Encounters with the Unknown—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, March 2024
An Interview with a Time Traveler:
Dr. Chet Snow
by: Brent Raynes
Chet Snow, Ph.D., is an internationally-acclaimed author, lecturer and regression therapist with degrees from Columbia University and the Sorbonne in Paris. Chet and his wife Kallista live in Sedona, Arizona, where he is a regression therapist. They also lead summer tours to crop circles in England, to a spiritual master named Mother Meera in Germany, and organize the annual Signs of Destiny conferences. Visit their website at: http://www.chetsnow.com
Editor: I guess the best thing to do is for you to just go ahead and tell about yourself, where you are today and how you got there.
Dr. Chet Snow: Okay. I suppose that like many other people I grew up in a pretty ordinary American household. I always did seem to think that there was probably more to life than the stories that people were telling me about the world. So for a long time I devoted a good deal of time and energy to finding out everything I could about this world. That’s why I went into history and sociology, eventually getting a Ph.D., and also, at the same time, because my mother was of French origin, and we spoke French as well as English sometimes, I took my junior year in Paris, at the Sorbonne University. I loved it from the start and later returned for graduate work there. Many people say I have a European personality alongside my very American outlook.
It wasn’t until the early 1980s that I actually got into the paranormal, and that came about primarily because of my paternal grandmother. My parents died young, when I was in my 20’s, so Gram became very important to me. Basically, and I don’t know any other way to put it, shortly after her own eventual passing, she quite dramatically re-entered my life and started giving me a series of you might call them visions or interviews or conversations I’m not sure how to put it. In any case, she came back to me and we had a number of sessions together lasting anywhere from ten minutes to two hours in which she appeared right in the room with me quite literally. She was just as physical and real to me as my computer here that I’m looking at across my home/office as I talk to you on the phone.
Editor: And this was after she had passed on?
Dr. Chet Snow: About three weeks after her death. She passed away in early December 1982 at the age of 91. So these psychic interactions from the “other side” took place from late 1982 into early 1983. My Gram really led me into a whole new career, a new life. Initially, we had some unfinished family business to settle, having to do with the events surrounding her death some things that I was concerned about. I think that’s what led to the linking that happened. I don’t think it was an accident or a fluke. I needed to get some closure because I’d not been there when she passed on and some of our relatives hadn’t told me how ill she was the last weeks of her life. I was very upset about all that. That’s what she first came back to explain to me why it was necessary that things had happened that way. I needed that information. But then, very quickly, she turned to bigger issues. I’d always been interested in philosophy and stuff, and she knew I needed to change my life. I was in my mid-30s, pretty much alone in the world, working full time, and suddenly I was thrust into a whole new arena. It was awesome and I’d probably not still be here if it hadn’t happened. I’d gone as far as I could go in that part of my life and I needed to grow.
My grandmother told me that out of all the people remaining in my family, I was the only one awake enough for her to get through to. I wish that I could say that she answered all the great questions we have about life after death but it wasn’t like that. Still, from those conversations and my subsequent research, I know things don’t just terminate when our body dies. It’s not a belief; I know it’s true and that’s helped me immensely.
Gram always seemed to know just when I’d be ready for her to come to me. Our conversations usually happened late at night I’m a “night owl” even today. I might be reading a book before going to sleep and then I’d find myself putting the book down, beginning to nod, and then pick it up again. It’s kind of a hypnagogic state, as I later learned, and then she’d appear in a light at the foot of the bed. What followed was basically always the same. I’d notice at the end of the room, like 8 to 10 feet away, a small little light. It would blur and grow and then my grandmother would step out of it. Then we’d talk without spoken words but the thoughts came to me in words and I spoke back in words, but in my head, not aloud. Then, after we’d covered whatever it was she wanted to tell me, she’d smile and literally fade away and I’d put down my book, turn out the light and fall into a sound sleep. I always awoke right on time the next morning with a full recall of what we’d said together and sometime that next day I’d write it all down in a notebook. I never spoke about all this and at my job and in my ordinary social life, things went on much as before. I know I was happier than in a long time and people did comment how I seemed less prone to anger or frustration than heretofore. It’s true; I did feel calmer in my daily life. And I began to seek out books on psychic matters and even joined a local Edgar Cayce group that synchronistically had just formed in my small northern California town that month.
Eventually, maybe three or four months after this had begun; Gram told me that she was going to turn me over to someone else. That’s how she put it. She said she had “more work to do” that didn’t involve me and so she wouldn’t be coming back. She even told me very specifically that I’d soon hear about a woman named Helen who lived in Berkeley or who was at Berkeley [University California: Berkeley]. I distinctly remember she mentioned those two things: Helen and Berkeley as being the next step on my spiritual journey. I was a bit sad at the thought that our sessions wouldn’t continue but something inside of me knew that we’d reached closure and by now I understood that such a separation was only temporary and she’d be there if I ever really needed her.
After this final conversation with Gram took place, maybe three or four days later, I was in a small meeting with some people it was our local Edgar Cayce study group when someone I barely knew arrived all excited about a psychologist named Dr. Helen Wambach who was giving private sessions in Berkeley, doing research for a book on reincarnation. And, of course, as soon as I heard Helen and Berkeley like that, I immediately realized that this was my grandmother’s message. So I got Dr. Wambach’s phone number and went to see her, and in a sense the rest is history because the sessions that I did for the next two years with Helen formed the basis of my book “Mass Dreams of the Future”. In fact, although I did all the writing and I’m the book’s author, originally Helen and I had planned to write this book together but that idea disappeared with her own untimely passing in August of 1985.
