is that the children, one child Lucia, asked this Virgin Mary if that's who it was, please do a miracle so that the people can believe! So she said, “Ok, on the 13th of October I will perform a miracle.” So this was broadcast in advance, so everybody heard about it, that's the prediction: on the 13th of October there will be a miracle. So 70,000 people showed up for it, it is estimated.
Q: These are facts?
A: These are facts. It’s well attested. It’s all in the newspapers and all kinds of people had given their personal testimony and so on and so forth, that this really happened.
Q: 70,000!
A: They estimate; I am sure they didn't do a head count, but it was some kind of estimate. So it was terrible weather, it was sort of like New Vrindavana I think, mud everywhere, it was raining, drizzling. You can imagine 70,000 people churning the mud up out in the fields in that rural area. So anyway they assembled there. The report is that suddenly what appeared to be the sun appeared in the sky and for about a ten minute period it gave out colors of light of all different colors of the rainbow in sort of square patterns that flashed over the ground and over people and so on. So you look at the people next to you and they were turning now green, now violet, now red, and the whole landscape was lit up like this by this light coming out of what sort of looked like the sun. So this went on for some time. Then it began darting through the sky in zig zags and finally shooting out these colored lights. Now lots of people gave testimony that they were there and they saw it. They even say, “Well, if that's mass hallucination then it's a pretty good one!” Not quite like sort of seeing Mickey Mouse in a cloud, and saying, "I saw Mickey Mouse!"
So, anyway, finally it looked as though the sun, because that's what they thought it was, was going to crash down on them. Suddenly it came down, became much bigger and brighter and they felt it was going to crush them. People were falling on their knees and praying and screaming and all kinds of things. So, and then at that point it shot up in the air, and then there was just the ordinary sun in the sky and that was the end of the display. Now key point here, even if you advance the mass hysteria phenomenon for that crowd of people somehow over an area of 600 square miles, so that would be like 20 by 30 miles let's say...
Q: [unclear]
A: Non-attendees in surrounding communities, they saw it, and there were lots of reports from surrounding communities and they described it in the same way. Beyond that nobody saw it. And no university people reported it, looking through telescopes or anything. So it seems it was a local manifestation but it was seen over quite a broad area, in one locality, and lots of people reported it, and it had been predicted in advance, and that was in all the papers and everybody knew. So interesting phenomena. That was a more positive thing though.
[1:47:31]
One thing I wanted to mention as a curious little Vedic parallel there, when this glowing globe would show up that the people saw, they would say that it looked like rose petals would come showering down from the sky and they would vanish or dissolve just before they hit the ground. So this had the story of flowers falling from the sky, which is a standard Vedic thing, because there are so many reports of flowers from the sky.
So I’ll just show you one last little item just to finish things off. This shows a couple of things that were happening back in 1947.
[video played]
Major Keyhoe: The United States government has spent a lot of time and effort debunking UFO’s, even to the point of turning the whole thing into a joke.
Another voice: One of the things in our catalogue, there’s only one that could have the high velocity and low wind resistance of flying saucers: the cover of a GI trash can!
Secretary Brown: What some military people, like retired marine major Donald Keyhoe, spoke out accusing the government of hiding what it knows about UFO’s... they are simply following orders to hide away all UFO sightings as soon as they become public. I deny that UFO’s really exist...
RLT: There was a guy denying it there, that was Secretary Brown of the Air Force.
Q: One guy was confirming it and Secretary Brown was denying it?
A: The fellow who was speaking there, I cut off Secretary Brown, actually I should have showed you what he said. The guy speaking was Major Keyhoe, he was a famous personality in the 50’s regarding UFO’s. He became, he went to the public and argued that the military is covering up the information concerning UFO’s and so forth There was all kinds of controversies going on.
Q: Did he die a natural death?
A: I think so. I haven't heard that he died under mysterious circumstances. But that’s, well it’s 6:00. Any comments or questions? Yeah?
Q: I saw a book on Christian…
A: In Christian tradition? Well, yeah, I mean, it depends on what Christians you’re talking about. Traditional European Christians had angels and all kinds of things, devils, so many different things.
