by D. W. Pasulka

MATTER, INFORMATION, ENERGY . . . CONTACT

All family members present were willing to discuss what happened with me, all acknowledged hearing an external voice urging them to look at the UFO, and all of them felt in some way profoundly affected by their UFO encounter. This is one example from dozens of cases, which I have personally investigated in the Canadian province of Ontario, that demonstrates to a certain degree of what is known in UFO studies as “high strangeness.” ~ Susan Demeter-St. Clair

“While driving home from my parents’ home I spoke to God for the first time. I looked up at the stars and said to both God and the Entities with which I was interacting, ‘I congratulate you—you have managed to completely transform a total atheist into someone who now believes in God, the spirit world, and life after death, more than any Catholic priest in Miami.’” Thus spoke Rey Hernandez, while driving in his car one day. What had happened to Rey?

A UFO sighting or event often has the effect of completely changing the direction of one’s life, much like a religious conversion experience. This was the case with Rey, a lawyer and self-described rationalist and atheist. After a series of sightings and related paranormal experiences, Rey, together with Apollo astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Harvard astrophysicist Dr. Rudy Schild, and Australian researcher Mary Rodwell, cofounded the Dr. Edgar Mitchell Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial Encounters or FREE. It is the first global, multilingual study of people who claim to have had UFO-related contact with nonhuman intelligence and related paranormal experiences. Rey reminded me that, when I refer to his work, I should mention that he is just one of many qualified researchers “who have put in hundreds, even thousands of hours” in support of the organization.

As Jacques Vallee discovered, there are two types of UFO reports. There are those that are reported to “authorities” and those that are revealed to sympathetic listeners (who are sometimes also authorities). The fear of ridicule keeps many UFO testimonies subterranean, submerged within subcultures that nevertheless grow each year. The following explores the experience of Rey Hernandez and his wife, Dulce, and documents the unexpected twists and turns it took once he publicized it.

The Hernandezes’ experiences are instructive for several reasons. First, each saw something extraordinary, yet they interpreted it differently. Dulce is a devout Catholic and interpreted her experience as divine and within the framework of Catholic theology. Rey, who was an atheist prior to his experience, is still interpreting it. In his work Rey delves into the testimonies of UFO contact. In its secular form, testimony is a form of evidence. To give testimony in a court of law is to provide information that is supposed to be true and to correspond to real-life matters. If one provides false testimony, it is called perjury. Within the history of religions, testimony is also a type of evidence. Many religious traditions are built upon the testimonies of believers. Believers report extraordinary things and events, such as miracles or sightings of supernatural beings. This testimony is often accompanied by information about the credentials of those who testify. In both religious cultures and UFO cultures, the “credible witness” is an important feature that helps lend credibility, if not to the actual reality of extraordinary claims, at least to the fact that credible people experience extraordinary events.

Many of the scientist-believers I  interviewed think that the phenomenon functions like a technology, and that the human is a receiver and transmitter of information. Rey and his cadre of colleagues—twelve retired physicists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and scientists—employ various methods, including quantum physics, to explain the relationship between consciousness and contact with nonhuman intelligence. For them, this interaction defies a dualist construction of spirit and matter and bridges the rift between two camps of researchers in ufology: the “nuts and bolts” materialists and the subjectivists, those who focus on the testimonies of experiencers. According to Rey, the scientists associated with FREE are working on theories that will provide an explanation of how these experiences are both physical and subjective: “This new holographic theory challenges us to deconstruct the artificial wall of separation erected between events that occur only in consciousness, and those that can manifest on a physical scale.” The key is in the code, and Edgar explains how this is so.

THE SERIES OF EVENTS THAT CHANGED REY

It was very early on a Sunday morning in March of 2012. Rey and Dulce’s beloved Niña, a Jack Russell terrier who had been a member of their family for sixteen years, had become paralyzed the night before. Rey had contacted a veterinarian friend, who said that Niña had most probably suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. The friend offered to open his office the following day, Sunday, to euthanize Niña. Deeply saddened, Dulce turned to her faith. She prayed to God that he would send his angels to cure Niña. That morning, her prayers were answered, in a way that would shatter Rey’s atheism and confirm Dulce’s faith.