Editor: Now prior to all of this, before your grandmother’s passing, had she ever had any kind of psychic abilities or anything that you knew of?
CS: No. Gram was a “died in the wool” Methodist. Her father had been a Methodist minister, a judge, and a school principal in Alabama; then they’d homesteaded in Oklahoma when she was a girl. I can’t imagine a much more conservative, Bible thumping kind of person than my great-grandfather, and my grandmother inherited all that along with his love for education. She became a school teacher. Her husband was a high school principal and later taught at Penn State University. Their son, my father, was a mechanical and aeronautics engineer. My mother taught high-school French, Spanish, and Latin. She was raised partly in France because her father, who was a well-known geologist and college professor, had gone to Europe to do mineral research for the French and Spanish governments after the First World War, when my mom was a child. Her family was originally from France and they continued to speak French at the dinner table, so I was raised speaking some French as well as English. Yes, I grew up in this very American mixture of cultures with a Protestant work ethic and love for learning, especially philosophy and history. There wasn’t anything psychic about it; we all went to church on Sundays and did weekly family Bible reading. My brother is an elder in his church and has a doctorate in computer science. It’s only after my Gram died and refused to stay dead, at least not for me, that everything changed.
Editor: Please describe how you became involved in what is called progression therapy?
CS: My main experience with progression and future life therapy was with Dr. Helen Wambach back in the years of 1983 and 1984 when we did weekly regression sessions. Originally it was to help me understand what was happening to me, why my grandmother had come back this way. Then we switched to progressing me into the future for her research because she found I was an excellent hypnotic subject. Finally, after a while it became obvious that we were going to work together and we began to take notes for the book.
One of these sessions stood out actually we may have done two or three on this theme but it was very, very powerful because it was a future progression into this lifetime as Chet Snow and I saw myself quite literally catapulted some twenty years into the future into the late 1990s. Instead of living in California, or back in Pennsylvania or New York, which is where I had lived before moving west in 1978, I found myself in a very specific ranch house, all one floor, in the Southwestern desert. I immediately said “It’s Arizona”. The scene was on a ranch at that point. The house was in an unusual “L” shape, it kind of meandered in the back of a rather large property, and I remember, as part of the progression, this being set in the late 1990s, seeing myself living there with a small group of people, and there was a woman who was kind of the leader of this group, although she and I were not in a physical relationship. We obviously had a close friendship and bond. I called her “Patsy”.
All of this is in the first chapter of “Mass Dreams of the Future,” which I still distribute, by the way. Anyway, it could best be described as a “post earth changes” environment. We were actually still living through earth changes. Volcanic activity was important. Earth movements, earthquakes were important, and California and parts of it had actually slipped off into the ocean due to these earthquakes. In Arizona the climate was changing, but it was still a desertor, at least, pretty much so. Although it was more temperate than it had been in the 1980s when I was actually going through these experiences on Helen Wambach’s therapy couch.
As I had told you once earlier, Brent, at that point in my life, I had never lived in Arizona. I had only visited the state one time to go to a military air base near Tucson, as part of my Air Force work, but I had never been sight-seeing in Arizona. Still, the experience was very powerful of going through this house and being in this post-apocalyptic kind of environment. It wasn’t pleasant, but very powerful, very gripping. I wrote it all up in the book. But this all came later, these progression sessions, after I’d been seeing Helen Wambach regularly for a year.
Helen had been working on reincarnation from many viewpoints, looking into all the different aspects of Time. One of the things that fascinated her, and that I later developed, was the idea that under hypnosis one might not just be able to look at the past but also one could get some clues about the future. She called it like a Gallup Poll of the future, previewing people’s possible or potential futures, in the same way that a regression session helped one look back into the past. So instead of a regression, we called it a “progression”. For the next two years I learned her regression and progression techniques in weekly sessions and, at her urging, I also took some formal counseling training so I could leave my job with the Air Force and devote full time to this amazing therapy that was changing my life. In January 1985 I finally took the plunge and resigned. By that time Helen was already quite sick she had diabetes and a very bad heart condition. That spring we worked together, coming up with the title for the book “Mass Dreams of the Future,” and making an outline for the book that we planned to co-author. Our plans were well underway when I decided to take a break and so I went to France, which I’ve always felt was my second home. While I was there, Helen suddenly had a severe attack and passed away within hours. Once again I felt like an orphan.
Helen didn’t come back to me like my Gram had done but I know she helped guide me from that “other side” and I decided that I wanted a real change of scene so I moved out of California and got a small apartment in Paris where I lived the next four and a half years. One of my desires had been to test the idea of whether or not the regression and progression research we’d done with Americans in English would lead to similar results from people living in the quite-different culture of France, whose native language was French. Now that all my really close California connections had vanished, I felt free to pursue this overseas research. At the same time, I took all our notes for the book and began to write. For the next four years, I worked on Mass Dreams of the Future in Paris, adding my new French research and more sessions done in England and Canada to give the book a really global perspective. I found that, as far as the future is concerned, sessions done in French in France or Canada brought nearly identical results as those among English speakers in America or England. This was significant as it proved to me that these results weren’t just culture-bound fantasies brought up by seeing the same movies and TV shows but something more. I also really loved being back in Paris again and got to know a whole new group of French people interested in similar spiritual and metaphysical subjects. Again, I found an Edgar Cayce study group who became like a new family for me. As Paris is a world capital, people from many different countries mingled in that group and some even helped me with my research sessions and final manuscript. So I never had much time to feel lonely after Helen’s untimely passing it’s as if she and my Gram had planned it all in the best possible way.