Q: [unclear]
A: Well the basic thought that I have concerning this whole phenomenon, of course I can't say definitely what is going to happen, obviously, but what it serves to do is change people’s consciousness, as far as I can see. Nothing overt is occurring; obviously it's not an invasion from outer space or anything like that, even though this guy Jacobs in this book says we have been invaded, he is quite concerned about it. But this fellow Mack echoed another idea, namely, that this is going to bring people to some idea of some anima mundi which is in control of this planet and has some plan for it, to keep us from messing it up and so forth. In any case we live in a very materialistic period of time, but this kind of information can be used to help in spreading spiritual knowledge, which is the only reason that I’ve gotten into it.
Q: Perhaps you could show us….
[1:52:20]
A: Well I will. I began this discussion deliberately by quoting from a book which presents Vedic literature as fantasy and fairy tales. Now let's be realistic. That's what most intelligent educated people think, not only in this country but in India. If you go to India to the universities also they think the same thing. I mean, I have talked to people. Mayavadi philosophy is fine. Brahman does not get in the way of science you see. But Krsna lifting mountains, and shape changing demons, all that kind of thing, definitely get in the way of science. So the whole point is the modern scientific view accepted by rational educated sensible people of today kicks out Krsna consciousness across the board. So therefore we must remain as a very small isolated sectarian group as long as that is the prevailing situation.
Q: [unclear]
A: Now empirically speaking, because we are talking here about science and empiricism, science is supposed to be based on data, evidence. Science cannot give you absolute conclusions about anything. It's all imperfect, it's all speculative, that's the nature of science. But people are believing in science today. They are getting the whole picture of the world from science. As I say, even in India intellectuals likewise are following science. They believe in the Big Bang, they believe in Darwin, they believe in dating Hastinapura to 800 BC and no earlier, and so many different things like that.
So the point is, what is the world really like? So based on empirical evidence the world is really quite different from the world as presented in modern science. It is much more similar to the world as presented in the Bhagavatam. Now the Bhagavatam describes that you have 400,000 human forms of life. Obviously we don't hear about all them in the Bhagavatam because it only has 18,000 verses. So you have got 400,000 forms of life. But we know generally about them, their mystic powers, and so forth. So that is the world of the Bhagavatam. So what is the real world like? This kind of evidence and other kinds which, as I said, I have discussed on other occasions, backup the worldview of the Bhagavatam. And they indicate that the worldview of modern science is seriously deficient. That’s why the scientists kick out this kind of evidence. How are they going to account for beings that come through the wall and all that kind of thing? I mean it doesn't fit into their world picture at all. But it does fit into the Bhagavatam world picture. And therefore it can be used to suggest to people we actually live in the world of Vedic literature. And then ultimately the solution to problems should be the kind of solution presented in the Vedic literature. At least that's a corollary we can suggest. That's only a suggestion, but people can see if it makes sense or not. The scientific method as I mentioned before is that we are the topmost beings, certainly within millions of light years of here, and we have to figure everything out on our own power. There's no God that's going to help us and we can do it by our own power because we have the intelligence to manipulate matter and so forth. So if that's not true then the basic devotional approach of the Srimad-Bhagavatam becomes a much more viable alternative. And if the basic world picture of the Srimad-Bhagavatam is realistic and is supported by empirical evidence then that’s reason for taking that devotional approach seriously. ,
Q : ...a strange man walked up and he talked strange stories… the person had golden hair, gold eyes, a nose like an elephant… that was my experience… at the end of the show… a flying saucer landed… he had gold hair, gold eyes, a nose like an elephant… planet Uranus and they had come to invite us to join the united federation of planets…
A: Well that’s interesting, but I tell you, I know a little about the Holloman Air Force Base story. And I’m not so sure.
Q: Well, that's another Holloman base story. This is a different one.
A: The little grey guys? That’s a different Holloman Air Force Base story? Okay, I’m familiar with that one. But anyway, you had a question for some time?
Q: Bali Maharaj’s airplane in the Eighth Canto… Sukracarya brought him back to life… flew him back up to heavenly planets…
A: Well, in Vedic literature there are plenty of amazing flying machines. I didn't go over that but there are lots of examples apart from Salva’s vehicle. There is the flying city of Hiranyapura, which was a good one. This is a city flying in outer space inhabited by the Paloma and Kalakeya Danavas. And they were just having a gay time flying around from planet to planet in their city and they had one of these benedictions from Brahma that they couldn't be slain by so and so different types of entities, but humans weren't mentioned in the list. So when Arjuna went up to the heavenly planets to meet Indra, who was his father, Indra actually revealed the real reason for whole thing of even having Arjuna be born. Indra it seems was a master politician. So, and that was that Arjuna would come up there and he would kill off these demons who had benedictions that demigods couldn't kill them, but humans could. So he wiped out Nivatakavaca demons and also devastated the flying city of Hiranyapura.
