(Some Ideas about the Riddle of Reality)
By Cynthia Newby Luce
In the late 1970's, having begun my odyssey of looking for answers to the UFO Phenomenon as a result of actually seeing one up close in daylight, I traveled from my remote mountain top to a conference in the Brazilian Capitol of Brasilia.
Ufologists from all over the world were reporting on their data and venturing ideas---mostly that advanced humanoids had succeeded in "arriving." It seemed too simplistic. I was not convinced, and early one morning when I thought I was the only person in the dining room, in came Allen Hynek and we began to talk. Over orange juice he asked me a lot of questions, including: "Where do you think they come from?"
I hesitated because at that time my conclusions and ideas were not easily accepted.
"I think they come from another dimension," I said and waited.
"That's interesting," he answered, "I agree, but I can't say anything now because the public isn't ready for that idea yet," and added, "I just hope I know the answer before I die." Of course, he didn't know the answer before he died and we still don't.
But now we seem a bit closer to the idea of dimensions as a viable explanation for the UFO and other phenomena. And for me, finally the sheer volume of my own experiences not only with UFOs but other Anomalous Phenomena and what I was hearing from others (plus the literature) seemed to make various conclusions inevitable: We must realize that our "consensus reality" is discontinuous, and take a look at how we perceive Anomalous Phenomena.
Saying that our "consensus reality" is discontinuous usually confuses people; hard to imagine. Then as I illustrate the idea and I cite a few well-known examples, i.e. of what we call "off-world" creatures, like the Chupa-Cabra, or the experience of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Chemistry Kary Mullis who had the courage to detail his meeting with what must have been an animal not from our reality, (page 131, of DANCING NAKED IN THE MIND FIELD), or how people report being awake in two places at once, I begin to see changes. With their eyes in the position of recovering the memory of an actual event, out pops a strange account.
I've also had the experience of an odd animal, an "off-worlder", darting in and out of my reality and without any effort, by accident, encountered four other people (at different times and places) who saw the same peculiarly colored, wide-striped, needle-toothed creature. And others, besides myself, that describe these chunks of other realities, what I call "blips" and "blobs," that appear for a few seconds. And there are the entities. The list is endless because we seem to be walking around in a dimensional soup.
This conversation is fine when you're talking to someone either on the same wave-length or who has had an experience with Anomalous Phenomena themselves. But what about those who have never had any experiences at all? If we are all walking around in a Dimensional Soup why can't everyone see the same thing?
For years, on an informal level, "Ufologists" or people talking about sightings, have noted that it is very common that once a person has seen an UFO, or even experienced any one of a wide range of phenomena, their chances of further experiences outside "Consensus Reality" shoots up.
So what's the mechanism? The structure of perceiving Anomalous Phenomena has not been well looked at. Given witnesses experiencing the same input, there are several factors that account for variance of perception in any group of people. (Discounting the Roshamon effect of course.)
Why can you have ten people and only seven see an UFO that even a camera captures? It depends on the intensity of the input plus, the individual threshold of each witness.
The intensity of the input any Psych 101 student understands. It’s that individual threshold that is tricky.
There's been recent research on what happens in the brain when a person encounters input of "High-Strangeness." Apparently the amygdala blocks the conscious registering of input of high-strangeness, depending on the individual´s threshold. That means the person perceives the input but it does not register consciously. But it is not totally lost. From my experience with documenting accounts of input of high strangeness and how they seem to surface, I've come to the conclusion that we have what I call Memory Limbo. That is, perceptions of input of high-strangeness that are blocked by the amygdala and not registered consciously go into Memory Limbo but can be recovered.
I want to use an example of someone I have known well for many years, an experiencer of many types of phenomena to illustrate what I mean.
My friend Genaro is around fifty, married with a teenaged daughter.
They were living in Petropolis, a larger city some 60 miles from my village when there was a real Chupa-Cabra flap which was reported in the local newspapers. At the same time Genaro, with his wife and daughter saw an UFO flying around low in the sky. This was not reported to anyone but me and I was documenting the whole sequence. Genaro was interested in knowing just what I thought about it all and when I said that I´d reached the conclusion that it had to do with dimensions because of the way these phenomena acted he agreed. But when he wanted to know why I´d reached that conclusion I said that from my own experiences I had realized that consensus reality was discontinuous..why? Because when one saw chunks of matter completely out of context floating around it then seemed obvious.
Genaro began to make eye scanning movements up and to the left (his left, my right) which signifies (in right-handed people) a stimulation of the right hemisphere in order to access a visual memory.
"I've never told anyone this before," he said, and proceeded to recount several more strange incidents with input not from our world.
Together with his younger sister he'd seen an off-world black, furry, dog-like creature with red-glowing eyes between two houses on several occasions. It seemed menacing. Then, what to me was even more indicative of more a complicated dimensional system was a further account of seeing a waterfall of points of light, not large, just about 15" high by 10" wide.