Around May of 1989 I finally turned in my over-sized manuscript to my editor at McGraw Hill, which had accepted to publish “Mass Dreams of the Future”. At that point I decided to move back to America where my roots were. The book was due out at the end of the year; I had some money saved from my Paris therapy practice. And something in me said to get away from books and stuffy inside work and explore the Western USA, which aside from California, was unknown to me. The writing process had been lengthy and quite demanding and I was back from France I didn’t have a job yet so I bought a used car and began from northern California and went to several of the national parks, starting in Glacial National Park in Montana and then driving south through Yellowstone and the Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, then into Arizona, to see the Grand Canyon, Sedona, the Petrified Forest and all. Eventually I ended up in Phoenix, where another close friend of mine, whom I had met at the Robert Monroe Institute in Virginia in 1987 on one of my research trips back to the USA, had an alternative health clinic in Phoenix. She wanted me to come there and do regressions, and so I was checking this out. This was in the summer of 1989, and my book was actually published in November 1989.
During that time I remember looking for the desert ranch scene that I had been progressed to. I saw immediately certain desert landscapes that looked very similar, very familiar. One that stands out in my mind was north of Phoenix, somewhere between Phoenix and Sedonaoff the highwayI was driving on some small roads, and I came across this landscape that I just felt was like the landscape that I had seen in the progressions with Helen some six years earlier. I was amazed because when I turned a corner there was a big sign that said, ‘Future vision properties for sale.’ So I thought that this pun was the universe playing a neat trick on me. Here I was trying to track down this future vision and I found it on an Arizona real estate sign.
I did not buy any property there. Instead, after two more years in California, I moved to a Scottsdale apartment to continue my regression therapy practice. I had an office there for three years until 1994. During that time my life again changed completely. Sometime during 1990 a close friend in Sedona invited me for a visit. I was still looking for a property to buy. Not so much to live in, but as an investment, and this friend and I came across this amazing house. It was exactly the house that I had seen in the progression with Helen, only it wasn’t in the desert far out in the country or on a ranch. It was a ranch house in the small town of Sedona, Arizona. Sedona is a rather unique town with electrical and magnetic vortex points around it. A lot of healers live here. It’s also a very beautiful place with incredible red rock and western scenery. Although it’s not a cactus filled desert, which is the scene that I had originally seen, it is nonetheless still in the high desert. I was so amazed that I’d found the house of my future vision here in Sedona that I tried to buy it. It was for sale, but things didn’t work out, for various reasons. The conditions of my life were just not right for it, I now understand.
I settled in Scottsdale and went on with my life when, again out of the blue, it all changed. One thing these major unexpected changes have taught me is that one isn’t condemned to live the same future that you may have previewed in a progression or an out-of-body experience. These can reveal the main themes of what’s coming, but many aspects of the future are still under our control and we have points, throughout our life, where we can change it. This fact has made me more optimistic because frankly after having seen some of the bleak future scenarios that seemed to lie ahead, there in California in the early 1980s, I wasn’t too thrilled. It’s one thing that took me back to Paris after Helen’s death if it was going to be the “end of the world,” at least I’d go out in a place I loved!
Now, what happened in 1991 was that for the first time in my life I met a living, spiritual master. Her name is Mother Meera. She is originally from India, but she’s lived in Germany for many years. I met her through some friends in France who had already been to see her earlier. She says she is an incarnation of the Divine Mother Principle, the Divine Mother Energy. Just being in her presence has changed thousands of lives.
After “Mass Dreams of the Future” was published, the money I made from lectures based on its ideas allowed me to go back and forth across the Atlantic to continue to work in Europe as I still had a clientele and many friends in France. The book’s popularity led to its being quickly translated into other languages. In 1991 it won a literary prize in Germany as the best new metaphysical book in the German language. I had a lot of speaking engagements for the next few years in Europe as a result of that. It also came out in French, Italian, Turkish and Russian.
Thus, in November 1991, I was visiting some French friends who told me about this extraordinary Mother Meera, a living spiritual master you could actually visit and do what they call “darshan,” which means being in the presence of and receiving a blessing from a master. So one weekend when a lecture in Frankfurt was cancelled at the last minute, and since Mother Meera lived near there, I went to experience her darshan. It turned out to be very, very powerful for me and I realized that it was something that might change my life.
Unbeknownst to me, a French friend whom I’d met in Paris back in 1986 when she was running a yoga center with her boyfriend and where I had given regression classes, she was also interested in going to see Mother Meera. She went for “darshan” on a different day but also in that same November. A few weeks later, back in France, we met with some mutual friends for a meditation afternoon and to talk about our experiences, everyone there having been to darshan with Mother Meera already. What happened next changed both of our lives because during this group meditation in a closed room just as it had happened with my grandmother a bright point of light suddenly appeared. Everyone opened their eyes but it wasn’t a ray of sunlight for the blinds were drawn. Each person interpreted what happened differently but we all saw the light in our midst and everyone later said they knew it was Mother Meera’s presence. What I saw was similar to what had happened nine years earlier with Gram only this time no one was dead and it was in daylight and I wasn’t alone. For me the light grew bigger and brighter and then Mother Meera stepped out in one of her beautiful Indian saris. Without a word Mother Meera never speaks in public she pointed first at my friend, Kallista, straight at her heart, and then at me. In that moment I felt like a blindfold had lifted from my eyes, my heart opened and I knew that I’d loved this beautiful woman seated across the room since we’d met but that I’d always considered her unattainable, somehow beyond me.
