"The voices at Van Tassel's were like no others I have ever heard."
Dr. Ralph E. Lapp

"...the scientific community has been corrupted or silenced by
military domination."
My introduction to UFOs came through Major Donald Keyhoe's books
"Flying Saucers Are Real," "Flying Saucers From Outer Space,"
and "Flying Saucer Conspiracy," which rightly rank as UFO
classics. Major Keyhoe laid the basis for establishment-type
ufology by collecting verified data, recounting dependable
sighting stories, and endlessly chasing down evidence. This
approach essentially regards UFOs as extraterrestrial spacecraft,
and has high confidence in existing scientific theories and
those who adhere to such theories. Purely mechanistic
speculations are made from this seemingly safe base in reality.
Personal experience forced me to diverge from this approach, but
I pay unreserved tribute to the integrity, courage, and
perseverance of Donald Keyhoe.
A professional U.S. Marine Corps officer and pioneer aviation
writer, Major Keyhoe, risked a sound reputation and his literary
career when he took up flying saucers. Through his books and
labors with NICAP, he has made large personal sacrifices to make
the world aware of alien visitation. He did this on the basis
most likely to find the widest acceptance, working diligently to
keep the subject respectable. Like all pioneers he had plenty
of mud thrown in his face.
Keyhoe had been treated shabbily by official Washington and
unchivalrously on many occasions by the broadcasting industry
and the press. I once saw the sound deliberately shut off while
he was speaking on TV. For years, he urged a formal UFO project
by top scientists with Federal backing. The Colorado University
project under Dr. Edward Condon nominally provided the elements
for which Keyhoe had long asked. Within a short time, he found
that NICAP data supplied to the Colorado project were not being
properly utilized and he withdrew NICAP support. Keyhoe has
always deserved better than he received from official sources.
He is an idealist in realist's clothing and this field would not
have been as far along as it is without him.
On the basis of the evidence Keyhoe presents in his book, a
rational person is compelled to accept the presence of UFOs,
although not necessarily to accept that they are spaceships and
nothing else. Keyhole's books and other classical UFO
literature left me puzzled by one element I found sharply
anomalous. There has been no communication between these
alleged spacecraft and human beings. Such a silence did not jib
with my own personal experience of the way our own world is run.
Practically all my life up to the time I learned about UFOs, I
had been a professional in communications, both in a technical
sense and in the realm of ideas. As a staff writer for radio
programs in New Zealand in my teens and also as a radio actor, I
eagerly learned and applied the art of communicating ideas from
the written word via the human voice. In a technical sense, I
qualified myself as a broadcasting engineer and as a shipboard
radio officer.
In this latter capacity, under the flags of both New Zealand and
Great Britain, I traveled all over the world before I was 25.
This experience made me aware of the role played in civilization
by communications because of my daily involvement in this field.
The living standard of any country could be measured by its
communications development -- a criterion valid to this day.
The more refined the communications of a given country, the
greater its technical advancement and the higher its living
standards.
Communications are an index of technological achievement and
material progress. The American people were able to see their
astronauts aloft and walking on the moon, and to broadcast the
spectacle simultaneously to the world. American communications
are un surpassed and there was no insuperable difficulty to
communication with earth from the moon.
To me it was logically untenable that a civilization capable of
building a spacecraft would not be capable of communicating
adequately. While I tended to accept Keyhoe's general view that
there had been no orthodox radio communications with humans by
UFOs , it seemed obvious that UFO designers and operators would
be using a different system of communication to earth man's
radio, as far beyond our methods as ours are beyond the tree
trunk drum or Indian smoke signals.
There seemed to me to be no rational dissent from such a view.
The propulsion methods employed by UFOs were generations in
advance of anything planned by our brightest minds. The
vehicles traveled in multiples of the best speeds attainable by
mechanical aircraft. Communications development must have
proceeded synchronistically with these technical advances.
Earth life has taught us this lesson in our own experience.
Our communications have progressed from the invention of the
wireless telegraph to modern television within the lifetime of
human beings who are still living. By the middle 1950s, under
the stimulus of the space program, scientific attention was
already turning to so-called extrasensory perception, or ESP, as
a possible means of space communications. By November, 1958,
the august Westinghouse Corporation, citadel of corporate and
scientific orthodoxy, had set up studies into mental telepathy
as a means of long distance communication, under the direction
of Dr. Peter A. Castruccio. Other corporations with pipelines
to the Federal treasury have since followed this lead.
Even a 10-watt mentality could project the likely results of 50
years of such work, since science has almost routinely achieved
any goal to which sufficient resources are applied. Blowing up
the entire planet or extinguishing its life, is achievable today
because men wanted this power. College educated killers by the
thousands have donated their lives to explosives and the
slaughter of children, and it seemed inconceivable that
Lifepositive scientific work aimed at the mastery of telepathy
would not be just as successful.
