Two Tales from the Dark Side

Gary S. Bekkum

January 16, 2008

Phenomenology paints a broad swath across human experience. Hidden within the phenomenal world is an amazing secret; one so obvious that it should have been as apparent as the nose on our collective faces many years ago, had it not been for the shortsightedness of cultural myopia in the Western world.

More on that in a moment.

Recently I have been reading two books with different views of the "phenomenological problem" which remains hidden within the compartments of officialdom here in the United States, or so we have been told.

One makes outrageous claims about "nuts and bolts" visitation from other worlds; the other digs deep into the problem of human perception and touches directly on the phenomenal currency of the human mind.

The first book, "Exempt from Disclosure," tells the tale of "The Disturbing Case About the UFO Cover-up" -- the second, "Surfing the Psychic Internet," examines a personal account of "psychic exploring, dimensional life forms, and our secret part in the universe."

In the heavily revised second edition of his book, author Robert M. Collins presents a case for U.S. government concealment of extraterrestrial visitation on the part of the United States Air Force. Rumors abound, speculation prevails, but thanks in part to a wealth of detail the book succeeds in spite of the lack of narrative direction and
organization.

I first heard about USAF involvement "with the aliens" in the early 1980s from "Sarge," an acquaintance who had recently left the Air Force

According to Collins, "In 1985 Bill Moore (author of 'Roswell' book), Jaime Shandera (Hollywood TV producer), Ernie Kellerstrass (retired Air Force Lt. Col. with an intelligence background), Rick Doty (USAF Counter-Intelligence), plus others and myself were brought together as a group attempting to uncover the truth."

Later Collins explains, "I ran into the subject of UFOs while working as an FTD analyst in the areas of Theoretical and Applied Physics at the Foreign Technology Division (FTD), Wright-Patterson AFB, OH in the summer of 1985."

Speaking of the Foreign Technology Division, there is an interesting connection between FTD and the subject of Daz Smith's book, "Surfing the Psychic Internet," in the incarnation of Dale Graff, a USAF physicist from FTD, who played a role in the United States Government's STAR GATE programs.

STAR GATE is the generic name for a group of programs that ran from the mid-1970s until 1995 at various agencies. The goal of STAR GATE was to develop operational psychic capabilities for intelligence collection by America's Intelligence Community.

The actual role of the USAF FTD in the psychic work remains a bit of a mystery. Perhaps there is more to be learned from the 50,000 or so pages of STAR GATE that are still classified.

Curiously, some STAR GATE files describe psychic encounters "extraterrestrial beings" by military personnel trained in the art of psychic vision known as "remote viewing." More recently we heard a rumor passed to us by investigative author Gus Russo that the NSA had resurrected a deep black super-secret psychic program that had also run into problems with "an unknown extraterrestrial presence."

Robert Collins also tells of strange phone calls from metallic sounding voices similar to the supernatural phone calls portrayed in the film "The Mothman Prophecies."

For those of you more inclined to define your mystical human experiences in the cloak of religious imagery, we suspect the "unknown extraterrestrial presence" bears no small resemblance to the dark forces of Christian fiction author Terry James' fictionalized encounters of government persons and demonic beings.

Daz Smith's book is described as "a mystical exploration into the hidden dimensions that surround us ... Throughout these travels we communicate with and meet Alien Beings, Spiritual Masters, and a dark presence that stalks the traveler waiting for a time to strike."

Caveat emptor!

Unlike Rober Collins' book, which lacks a cohesive narrative, Daz Smith tells his tale of personal encounters with the unknown in a tightly written dramatic first-hand style that brings the reader face to face with the unknown, at times reminiscent of Carlos Castaneda's description of the terrors that await the initiate.

In one particularly dramatic moment, Smith writes, "The dark form had spread all around me and I felt trapped as it kept expanding and circled around and around, with its menacing whispering tentacles of dreadful noise. The wolf just sat there staring at me almost oblivious to the foreboding dark form. I didn't see it at first, but after a while it dawned on me, this wasn't a natural response from a wolf or any living form, if I could feel the crushing sense of dark evil that encircled us then a true creature certainly would."

Smith writes of an impending battle, "not a physical battle but a spiritual battle, a battle for the soul of man."

It is curious that Daz Smith's occult explorations reflect Terry James' Christian point of view:

"So, believing God´s Word as absolute Truth, I have to believe they [the dark spiritual forces] are presently intertwining themselves with government and science in clandestine, dark project areas. How aware governmental officials –in the black, covert regions, or other—are in these things, I wouldn´t conjecture. But, someone, somewhere, has to know something is beyond what we consider normal."

And that leads us back to the secret mentioned previously.

Information theory says that "there is no information without physical representation." The implication is that any experience of perception, including the imaginative variety, must have a basis in a structure that is no less real than any other experience of the world.

As 'phenomenologists' we are interested in understanding the unexplained and unexplainable varieties of human experience. A short list includes the 'nuts and bolts' materialists searching for everything from UFOs as alien spacecraft and sightings of Bigfoot, to spiritualists seeking close encounters with subjective realities.

These subjective worlds appear to imitate the collective experience of the "real world" -- the world we share with each other in our communications about the nature of personal experience. As our understanding of the nature of reality has increased, we realized that human senses are limited in their perception of the world around us. The modern western reality is built around an extended perception of the world provided by technology.

Of course science seeks to set that extended reality on a firm foundation of prediction and explanation and largely succeeds in doing so.

Recently there have been reasoned arguments for the possibility that human experience is one aspect of a massive "simulation." Unlike the fictional films of "The Matrix" the simulated universe would be self-contained within physicist Stephen Hawking's concept of "The Mind of God" that determines the laws which rule our realities.

Among those realities one encounters levels and hierarchies of the imaginable and the physical, each playing a physical role in the great machination of creation.

Are we alone in this universe of countless stars and alternative worlds? Robert Collins and Daz Smith offer alternative visions of mankind's role in the vastness that surround us.