At the same instant Kallista looked up and her eyes met mine. She later told me she heard Mother Meera’s voice in her mind saying “Here is the man who can understand you.” She felt her heart open just as I felt mine and we each knew that this could be a changing point in our lives if we accepted it. This happened in early December 1991. I can still remember the moment, how clear it all is. That it had been nine years, almost to the day, since my grandmother had passed away; setting a chain of events into motion, and here was the next link in the chain.
Well, after the meditation, we all talked about what had gone on. Everyone talked about seeing the light and they all realized that something had gone on between Kallista and me. Kallista is, of course, the same woman who is now my wife. Then Kallista and I talked about it more privately, and it was like our eyes were now open, that we’d been blind in our earlier friendship. Well, this led to our starting a new, intimate relationship and in February 1992 I brought her to Arizona for a visit because I knew that if we were going to share our lives then she’d have to accept being in the States at least part of the time. Right away she fell in love with Sedona, like she’d lived there before. So, one year later, in December 1992, we were married in France, receiving Mother’s darshan blessing together a week after the legal ceremony. We’ve gone back to Germany nearly every year since and now take a small group of spiritual pilgrims with us who want to change their lives in a positive way.
Since 1993 we’ve lived in Arizona and in 1994 we even bought that special “ranch house” here in Sedona the one that I’d seen in my future vision so many years before. What is amazing is that we realized that this house was for us and it wouldn’t have been appropriate for me to have bought it by myself. It isn’t the ranch house out on a ranch. It’s in a town; that whole future scenario I saw in 1984 has shifted. It’s been like seeing the future shift in your mind. When we were here in 1994 and found out that that house was still for sale it’d been rented out between 1991 and 1994 Kallista and I looked at each other and we knew that this was going to be our home. This time all the paperwork went through with relative ease and I think it was three months later that we moved into the house.
We later found out that this house had been built by some English healers who had come to Sedona in the 70s and had chosen its location specifically because it is at the junction of several key ley lines and energy grids that are very prominent here in this area. This impressed one of the Hopi elders whose name was White Bear, who was in fact the elder who gave the information to Frank Waters for the book called The Book of the Hopi. White Bear retired here to this house for about ten years in the 1980’s before he got too ill and had to be moved to another place closer to medical facilities.
This is still a small town. We now have a medical center, but back in that time there were only 5000 people living here. We’re now 11,000 people, so it’s still pretty small. I realized that this house had a whole history to it and that this history was much more than just the post-apocalyptic scenario of my 1984 vision. It is a healing history. It is a history of connection to the land, connection to the Native peoples of the land, and by the mid-1990s Kallista and I both realized that it was going to be our home for awhile, and it’s still our home today. Even though we do travel a lot, both of us agree that there’s nothing like the peace and serenity we feel when returning to the beautiful exposed wood beams of our cathedral ceiling living room, especially when it’s chilly outside so we light a fire and snuggle under a blanket listening to the wind and crackling of the flames. White Bear had the fireplace installed and it’s built out of rock brought down from his native Hopi lands. Our back yard where he once called in golden eagles is still home to quail and rabbits and a variety of birds. For us, it’s a small healing oasis.
Editor: How was it that you came to meet with the Hopi elders and got involved in Crop circle investigations and leading small group tours?
CS: That’s a long and complex question, but the quick and dirty of it is that even before Mass Dreams of the Future was published I saw it as going beyond the progression sessions that Helen and I did to include a discussion of prophecy, of the meaning of Time, Edgar Cayce, channeling and such. I’ve always been an arm chair philosopher! So I included these ideas plus a chapter on physics and quantum realities to round out the book. I got Frank Water’s Book of the Hopi this being a dozen years before coming to Arizona and buying the house that White Bear had lived in so it’s interesting to see how that was all being set up years and years before. But I got that book and I was very interested in the Hopi prophecies. I studied what had been written about the Hopi prophecies and I have a chapter that goes into Native prophecies from around the world, including the Hopi prophecy, and how so many of these prophecies seem to pinpoint the late 20th, early 21st century as a time both of great upheaval and great promise. Because any time there are challenges there are always spiritual opportunities for growth, and that does seem to be the time that we’re living in right now. Of course, the Hopi calendar is based on the ancient Mayan calendar, which as people today are now learning, comes to a transition point in the year 2012 and especially at the time of the winter solstice in 2012.
Therefore, I wrote about the Hopi in Mass Dreams of the Future. Nonetheless, it was quite surprising to me to get involved with them personally. Well, no, actually I want to go back and say one more thing. Not only had I written about their prophecies but after the manuscript was sent to the publisher, when I came through Arizona in 1989, I deliberately drove over to the Hopi reservation and up on the first mesa village of Walpi, one of the traditional Hopi villages. Again it was purely by synchronicity, serendipity, coincidence you can call it what you want I like to think of it as synchronicity, which Carl Jung defined as the coming together of seemingly unconnected events in a meaningful way. In this case, I arrived at Walpi on July 26th, which is the Hopi New Year and also what they call the “Home Dance Day,” so I was very privileged to be able to witness the Home Dance in Walpi’s town plaza. I was a total stranger all alone, not knowing anyone or having any connections there at all, except that I had driven up to the mesa. I met a young Hopi woman in a shop and she and I talked a little bit and I must have mentioned my interest in the Hopi and their prophecies because she told me, ‘You’re here on a very special day. Today is the Home Dance Day,’ and she explained to me that meant when the kachina spirits, who they consider to be the sky spirits but who now live under the San Francisco peaks, about 150 miles west of the actual Hopi reservation mesas when they go home. Anyway she said, ‘This is the day the dancing is done because we believe they have gone home to their mountain after the end of most of the crop season’ harvesting takes place there in early August. I later found out that July 26th is the western calendar date that marks the Mayan solar New Year, so the Hopi calendar is obviously based on the traditional Mayan calendar. They are related.