Scientific mastery of telepathy in 50 years seems reasonable.
Similarly reasonable is the proposition that entities utilizing
propulsion methods 50 years or more ahead of ours would have
communications 50 years ahead of ours. On the basis of what we
on earth have been driven to explore, therefore, we might expect
the aliens to be using telepathy. This expectation is
reinforced by their non-use of radio in any mode we are capable
of detecting, although UFO entities have at times communicated
with pursuing USAF pilots via their VHF radiotelephone receivers.
In an ever-broadening investigation of the UFO subject, with my
attention drawn to the communications anomaly, I became aware of
the contact stories. Involving encounters of various kinds
between alleged extraterrestrials and human beings, these
stories a lready made up a bulky literature by the middle 1950s.
I tackled them to see what I could find out about UFO
communications. I began to hear about psychic communications
with which I entered a new and wholly alien world.
Breaking down my structural resistance to such things was a
primary problem. Such resistance is present in all persons who
have been given either religious or scientific training.
Religionists consider such communications to be "of the devil."
Scientists consider the same area to be one of fantasy and
illusion. I had been raised as a Christian Scientist. In that
benign and tolerant religious system, the occult and psychic
were deemed things better left alone.
The discs continued in the skies, and the communications
problems could not be ignored. Already I detected an unhealthy
and irrational fear, outwardly manifesting as ridicule, among
the many trained persons of my acquaintance to whom I broached
my general theories about communication with space entities.
Friends in the aircraft industry passed on rumors of a man
living in the high desert of Southern California who claimed to
have telepathic contact with the entities piloting the flying
discs. Thus I came meet Mr. George Van Tassel, a pioneer in
such communications, who later died in 1978. His distinction in
this world was to obtain from his other-world communicants,
advanced technical information.
This technical information is impenetrable to conventional
scientific knowledge and to the mechanistic mind. Armed with
the revolutionary discovery of the orgone energy -- to which UFO
intelligences have extensively referred to as "Primary Energy" -
Van Tassel's early communications become a technical bonanza.
Any trained scientist whose thought processes have been
functionalized will be able to penetrate most of the early Van
Tassel communications, and conceivably could create instruments
and devices of a wholly new character.
At the time I went to see George Van Tassel at Giant Rock, he
was regarded by scientists as a crackpot. Most laymen who came
in contact tangentially with his writings undoubtedly regarded
him as just another flying saucer nut. History will probably
have a different verdict.
Investigators in this field must learn to participate -- to bore
in with the body, mind, and heart as a total human being -- if
they are to find their way to the truth. The old, onlooking,
withdrawn, and purportedly objective approaches have failed in
this field. The case of George Van Tassel, as I experienced his
doings and as they influenced me, is an example of how
participation and the use of all one's personal resources of
experience can open doors in UFO research. Sometimes the
consequent problem of how to get some doors closed again becomes
critical but one must dare to do in order to know.
Giant Rock derives its name from a colossal boulder that rests
near the end of a remote, dry-lake airstrip in the high desert
of Southern California. Around the Giant Rock, Van Tassel had
created through the years a small living complex including a
restaurant and his own home. He had also created the physical
facilities for his annual spacecraft convention.
In the days when I first visited Van Tassel's place, he used to
conduct communications with UFO intelligences from a chamber
hewn out of the ground beneath the Giant Rock. There was no
technical apparatus for this communication. Stumbling down the
rough stairs in semi-darkness, one was seized by the horrendous
possibility that the giant boulder might roll and crush the
chamber, complete with occupants. There were usually about
sixty or seventy persons present at these seance type gatherings,
varying from college professors to ordinary working people, and
always including a sprinkling of reputable and successful
businessmen.
Van Tassel's preparations for contact consisted mainly of
focusing the minds of all present into an energetic unity.
Songs were sung in unison. Prayers and chants followed. Then
came silence as Van Tassel waited for contact. Singing,
chanting, and prayers constituted the "call" phase of
communications, differentiating the group of people with their
common desire for contact with UFO intelligences, from the
random psychic racket of the ordinary world. The call phase is
intended to stand out above the psychic background noise as a
strong radio signal does above radio noise and weaker stations.
Such a call in radio receives the immediate attention of any
skilled operator monitoring the particular frequency in question.
He reads the signal if it is code and if the person signaling
is calling him, he answers.
Van Tassel in effect functioned as a psychic radio operator,
focusing the power of his transmitter -- the biological energies
of his gathering -- to attract the attention of someone with
whom he wished to communicate.