Q: [unclear]
[2:01:15]
A: France and Belgium seem to be exceptional. France is exceptional in that they are making these scientific investigations. They haven’t done an incredible amount but they have cases in which all kinds of scientists have taken soil samples and done chemical tests in the places where the UFO landed and shown different effects, so on and so forth. So that is going on in France. In the United States…
Q: and their conclusion…
A: Yeah, well, this Valasco concluded something, we just don't know what it is, landed in this guy’s field, and it involved very high temperatures, couple of tons of pressure, and affected all the plants. So that's there.
In Belgium it's also been unusual because the Air Force actually released the tape showing the radar screen on the F16 which locked on to this UFO. Now the United States military would never release something like that as far as I’m aware. By the way, I have spoken personally to one man who again, I have spoken to him for about a couple of hours total, who was an engineer working for the Navy at the Naval Ordnance Test Center at China Lake in California in the early 1950s doing metric photography. They were doing photographs of missile tests and other kinds of weapons tests with very high quality cameras so that you could get the coordinates of the object as it flew, from the photographs. So he told me that he was in charge of the group of men who were doing this work. He told me they frequently got UFOs in their photographs of the weapons. A UFO would come and follow the missile or whatever and he described to me that he personally saw a UFO. He said an Air Force cargo plane was coming in for a landing at about, I think, 600 feet altitude, he said. At about 300 feet altitude underneath it, this object was flying. It consisted of a front half which was a large diameter disc and a smaller back half which was also circular and the back half he said was amber coloured like an artist’s drawing triangle, if you know what those little triangles look like, and the front half looked as though it was made of silvery metal. The thing was coming along. At a certain point he said it flipped up to the wing of the plane in the blink of an eye. In other words it went 300 feet up like that, hovered next to the… [audio break] ...because they have compassion for the people down on the earth.
Q: [unclear]
A: Yep, we need it; we need a bit of compassion around here.
Q: I just find it hard to imagine…
A: Well that's the basic problem with the conditioned soul.
Q: So is this providing another function… we don't know what's going on. [unclear]...
A: Yeah we are actors on a stage like Shakespeare said, acting out karmic plays. [unclear]... What we have got to do is realise, “Hey, wait! the play is over, let’s get back home!”
Q: [audio break]
[2:05:45]
A: ...another planet which is one theory. How do they arrive, how do they arise there? Well you could say by evolution. Well the chances that evolution would produce a human-like form on another planet are exceedingly remote if you analyse according to the theory of evolution. It's equally remote that the human-like form would be produced on the earth, but you could say, “Well that's what came up!” You know, if you throw a bunch of dice and get a certain combination, something’s got to come up. Whatever ever comes up is improbable but that's what came up. So you can say, “Well, the dice were thrown, humans are what came up.” But now to do it twice, that's another thing, because if you throw the dice you get a certain pattern. Now you throw the dice twice, you get the same pattern or a close pattern, you can calculate the probabilities would be very small. In other words, it doesn't make sense in terms of evolution that anything remotely human would appear on another planet by that process. And they couldn't have evolved on this planet according to science because there are no fossils or anything that would support that idea. So whichever way you look at it the theory of evolution takes a real blow if this is real. So that's another point, apart from the fact that...
Of course another thing is that psychical phenomena are supported by these things. Another thing I even forgot to discuss was reincarnation, also out-of-body experiences, in connection with UFO phenomena. That’s another whole subject. People have the experience of going on board the UFO and then they go out of their body. In other cases they go out of their body and then they go on board the UFO.
Q: [unclear]
A: So the hook has come out. All glories to Srila Prabhupada! Jaya!
[audio break]
[2:07:45]
RLT: What they report is half-human, half-alien children seem to be produced which are kept with the aliens and shown to the women. The women are asked to hold them as though that would give them some feeling of security or physical intimacy and so on. There are lots of reports written up in detail in this book and other books also of that kind of thing which of course is really controversial. But that's the kind of thing people are reporting.
Q: [unclear]
A: That would appear to be stress because the memory was suppressed. In other words he couldn't consciously remember what had happened but he was very disturbed by it. So therefore it came out in the form of ulcers. But if you can bring the memory to consciousness then you can resolve the conflict and then you feel better. This happens generally in psychology in all kinds of different circumstances, that if a person has a repressed memory of some frightening experience or like sexual abuse as a child or something like that, this can produce physical symptoms; and then if through hypnotherapy or something like that they can bring forth the memory, then they are relieved of the symptoms. So that does go on. It seems to be what was happening with him.
