• AP Magazine

    An alternative way to explore and explain the mysteries of our world. "Published since 1985, online since 2001."

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Reality Checking




By Brent Raynes





Notice: Brent and his daughter Chandra host an internet radio show every other Monday night at 8 p.m. Central on the very popular site: www.Liveparanormal.com . Our next shows are scheduled for 12/05 and 12/19. Join us and our special guests as we delve into the full spectrum of paranormal high-strangeness!

Did Occultist Aleister Crowley open a Stargate in 1918?

The noted occult metaphysician Aleister Crowley, credited with bringing ancient and forbidden knowledge of the occult into the modern twentieth century, claimed to have entered into contact with a mysterious being named Lam, an entity that was of small stature, slender with a large head and eyes, and grey skin. There reportedly today exist cults of Lam with practitioners in North America and Europe, and many occultists even believe that Lam is the same kind of being today associated with the alien grays of modern UFO abduction literature! Well-known Turkish born ufologist Farah Yurdozu further affirmed this connection in her recent column in UFO Magazine (Issue #157,October 2011) when she wrote: “For some researchers, the modern UFO-ET era started with British occultist Aleister Crowley’s ritual magick works. Between January and March 1918 Aleister Crowley conducted a magickal ritual in New York City. According to his account, he opened and activated a stargate, and a being he called Lam entered into our physical dimension. The drawing of Lam made by Crowley has a remarkable resemblance with the typical gray aliens.”

The lives of these occult practitioners reportedly seem to have the same kinds of problems and personality deteriorations that John Keel associated with many in the UFO field.

Government UFO Cover-up first proposed in 1946!

That’s right, well before the modern “flying saucer era” really got into the swing of things in the early 1950’s and noted ufologists like Donald Keyhoe and Coral Lorenzen began pointing their fingers at the sinister CIA and US Air Force for covering things up, Ray Palmer (who later founded FATE magazine) declared in an editorial in his science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, way back in July 1946: “If you don’t think space ships visit the earth regularly, then the files of Charles Fort, and your editor’s own files are something you should see. Your editor has hundreds of reports (especially from returned soldiers) of objects that were clearly seen and tracked which could have been nothing but space ships. And if you think responsible parties in world governments are ignorant of the fact of space ships visiting earth, you just don’t think the way we do.”

Ray Palmer was certainly way ahead of his time! It wasn’t until a year later, on June 24, 1947, that an Idaho businessman named Kenneth Arnold, flying his private plane in the vicinity of Mount Rainier in Washington state, had a historic sighting of nine mysterious high-speed objects flying in a rather diagonal echelon formation, moving like a saucer would if skipped across the water. Arnold and Palmer would later both collaborate and in 1952 their book would be published, The Coming of the Saucers.

Noted UFO author John Keel found the majority of alleged ufological conspiracies without any real substance or foundation. Keel wrote me back in 1970, “UFO buffs tend to confuse suspicion (often of paranoiac proportions) with objectivity. Keyhoe and the Lorenzens have led the pack in this.” Keel often found himself at the center of such suspicions. “Since my very first article in TRUE I have followed the same ‘line,’ but the assorted interpretations have been fantastic,” Keel added in another letter. “Anyone who has read my pieces objectively can see the route I have chosen. Yet people are always concluding that I have suddenly switched somewhere along the line…and this has led to the absurd speculations that I have been brainwashed, kidnapped by UFOs, bought off by the CIA, etc.”

“Although numerous newspapermen, editors and scientists strongly advised me to have nothing to do with the UFO buffs I decided to try to introduce professional integrity into the field,” Keel also added. “The result is rather obvious: the buffs have labored to turn me into some sort of controversial mystery man. I had incredible problems with teenaged buffs in particular. But others, who should know better, such as Ralph Rankow and Hynek, have also circulated ridiculous, totally unfounded claptrap about me.”

The Socorro Incident

In correspondence with John Keel back in 1970, he lamented about how the famous Socorro case, which has in recent years come under great suspicion as a hoaxed event, was poorly investigated to begin with and that it is so “incomplete that it is useless.” It was, in fact, this case that Dr. J. Allen Hynek had credited with convincing him that there really and truly was something genuine to the UFO phenomenon. But on January 4, 1970, Keel wrote me: “I have really been swamped with letters, clippings and personal reports of all kinds in recent months. The quantity of the material alone poses tremendous problems and the only feasible way to handle it is through standard statistical methods. Unfortunately, I have no secretary and very little time to devote to filing, preparing index cards, etc. Groups such as NICAP and APRO should have been preparing statistical flap studies all along as a matter of course. But, alas, they have always been bogged down in their causes and have never had personnel trained in the standard scientific methods. As a result, the flap of April 24, 1964 went completely unnoticed while Socorro, NM became the focus of all buff attention. Ironically, no one ever interviewed Lonnie Zamora in-depth and so our record of the Socorro landing is so incomplete that it is useless to an objective researcher.”

