Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, May 2024
UFOs and Psychic Connectivity
by: Brent Raynes
Numerous branches of modern science strongly suggest how there seems to be an expansive, energetic, and still enigmatic field that reaches across the full spectrum of existence. Increasingly scientists are recognizing this as an integral and very likely key component of our reality. Some years ago, I came across certain pieces of thought-provoking literature that introduced me to such ideas.
Lyall Watson, PhD., born in Africa, educated in Holland and Germany, and who got his doctorate from London University in 1963, acquired a well-deserved nickname as a "scientific nomad." He was a globetrotting scientist whose insatiable curiosity drove him to the many ends of the earth. He was a uniquely open-minded and inquisitive man of science who conducted extensive research into the fields of anthropology, archaeology, paleontology, marine biology, botany, and medicine. He aggressively explored and defended the critical need to research and investigate this connectivity issue. He even included UFOs and psychic phenomena as a relevant part of his determined quest for answers. His books Supernature: A Natural History of the Supernatural (1973-74) and Lifetide: The Biology of the Unconscious (1979-80), certainly deepened my own interest and curiosity into unexplained phenomena well beyond what the literature of mainstream ufology had generally offered.
Two unforgettable accounts in Lifetide are burned into my memory. They illustrate well the complexity of consciousness and the physical dimensions and physics of our reality. Even between humans and other life forms. I'll begin with this one:
"Arthur Grimble, that most delightful and enlightened of all colonial administrators, tells of an occasion on Butaritari, the northernmost atoll of the Gilbert Islands, when he took part in an extraordinary interspecific exchange. On a day arranged weeks in advance he joined the people of Kuma village while their hereditary porpoise caller lay alone in a small grass hut on the beach, feet to the west, summoning the dolphin in a dream. In the late afternoon, 'a strangled howl burst from the dreamer's hut. I jumped round to see his cumbrous body come hurtling headfirst through the torn screens...A roar went up from the village, 'They came, they came!' I found myself rushing helter-skelter with a thousand others into the shallows, bawling at the top of my voice that our friends from the west were coming. Fifty yards short of the reef the people stopped and watched as a shoal of porpoises cut through the surf outside. Then they surged through a gap and moved in toward the waiting crowd 'in extended order with spaces of two or three yards between them as far as my eye could reach. So slowly they came. They seemed to be hung in a trance. Their leader drifted in hard by the dreamer's legs."
Lyall Watson was able to verify this second story himself. He was living in a fishing village on a remote Indonesian island on the Banda Sea. On the island there was a man known as the djuru. He was the local expert on locating and identifying fish and marine life. He would dunk his head underwater and listen and accurately identify, even at night, the presence of fish underwater. It was said that he once detected an approaching tidal wave about half hour before it's arrival.
Watson wrote: "This much can be accomplished by sensitivity and training, but there was one incident which occurred during the time I spent with him that I can't file away in a mechanistic pigeonhole quite so easily."
Watson had spent many nights quietly observing female marine turtles hauling themselves up on a beach to lay their eggs. During this time, he had been hoping to catch sight of a rare leatherback Dermochelys cariacea turtle. But each night passed without seeing one. One day he mentioned it to the djuru who promised to show him one. His exact words were: "I will dream one for you."
Nearly a month later, early one morning, as Watson was teaching a class, the djuru came to the school and told him everything was arranged for later that day. Then in the middle of the afternoon, while the tide was at its peak, the two men walked out to a place called Bato Jari, the "toe rock," in a sheltered corner inside of a reef.
"I sat up on a raised shelf, as I had many times before, watching the kaleidoscope of colorful reef fish darting in and out of crevices in the coral, while the djuru crouched at the water's edge with both hands immersed, working the water with his fingers as though he were playing it like a piano. This went on for twenty minutes or more until my attention was distracted by the sight of a frigate bird swooping down at the surface of the lagoon about a hundred yards out, doing I assumed a little of his own fishing..."