Q: So are there a lot of people who suffer from cancer or some kind of malady because of having been examined?
A: People sometimes report physical maladies of different kinds. Oddly enough though, people also report cures and this is a common thing, happens quite frequently. This guy for example claims that his health was improved greatly. He felt very satisfied about the whole experience.
Q: Which guy is this?
A: This is the guy, the University Professor from North Dakota, civil rights worker, that guy. So he thought it was just great.
Q: [unclear]
A: Yeah, he said after that I don’t get colds, all kinds of improvements physically he said, feels ten years younger you know. He is about 55 years old, so he is getting on a bit – yeah like a young man again!
Q: [unclear]
A: So of course now this guy, he’d take a very suspicious viewpoint on that. He’d say either that they’re setting this guy up in order to do propaganda for themselves. So he takes a suspicious negative view point.
Q: So he described the abductors as beautiful.
A: No, he described the standard ugly looking guys, with the big eyes and the whole thing.
Q: [unclear]
A: There are cases of featureless beings just like this Pascagoula case. No facial features. They seemed to have bodily features entirely covered with, like, thick elephant skin. It's a very weird case.
Q: [unclear]
A: He felt they were robotic. That was interesting; they never moved – their legs remained together – and they just moved by floating, levitating.
Q: [unclear]
[2:12:20]
A: People have speculated that. I’ve heard that speculation; I really don't know. But I’ve heard people argue. Well this guy Harder, James Harder, Engineering Professor at UC Berkeley, he’s now emeritus, he’s been studying these things for years and he presents that theory. He says that the inexperienced ones, they are kind of crude in their dealings. And then there are the more experienced ones who, you never remember anything from them. They’re so expert. But I don't know, that's an idea he has.
Q: ...do they have theories in terms of… people disappearing.
A: Well the whole, disappearances, that's a whole other subject about which there is quite a literature. People who mysteriously disappear and there’s never a trace of them. That could be due to all kinds of things, foul play of different kinds… [audio break]
Q: [unclear]
A: Nobody knows. Nobody sees any obvious connection because they don't see UFO’s in connection with the crop circles.
Q: [unclear]
A: But you see, in those crop circles they don't see something which looks like a craft that comes flying down. They may see glowing light, that's been reported. But they don't see what looks like a flying machine. So now in the case of the cattle mutilations they do. There are lots of reports of UFO-type flying machines in the same area as that where the cows are found to be cut up and all that kind of thing. So there it is reported, but in the case of the crop circles it's not.
Q: [unclear]
A: They could be. There is no visible connection tying that with UFO’s. But the indication is, one would say, that some kind of intelligence is behind it.
Q: [unclear]
A: Well for all I know… well you see another whole interesting aspect is according to Vedic literature there are other inhabitants of the same countries that we live in. And in Europe, in places like England and Ireland and so on they were called the fairies or the leprechauns and various names. In Scandinavian countries they were called elves and so on. The whole idea is that they were the original inhabitants of the country and they’re still living there even though people are living there. And that's another whole subject if you want to get into what happens in Ireland. You can ask some of the devotees from Ireland, but anyway.
Q: Mischievous type of thing.
A: Yeah, they tend to be mischievous. The Irish story interestingly enough is these beings called Tuatha de Danann were the original inhabitants of the country and people later moved in. The Tuatha de Danann are still there. And that means the descendants of Dana. Dana is the same as Brigit. That was a god of the Irish and that was incorporated into Roman Catholicism as Saint Brigit. And right down here on Mission Boulevard I happen to notice there’s a church to Saint Brigit. So Brigit still lives on. But anyway, Dana was a goddess of the Irish. Interestingly enough Danu is a goddess described in the Bhagavatam and the Danavas are the descendants of Danu. I don't know if there is any connection. But supposedly the Tuatha de Danann are still there. And so, who knows, but there are all kinds of stories, that's another whole category.
Q: My European question… changing world view… is that changing worldview more in Europe or in America?