Rey, in an interview, relates the first of a series of extraordinary experiences, and figure 6.1 is a depiction of what Rey saw. Rey’s wife saw something like figure 6.2.

My wife woke up and [checked on] the dog to see if she had regained her mobility. Our pet was not able to move at all except just from the neck up. My wife then carried her down the stairs, and when she got down there she saw an object that was floating four feet off the ground, one foot [away from] the wall, and it was metallic in shape—approximately like an upside down-U. . . . It had these two ring lights in the center. My wife, being the good hardcore Catholic from Mexico that she is, she knelt down and started praying . . . basically [saying,] “If you’re a bad spirit, leave. But if you are a good spirit or an angel or the Virgin Mary [stay].” Mexicans always see the Virgin Mary everywhere [Rey laughs]. And she said, “Please stay and don’t let my dog suffer. My poor Niña.” Niña is her name, which means “little girl” in Spanish.

Then all of a sudden these green lights started blinking and started flashing on her—like scanning her. At that point she freaked out and she started yelling for me. She started screaming my name. It was six in the morning, and I thought she had seen a cockroach or a little mouse on the floor [Rey laughs]. I  just totally ignored her. After 10 or 15 minutes of screaming for me to come downstairs, she went upstairs and literally hauled me out of bed. When I got downstairs, what I saw was not the object that she had seen. . . . What I  saw was, I  guess could be described as a plasma-object. This was not just an object; I call it a plasma-being, a light being, because it did control my mind. It was . . . approximately two-to-three-feet in width, one and a half to two feet in height, cylindrical in shape, but it didn’t have any external outer edges because it was pure energy plasma. Multicolored, translucent, and when I looked at it I did not have any peripheral vision . . . just straight ahead at that object. I could not see to my right or to the left or up and down. . . . I was just focused only on that object. What I did was quite irrational—I  stared at it, I waved my hand at it, and then I  said, “Ah B.S.”  .  .  .  Then I  turned around, I walked upstairs, I went to my bed, I folded my hands on my belly, and I looked straight up at the ceiling. So for 15 minutes I was in this hypnotic state with nothing entering my brain/my consciousness. After 15 minutes, it was [as] if the hypnotist said, “OK Kid, wake up, we’re finished with your wife and your pet.” And all of a sudden I woke up and I said, “Oh my god, what in the world just happened?” I ran downstairs and there was my wife jumping up and down, saying “Hallelujah! Hallelujah! The angels cured her! The angels cured her!” She was running around the living room dancing, and the dog was running up and down with the energy of a little puppy. Right there my whole worldview was totally shattered [Rey laughs]. That was the first event.

Dulce said that she had not seen what Rey reported seeing. He insisted that he had been asleep for forty-five minutes after he left the living room. He pointed at the clock to demonstrate that forty-five minutes had indeed elapsed. Dulce insisted that she never left the living room and that Rey had never gone back upstairs. According to her, she had walked downstairs with Rey behind, looked down, saw Niña running around, and then started to celebrate. Then she saw Rey. Their recollections of the event were completely different. Later, Rey would incorporate the idea that “missing time” must have been a factor in the event, and that the nonhuman beings had taken his wife and dog, healed them, and then returned them.

My wife does not want to speak much about the incident and acts like nothing of consequence happened—to her this entity was merely an Angel that had answered her prayers. Maybe she is correct. Our living room corner wall is on the northwestern corner of our house. At 6 am that corner is dark because light does not enter that corner. We have closed drapes on the western window as well and that part was dark because the sun was just rising on the southeastern side. We also have a wall dividing the windows from the sun rising in the east from this western corner. We know what we saw was not an optical illusion.

This event shattered Rey’s view of reality. At the time, he said, he was a “pure rationalist”:

I went to Catholic mass but just to comfort my wife. I had never read any UFO, ancient alien, paranormal or “new age” books. I believed that all the new age “metaphysics” literature was pure BS from ex-hippies even though I considered myself an ex-hippie while living in Berkeley, CA, from 1981 to 1988 while attending a PhD Program in City and Regional Planning. I was a total skeptic. I was a pure rationalist and any “metaphysic” or UFO related themes were pure BS. On that day, my world view came crashing down.