Next, he noticed a huge shadow of something beneath the surface of the water coming their way. He began trying to figure out what it was. Manta ray? Shark? Whale? Soon, before his astonished eyes, he recognized what it was. It was a giant leatherback turtle, just as he had requested, and larger than he had dreamed it could be.
"The turtle seemed to see me, almost dancing in my excitement, when she was about twenty feet away, and she turned suddenly on her side so her belly flashed white, and winged away into the deep. But she didn't leave. Three, four, five times she swept up and down the channel in front of us, each time a little closer and a little more calmly. Finally she stopped directly opposite the djuru and came drifting slowly to the surface to breathe. When she breached, her head was only three feet from his hands. He kept his right hand underwater and stretched out with his left, palm down, toward her. And while I watched incredulously, she lifted her beak deliberately up toward himn, and twice, as gently as a suckling calf, nibbled at his fingers. Then she turned and swam with swift clean strokes of her flippers straight out toward the gates of the lagoon and into the open sea."
While most ufologists have been deeply mired up rather exclusively and blindly within the belief ridden confines of their field, Fortean journalist John A. Keel cast a wider net over the matter when he suggested ufology would be better served as a branch of parapsychology and as for ETs and ghosts, the only difference was in the frame of reference imposed.
On the subject of parapsychology, the late great Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung emphasized, "'absolute knowledge' occurs not only in telepathy and precognition, but also in biology, for instance in the attunement of the virus of hydrophobia to the anatomy of dog and man as described by Portmann, the wasp's apparent knowledge of where the motor ganglia are located in the caterpillar that is to nourish the warp's progency, the emission of light by certain fishes and insects, with almost 100 percent efficiency, the directional sense of carrier pigeons, the warning of earthquakes given by chickens and cats, and the amazing co-operation found in symbiotic relationships. We know, too, that the life process itself cannot be explained only by causality but requires 'intelligent' choice." [Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, 1959]
Jung perceived the UFO matter as something of deep potential significance. In fact, he devoted the last years of his life writing a book on the subject. He did his best to apply his theories of archetypes of the collective unconscious to the phenomenon, along with parapsychology, all the while engaging in extensive dialogue with Wolfgang Pauli, one of the early pioneers and founders of quantum physics. Jung felt that UFO, psychic, and religious apparitional and visionary phenomena might be something he called "psychoid." This term implied something that exists on the borders of mental and physical reality, which could be something like psychic phenomena or something of a quantum nature. In his book Flying Saucers he provided this personal example: "...I was once at a spiritualist seance where four of the five people present saw a object like a moon floating above the abdomen of the medium. They showed me, the fifth person present, exactly where it was, and it was absolutely incomprehensible to them that I could see nothing of the sort."
The concept of interconnectivity is certainly not a new thing, even though modern science writers and scientists are exploring the idea. Just as I'm putting the finishing touches on this article, my longtime friend, colleague, and major contributor to this magazine from it's very beginning, Dr. Gregory Little, the author of The Archetype Experience (1984, 2022), People of the Web (1990, 2022), Grand Illusions (1994, 2022), and The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Native American Mounds & Earthworks (2009, 2016), today (04-29) wrote the following on Facebook:
Simple definition of synchronicity: A meaningful coincidence.
This morning while walking I was considering how to word a paragraph describing how to leave a very tiny tobacco offering at mound sites. The amount doesn't matter, just one's intentions and sincerity. I was thinking that the tobacco in just one cigarette could be used at many, many sites using just one tiny flake from it. As I was thinking these ideas I looked down and saw what's below on the ground. I picked it up assuming it was empty. It had one cigarette in it. [And I don't smoke and strongly discourage smoking.] If you know me you'll know I talk about a person's True Self and True Path. When you are on that path, whether just crossing it briefly or living in it, it seems that the forces that are "Out There" will "place" reminders and helpful hints when needed. This relates to the Native American saying: All things are connected.
