• AP Magazine

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

  • 1
Alternate Perceptions Magazine, June 2017


An Interview with Tim Beckley

by: Brent Raynes


John Keel & Tim Beckley




TIM BECKLEY REPORTS ON THE MATRIX AND THE
STRANGE UNIVERSE OF PHILIP K. DICK

Exclusive Interview with Brent Raynes Brent Raynes: Philip K. Dick was a popular, acclaimed novelist. He was the author of such popular Sci Fi books as A Scanner Darkly, VALIS, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In addition popular movies, such as Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Minority Report were based on his works. However, this well-known writer was also unique and noteworthy for other deeper and more profound reasons besides fiction, for which your book The Matrix Control System of Philip K. Dick and the Paranormal Synchronicities of Timothy Green Beckley was written.

As the books primary author, can you explain a little for us about the Philip K. Dick you're most interested in?

Tim Beckley: I don’t see why not. Since I can remember I have had an untold number of very weird, most strange, paranormal synchronicities in my life that don’t make a hell of a lot of sense. And I’m not talking about thinking of someone and they call the next day on the phone, or looking up at the clock which says 11:11, a favorite of those who are familiar with the subject we are bridging. Its a lot more complex than just a few random numbers or about da ja vue or dreaming of some forthcoming event. Philip K Dick was the first, as far as I know, to utilize the term Matrix as far back as the Nineteen Seventies, long before the block buster movie with that name was made. I’m not sure, how PKD would describe this parallel universe created by some outside intelligence, but I picture us living inside a bubble. Sort of like what we are referring to when we talk about the holes at the poles which supposedly are entrance ways to the core of the planet. There is some way in and some way out. But it’s not easy finding the entrance/exit. I am pretty sure that Philip K. Dick was the first to raise the specter of our world existing in a computerized simulation. The internet as we know it didn’t come into “existence” until 1983, though computers had been around for a while. Yet it was in 1977 that PKD took the podium at a high profile science fiction convention in Metz, France, and revealed his thoughts on a subject that so weighed upon his thinking that he had to get up in front of a room full of his contemporaries and announce to the world that what seems real may not be real at all.

Yup, according to Philip, we may all be living inside of a “fishbowl,” though that is just my awkward phraseology, not knowing what shape and design we may well be – or not be – talking about. Or are perhaps held prisoner in. Below you will find a transcript of Dick’s summation of his avant-garde theory:

“The subject of this speech is a topic which has been discovered recently and which may not exist at all. I may be talking about something that does not exist, therefore I am free to say everything or nothing. I in my stories and novels write about counterfeit worlds – some are real worlds as well as deranged private worlds inhabited often by just one person. While, meantime, the other characters either remain in their own worlds throughout or are somehow drawn into one of the peculiar ones. This theme occurs in the course of my 27 years of writing. At no time did I have a theoretical or conscious explanation for my preoccupation with these plural form pseudo-worlds. But now I think I understand that what I was sensing was a manifold of partially or actualized reality tangent to whatever is the most actualized one. The one the majority of us by conscious gentium agree on. Later that day, at home again, but still deeply under the influence of sodium pentothal, I had a short acute flash of recovered memory. Than in mid-March – a month later – the total body of memories intact, an entire memory, began to return. You are free to believe me or disbelieve, but please take my word on it. I am not joking. This is very serious. A matter of importance. At that time I had no idea of what I was seeing. It resembled nothing I had heard described. It resembled plasmic energy. It had colors. It moved fast. It collected and then dispersed. But what it was I am not sure even now. In other words, it’s a common theme in my writing that a dark-haired girl shows up at the door of the protagonist and tells him that his world is delusional. That there is something false about it.

“Well, this did finally happen to me. I even knew that her hair would be black. I had an actual complete sense of what she would look like and what she would say. She did appear. She was a total stranger and she did inform me of this fact. That some of my fictional works were in a little sense true.

“I wrote about these dreams in novel after novel, story after story. To name two in which this presents appeared most clearly, I cite ‘The Man In The High Castle’ and my 1974 novel about the U.S. as a police state. I am going to be very candid with you: I wrote both novels based on fragmentary residual memories of just such a horrid slave state world. “People claim to remember past lives. I claim to remember a very different present life. I know of no one who has ever made this claim before, but I rather suspect that my experience is not unique, but perhaps as unique to the fact that I am willing to talk about it. “We are living in a computer programmed reality. And the only clue we have to it is when some verbal cue is changed and some alteration in our reality occurs. We would have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present Deja vu perhaps in the same way, seeing the same thing, hearing the same words. I submit that these impressions are valid and significant and I will even say this – such an impression is a clue that at some past time point a verbal cue was changed – reprogrammed as it were – and because of this an alternative world branched off.”