After this experience, Rey did what most experiencers do: he sought out materials to help him understand what had happened to him. He had never had any type of paranormal experience and certainly never encountered an “energy plasma being.” He wasn’t Catholic like his wife, so he wasn’t sure it was an angel, although he wasn’t ruling out that possibility either. He thought that he could find answers in the UFO and paranormal literature. Perhaps what they had encountered was some type of nonhuman intelligence. He looked for answers on the internet and ordered “tons” of books about the topic. His intensive “book encounter” was interrupted, however, by more strange and anomalous events.

THE NEXT EVENT

The next event occurred in May of 2012, when Dulce reportedly saw a huge, blimp-sized UFO outside their house with “stained glass windows just like our church” all around the craft. When Dulce later visited Mexico, she claimed to have had a series of additional UFO sightings, some with her family, and saw three eight-foot-tall human-looking beings dressed in white monks’ robes floating in front of her.

Rey had his own sightings. The next event provided Rey with more information about the phenomenon and further changed his life and its direction. It was also witnessed by his daughter, he said, and three of his friends. By this time, his wife was having regular sightings of giant UFOs. For her, these were angels and evidence of sacred contacts. She did not tell Rey about these encounters at the time, because she was becoming concerned about his increasingly obsessive interest in UFOs and literature about them.

On August 25, 2012, a few months after the appearance of the “plasma energy being,” a friend of the family came by for help with some traffic tickets. Rey decided to wait for him outside. It was around 9:30 p.m. The sky was dark and cloudy and completely devoid of stars. Rey had been learning about UFOs and knew that some people attempt to “call them down.” Rey thought, I am going to try this, so he did. Fifteen minutes went by and there were no results. Rey thought to himself, I am freaking losing it; I am going nuts, and he stopped. Just at that moment, he saw an enormous object over his neighbor’s roof and backyard.

Rey describes the object as huge, approximately two to three city blocks in length. It was hovering about five feet above his neighbor’s house. He saw hundreds of swirling white lights all around it. Then he heard the voice of his daughter, even though she was not present. The voice said, “Daddy, next time you see a UFO please let me know. You and mommy have seen a UFO and I want to see one too.” After this, Rey called for his daughter, who was in the house. His daughter, who had just turned ten years old, ran out to see the object, and stared in amazement.

Rey and his daughter gazed at the object for about fifteen minutes, he said, and then his friend drove up with his wife and seventeen-year-old daughter. These people are conservative Catholics and college educated. Like Rey’s wife, they attend Sunday Mass and are involved in many different ministries. They weren’t interested in anything that had to do with the paranormal, or with UFOs. When they arrived on the scene, Ray says, they were flabbergasted.

“What is that?” his friend asked, alarmed.

According to Rey, they asked repeatedly, “Please tell us what that is.”

Finally Rey spoke to them in Spanish: “You know perfectly well what that is.”

His friends spent a few minutes discussing what it could be. They thought perhaps it could be strange atmospheric conditions, lights from the cars on the street, or lightning. Rey was not going to tell them that he “called down” this craft. He knew his limits, apparently.

As the speculations of his friends became more elaborate, he decided to try to communicate with the beings, mentally. He told them, “You better come up with something better than this because they don’t believe you.” Instantaneously, he said, the light patterns of the craft changed.

The craft burst into a spectacular display of hundreds of stars, ten times the size of Venus, that flickered on and off.

Like Carl Jung’s friend who reported witnessing, with many others, a UFO in South America and never thought to take a picture of it, the same happened with Rey. He comments on this incomprehensible aspect of the experience:

After about fifteen minutes of watching this light show of stars bursting all over the place inside the craft, my friends said they had things to take care of and they drove off. Looking back at it I did not even question them leaving. Here they were in the middle of an “event of a lifetime” and in the middle of this they decided to leave and I did not even question this. This was not rational.

