AN ARCHETYPE EXPERIENCE?

By Brent Raynes

To his friends he is simply Al, and since he does not wish for me to reveal his full identity in print we shall cut through the formal introductions and go straight into the story.

I was introduced to Al at the home of UFO contactee/researcher, Mrs. Madeline Teagle of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. This was during a UFO skywatch in which Al was attempting to telepathically communicate with, and thus call down, the pilots of UFOs, with whom he was allegedly familiar on a first name basis as well. Nothing extraordinary (at least to my knowledge) occurred that night, but I did manage to tape an interview with Al, which I had been desperately wanting to do since the previous month when Madeline had described to me a number of remarkable firsthand experiences she had had with Al, whom she had known since the late 1950s.

In one episode, Madeline recalled seeing a small ball of silvery white light seemingly rolling across the lawn of her home, between herself and another woman. In an even more remarkable episode, she encountered a strange "patch of fog." "Tentacles or something whipped out of that thing and wrapped right around me," she recalled.

She was naturally frightened, but relieved to hear a pleasant sounding voice exclaim that since she was scared the contact would be terminated, at which point she was released and the apparition vanished.

"You met him!" Al excitedly exclaimed as he rushed up to Madeline afterwards. But when Madeline told Al what she had seen, he seemed disappointed and explained that she had not seen the alien being's true appearance. Supposedly her fear had acted as a kind of mental block that somehow distorted her perception.

However, later that evening, silently gazing into the heavens she rebuked herself for blowing such a rare opportunity and wished that she could be granted a sign of some sort, whereupon all of the clouds in the sky seemed to be drawn together into one forming a human-like figure, but with the head and wings of an eagle.

At this point she mentally reflected that if that were the true appearance of Al's contact then she be given another sign, whereupon a ball of fire dropped down from out of the night's sky and seemed to explode like fireworks over Al's head. Then Al turned to face Madeline and told her that whatever her question had been the answer had been affirmative.

That September I met respected MUFON investigator Larry Moyers, who also described to me a remarkable first hand experience with Al, and how he too had been quite bewildered. He told me of how on one occasion near Cleveland, he and several others were with Al when they saw three small "football shaped lights" hovering near a bush. "They were transparent" he exclaimed. "You could see the leaves through them." He tried to grab them but they disappeared without a trace just before bodily contact.

But anyhow, getting back to Al's own story, Al had described to me how he had come to believe in ETs while in the service, back in November 1945, when he and the entire crew of the USS Tidewater, a tanker, saw a bright orange disc at a point east of the Florida Keys.

By 1958, firmly rooted back in civilian life and actively joined with the civilian ranks of UFOlogy, Al felt quite certain, based on literature he had read and what he had learned from his nationwide correspondents, that somehow he would be able to establish contact with a UFO! So that year, 1958, Al set out to test out his theory. "I was running a series of communication drills which were attempted substitutes for radio frequency communications," he told me. "This is actually conscious reflexes, or these are mental reflexes. Like you presuggested its interest. Like whatever you're interested in you develop a series of reflexes and these reflexes, if they become intense enough, can actually cause a certain force or reflex to be transmitted." In short, Al was describing his formula for telepathic transmission, and on August 6, 1958, his efforts seemingly struck pay dirt!

He was in his home and he felt an intense "spinning sensation," and sat down. Then he noticed the walls, in various places, began to look as though they wre somehow not solid. He briefly "blanked out".... then "within seconds I was trying to regain consciousness... I saw everything in that house, in my neighbor's houses, that street, and that neighborhood completely different than I've ever seen it before, and I could not believe what I saw. Because what I saw was nothing but black and white, and what is ordinarily people became white dots spinning around in a kind of a black void. In other words, human beings not only looked transparent but white, like a white light ... within a black field."

At this point I interrupted Al to ask him how he had determined that those strange lights were indeed human? "Because they were screaming," he replied. "they were making noises. They were yelling and they were cursing and they were cussing, and they were communicating."

Then, to the right of his chair, appeared a vertical beam of light. He reached for it, "as if it was a matter of life and death." He stood up and walked into it, and there two humanoids appeared on both sides of him. They were dressed in "yellow-white robes" and had large heads, slanted eyebrows, and stood eight feet or so. Mutely they stood at his side, and as he eyed them over he marveled that he was unable to distinguish whether they were male or female ... even though they had large chest regions.

Then Al felt as though he were going up a very fast elevator, and soon was inside an "enormous green, translucent sphere." He now was in the company of three humanoids. "The planet looked like a dot behind us in a few seconds," Al said.

Soon Al arrived at an alien planet. ".. I was permitted to see what their architecture was and they were humble buildings by contrast to our own, made out of slabs of stone and rock, and what looked like metallic silver and gold."

Throughout his tour of the alien world, the three humanoids, whom he called "reinforcing beings," accompanied him. He was taken to the center of a large stone structure, of octagonal design. The entities informed him they were going to demonstrate construction to Al. As he watched two aliens went over to a large rock and cut themselves a slab simply by extending their two arms out from their bodies. Al was amazed because he had not seen them use any tools to accomplish this feat. Then they materialized to his vision a seething red sphere hovering by the two entities. "That is god energy" Al says they explained. "We know how to use it. But to us that's god and energy, and god and energy are one and we know how to use it."

"Where is the Great White Father?" Al heard himself blurt out. "I don't know why I said this," Al explained. "This made them mad. They took me to another place where they had a stone octagonal court with gates in it, and they put me in the middle, and they said, "You stand it." They opened the gates and a lion came out. A real, honest to God lion. So they said, "Watch this force that contains the lion." Because they had a force that kept that lion from moving... I was led to understand that evolution can occur in different directions at this point. That is, we can have thought forms that are lions and bodies of men. That is, the thought forms that constitute the spirit are not the same as the thought forms that constitute the appearance of the body. At any rate, they called this the lion test. They were showing that this force contained these lions, or held the balance of nature so that nature does not attack."

COMMENTS: The reality of Al's 1958 UFO contact strikes me as a rich harvest of subjective language that is familiar to the literature of religious and visionary experiences. Briefly, from my own interpretation, Al awakens, so to speak, to the dark despair of this world and of our humanity, seen as "white dots" in a "black void," and this humanity is "cursing" and "cussing." Then a light shines down from heaven and Al, in his own words, instinctively reaches for it "as if it was a matter of life and death." He is then guided to a place in space (heaven) by three guardian beings (angels?). There he is shown that God is energy, but in his conditioned, acculturated view he asks about the familiar "Great White Father" of our own human image. Then he is taken into the center of a second stone octagonal court (mandala symbolism) where he must stand his ground in a confrontation with a lion, something wild, untamed, and non-human. Jung, by the way, has noted the importance of the lion as an emblem of the devil... as a fiery animal, and as a symbolic representation of the danger of unconscious contents threatening to engulf and swallow conscious ground. Thus a perfect psychological explanation for the emphasis of holding "the balance of nature so that nature does not attack," and additionally appropriate the observation that the "thought forms" of the spirit are different from our bodily forms!

However, beyond these very general observations there is no easy solution. While one interpretation explains these events as energized by contents of the "collective unconsciousness," another looks more closely at contents from ones own personal background and culture - some conceding that telepathic transfer of thoughts occurs - while, of course, others say ridiculous. Whatever the explanation, there certainly is a great deal of data of both a symbolical and parapsychological sort to be dealt with.