I didn’t know any of that in 1989. It was just totally by synchronicity that I got to see my first Home Dance. I have since gone up there two or three other times and have been very privileged to see some of their other dances. It’s a wonderful traditional culture. They’re not perfect. These are not super heroes or spiritual saints. They’re ordinary people with their share of problems but somehow they have kept a spiritual tradition alive for thousands of years that goes way back and has a lot of ancient knowledge.
So from my book research, I’d learned a lot about the Hopi and had even visited there in 1989. Then in early 1991came another one of those synchronistic experiences that I will never forget. I had just moved to Scottsdale. It was before I met my wife and Mother Meera so I was living alone. I had some good friends who lived in Sedona, as I said a little earlier, and the first Gulf War had just begun. You may recall that it began at the end of January with our bombing Baghdad and then we sent in the troops of the first coalition. Well at that time my book was doing great in Europe as well as in the United States, and I had done some lectures for the Edgar Cayce organization, including a number of them in England, so that in the summer of 1990 I had been over there working with the English ARE council and someone had shown me some pictures of crop circles. They were interesting, and I thought to myself some of them look like Native American petroglyphs or rock art. Although it wasn’t something that I was particularly into, I noticed that connection in my mind.
In February 1991, synchronistically again, someone from England sent me a copy of one of the first books on crop circles that had just been published in the United Kingdom. Crop circles had just begun to become interesting to the media this was one of the first published books on the topic. It had line drawings and photos.
The phone rang when I was in my Scottsdale apartment. I believe it was like a Friday morning - 8:30 or 9:00 AM - in mid-February 1991. I answered it and someone I didn’t know, a young Native American fellow, said “You don’t know me but I’m a friend of your friend in Sedona and I also live with some of the Hopi traditional elders at the village of Hotevilla, on the Third Mesa, and they and some of the elders on Second Mesa are going to be having a special gathering this weekend and they want you to be a part of it.” I said, “Today?” He said, “Yes, it is going to start in 5 or 6 hours. That’s just about enough time for you to get up from Scottsdale. Can you come?” I said, “Well, all right. Is my friend from Sedona invited?” and he said, “Yes. What we want you to do is drive through Sedona and meet him because he had a pick up truck and he can drive on some of the dirt and rough roads on the reservation.” So that is what we did.
When I asked why I was being invited, the guy said, “Well I read your book, Mass Dreams of the Future, and I see you talk about the Hopi prophecies. Some of the Hopi elders want to tell you their real prophecies.” In other words, they wanted to teach me, which was wonderful. I was excited, and very flattered to be given that invitation.
I didn’t know, but there were only about a half dozen non-Hopi people present on that weekend. So my friend and I drove up to Second Mesa where they were meeting for the late afternoon and early evening, and they wanted to talk to me first about their stone tabletswhich are part of their ancient heritage and propheciesone of which was broken off. The piece that was broken off was given to one they called the Pahana, which means the light skinned one who had taken it east, toward Europe. They were hoping that maybe in my research, since I had looked into native prophecies, I might have found someone or some group that had knowledge of this in Europe, since I had lived in Europe too. Unfortunately, I’d never heard of anyone with something like that over there. This is what they told me that they were hoping. They were looking for this piece of that lost tablet. They also wanted to talk about some of the prophecies that I had mentioned in the Mass Dreams. They said that their understanding of their prophecies was that this was a time of great change and that the change was perhaps not as immediate as I had seen, but it was imminent and it was being prepared for.
We discussed all this during the weekend and they shared their prophecy with me. Much of it matched what White Bear had told Frank Waters. They weren’t particularly happy that White Bear had told these secrets to a non-Hopi, although they acknowledged that they knew that in the present time the Hopi who would follow their traditional ways would be reduced to the numbers that you could count on your hands and feet. In other words, no more than 20 people. There would be very few left and therefore the tradition would be carried on by people who were not native Hopi. But this was something they didn’t like to talk about and in fact they didn’t talk a lot. They were very reserved. One didn’t talk to them so much either. When they wanted to, they talked to you. There was a lot of silence. They really observed us including the people from New Mexico who were there also. We were particularly invited into the home of one of the elders named Martin Grandfather Martin a wonderful man, still living up there, and another one who has since passed away. His name was Titus, and he was a 101 at the time. We then had dinner in this community hall with about two dozen Hopi, mainly elderly men; their average age must have been about 75.
Then again, synchronistically, everything changed. Curious to see their reaction, I had brought some photocopies of some pages from the English crop circle book especially those that looked like some of the petroglyphs from Southwest Native American art. I pulled these photocopies out of my briefcase at dinner. It didn’t seem appropriate when we were talking earlier specifically about their prophecies. But dinnertime was kind of a break. I showed the crop circle drawings to Grandfathers Martin and Titus and to a couple of other elders sitting near me, and that changed everything. Their reaction was immediate. They went from reserved elders, sharing just a little bit of knowledge to us non-initiated, non-Hopi heathen to acting like school boys. They started to take the paper and pass it back and forth to one another. They started talking excitedly in Hopi. We had a young interpreter, but they were talking among themselves now too rapidly for translation. They were amazed. They turned the paper upside down. One man grabbed a pen and started to sketch a photocopy. He changed some of the drawings and turned them in another direction and said to me, through the interpreter, “You’re looking at this the wrong way. This side should be up.” That changed the meaning of the crop glyph. The other non-Hopi present were all looking at me in bewilderment, like I had just arrived from the moon. They asked me, “What are these?” So I explained to them that these were crop circles that had appeared the last couple of summers in England. They occurred with the flattening of standing cereal crop like wheat or barley. The flattened crop made up the geometric patterns.