It was the odd reactions of the other experiencers that most struck Rey as unbelievable:

During our UFO contact encounter, I was fully cognizant and “awake” for almost everything except the realization that we were actually looking and interacting with a UFO craft and its beings. We all had cell phones and yet no one even bothered to take a picture, especially the teenager who always has a cell phone glued to her hands. I also did not notify my neighbor to inform them what was above their house. They were aware of us looking at them because they had turned the light on in their living room and they saw us staring at their house. I also did not run inside to get my video camera or tell my wife. After my daughter told me that there were no mosquitoes outside, I “woke up” and realized that I was under some type of “mind control.” I could not understand why I had walked away from a scenario that should have been the front page story of Time magazine and every media outlet around the world if I had captured it on video. I quickly got my camera and camcorder and ran outside with both but the huge UFO craft was gone.

Here again is the problem Jung noted long ago. Some UFOs are not photogenic.

Determined not to let such an event go unrecorded again, Rey took the route taken by Alison Kruse. He purchased high-end photographic equipment so he could prove what he had seen:

I had purchased a large telescope, a night vision CCTV camera with adapters to attach this camera to the telescope, an old used SONY camcorder with the old night vision technology and a digital camera with high-powered zoom for night shots. I said to myself, “The next time my wife or I see these objects we will be prepared to capture them on video and on camera so no one will doubt us.” We know what we saw and they were real. “Next time we are going to prove it.”

None of this helped one bit. The phenomenon resisted being photographed by Rey. Yet, it made a lasting impression on him. He has turned inward to assess what it means to be human, a human who lives within an immense universe, and who has a relationship with something like God.

REY’S “DIRECTED” BOOK ENCOUNTER AND THE ENSUING SYNCHRONICITIES

The day after his close contact experience with the huge UFO craft, Rey saw a YouTube video on near-death experiences that discussed the quantum physics of consciousness. He immediately stopped searching the internet and purchasing books about UFOs. Instead, he began to order books on near-death experiences (NDEs) and consciousness studies. Over the next four months he devoured more than two hundred such books, sometimes reading for eighteen hours per day. He was obsessed. He neglected his job and his family, and did not go outside or watch television or use the internet. Instead, until December 21, 2012, he spent all of his time reading.

Dulce became concerned. She doesn’t use the internet, she is not interested in UFOs or NDEs or consciousness literature, and she rarely discusses her experiences except to say that they are “her angels.” She was concerned by the obsessive nature of Rey’s interests.

Significantly, Rey felt as if this intensive book encounter was being orchestrated by the nonhuman intelligence that had been interacting with his family. After four months, he felt that he was being taken to the next level of his education. After his immersion in studies of consciousness and the literature of NDEs, he experienced a powerful set of synchronicities. The synchronicities involved meeting people who had experienced NDEs, and also hearing, for the first time, about his father’s NDE. Rey was struck by the timing. What were the odds, he wondered, of meeting people who had experienced NDEs just after he had learned about them for the first time? And what did these have to do with the UFO experiences?

After these events, Dulce told Rey that he needed to believe in God. She said that she knew that people in their church believed in God, but her belief was different from theirs. She said she could feel God and her angels. “I can feel God. I feel these spirits in my hands when I pray and I can feel the energy of God and these spirits in my body.” Rey didn’t accept his wife’s Catholic interpretation of these strange events, but he did not reject it.

At this point, Rey was utterly and truly confused. He continued to read, and to be confused by what he read. Then he experienced yet another unusual event. It came in the form of an out-of-body experience that combined visual information and a direct message. After the experience, Rey believed that he had been given a special project—a mission. The mission was to present to humanity the relationship between the nonhuman intelligences that were interacting with him, the spirit world, and the physics of consciousness.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DR. EDGAR MITCHELL FREE FOUNDATION

After these events, Rey believes that he was given a mandate by the beings who had been interacting with him.