This concept of an outside force toying with us and influencing our lives is a concept that intrigues me no end. Some folks see this supernatural “interference” in terms of God, but if this is the case we need to update our thinking of the Creator to a more technologically minded one. You can find examples of such radical thinking in the works of John A Keel.

John Keel was a good friend of mine. We both resided in Manhattan’s Murray Hill district. Ate at the same deli. Even went to see a couple of movies together. JAK didn’t drink so we would part company for our individual evening’s entertainment. I was on the board of directors of the New York Fortean Society, which he founded in the 1970s. In fact, the meetings were held just a few doors down in a building that was torn down ages ago and is now a vacant lot. Keel didn’t like to be called a UFOlogist. He was admittedly picky about who he hung with, not wanting to tarnish his reputation. He thought the ET hypothesis was meritless. He was among the first to lump together all manner of weirdness, including UFOs, cryptid creatures (i.e., even Bigfoot), ghosts – all of which pretty much can be labeled as what we today call “Fortean Phenomena.” That all-inclusive term is named after Charles Fort (1874– 1932) who for all intents and purposes started the discussion when he said humans were but pieces on a cosmic chessboard and were being controlled by some outside influence. Keel didn’t identify with the term “Matrix” cause it was still early on. But he did believe there was what he called a “Superspectrum” in existence all around us and that openings (he called them “window areas”) allowed a wide variety of otherworldly denizens to hop back and forth before taking the midnight train back to Magonia.

On the back cover of his book, “The Eighth Tower,” we learn that: “There is a single intelligent force behind all religious, occult, and UFO phenomena. Strange manifestations have haunted humans since prehistoric times. Beams of light, voices from the heavens, the ‘little people,’ gods and devils, ghosts and monsters, and UFOs have all had a prominent place in our history and legends. In this dark work, John Keel explores these phenomena, and in doing so reveals the shocking truth about our present position and future destiny in the cosmic scheme of things. Are we pawns in a celestial game? “In the Orient, there is a story told of the seven towers. These citadels, well hidden from mankind, are occupied by groups of Satanists who are chanting the world to ruin. Perhaps this is just a story; perhaps there is some truth behind it. But what if there is yet another tower, a tower not of good or evil but of infinite power? What if all our destinies are controlled by this cosmic force for its own mysterious purposes? And what if UFOs and other paranormal manifestations are merely tools being used to manipulate us and guide us toward the cosmic role we are fated to play? Perhaps, after all, we are not independent beings but are instead the creations and slaves of the eighth tower.”

Utilizing Keel’s own words, we start to get a better picture of what he is trying to convey to us: “This is a hypothetical spectrum of energies that are known to exist but that cannot be accurately measured with present-day instruments. It is a shadowy world of energies that produce well-observed effects, particularly on biological organisms (namely people). “This superspectrum is the source of all paranormal manifestations, from extrasensory perception (ESP) to flying saucers, little green men and tall, hairy monsters.” Others who have broached the UFO topic with similar views would include, of course, Dr Jacques Vallee, Paul Eno and probably yourself to a large degree.

Brent Raynes: Brad Steiger is a well known name to all of us and he has written about PKD in your book. Can you explain the connection between Brad and Philip?

Tim Beckley: I didn’t realize this when I started to put the book together, but Brother Brad as I call him cause to me he is like family, and PKD were engaged in regular correspondence. Most Sci Fi writers shun UFOs and the paranormal, they think such topics are beneath them. But PKD’s writings, though they are presented as novels, are full of cleverly disguised descriptions of a vast parallel universe most of us know little – or nothing – about. The vessels we call UFOs are part and parcel of this multi dimensional existence. Brad says PDK quizzed him at length about the notion that he might be what is termed a “Star Person,” someone who carries with them the intelligence of other, or many other, worlds.

I quote Brad: “Dick (told me) he was shown a vision of himself in a disabled spacecraft heading toward Earth in prehistoric times. He was one of the emigrants of a technologically sophisticated civilization that was undergoing vast convulsions. But the survivors of that extraterrestrial civilization feared that, once contact was lost with the home planet, they might lose continuity in terms of the handing down of their culture from generation to generation. The solution was “phylogenic memory.” Dick was shown a vision of himself in a disabled spacecraft heading toward Earth in prehistoric times. He was one of the emigrants of a technologically sophisticated civilization that was undergoing vast convulsions. But the survivors of that extraterrestrial civilization feared that, once contact was lost with the home planet, they might lose continuity in terms of the handing down of their culture from generation to generation. The solution was “phylogenic memory.”