A: What you find in Europe is, first of all, the same kinds of things are reported: abductions and all this sort of thing. A lot of European intellectuals take the point of view of explaining away the whole thing psychologically. That's fairly prominent in Europe. A lot of people in America who study the UFO question think they must be extraterrestrial beings from other planets. In Europe the tendency more is to think, well, it must be some kind of psychological manifestation. Maybe with a paranormal component to it. But then there are people in Europe who study it very scientifically. However, to my knowledge they don't get involved with the entities because that's too weird. They are just concerned with the ground traces and the radar tracking and all this kind of thing. But apart from that there are all kinds of close encounters, abductions and so on in Europe.
Q: More so in America?
A: I don’t think it’s more so.
Q: Are the books more popular…
A: I think it varies depending on the publicity situation at a given time because right now in America for some reason, the conspiracy theorists can really go to town on this one too, there has been a huge amount of publicity concerning UFO’s. And also all these books have come out recently like that one. So it's been given a lot of impetus now in the United States. I don't think that is there so much in Europe. You see Whitley Strieber came out with his book even though that's just one man’s story. That's all it is. It's not even supported by any corroborating evidence. It had a huge impact, sold a vast number of copies, it was on bestseller lists for months. And that became such a phenomena that in fact this guy wrote a book about Whitley Strieber’s book.
Q: [unclear]
[2:18:30]
A: They went after him. Yup, he woke up with the famous nose bleed phenomenon, all this kind of thing. That's another whole topic. But anyway, things started happening with him it appears, but I mean, he did go and stay overnight at the Strieber’s cabin, right? That’s sort of asking for it! But anyway, it’s curious the way that book is written, on one hand he takes this viewpoint of real scepticism, you know, hard nosed, and on the other hand he tells equally weird stories about himself. But what do you make of that?
Q: [unclear]
A: He said he did. He said, there’s three letters he wrote to three different people, he maintained that he tried to do that, which is interesting that somebody in Barry Goldwater’s position would do something like that. Sure he would be turned down because top secret, but anyway.
Q: …time travel… Vedic view on whether or not it is a reality, time past and future… it is not existing…
A: The nature of time in Vedic literature? Well there is some idea that the future is sort of laid out because there the sages are trikala-jna, like Narada Muni who will just go to Krsna and say, “Well, I’ll see you doing this, I’ll see you doing that” and so forth. Vyasadeva was seeing what would happen in the future. So the idea of being able to see the future is there and the past because it's trikala-jna: past, present, and future. I interpret the present to mean we can also see at a distance because these sages could do that also. Just like Sanjaya was reporting what was happening at the battlefield of Kuruksetra. So that seems to imply that it's sort of all laid out. Then the question is how do you relate that to free will? If it’s all laid out then how can we make decisions about what we are going to do? It's all determined. But one answer to that is our free choice maybe perfectly well known to Krsna well in advance; it's still our free choice. Krsna may know it but it doesn't mean we don't make the choice. So we can have free will but Krsna still knows, and some sage by the mercy of Krsna could see. So that the sage could see what we are going to do by our free will.
Q: …so much science fiction has been written about…
A: Now the idea of time travel is another thing. I haven’t seen in the Vedic literature any reference to, say, going into the past, or you come into the inevitable problem: what happens if you kill your grandmother, right? Then you couldn't have been born so you couldn't have gone into the past to kill her. So therefore you didn't go into the past, so therefore you were born. Then you went into the past and killed her, therefore you couldn't have been born, therefore you couldn't have done it. So you get into a total contradiction.
Q: [unclear]
A: Now that Philadelphia experiment thing, if you want to delve into far out ‘far-out-iana’, I saw a videotape in which his fellow whose name I forget made this testimony which was about the weirdest thing I have ever heard, about time travel. I don't know if the thing is totally whacko or what. I would like to see some confirming evidence in which somebody else tells a similar story. But he told some far out time travel story involved with the Philadelphia experiment.
Q: ...was it similar to the movies…
A: Well somehow he got zapped into the future, I mean he was back into the 1940s or so and he got zapped into the 1980s.
[audio break]
[2:25:21]
A: ...just to figure out what happened when, because of course everything was out of order in time, and it was really difficult. So since that was an isolated piece of testimony and I’ve never run across anything else like it, I don’t know what to make of that.
Q: The ship disappeared. We tend to be skeptical about…
A: I don't know if the ship disappeared or not, but they say. Number one, our philosophy doesn't mention it to my knowledge. I have not run across a case in Vedic literature where somebody goes into the past. Number two, there are those paradoxes: if you go back and kill your grandmother, so then what happens. Logic tends to indicate there is a problem with going back into the past.