As he was driving through rush-hour traffic one morning, he had an experience that he describes as a download experience, or an extraterrestrial telegram. He said that he felt like he was inside a large spinning wheel with many spokes. Each of the spokes represented a particular anomalous experience, such as an NDE, a UFO contact, or an out-of-body experience. He later called these “contact modalities,” as, he explained, each of them was a way that nonhuman intelligence interacts with humans.

He described how he then received a telepathic message, not via a voice, but via information:

You need to inform humanity of the relationship between us (the nonhuman intelligence), the spirit world (the reality we transition to after our death), and consciousness (the physical structure of our cosmology). You will need help. There are two criteria for this help: this is not about making money and there has to be minimal ego.

After this he experienced another series of powerful synchronicities. He relates that after his first experience he had sent emails to ten well-known researchers in the field, one of whom was Mary Rodwell. Mary is a researcher who claims to have supported over three hundred thousand experiencers, and she has written a number of books about her work. Mary didn’t respond to Rey’s email until after his rush-hour experience. To Rey, it was a very meaningful communication that occurred directly after he was charged with the mission to found an organization.

Mary introduced Rey to Dr. Rudy Schild, who was interested in UFO contactees, consciousness studies, and quantum physics. Rudy is an emeritus professor of astrophysics at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a retired tenured professor of astrophysics at Harvard University, as well as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cosmology. Rey was impressed that Rudy was interested in his experiences, and gladly recounted them in a phone call.

I informed him of my “adventures” including the OBE event that had occurred the day before where I was given information about consciousness and the contact modalities. He was fascinated. He informed me that in fact, the information I received on what I now call the “contact modalities” can all be explained through the quantum hologram theory of physics and consciousness (QHTC), a theory developed by the late Apollo astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell.

Rudy suggested that Rey form an organization, and offered to serve as its science adviser. He also provided Rey with the number for Edgar Mitchell, the former astronaut and Rudy’s mentor. Rey phoned Edgar and found that they lived very close to one another, so they decided to meet. The meeting proved to be very important for Rey and influenced the creation of the organization that would become FREE.

When I arrived at Dr. Mitchell’s house, we exchanged stories. He told me about his “awakening” in space and his early years growing up in Roswell, New Mexico, the site of the world famous Roswell UFO crash. He told me that he worked at a local airport when he was a young teen and he was paid via flying lessons. Edgar’s parents owned two farm supply stores in the Roswell area and he knew most of the ranchers and workers in the area because they were always in his parents’ stores. He told me that after he came back from the moon he was not only a national hero but a hero to the folks in Roswell. When he returned to Roswell, many of the old timers and their children began to pull him aside and told him very intimate stories of the ship that crashed in Roswell. Edgar informed me that based on the information he was given by very reliable individuals, individuals he had known most of his life, that the Roswell crash was real. He then told me about his work as a test pilot for the Navy. He also told me that many of these test pilots were admitted into the NASA program as Astronauts. He even told me of some of the “Experiences” of the astronauts, including Russian Cosmonauts, in space that were similar to his involving a series of paranormal experiences. His stories went on and on for hours.

Like Rudy, Edgar offered to assist Rey in the formation of an organization. Rey replied that he was confused about what the organization would do, but Edgar told him that the answer would come to him, adding, “It always does.” After his meeting with Edgar, he spoke to Mary. He asked her if she would help him found the organization with the help of Rudy and Edgar. After a few days of considering the idea, she agreed to help Rey and she came up with the acronym FREE, for the Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial Encounters. Rey relates, “Thus, FREE was started over a three-day period under the guidance of some unknown nonhuman intelligence.”

According to Rey, there had never been an in-depth academic study of the topic of UFO-related events. Rey proposed that FREE undertake the first comprehensive, multi-language, quantitative and qualitative data-driven research study of the topic. In my discussions with him about FREE, he was careful to note that FREE is not an organization devoted to ufology. He said, “This paradigm has revealed very little about this phenomenon over the last sixty years. A new paradigm is needed and this is the Consciousness Paradigm.” He explained that FREE’s mission was to understand the relationship between the science of consciousness and contact with nonhuman intelligence via what he termed “contact modalities.” He said that Edgar firmly believed that a study that focused on the experiencer was important, so FREE’s motto became “Disclosure from the Bottom Up.” Disclosure is a term used by ufologists that means that UFOs have revealed themselves, or that there is a public awareness of their presence.