It's always the same (in Portuguese or English), the eye scanning movements and then saying that they had never said anything about this before or, they weren't going to mention this...but, and up comes something that's surfaced from memory limbo. There seems to be a huge spectrum of phenomena with a wide range of variables. The UFO is just the most obvious and well-known. The Chupacabra and Yeti or Big Foot the most well-documented off-worlder, but beyond that there are other even more weird creatures and a lot of other phenomena that people "forget."
Apparently most of us see a lot of things we don't talk about and/or consciously register. One reason being that the stimuli are often hard to describe verbally. (This is besides the inherent fear of being judged a nut case.) The Phenomena don't conform to what our idea of what is: They can appear and disappear in a disconcerting manner, they are often not as solid, not as tangible, as we are used to, can be out of context, i.e., a "blob," a chunk like a volley ball-sized crumpled brown paper bag floating around the ceiling , or a little 15" X 10" "waterfall" of semi-luminous yellowish strands seen on the curb bordering grass while driving along going to lunch in the city. Or even something bigger..like the end of a cigar-shaped silvery blimp-like ship, with rows of windows, going into the embankment beside the road. This in daylight. (Later, I found an exact drawing of what I'd seen in Wm Bramley's GODS OF EDEN. Trouble is that this drawing was done in 1479 and published in 1557! And it's a drawing of a "comet" seen in Arabia.) And while we're on the subject of objects seeming to penetrate a solid, I have three cases of multiple witnesses seeing an UFO dive into monoliths of solid granite.
People also report Shadow Beings that flit quickly across one's visual field, short irridescent strands and luminous sea-urchin-like forms appear, meander a few seconds then disappear.
Much can be written about each phenomenon (and I've only listed a few.) I've mainly talked about phenomena I´ve experienced myself, documented in others and subsequently read about in the literature. My point though, is to raise awareness to the fact that our consensus reality is a limited view of a greater, expanded reality that holds far more than we at the moment understand. Given the diversity of Anomalous Phenomena there are probably many dimensional systems jumbled up with our own. In the past, when we were more at risk of being eaten by predators, we had to concentrate more on evading the jaws of a hungry lion than contemplating appearances of strange input.
Studying these phenomena and understanding their implications in terms of science, is a journey into unknown worlds. It is our future.
A few notes and references:
!. While the "blips" & "blobs" don´t usually interact with us, I found a reference from the Monroe Institute that is certainly startling. A woman actually picked up a piece of a "Dimensinal Blob." Her dog began sniffing and barking at it and she did not want him to eat it so she picked it up. It was about the size of a half-dollar and looked like green cellophane. When she picked it up she got a shock and started to toss it in the direction of the fireplace and there was a noise, then her fingers went numb and the thing disappeared.
2. Because of having the experience of seeing through a circular opening in my visual field into another reality and then discovering others that had had that same experience, I would recommend taking a look at Scott Rogo´s MIND BEYOND THE BODY. The article by the mathematician A.J. H. Whiteman is a very articulate account, and especially , on page 277, the entry entitled, "C. Intiation from a State of "opening." "
3. In Jerome Clark & Loren Coleman's classic CREATURES OF THE GOBLIN WORLD are to be found many accounts not only of off-world creatures but also how they are sometimes linked to UFO sightings. The researchers in the Varginha case here in Brazil did not want to talk about the strange bi-pedal "Wolfman" that attacked several people in the same time-frame as the appearance of the famous "ET" that most people know about.
4. Recently I saw the NASA video of very odd organic forms circulating around a huge (3km X 12km ) tether floating out from a space probe. And also the FLIR video from Mexico. These were not visible to the naked eye but were taken with cameras that picked up things we can't see. Then, looking back into Ivan T. Sanderson's UNINVITED VISITORS, he seems to anticipate the idea of Dimensional Soup when he talks about the photographs of the author Trevor James in his book THEY LIVE IN THE SKY.
Sanderson says: "It contains a large number of photographs of things in the sky, ranging in form from opaque spheres to vast diaphanous monstrosities, which the author claims he photographed in our western deserts with a special camera he built." And Sanderson continues, "...for it can only mean that our atmosphere is literally crowded with (to us) invisible objects, ranging in size from a cookie to a county."
(Pages 73 & 74)
Editors Note: Alberto Francisco do Carmo of Brasilia, Brazil, has informed me of Cynthia Luce’s recent passing. Though written some six years ago, I wanted to re-post this submission that she had shared with us earlier so that her thought-provoking article will remain available to others in the UFO field.
Cynthia worked with American journalist Bob Pratt (author of UFO DANGER ZONE) on several of his trips to Brazil. Born an American herself, Cynthia posssessed a Masters Degree in Experimental Psychology and Anthropology. She moved to Brazil in 1975 and lived in the mountain village of Sao Jose do Vale do Rio Preto, northwest of Rio de Janeiro, until just a few years ago.