Brad says that PKD explained phylogenic memory as complex DNA information packets distributed in dormant form: “These dominant DNA information packets would be disinhibited – induced to fire – in due time, depending on either synchronized inner biological clocks or pure chance stimuli. Or a combination of both, ideally. Thus, even thousands of years later, the primordial civilization will be ‘released’ in the minds of the astonished descendants who suppose themselves autochthones [aboriginal inhabitants] of the planet they now inhabit. “The DNA packets in a given individual will tell him: 1) Where he is from; 2) What made up that original civilization, his civilization; 3) His true nature and faculties; 4) What he must do. “Ideally, he will act out a series of responses based on the packet, the purpose of which is to create on his planet, insofar as it is possible, the civilization which his ancestors maintained. “I evaluate the current widespread firing of these phylogenic memory packets in those you call the Star People as a matter of supreme importance. “In February, 1974, my own DNA memory packet was disinhibited, either by an inner biological clock, which synchronized it with disinhibitions other people, or by accident. It fired for one complete year.”

Dick utilized a jargon all his own both in his now classic Sci Fi works and in his raps with others. This is not unusual in the world of novelists who are always busy creating a parallel reality of an existence all their own.

Brent Raynes: Synchronicities have become a very familiar part of your life journey. Can you share one good example that would be amongst the strangest episodes that have happened to you in this regard to illustrate how such events are not just pure coincidence? Tim Beckley: For a long time Tucson has been pretty much my “second home.” On a regular, usually an annual basis, I get together with my UFO chums Charla Gene, Christine Franz Dickey, Ed Biebel and Allan Benz, who is a real ”ole timer” on the scene, having been involved in UFOlogy for a respectable number of decades. Currently, Allan is the director of the World UFO Group and the U.S. organizer of World UFO Day, which celebrates the birth of the modern UFO era which began with Kenneth Arnold’s sighing of nine crescent-shaped “wings” over Mount Rainier on June 24, 1947. A couple of times I have participated in meetings held by Allan for Tucson’s “inner circle” of UFO devotees.

What has always intrigued me about Allan is his background as Librarian for the now longdefunct international organization – the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization. APRO (best known as) was at its zenith the second most popular UFO group in the world, next to the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP). Unlike the Capitol Hill-based NICAP, APRO was less “official,” had no political affiliations, and was more interested in who flew the saucers than whether the government was trying to hide the truth about UFOs from the American public. They had no CIA operatives on their board of directors, but instead pulled in correspondence from a global team of researchers who studied landing cases and reports of close encounters with humanoid beings gathered from Italy, France, Sweden, and even Russia, which in those days was a real effort since the “Reds” had a very closed society, especially when it came to discussing UFOs and space beings. The state run Soviet press ridiculed the subject, if they mentioned it at all, going out of their way to identify the unidentified as purely a Capitalist phenomenon contrived as a way of taking people’s minds off of troubling social issues taking place in American society. APRO was run efficiently by the husband and wife team of Jim and Coral Lorenzen, who also edited a nicely done, very professional (for that period at least) newsletter, the APRO Bulletin.

Allan Benz was voted in as official Librarian (he held a degree in that profession) and as such his job was to catalog and file the hundreds of translations of reports streaming in from all over the world so that they could be pulled up quickly in an era when Kindle tablets, iPhones and lap tops still were quite a ways off. I sat spellbound as Allan told me about how he was handed the opportunity of a life time. APRO had received a phone call from Paramount Pictures, who were in the early stages of development on a film that turned out to be a massive box office sensation. “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” was the brainchild of Stephen Spielberg, then a young upstart film maker who had experienced a UFO sighting in his teens, had read lots of books on the subject, and was so intrigued by the phenomenon that he wanted to produce a serious movie that would portray a UFO encounter as accurately as possible, based upon the “real life” exploits of someone who had been “touched” by the hands of an off-world intelligence.