ESOTERIC COSMONAUT EDGAR MITCHELL: THE FRINGE OF THE FUTURE

Through his association with Rudy and Edgar, Rey forged headlong into the study of quantum physics. Within my growing research circles, which included invisibles and visibles such as my academic colleagues, the field of quantum physics was the go-to explanatory framework for impossible skills like remote viewing, information downloads, and the strange physical aspects of UFO events, such as their ability to appear and disappear. Even my atheist colleagues entertained quantum theories as possible explanations for the extraordinary abilities that certain saints were reported to have possessed. A colleague who scoffed at my interest in UFO cultures was nonetheless fascinated by my work on the cases of saints like Teresa of Avila, who was reported to levitate, and other saints who were said to have been in two places at the same time—bilocation. After one such discussion he sent me a note in which he theorized, off the record, about bilocation. He linked it to his own studies of quantum physics.

“The idea of saints being in two places at once is intriguing,” he wrote. “Physical laws seem to suggest the impossibility of being in two places at once, but the idea of ‘superposition,’ in quantum mechanics suggests that atoms and electrons can be in two places at once. Not only that, but these two things seem to remain connected to one another on some level in that they can influence one another. Of course, larger objects have not been observed (scientifically at least) to be in two places at once. And, I thought it interesting, that in the cases of saints, bilocation is chiefly associated with acts of charity.”

“Charity?” I asked. That jogged a memory I had of both Rey and Tyler saying that the idea of humility (not ego) seems to be important to their “beings.”

“Can you say more about your idea of charity?” I asked.

“Scholastic philosopher Thomas Aquinas views acts of charity as divinely infused/inspired. This would place the saint both in the world and not.”

I was mostly a bystander in the discussions of quantum theory and mechanics, but I was intrigued that so many of the scientist-believers used this relatively new branch of physics to explain the phenomenon. This included Edgar, one of six humans to have walked on the moon on the Apollo 14 lunar landing mission. Edgar earned a PhD in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was also the founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), which is dedicated to the study of consciousness, and Quantrek, an institute populated by physicists and scientists who study energy and consciousness. He founded these institutions after a remarkable, transcendent experience he had while on his way home from the moon, floating in space, and looking at Earth.

The biggest joy was on the way home. In my cock-pit window, every two minutes, I saw the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun, and the whole 360 degree panorama of the heavens . . . and that was a powerful, overwhelming experience. And suddenly I realized that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the space craft, and the molecules in the body of my partners, were prototyped, manufactured in some ancient generation of stars. And that was an overwhelming sense of oneness and connectedness, it wasn’t them and us, it was “that’s me,” it’s all of it, it’s one thing. And, it was accompanied by an ecstasy. A sense, “Oh my God, wow, yes!” An insight. An epiphany.

This experience was so profound that it changed the direction of his life. Upon his return to Earth, he went on an extended book encounter, voraciously reading as much as he could on the topic of consciousness. Edgar had been raised as a Southern Baptist and he was a trained scientist, yet he finally found reports of a similar experience within the literature of Hinduism:

The experience in space was so powerful that when I got back to Earth I started digging into various literatures to try to understand what had happened. I found nothing in science literature but eventually discovered it in the Sanskrit of ancient India. The descriptions of samadhi, Savikalpa samadhi, were exactly what I  felt:  it is described as seeing things in their separateness, but experiencing them viscerally as a unity, as oneness, accompanied by ecstasy.

The transition back to Earth was difficult for Edgar, a feeling that Tyler had expressed as well, after each of his launches of satellites and shuttles into space. Tyler said, “It’s an intense experience to launch such a big thing into space; the whole crew, the astronauts, the engineers, those in mission control, have to be working together as one unit. Nothing, and I mean nothing, can go wrong. Then, it’s such a high when the launch succeeds. Afterward we celebrate. But then, how does a person go back to their normal life? How do we just go to the gym? It’s surreal in a way that is a complete and total let-down. I would call it a form of grief.”