The Hopi elders talked some more among themselves. They were very interested in this. Then they talked with me. All of a sudden I became in a sense a star, although that was not my intention. Of course, as I said, they were looking for signs from Europe that their prophecies were or were not coming true, and I think they realized that here were some of the signs they sought; some of the symbols in the crop circles had deep and sacred meaning to them. They had cosmological meaning. That means that it had to do with the story from the beginningthe beginning of humanity, the beginning of the earth, of life on earth. It was eschatological also, which means that it is about the “end days;” certain of these symbols were talking about the time of their prophecies.
Well, the upshot of all this was that they convened later when we weren’t with them and they made a decision. The next morning Grandfather Martin invited us as I said, a half dozen non-Hopi people to go with him actually he directed some younger men who drove us in pickup trucks to a remote, sacred part of their lands he asked me to not reveal its exact location (but, of course, I have no idea exactly where it was. It was way out in the middle of nowhere on these dirt roads). We bounced along to a canyon in which there were petroglyphs carved from ground level all the way up to about say 8 feet. As far up as a man sitting on a man’s shoulders could inscribe rock carvings comfortably. These petroglyphs were etched into the rock face of this canyon maybe a quarter mile long. One section, the most sacred section of it all, I was told, included pictograms of the beginning time and end time, particularly the beginning time, and these glyphs were remarkably similar in geometric design to some of the crop circles that I had shown them from England. Grandfather Martin permitted me to take some photographs of them - which is unheard of. The Hopi never allow photographs. It’s not that they believe that photographs are taking your soul or anything like that. It’s just that they believe that their spirituality has been exploited by white people and they’re very careful now of trying to keep it private. But they wanted me to be able to show the people in England these glyphs and they told me that as long as I never had the photographs videoed or used for a commercial purpose, like put in a book, or anything like that, that I was free to talk about them and show them. So sometimes I show them when I give lectures, some of these photos. But always at a time when no one can take pictures or do a video of them. Because they are sacred to these people and I honor that commitment to them.
Like I said, these glyphs were primarily about the beginning of what the Hopi call the Fourth World, that current age of civilization that they seem to feel is coming to an end or a crucial transition point at the 2012 Winter Solstice, and therefore, a very important time in prophecy. I’m still awed that I got to see and photograph them.
Well, that experience in February 1991 hooked me on crop circles, I guess. I was fascinated that these drawings of temporary geometric shapes appearing overnight, very mysteriously in crop fields in England, half a world away, would turn reserved Native spiritual elders into chattering, excited men. For the next four years or so I regularly visited the Hopi elders. After 1996 things changed. Their world outlook grew a lot more pessimistic than mine and we drifted apart. I haven’t been up there now in a while but in those early years I drove there on a fairly regular basis. Later, my wife joined me and she felt very much at home like she recognized the area from before.
That’s how we started to go to England. That summer I began to get involved in the crop circle research and exploration, to try to see first if the new circlespictograms would have meaning to the Hopi or other native people. I actually met some aboriginals from Australia who said that certain ones not always the same ones as for the Hopi, interestingly had meaning to them. Some did not. Some did not have meaning to anyone at that time.
Anyway, I got very fascinated with it and that started me into the whole crop circle phenomenon. The upshot of it is that for about three more years I compared crop circle notes with the Hopi elders and they told me that certain ones meant certain things to them. Others didn’t mean anything. I remember from the summer of 1992, there was a crescent moon that appeared in an English crop circle. It was the first time that a crescent shape had appeared there. Now, for every year since then, there’s been at least one crescent shaped crop circle somewhere in England. That event was very significant in the Hopi time line. The next year (1993) there was a pair of crescents that came together in a specific way in the same pictogram and that also was important to the Hopi because it was actually inscribed on one of their ancient stone tablets with other sacred symbols. And then about a year after that we were still in pretty close contact then another set of crop circles had to do with star positions, showing the planets and the stars at certain dates. This also was important to the Hopi. So there were definitely some circles that match Hopi prophecy.
About 1995 or ‘96 it’s not that they lost interest, but bad things happened on the Hopi reservation. The problems of the traditional elders versus the more modernist majority of the people led them to withdraw from us. They closed their ceremonies to outsiders, including myself to everyone who was not a Hopi. They basically cut off a lot of communication. I’ve been up there only once or twice since 1996. Essentially, they told me they felt the ‘die was now cast’ and there was nothing they could do to change the hard times that they foresaw. They didn’t know exactly when these were going to hit but that many of the scenes that had been in my Mass Dreams of the Future, sort of apocalyptic, or earth change scenarios, were going to come. They didn’t know if they were going to be there to see it, but they felt that it would be in the next generation. As I said, these were men whose average age was 75, many were in their 90s.
