According to a report in The Houston Post of April 22, 1897, one Mr. John M. Barclay had an extensive interaction with a man from an airship who didn’t give his name. “Never mind about my name, call it Smith,” he said. Mr. Barclay asked him where he was from and where he was going. Smith replied, “From anywhere, but we will be in Greece day after tomorrow.”
God I love that. It’s a bit out of Jacques Vallee’s more-relevant-than-ever Dimensions. More relevant now because it was so ahead of its time when it came out that many ignored it and few of those who didn’t knew what to make of it. Now that quantum physics has hit the mainstream and the popular culture is prying itself off of Newtonian physics, perhaps some of the ideas contained in the book will make a little more sense to a lot more people.
But that’s not why I quoted the above. I think “Smith” gave a brilliant, truthful answer. Whatever this enigmatic other is, names are irrelevant and so is location. Therefore, so is space-time. In a roundabout way it reminds me of something a disembodied female voice once interrupted a dream to tell me: “I understand hither/thither and in that understanding shall neither be swept away nor carried on the seas of time.” (Into The End readers know what fun I had with that one in the realm of fiction.)
If you need a reminder of what great theater this “alien” enigma truly is, read Dimensions. He has a piece in there about alien abductions, basically saying that if we ignore all of the pitfalls of hypnosis and take the stories given under hypnosis as accurate, we still must see them for their symbolic value, because advanced aliens would not need the crude tools they are said to use, nor would they need to do the surgical procedures they are alleged to perform. These are antiquated by our scientific standards.
Dimensions was first published in 1988. Knowing what we do now about hypnosis and about the (not to be) trusted men who used it, I wonder if he’d even allow for that premise in a 2014 edition. Has anyone ever consciously recalled the alien doctor scenario? If not, we can, as Jeff Ritzmann says, safely attribute it to cultural contamination. And really, when you look at it, the irony is… it’s too logical to fit the scenario.
Go back. Read the accounts of “alien” and “human-from-airship” interactions sans hypnosis. They’re ridiculous. It’s as if the Rorschach test is alive and a few researchers said, “I see a wolf’s head. Everybody? It’s a wolf’s head. Now we’re going to put you under hypnosis and you’re going to tell us about that wolf’s head.” Meanwhile, in reality, it’s an inkblot that can look like a wolf’s head if that’x how your brain makes sense of it.
This gets me to a point about missing time. Missing time is the thing we fill in with hypnosis, right? That’s the whole reason for the hypnosis debacle in the first place: you have a weird experience and there’s a chunk of time missing and you want to know what happened. But if the consciously-remembered events surrounding this missing time are seemingly illogical, should you recall a logical space doctor interaction during the “missing” part? Nothing in past interactions suggests this.
Perhaps Jacques was wrong about the content of missing time being symbolically relevant but right about missing time in general. Perhaps it is symbolically relevant in and of itself. Maybe nothing happens during missing time. Maybe it’s there, like everything else in high strangeness, to keep the person’s focus on it. It can be another way to make the enigma undeniably real to the experiencer.
Or maybe it runs deeper than that. Maybe it’s a message waiting to be decoded, much like that of our friend “Smith.”
What’s missing? Not just time, space-time. Not just any space-time, a person’s or a group’s personal space-time. What’s missing? The person. The observer. You’re there, not there, and then there again. Do you wink out of existence and then back? Just like the very UFO you were witnessing?
We talk about these futuristic craft sometimes winking in and out of existence and how far in advance of our technology they must be and yet running parallel to that is the fact of us sometimes winking in and out of existence during the same experience. To my knowledge, no one has ever picked up on that. It’s easy to understand why–it is far too tempting to ignore the symbolism and say that aliens are using technology to wink the experiencer in and out of existence like they do their craft. Problem is, we don’t know those are aliens, we don’t know those are craft, we don’t know if the alleged craft is even piloted, and if you were to ask a supposed alien pilot, you’d just as likely be offered a pancake as you would be asked, “What’s existence?” It’s only through hypnosis that you’d have a prayer of being given a logical (or at least straightforward) answer by busy doctors.
¿Qué?
Ironically, what’s missing in missing time is missing time. We keep filling it with answers from ourselves. And maybe we are supposed to turn inward and ask ourselves about it. Just ask, not answer. Wait for the answer to come or for the next clue to unfold. And as I wrote that, something fell off a shelf in the next room. I hadn’t planned on ending it here.
And so it goes.
Abruptly into the night.
POST SCRIPT: As poetic an ending as that is, I realize I do need to make the point. Thankfully, I wrote it succinctly on Facebook and can lazily paste it here….
As I was going to get to before I was so rudely interrupted by a crash, maybe it’s a clue that there is no technology here, or if there is it’s one that runs on holistic consciousness (for lack of a better term.) The self “disappears.”
Like the other is saying, “You don’t get it. This isn’t advanced science. You can do this, too. This is how things are.” But we miss the meaning by looking at it the wrong way–as a hole to be filled with memory.
JayVay 