For Dr. Hynek the Socorro incident was described as a major turning point. “He began to realize, after fourteen years of total disbelief, that perhaps there really were some funny unidentified things buzzing about our skies,” Keel wrote in one of his published pieces. But later it was found that special tests at the north end of White Sands Missile Range had been done involving a Lunar Surveyor being moved about for doing some tests on the very date of the Socorro sighting! The Lunar Surveyor was an unmanned probe that was developed by the Apollo space program. Blue Book’s Major Hector Quintanilla had suspected that what policeman Lonnie Zamora had sighted in Socorro had been a Lunar Landing Module being tested for the Apollo moon program, but he himself had found no evidence that such a prototype was being operated in that area at the time. More recently, information has surfaced that it might have been mischievous physics students who were responsible for the event. A New Mexico Tech President affirmed back in the 1960s, in a letter to multiple Nobel-Prize recipient Dr. Linus Pauling, that a helium filled balloon had been used by physics students to pull off a grand UFO hoax. Reportedly students of short stature in white lab coats were the “aliens” that Zamora had sighted.

The UFO/Out-of-Body Connection

As Dr. Greg Little had reported in his book Grand Illusions (1994), I had done a statistical survey of 46 people who had described having UFO close encounters and contact experiences and found that some 63 percent of them claimed to have had “out-of-body” experiences. Many prominent ufologists have taken a serious look at how the out-of-body experiences seem to relate to the UFO abduction/contactee syndrome. Noted researchers like Ann Druffel, Raymond Fowler, Phil Imbrogno, and even the noted psychiatrist Dr. Berthold E. Schwarz took a serious look at this matter. In his book Our Haunted Planet (1971), the late John A. Keel even speculated how some UFOs might actually be “astral travelers” cruising through the night skies, visible as a strange luminous orb, often visible especially to certain psychically sensitive people.

Through the years, I have heard some truly incredible accounts. One UFO “abductee,” who describes frequent out-of-body excursions introduced me to a friend who shared how he had “astrally” appeared to her one night. “I felt his presence in my room,” she wrote. “Then his face became clear and he (was) smiling down at me. It was a surprise to see him. I felt his fingers softly touch my face. I responded with a smile, and then he was gone.”

A few parapsychologists have actually studied people under laboratory conditions who claimed to be able to project their astral essence it seemed outside of their physical bodies and in some instances successful results have been reported. Noted Maine psychic Alex Tanous was a star subject of such tests conducted by Karlis Osis and his assistant Donna McCormick at the American Society of Psychical Research in New York City. In their experiments, Tanous would lay down on a bed in a sound-reduced room and try to project himself into another room where he would stand in front of an optical viewing device. There he would see randomly selected visual targets. Near this device something called a strain-gauge sensor was installed, and its purpose was to detect the slightest vibration or movement of anything physical in the vicinity. “In a series of 197 trials over twenty sessions, he succeeded 114 times,” Michael Gross, Ph.D., wrote in his book Experiencing the Next World Now. “What was important was that when Tanous correctly guessed the targets the strain gauges acted up, proving some kind of physical presence. Osis concluded that this correlation supported the hypothesis of a localized out-of-body entity, and claims to have caught Tanous’s living ghost, so to speak, in a net of objective measurements.”

In the Classic Mysteries feature of this issue, read the testimony of a witness who claimed that Tanous had bilocated to his home up in Canada! Various other techniques have been used by paranormal researchers to substantiate the fact that some kind of “subtle” body or some sort of intelligent energy can be directed outside of ones self and somehow interact with the outside physical world.

John Keel, best known for his anti-ET views and his theories of UFO intelligences originating from a parallel world, entities he nicknamed “ultraterrestrials,” departed from his usual theme of earth-based UFO phenomena in a 1976 article in SAGA magazine involving the possibility of time travel and instantaneous astral travel, when he wrote: “If some humans have a capacity for this kind of time travel, then it is quite possible that intelligent beings on some distant star system may have the same ability to a very advanced degree. …if the cosmic time travelers are projecting only their consciousness to our planet they would arrive as shapeless energy forms. They could assume any form when perceived by the limited human senses. …they would not need spaceships and other sophisticated technological devices.”


Thursday, March 28, 2024