Notes on the Development of the Interdimensional (or Occult, Paranormal) Hypothesis

With some members of Congress, especially a few religious-oriented ones from the House Oversight Committee, giving voice to the idea that UFO phenomena are based on the angels and demons biblically referenced, its helpful to examine the so-called Interdimensional Hypothesis. That hypothesis is seen as an alternative explanation to the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis. In particular, its credibly reported that there's a faction of people within the intelligence and military communities who feel that bringing any attention to UFO events only encourages the intrusive emergence of demons. These individuals come from a Christian fundamentalistic perspective but there are others, attuned to occult phenomena or with perspectives shaped by an esoteric spirituality orientation or shamanic perceptions, who favor the ID hypothesis over the idea of phenomena originating from distant planets circling other solar systems.

This paper is chiefly based on notes from Jerome Clark's 3rd edition UFO Encyclopedia article in volume 2, entitled "Paranormal and Occult Theories About UFOs", pages 875-893.

~~~The notion of contacting other worlds and beings there arose when a Swedish scientist and mystic named Emanuel Swedenborg in 1758 published "Earth's in the Solar World". Book is an account of his alleged direct observation, via astral travel, of planets and occupants allegedly existing on planets in our solar system. (Which is not possible in the physical sense.)

~~~Spiritualist movement of late 19th/early 20th Century sometimes included in medium contact with spirits communications also with alleged extraterrestrials.

~~~Theosophy founder Helena Blavatsky (19th Century) described a subtle dimension or beings that she allegedly communicated with who were said to be ascended masters known as Lords of the Flame living on Venus.

~~~Later, the American founder of the cuktic I AM movement, Guy Ballard, wrote works popularizing Theosophical notions of ascended masters that included beings from Venus whose messages he shared. "Ballard died in 1939, but angelic Venusians...would become a staple of the contactee movement, which began in 1952 with the likes of George Adamski and George Van Tassel." [Clark pg 876].

~~~N. Meade Layne from San Diego created in 1945 created the Borderland Sciences Research Associates (BSRA). This org, with the assistance of a trance medium named Mark Probert, focused on a "scientific" exam of the so-called etheric dimension, slightly more subtle (beyond normal perception) than the familiar physical one.

~~~After the publicizing of flying saucer sightings in 1947, Layne and Probert asserted that "etherian" beings were able to create craft of differing shapes by lowering their vibrational level and as "thought" or "mind constructs" create bodies and craft using "etheric substance". A few years later, during the contactee movement involving alleged beings from Venus sharing messages to help humans, Layne would claim these beings weren't from the physical planet of Venus but from its etheric counterpart. In Layne's view, "etherians" were benign beings who viewed humans in a positive way.

~~~Trevor James Constable, a student of Layne's, presented a more negative picture. For a time Constable had supposedly been receiving psychic communications from self-identifying extraterrestrials. He came to believe that they were deceptively claiming to be from other planets. Instead he saw that beings more subtle than etherians, existing in astral dimensions, were anti-Christ demons posing as "Angels of Light". Constable felt there were "etheric (good) and astral (bad) entities...engaged in a battle for control of earthly minds". [Clark pg 876]

~~~Constable incorporated ideas from the hollow earth theories about astral beings based inside the earth. He felt that nuclear testing affected the astral plane and that that was the basis for astral beings posing as positive Space Brothers who preached against nukes. Constable's later work, 1976, presented alleged images of etheric beings in the atmosphere ("The Cosmic Pulse of Life: The Revolutionary Biological Powers Behind UFOs").

~~~Layne and Constable were not in the mainstream of ufological perspectives dominant in those early days but Jerry Clark reports that "some more conservative ufologists nonetheless considered it possible that if UFOs did not come from outer space, perhaps they were visiting from the 'fourth dimension'....They picked up the idea not from occult literature but from science fiction, of which many early ufologists were fans..." Clark also mentions the influence of Fate magazine, founded in 1948 where "true mysteries" beyond the UFO subject were profiled.

~~~An early voice for the idea of interdimensional realities was Thomas M. Camilla aka "Peter Kor" who in 1959 began writing a "Critic's Corner" column in Ray Palmer's "Flying Saucer" magazine. In 1962 Kor opined that "[UFO] reality must be so strange that it cannot be confined to our three-dimensional world....The reality behind the saucer phenomena [sic] transcends our immediately perceptible world, thereby not availing itself to our scientific methods of proof which are geared to the physical world."

~~~During the same time period a writer from Austria named Luis Schoenherr in 1962 began writing papers for the Flying Saucer Review (published in England) discussing "UFOs and the Fourth Dimension". What particularly captured Schoenherr's attention were the observations of UFOs and related beings making sudden appearances and disappearances.

~~~In 1964 articles for the Flying Saucer Review, Antonio Ribera and Gilbert Ingelfield presented the 1917 Fatima event of an alleged Virgin Mary visitation as an actual UFO event.

~~~In a 1965 editorial in the Flying Saucer Review (FSR), Charles Bowen wondered if contactees were being deceived by a "facade deliberately created by alien entities whose objectives are in no way connected with our welfare." A couple of years later, Gordon Creighton would write in the FSR that beings associated with UFOs may "correspond" with religious and traditional lore regarding angels, demons and goblins.

~~~After Charles Bowen assumed editorship of the FSR, "FSR pushed a demonological interpretation of the UFO phenomenon". [Clark, pg 878) While still covering case histories, and with conventional analysis still included, there was a "new emphasis on sinister occult explanatory schemes". [Clark, pg 878]

The high strangeness elements in UFO reports that were increasingly evident in encounter experiences were more highlighted and used to suggest a subtle domain-origin to UFO manifestations rather than physical exoplanets around distant stars.

~~~Bowen, along with writers like Gordon Creighton and John Keel, held a dark view of an alien presence, seeing the negative as dominant in a battleground of good and evil. The alien presence was seen as a network negative, basicly demonic, and involved in creating illusions to disguise their intent and activities.