So that’s my Hopi story. As I say since the mid-1990s I’ve really had very little contact and they have more or less stayed fairly closed in their villages and mesas, tending their corn. As you know, starting in 1992 we’ve gone through a time of quiescence in earth changes but since January 2001 that has also changed and we’re now going through an accelerated period where bigger earth changes are again taking place. More volcanoes are going off or are about to go. There has been significant earthquake activity in Yellowstone Park in the last six months, this being the fall of 2003. Also, there has just been released news of great concern in Italy that the strata under the magma within Mount Vesuvius are moving again. In fact, the Italian government has offered people living on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius quite a handy sum to move to a safe village. The recent solar flare activity also is part of this picture. Some of recent crop circle symbols seem to relate to the sun, by the way.
Now I’m not a scientist taking physical measurements of the circles but I am, you might say, a kind of cultural anthropologist, more or less, trying to understand what the symbols are, how they relate not only to the Hopi prophecy, but also to our own Western culture and especially to the Celtic roots of our culture. I’ve found there are relationships to Christianity, the spiritual aspects of our culture, to sacred geometry, and more important I think that it is important for this message to get out to the American people. And not just in America, but all over the world. They have had annual conferences on crop circles in England since the 1980s. But we’re just beginning to get to that level of consciousness, and so last year my wife and I organized “Signs of Destiny,” America’s first international crop circle conference, with leading researchers and authors talking about this phenomenon and sacred geometry. We did it in November 2002 near Phoenix, Arizona, and frankly I chose Arizona because we live here and it’s an easier thing to organize a major conference in the same state where you live. Now we are making this event an annual one for the third weekend in November. We are happy to announce “Signs of Destiny II Crop Circles & Earth Mysteries” this year. November is a good time because it’s after the harvest season, so the crop circles are gone in the northern hemisphere, and there’s been enough time for people to have get photographs, to collect evidence and documentation, to get together the researchers and people who are looking into this from a scientific point of view. We also want to include all those who are looking into this from a spiritual point of view and to relate it to cultural changes and prophecy. We’re blending those people interested in this from a spiritual, from a scientific, and from a prophetic point of view.
Editor: So what direction are you currently going in?
CS: My wife and I are dedicated to bringing together the best and most credible experts from many levels and different points of view to try and understand what is happening now, not only in England but actually more and more across the entire world. These are our Signs of Destiny conferences. We’re holding the Signs of Destiny II Crop Circles & Earth Mysteries conference on November 21st to the 23rd, at the Tempe Embassy Suites, near Phoenix, Arizona. We invite people to come to this public event. Details are posted on our website: www.chetsnow.com/. We’re having Sir Laurence Gardner, who isn’t a crop circle expert, but who has done incredible research on the prophecies of ancient people of the Middle East, of the Celts, of European royalty. He wrote The Bloodline of the Holy Grail, among others. He’s going to tell us all about alchemy and the secrets of the lost sacred Ark of the Covenant. We have Dolores Cannon who is a fascinating woman who has had contact with the 16th Century prophet Nostradamus. We also have the scientific researchers like Dr. Eltjo Haselhoff, a Dutch physicist who has written a book, The Deepening Complexity of Crop Circles, talking about the physics research into crop circles and how they match laws of physics, along with Nancy Talbott, head of the BLT Research team out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, who is doing plant and soil analysis of crop circles all over the world, in fact. Not just in England, but also in the United States, in Canada, from other countries. Linda Moulton Howe has done very interesting research into UFOs and crop circle phenomenon will be here. Strange Lights and Crop Circles is a recent book of hers. A number of people are coming from other countries as well as America, to talk about and to share knowledge of what I think is one of the greatest world mysteries of our time.
So I feel that this is my wife’s and my primary mission for now. To get information about how this phenomenon, which seems to be so important to Native people like the Hopi, who have a vision of these troubled and yet opportunity-making times, come forward and get people knowledgeable about this. It’s real research and interesting and interested people to possibly understand what is happening in our world. Or, at least, the signs of what’s going on. I call these events “Signs of Destiny” or the signs of our destiny. This year the weekend’s title is: Signs of Destiny II; next year I’m simply going to call it Signs of Destiny 2004. We want to get into Mayan prophecy and the 2012 events next year.
Another way that we spread this information to the public is that my wife and I distribute/sell the Wiltshire Crop Circle Study Group’s annual Crop circle calendar, which is printed in England with color photos of the best English crop circles from the current year. It’s the only calendar that shows the ones from the current season, by the way. There are some other crop circle calendars but they have previous years’ pictures. For us, it’s a way to kind of a wrap up the season. We import the calendars from England and the money goes to help the English crop circle study group. Their coordinator and photographer Francine Blake will be here in at Signs of Destiny II in November. She was also with us last year to talk about her knowledge and photographing the crop circles. She’s going to do a very interesting workshop on getting involved with the spiritual and photographic aspects of the crop circles this time.
Beyond that, we take a small group of no more than ten people on a week-long tour of England’s crop circles and adjacent sacred sites each summer. This is an ongoing series that my wife and I began in 1997 that we call “Sacred Journeys Tours”. Our first sacred journey tour was to take a dozen people to visit the spiritual master who brought us together, Mother Meera, who now lives in Germany, as I said. She is now in her early 40s, and has a public gathering four nights a week. People come and are blessed in her presence. I’ve seen people’s lives changed. In June 2004, we’re going to do a tour to the Black Madonna sites in France. It’s a very interesting tradition especially in France but also in Spain and Germany. The most ancient statues of the Madonna and child are actually a dark color, and there’s a belief that these go back to the ancient Egyptian Madonna Isis, with the child Horus, which was a proto-type for the Mary and Christ Madonna’s. There are still some of these statues, and some of them are nearly 2000 years old. Some are more recent ones. But they’re all in quite wonderful, holy, venerated sites, so we’re taking people to France next summer to visit some of these, to understand and experience the energy of these places.