Q: [unclear]
A: Well you see, as far as I am aware, Krsna, when He appears – I mean He appears at all times, all at once, and He’s aware of the past, present, and future, the whole thing all at once – so for him it's not a matter of travel. He’s already there. He’s in the future, He’s in the past, He’s in the present, He’s everywhere at once, all in one moment, like that.
Q: The living entity has to be considered only in one place at once...
A: In terms of places you can be in more than one place at a time, Narada Muni has been known to do that. So in one sense maybe you could be in two times at once in terms of the order of your experiences. But I don't know.
Well we are in two times in the sense that we were here in say 1957 and we are here now, but the point is the ‘us’ of now remembered the ‘us’ of 1957 and not the other way around. Whereas if the ‘us’ of 1957 remembered the ‘us’ of 1992, that would be unusual situation. The thing is, people have precognitive experiences where they see things which will happen in the future like the whole sinking of the Titanic, that’s fairly well documented: all kinds of people foresaw that the ship would sink and they cancelled their reservations and things like that. And I’d really like to check it out. I haven’t personally checked to see it it's really true, but I have read that a novel was written about the book called not exactly the Titanic, but I believe Titan or something like that. There is a book about a ship that is supposedly unsinkable called the Titan or something like that, about the same size as the Titanic. It also had the problem that there were too few lifeboats because the people were overconfident, they thought it couldn't sink and sure enough, it went out and on its maiden voyage it sank. This was a novel written before the Titanic was built.
Q: That happened on a number of occasions. Some woman…
A: Well that would be an interesting point to look into. But another point regarding this kind of thing is that if there are a lot of accounts of the same type of thing, then you begin to think there is more credibility to it. If there is just one then it's hard to tell. So in the case of this testimony of Philadelphia experiment it’s sort of a unique case. I don't know of anything else comparable to it. But you see the thing about this UFO abduction business is now there are hundreds of cases which are practically stereotyped in their similarity to one another. It's quite curious.
Q: ...two people who knew each other, they were abducted…
A: Well there are, things like that happen, I don't know of any case...
There are cases where people meet somebody else on the UFO but I don't know of any case where later they meet down on the earth and compare notes. And to make it evidential they’d have to first meet some investigators and later be brought together. I do know of one case that's sort of along those lines. It’s like this: At a summer camp on Lake Champlain in New York State, a teenage boy and girl who slightly knew each other, summer camp workers, were abducted from the dock of the summer camp and returned. They both suffered amnesia for what happened during the abduction experience. After the event they returned to their cabins somewhat in a dazed state; they didn't talk to one another about what happened. A few days later they both left their camp and went their separate ways. During those few days they never got together and talked about the incident. The boy had said a few things about it, but everybody laughed at him and poked fun at him and so forth. He just clammed up and he never spoke to the girl at all. And she apparently didn't even say anything to anyone about it. So they went their separate ways and never met again for a period of ten or so years, I think. At one point the boy, now ten years older, later got in touch with a UFO investigator, a fellow named Webb, who was actually the Director of the Planetarium and Science Museum in Boston, so he’s a responsible sort of person. So he himself got in contact with the woman and traced her down – she’d gotten married and so forth, had kids and all that. He had them separately hypnotised; they came out with stories separately; they had not had a chance to meet or discuss; the stories corroborated one another quite accurately. So there’s that case. So there are things like that.
Q: It's kind of sad even the gentlemen here… response laugh…
A: There are a lot of cases like that. Someone tells a story like that, they say aaah! But the thing is, if these cases are recorded then they begin to pile up from all over the place. You think, “Well something must be going on.” I don't know about his case, I mean, I don't know of anyone with an elephant-like nose.
Q: [unclear]
A: Yeah, it's a third party story. I am touching upon the fact that how we were seeing, just because it wasn't within our experience of seeing an elephant nose kind of guy.
Q: ...the scientist’s are naturally skeptical...
A: Well you see, there is no need to engage in ridicule or in that kind of thing, because, you see, a person who is honestly skeptical admits that he doesn't know, so what is there to laugh about. If you don't know, then it could be one way, it could be another way, you just don't know. So the scientific approach would be just to note that down and say, “Okay, there it is, we will come back to that and see if it is confirmed or disconfirmed.” And from a strictly scientific point of view all of these things can be researched, you never can come to an absolute conclusion – there are no absolutes in science. Any conclusion based on your senses has to be imperfect. But then, even though it is imperfect it doesn’t mean that your senses are useless because we use our senses all the time; you just have to realistically realise that...
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