~~~Bowen and Creighton never wrote a book but in the mid 1960s John Keel (born John Alva Kiehl) obtained a book contract and began field investigations. Clark describes his activities: "[He] crisscrossed the Ohio River Valley pursuing reports of UFOs, monsters (among them the eerie and terrifying Mothman), men in black (MIB), poltergeists. He also dealt with witnesses and contactees in New York City, where he lived, and its Long Island suburbs. Most remarkably, however, he asserted that on more than one occasion he himself had seen UFOs, MIB, and apparitions. He also said he frequently spoke over the phone with an entity, 'Mr. Apol', whom he thanked on the dedication page of his 1971 book 'Our Haunted Planet'...[Clark, pg 879]

~~~Keel first previously worked editing a column for a small newspaper and then wrote for small newspapers while in Greenwich Village for 5 years. He also wrote for the new TV industry and became familiar with many "colorful locals, including Forteans, psychics, occultists, magicians, and cranks". [Clark pg 639, vol 1 article on Keel]. He avidly read Fate magazine from its 1948 start. In 1951 he was drafted into the military. After service he toured the east studying mystics and in 1957 he wrote a book "Jadoo" chronicling his experiences.

~~~Keel labeled the UFO-related beings as "ultraterrestrials", non-physical or subtle beings in a dimension he called the "superspectrum". That dimension is an "intelligent energy field" where there is a capability to manipulate matter. He saw ultraterrestrials as deceptive and able to manipulate perceptions and memory. "In Keel's revisionist history ultraterrestrials 'posing as god's and superkings' once ruled the earth, but when democracy became a force in human affairs, these 'gods' and their descendents (royal families whose ancestors had mated with ultraterrestrials in human guise) lost their power and authority. Ever since then the ultraterrestrials have waged war on homo sapiens." [Clark, pg 880]

~~~Clark critically noted [pg 880]: "Unfotunately, Keel was so focused on the hoaxes perpetrated, so he believed, by ultraterrestrials on humans that sometimes he seemed to forget that humans play hoaxes on humans. In his writings even the most blatantly bogus claimants were portrayed as sincere victims of scheming demons. In his magnum opus 'UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse' (1970), Keel swallows whole the testimonies of confidence artists, practical jokers...." Clark reports that Bowen and Creighton also made this error.

~~~Jacques Vallee would become another key figure, along with Keel, as a promoter of the ID hypothesis. Clark introduces him [pg 881]: "Jacques Vallee, a French-American trained in astronomy and computer science (with a PhD in the latter), was a graduate student under J. Allen Hynek at Northwestern University in the early 1960s. Interested in UFOs since the 1950s, he exerted considerable influence on Hynek's later thinking about the phenomenon. Like Hynek, Vallee also had long been interested in the occult, though that would not be apparent in the scientific and technical articles he would for the Flying Saucer Review in the early to mid-1960s. His first two books, 'Anatomy of a Phenomenon' (1965) and 'Challenge to Science: The UFO Enigma' (1966), argued the case for ETH in an articulate and cautious manner."

~~~Clark reports [pg 881]: "Though the names Keel and Vallee would eventually be linked as if joined at the hip, Vallee was at first unenthusiastic at first about Keel's sudden prominence in FSR. In a letter published in the July/August 1968 issue, he complained about Keel's habit of making broad statements without supporting data. Earlier, in his personal journal, he expressed misgivings about Keel's 'disturbing, prophetic style'. Keel had just written him to predict that the next week (late July 1967) religious madness would engulf the world and a 'prolonged [power] black-out' would occur...Vallee and his circle, including Hynek, privately considered Keel something of a crank."

~~~Clark further reports [pg 881]: "By 1969, however, Vallee had signed on to an occult-based, anti-ETH ufology. In 'Passport to Magonia', his third book, UFOs become just one more of many guises a chameleon-like invisible order to shape and direct human consciousness. Vallee calls the order 'Magonia', Latin for 'magic land', after a medieval French peasant belief in a region by that name, 'from whence come ships in the clouds', as an 850 A.D. manuscript by the Archbishop of Lyons put it. Vallee surveys religious traditions, folk beliefs, occult texts, and nineteenth-Century newspapers for evidence of other, pre-UFO manifestations of Magonia...."

~~~In Vallee's next book, "The Invisible College" (1975) Magonia would be described as a "control system" designed as a thermostat where, as Vallee states "UFOs may serve to stabilize the relationship between man's consciousness and the evolving complexities of the world which he must understand".

~~~Clark critically describes further [pg 881]: "Vallee never offers a clear definition of the control system, but he suggests that it interacts with human beings via 'meta-logic', producing absurd and irrational phenomena which defy reason but which resonate on the unconscious level. The regular occurrence of waves constitutes a 'schedule of reinforcement' which ensures that UFOs are never out of thoughts of human beings".

~~~"The Messengers of Deception" (1979) was Vallee's next book "where Vallee's theories took a conspiratorial turn...[He] contended that besides the supernatural realm and its manifestations, a shadowy human group-- whose sponsors, members, and purposes are never defined--is employing 'psychotronic' technology to create pseudomanifestations." Clark notes Vallee asserting that these folks (with access to powerful insider circles and the media) have infiltrated UFO groups and "are seeking to effect social change of an unspecified sort" [Clark, pg 881].

~~~Clark devotes the last section of his article to the voices arguing "the new age perspective" of UFOs representing beings and phenomena engineering positive psychological and spiritual transformations.

Some of these voices: Brad Steiger, Michael Grosso, Carl Jung, and Kenneth Ring (who coined term "imaginal realm").