All of these things, in my opinion, are a part of our work of helping to educate the public growing to a wider and wider public with credible, interesting and informative information and experiences - hands on experiences. You see, I’m not sure that everyone is awake yet to have their grandmother come to them in a series of sessions like I did. I’m certainly not alone in this but I think that when this kind of event happens, something like having a near-death experience, it changes your life and makes you more aware of the greater realities beyond this one. Then it is incumbent on such people to share their experiences with other people in the world around them. If I have one gift it is, I think, that I am a down-to-earth, average, credible kind of person. I’m not a wild long-haired prophet out preaching the end of the world. Although I am not a scientist per se, I am a social scientist, and sociology interests me, cultural anthropology, and history. I have a lot of knowledge in those areas. I think I also have a vision of a better future ahead and I have been shown things about this. These future visions, many of them, some for the good, some for the not so good, seem to be coming true. So I think that it’s important for people to begin to realize this and this aspect of the current world and what we’re doing to our inheritance.
My sense is that in the time between now [2003] and about December 2011 (in 2012 I think things are going to be going so fast it will be difficult to make many plans) we’re either going into a time of great fear, which it will be for some people, or a time of great opportunity and spiritual promise, which is what I hope will become the case for more and more people. It may never be the majority, but it will certainly be more and more. Remember to make a loaf of bread all you need is a certain percentage of leaven in the dough. What I feel people like myself and others are doing, each with our own personal point of view, perspective, and information each with our own part of the puzzle - [by the way, no one has the whole puzzle; everyone has part of the puzzle] is putting those pieces together to create a blueprint of the future. Hopefully this will be the most positive possible future, as we look at different aspects of the world, and as we all moving together toward it. For example, next year we’re hoping to add to our crop circle theme the theme of the Mayan calendar and Mayan prophecies. In another year I would like to work with those who have had connection with the goddess and the divine mother and the Virgin Mary. In another year I want to hear from men and women whose spiritual visions have taken them into other realms or dimensions. Those are all aspects of the same phenomenon to me. We’ve had crop circles that involved all these themes. I’m sure there are a number of other themes that will come up.
I really foresee this annual conference as being more and more a coming together of those people who not only want to know about crop circles but who want to understand the involvement of crop circles from a multi-dimensional point of view, a multi-purpose point of view. From a body/mind/spirit point of view. That’s the most extraordinary thing about crop circles. They are multi-dimensional in their impact. They appeal to people from many, many different walks of life. The geometry and mathematics behind them is also important, and we need to come to a better understanding of that as well. So all of these themes are themes that my wife and I are working on from here in our little retreat in Sedona, Arizona, which is a ranch house not on a ranch in a desert that’s been made to bloom. There’s lots of underground water here, by the way, so water is not as big a problem for us as it is for some people.
Perhaps the most positive part of the visions that I was shown in the early 1980s was that important changes are coming, earth and other types of changes some of which we can alter, but others which we cannot alter and they’re for the good of the planet and the good ultimately of this level of reality. This is true despite any temporary hardships or setbacks they may cause the human race. As these changes take place we can channel how they affect us and where our place is in them and not be overwhelmed. I think that this is a very important message of hope to give to people. That there are signs and symbols and actual occurrences taking place monthly, yearly, not only in England and the United States but in other parts of the world that give us those signs of destinysigns of hope for a better future that we all hope for and I believe that we are co-creating and will co-create as we go in into what we call the 21st Century.
Finally, I want to add that I think the Internet is a part of these changes at this time and that it’s a powerful method of communication. That’s why I often tell people to get connected and go see many websites. One of the great lessons of our time is that of discernment, and certainly one of the greatest teachers of discernment is the Internet because it is virtually unpoliceable, which means that everything is out there. The good, the bad, the ugly, and the downright wicked, but the truth is also out there if you can learn to discern how to ferret it out how to pick out the flowers from amidst all of the chaff, as they say.
So hopefully coming together in events like the conferences that we do or the small tours that we promote to take people to sacred sites to specific energy experiences there will help people in that discernment. Discernment for me is the key lesson that we must learn in these days and years, in this time right now, as we approach 2012, because possibly after that time, or at least within the next 20-30 years, if we haven’t learned how to discern, it will be much more difficult given the conditions we will probably all be living under at that time, to do much learning. That’s what I’d like to leave you with. That to me the main lesson, and also what the Hopi were trying to teach in their prophecy is that we must learn about commitment, discernment, hope, cooperation the foundations for the Fifth World, the New World, moving into a higher realm of consciousness that I do believe is our birthright and which we can achieve, if we will just let go of some of the prejudices, biases and holding-on that we’ve learned from the past. And science is an ally in this if we will use science correctly. That is to say, if we will allow the scientists to be truly experiential and experimental in their work and not just repeating inherited biases for they too are human.
So that’s what I want to leave you with. We are co-creating our future with each breath we take and each intention we hold. Signs and wonders are appearing in increasing numbers to help us mold what we do in creative and positive ways if we’ll only attention to them. Thank you so much. I sincerely appreciate the opportunity to talk with you and through you to your readers about what I feel are some of the key issues of our current time and of the times that are just ahead of us.
Editor’s Note: This interview was done back in 2003 and appeared in my book Visitors From Hidden Realms (2004).
