Many Dimensions (Part One)

"They come in at a funny angle." - The Invisibles

In the conclusion to their 1975 conversation The Edge of Reality, J Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallee brainstorm various UFO theories, although then and now, "UFO" is both too imprecise and too fraught with pop baggage to convey much more than its own parody. But in that case, what should we call them, and how might we explain manifestations and liminal phenomena as broad, and untidy, and bizarre as the mile-wide disc sighted over the English Channel last week and Joe Simonton's pancakes?

Vallee begins by asking, "What if we were writing 'The UFO in the Year 2000'?" He then hypothesizes, correctly, that the next 25 years and more will pass much as the 25 before. "Every two or three years there's a flap somewhere. There is no visible effect on society, there is no direct threat, there is no mass landing; that's one scenario." Hynek notes dryly, "Well, the theory that they are going to invade us would have to change." To which Vallee comments, "If they are hostile, and they've been hostile for 25 years, they're certainly not doing a very good job of invading us!" True enough, but invasion is one thing - and it is the one thing disinformation repeats ad naseum from Roswell to Dulce for the benefit of those who mean to hoax and exploit UFO events - and hostility something else.

In the course of their discussion Vallee suggests that it needn't be the US government as such which serves as the Earthly master and keeper of secrets of the phenomenon, as assumed by many of those championing "disclosure." Rather, he wonders whether that role of contact or channel or controlling agent might be assumed by an "occult society" (Though of course, if that's true, it could be expected that there would be considerable overlap between the occult order and secular governance.)

Vallee continues:

Much of technology is very linear. The reason we have radio telescopes and the reason we have radar is because of World War II - because someone was already an expert with radio waves and happened to think of the right configuration along the lines of technological development. If somebody, say way back in the fifteenth century, had found an entirely different science on that basis....

Suppose a group had investigated along the lines of rational thinking and finally contacted other forms of consciousness? They would have kept it secret, because their leaders were worried of the consequences of releasing it into an unprepared world.... What's wrong with my scenario, then? Well I'll tell you what's wrong with that: we know that occult organizations in the US are usually groups of crackpots, idealists and little old ladies. But then, maybe there are groups and occult societies that really have kept themselves secret. If so, a group like that could have the motivation and the means to manipulate public opinion on a grand scale.

Vallee's mention of somebody, say way back in the fifteenth century is almost certainly an allusion to John Dee, Elizabethan scientist, occultist and court spy. Dee's Enochian system of "angelic" evocation - an entirely different science - was preserved and embellished by esoteric, Masonic-born orders such as the Golden Dawn and the OTO, and has entered both UFO lore (for instance, the Naval Intelligence officer who, in 1959, channelled an alleged alien entity by the Enochian name of "Affa") and cyberculture ("lonelygirl15" flees "the Order" and its mysterious Enochian rites).

The alchemical opening of "portals" and the crossing of dimensions - we've been over this weird ground before. Something different, though, is that the linear science to which Vallee referred may soon reach the point at which it could do the same.

Last week, CERN's Large Hadron Collider received its final "megamagnet," though because a smaller superconducting magnet failed during a expectedly routine pressure test in March its start-up date will likely be pushed back several months from its anticipated November launch.

The LHC will search for the Higgs boson which, it's theorized, determines the mass of other elementary particles, and is the last unobserved component of the "Standard Model." But physicists like Harvard's Lisa Randall believe the Standard Model isn't all there is, as CERN's new collider may demonstrate. Secrets it may make manifest include extra and even infinite spatial dimensions to which we are routinely oblivious.

UFOs are frequently observed performing actions that defy an explanation in three dimensions. They swell and contract, split and come together, as strange as a 3-D figure would appear to Flatlanders if it penetrated their 2-D world. Witness Jane Chapin claimed to have observed an egg-shaped UFO pass through the trees, as though they didn't exist, and not above them as she'd initially told researchers. ("I could see they wouldn't believe me if I told them the truth," she explained. "They were such nice people. I didn't want to shock them.") Abductees too, often describe violations of three dimensional space. Sandy Nichols told author Brent Raynes that "It doesn't matter how many times they've taken me through the walls, or the windows, my mindset is that, 'Oh I'm going to hit this wall with the top of my head and it's gonna hurt,' but then the next thing I know is I'm actually going through the wall":

It's really weird because all of a sudden I see the outside and I can move my eyes and I see part of my body still in the wall or the window. But my head, and say shoulders, are already outside.... Then I see a light.... and it's like I get in this light and it's like a light elevator that takes me up.... here comes this metallic looking craft...and then the next thing I know I'm already in the craft.

Of course this sounds an awful lot like an Out-of-Body-Experience, and perhaps it was. Or perhaps extra physical dimensionality is a persuasive mimic of astral states. If so, then intelligences native to such dimensions could easily masquerade as gods and angels, and Earthly orders committed to their devotion could keep them well fed, depending upon their appetites.