I met Edgar on two occasions. I knew that he believed in UFOs and extraterrestrials, so I asked him to meet the small group of researchers that I had organized in California. He would attend our session via Skype. Beforehand I found out everything I could about him and was surprised to learn that, just like the other brilliant scientists I had interviewed, he had been involved with the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). He was also a practitioner of remote viewing. What was more surprising to me was that he had conducted remote viewing experiments in space during the Apollo lunar mission. These experiments were not sanctioned by NASA, and Edgar said that they were “secret.” Edgar Mitchell, like Tyler D., was part of the hidden and unofficial history of the American space program that I had been discovering—the cosmonauts and rocket scientists, like Jack Parsons, who believed in extraterrestrial or nonhuman beings that interacted with humans with the goal of helping them achieve space travel and, in Edgar’s case, peace on Earth. (He believes this is a prerequisite for deep space travel.) In a sense, there was a hidden history of esoteric cosmonauts. Edgar certainly fit the bill.

Edgar believed that extraterrestrials or nonhuman intelligences intervened in space launches. Before our Skype session I asked each of the other conference attendees, who were all physically present at the conference, to frame a question to ask Edgar. We would each have time to ask our question and we would all listen to his answers. When it came time to ask the questions, I was the only one who asked Edgar about extraterrestrials, even though that was the theme of the conference. Apparently, the silencing mechanisms Jacques had identified had been strongly internalized by my academic colleagues. Here was an opportunity to quiz an astronaut, a scientist-believer in UFOs, yet most of the questions had to do with whether or not humans would be able to live together peaceably on Earth. This is an important question, but it was not the question I would have thought of in these circumstances. And indeed, why would he know the answer to that question? He was an astronaut, not a deity!

When my turn came, I  thanked him for being a part of our session, and asked my question. “Edgar, I know that you believe in extraterrestrials, and I also know that you believe they have been interfering with our satellites and some of the rockets we launch into space. Can you describe how you came to this knowledge and if you might know why they would be doing this?”

Because of his connections, Edgar said, he was privileged to know that extraterrestrials had dismantled several weapons that the United States had launched into space. He said that they did this because our weapons, particularly nuclear weapons, not only damaged humans and our environment but also somehow damaged their environment. He said that there were different species of aliens, and that there were good ones and bad ones. The ones who intervened in our space explorations were good ones.

I asked him to elaborate, if he would, on the nature of the good and bad extraterrestrials. He appeared happy that I had asked this question. He explained that there are some people on Earth who are in contact with the good extraterrestrials, and that they have missions to accomplish, sometimes in secret. He believed (like Tyler and James) that some extraterrestrials had left advanced technologies that certain scientists can unlock and use for the good of humans and the world. He said that we have already benefited from this technology.

At the end of the interview, which lasted about an hour and a half, I came away with several observations. Edgar used language that I had heard used by many of the invisibles. Certain words and phrases were repeated often enough to form somewhat of a lexicon, or a language group. It reminded me of academics who communicate in their own discipline’s jargon, and unfortunately other people cannot understand what they are talking about. I wasn’t sure what this meant, other than that there was a group of people who shared a common set of phrases and words and who also shared similar beliefs about extraterrestrials, the US space program, and technology.

Also, Edgar believed that networks of human-extraterrestrial contact already exist. Organizations like SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, were not the preferred contact centers, apparently. Tyler had mentioned this too. He thought humans, with their DNA and cellular receptors that worked like mini-satellites, were the best receivers of contact information from nonhuman intelligences.

According to several of the scientist-believers, including Edgar, quantum physics provides a framework for understanding the paranormal and supernatural events and abilities, including remote viewing, miracles, and contact with nonhuman intelligence. Rey and Edgar each called this the contact modalities. Edgar’s theories are elaborated in several of his books, and in his idea of the quantum hologram theory of physics and consciousness. According to this theory, Edgar says, information consists of patterns of energy. Information-energy packets are given off by matter. On some level, all bodies of matter contain information.