Jim and Coral of APRO made Allan their “go-between” with the Hollywood studio. He plied them with all sorts of pertinent data that would make the film as realistic as possible, given that “the suits,” as we call the corporate big wigs, would ultimately call the shots. He dug deep into APRO’s files to share with Spielberg’s production team the top cases involving the electromagnetic effects of UFOs on appliances, motor vehicles and the blackouts of entire towns along our national, interconnected, electric grid systems. There were also commercial pilot sightings and face-to-face meetings with the Ultraterrestrials, enough material to hook Paramount and ultimately Spielberg up with so that they could head in the “right direction” with their plans for a movie that would ultimately gross worldwide $337 million, ranking it in the top ten films of all time. You would have thought that maybe APRO or Allan would have been graced with an honorarium from those they had humbly served without concern for the long hours put into the task of putting together a dossier of great value and importance. Well, no. Actually, Allan, if I recall, does have a “thank you” letter from Paramount Studios for his considerable efforts. And as it turns out, through some weird set of circumstances (here we go again), Paramount ended up handing over the project to Columbia, who eventually released the film domestically in a little over 600 theaters, which is considered a very small debut for any theatrical product. That usually indicates that the distributor is leery that the the film will not do very well and is hedging their bet on the presumption that the film may be a bomb.

It was an interesting conversation I had with Allan over the course of a hot and dry Tucson afternoon. I did have some minor involvement with “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” myself, in that I was an editor on the staff of the film’s official poster and magazine special, the latter of which was a real glossy publication printed on high quality paper suitable for collectors. My job was to stress how the various scenes in the movie were comparable with events that had taken place in “real life.” Sure, it was science fiction, but it was based on actual events that had transpired for someone, somewhere. And, indeed, there was a liberal dose of special effects movie magic tossed in that brought about an almost spiritual experience in viewers who were seeking to confirm the reality of a phenomenon they might have had to come to grips with themselves at one time or another.

After a long and extensive interview with Mr Benz which covered primarily his involvement with Close Encounters, I packed my suitcase and headed down the road to Sedona, AZ with my associate Charla Gene who has a long time interest in UFOs and acts as my personal photographer when I am in the area. Beside being an artist colony and a place to buy Native American jewelry, Sedona is known as a hub of paranormal and spiritual activity. Those who reside in and around Sedona who are of a metaphysical or New Age persuasion seem willing to share with those who come here to meditate with crystals and dream catchers and hunt for UFOs how the town rests on several portals or gateways where all manner of odd events frequently occur. We’re talking about entrances to an underground UFO base, a canyon where a flying saucer is said to have crashed, orange orbs that haunt a ranch once privately owned and which is now fenced off government land. Not to mention a “blue man” who has appeared in photographs. Even though no one can see this presumed ultra-terrestrial, his presence is hard to deny as he stands next to witnesses at a night time UFO skywatch and can be captured digitally or on film. If you want more information on Sedona in general, this case in particular, go to our YouTube Channel, “Mr UFOs Secret Files” and do a search for Tom Dongo. There is a 90 minute video perched at this site that is most intriguing.

When we got to Sedona, Charla and I wandered into the Coffee Pot a place where you can get a great cup of java and select from 103 kinds of omelets. Its right near one of Sedona’s vortex, which are known as a sort of portal areas to the unknown. After chitchatting over a glass of wine and some Eggs Benedict (with coffee to go naturally), we wandered out into the parking lot. I’m not sure who noticed the car parked right next to our vehicle, but it was sticking out a bit more than it should from its parking space. We couldn’t believe our eyes. We had to get closer to the car to make sure we weren’t hallucinating in the noonday sun. But we have photographs to prove that the license plate on the car parked next to us said, in big bold license plate letters: APRO. There is no APRO! The group hasn’t existed for over twenty years. So how could there be a license plate on the vehicle parked two feet away that has these four giant capitalized letters like it was a vanity plate smacking us in the face? And even if someone was, say, an old member of the group and still identified with it, why would their car be parked next to ours in the town of Sedona, or anywhere else for that matter? It’s more likely you would win the lottery. It’s not by “pure chance.” It has to be a planned “secret operation.”

It don’t add up, my friend. It’s just downright spooky, and there is no “rational explanation” that will suffice. So don’t accept any of Carl Jung’s theories about dreams and deja vu, it has nothing to do with synchronicities based on these assumptions. Someone is screwing with our heads. Hey, but I’m not paranoid enough to let it trouble me. It just fuels my appetite to learn more about the “chess playing” masterminds from “outside the box” who are attempting to signal to us to get our attention. But I would still like to know why? Maybe Philip K. Dick knew!


NOTE: “The Matrix Control System of Philip K Dick and the Paranormal Synchronicities of Timothy Green Beckley can be ordered from Amazon.com ( https://www.amazon.com/Matrix-Control-System-Paranormal-Synchronicities/dp/160611977X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1495555630&sr=1-2&keywords=philip+k+dick+matrix ) or if you wish to pay via PayPal send an e mail to Tim at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and request a PP invoice. A free subscription to his printed publication will be included and the book will be discounted by 10% if you mention this publication.


Friday, March 29, 2024