Edgar and his associate Rudy Schild helped Rey understand this theory, and Rey published articles arguing that it provides a framework for his contact with nonhuman intelligences. Significantly, he also argued that it retires the conundrum of the subjective versus materialist approaches that has plagued research of UFO events. “I now approach the so-called ‘ET contact phenomenon’ from a nontraditional perspective, one that embraces both spiritual/psychic and paranormal aspects, as well as decisively physical manifestations.”

This theory is able bridge this gap because it posits a reality that is made up of patterns of energy. Edgar’s theory is elaborated in his idea of the “dyadic model” of consciousness. This model, according to Edgar, explains how remote viewing, telepathy, and even extraordinary mystical experiences, such as his experience of Samadhi while traveling back from the moon, are possible:

Several factors emerge immediately from considering the mystical experience from the dyadic point of view. The first is that mystical insights are just information that requires interpretation, not absolute and literal realities, that can stand alone. The flaw in cultural interpretation of mystical interpretation is precisely that of interpreting metaphor literally. However, a valid information function is taking place nevertheless. Consider the experience of the nirvikalpa samadhi which is described similarly in different traditions. In this experience the sense of Self merges with the cosmos and reality is experienced as unity of Self with All-That-Is. The experience is accompanied by intense ecstasy, a sense of eternity and a complete loss of fear. The cultural interpretations are generally that the experience represents union with the godhead, or the ground of being. It is the experience of the “peace that passes all understanding.” The dyadic model interpretation is that the body/brain is experiencing its “ground state” or resonance with the zero point field. The awareness is the undifferentiated awareness of the primordial field, as the sense of Self is merged totally into the field. The question immediately arises as to why an intense ecstasy plus a sense of security and eternity accompany this state. It is only within the larger question of why nature provided feelings at all that this question may be answered. The internal feeling sense accesses the state of well-being of the organism. In addition, the subconscious brain functions integrate information from external senses and from non-local sources to provide a “feeling” of alarm or security as to the state of the environment. The feeling sense also provides reward or punishment for behavior influencing survival: gratification of thirst, hunger, sex drive, and discomfort or pain for dangerous behaviors, etc.

According to Edgar, the feeling of ecstasy indicates that this experience should be repeated. In this way, he integrates an evolutionary component into his model. He explains how this model helps us understand how skills like remote viewing and telepathy are possible:

Although non-local effects have been observed and studied for over a century by parapsychologists, in the absence of a compelling theory the results have been ignored or disparaged and certainly misrepresented by mainstream science. Non-locality in quantum physics now provides a physical basis for these effects. A  large number of investigators for several decades have demonstrated that brain waves can be synchronized and information transferred between individuals across Faraday cage barriers. The results do not obey the inverse square rule of electromagnetic propagation, nor are they time dependent, suggesting the phenomenon is a macro-scale version of quantum non-locality, but with more degrees of freedom than simple particles undergoing a double slit experiment.

Edgar worked to establish several organizations devoted to the study of consciousness. He also helped fund and establish the Disclosure Movement, which is a movement initiated by the citizens of various countries to force their governments to declassify documents related to UFOs. Through his connections to astronauts and the US space program, he was able to motivate people who worked for these institutions to testify in front of Congress about UFOs. He is a pioneer who supported scientists who wanted to study consciousness and physics. This is now seen as a legitimate field of study, but when Edgar started out it was not. He has joked that when he began his work on consciousness studies he was called a “space cadet” by some of his colleagues, while others said he had been “lost in space.” I place Edgar within a lineage of esoteric cosmonauts and rocket scientists, such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, John (Jack) Parsons, Tyler D., and many others—people whose ideas and beliefs might appear to be on the fringe, and are. They may be on the fringe of our future.

Edgar had returned from space with the confidence of one who has been where only twelve humans have ever gone. Several months after my colleagues and I spoke with Edgar, he passed away on the eve of the anniversary of his landing on the moon.

Excerpt from American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology

High Strangeness & The Mind of God with Rey Hernandez

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