His calls were answered. Out of the darkness from Van Tassel's
direction would come booming the most dynamic and powerful
voices I have ever heard. For years as a youngster, I studied
voice and speech and as a young radio actor put these studies to
practical use. I was always around accomplished radio actors
and announcers, and on this account was extremely voice and
speech conscious. I understand fully the art and technique of
changing one's voice so as to act out an entire radio play doing
two, three, or sometimes more, separate voices.
The voices at Van Tassel's were like no others I have ever heard.
George Van Tassel was an ordinary man and not highly educated.
He spoke well but did not have an unusual vocabulary. He made
occasional grammatical errors like most people. The
intelligences that spoke through Van Tassel, utilizing his vocal
apparatus as though it were a physical amplifier or transducer
for their own thoughts, made no grammatical errors. The
intelligences flowed in strong, forceful language without a
split second of hesitancy. The effect was like having Orson
Wells present, orating at the height of his powers.
Several of these intelligences would speak, one after the other.
There was in each case a distinct change of the speech pattern,
pace, voice timbre, accent, and subject matter. No radio actor
could have done it. Van Tassel's vocal mechanism provided a
sound carrier, as it were, upon which all these other voices
were impressed. There was no doubt that they were speaking
through Van Tassel, not only because of these objective facts,
but also because of something that I experienced, and therefore
learned, by actually being there.
I found that I could hear, in a new way to me, the thoughts of
these beings before they were transduced by Van Tassel's vocal
apparatus. The effect was akin to monitoring a tape recording,
the broadcast of which is briefly delayed. I knew what Van
Tassel was going to say before he got it out as audible sound.
Prior to this time, I had no psychic abilities or experience
with any kind of psychic phenomena. All of it had been to me a
tightly closed book. Now it was opening.
Blundering in where angels might be terrorized, I asked Van
Tassel how he was able to develop his receptive ability. He
gave me certain routines to follow. Not aware at this time of
any element other than idealism in connection with UFOs, I
followed Van Tassel's indications with diligence and persistence.
Once, at a later time, I became for a brief minute, the "
loudspeaker" used by these strange intelligences.
There was no doubt that communication was being carried on by
these means, no matter what official science might think of it
all. On one occasion in my presence, and subsequent to their
promise to do so, luminous UFOs manifested in profusion above
the nea rby desert until dispersed by Marine aircraft from the 29
Palms base that were scrambled on intercept. The troglodytic
professor on the USAF payroll may smile but he does not know.
The New Knowledge is the property of those who participate and I
was unequ ivocally convinced that the entities piloting the
discs were quite capable of communicating with human beings,
without any need for radio apparatus. My empirical work had
begun with a little research involving my own psycho-physical
person.
With consuming interest I read the technical matter that these
intelligences had communicated to Van Tassel. My electronics
background was insufficient to penetrate this material but
everything about it seemed to throb with life, even though it
was beyond my comprehension. Reading the communications was an
adventure in itself. Worlds within worlds, densities within
densities, energies, polarities, ethers -- material with no
seeming connection to earthly concepts -- but all of it
discussed with an overlay of good humor and love. From this
time on, I began to think that just being an ordinary man might
be an advantage in investigating this subject. I had only a
little junk to jettison before tackling this New Knowledge.
The communications referred often to the primary energy in
connection with spacecraft propulsion, and I knew that there was
at this juncture no readily intelligible connection with earth
science. There was something missing -- something crucial -from
the ever-multiplying trivia of modern knowledge at human
disposal. Intuitively, I got on the trail of that missing
something right then. These intelligences were doing things
differently than us, and our men of science weren't trying to
find out the answers. They were trying to kill UFOs, and
pouring their energies instead into the rackety and uncertain
fireworks at Cape Canaveral.
In "They Live In The Sky," I detailed my first psychic
experiences and will not, therefore, repeat them here. Suffice
it to say, that by persisting with the techniques learned at
Giant Rock, I set the stage for an eruption of the unseen worlds
into a consciousness -- mine -- not prepared for such an impact.
Becoming sensitive suddenly to spectra of vibrations with which
one is totally unfamiliar can be an unhinging experience. In
recent years, the so-called "psychedelic revolution" has exposed
untold thousands of persons to the consequences of chemical
tampering with consciousness. All such forcing open of doors is
destructive of orderly inner development, no matter what the
academic qualifications of its advocates.
There was in my case no visions of the unseen worlds or astral
phantasmagoria but I did develop extreme sensitivity to
telepathic impulses. I found that I could barely control the
situation. In daily business life in the aviation industry, I
would hear a sentence psychically before a client ever spoke the
words physically. When the telephone rang, I knew who was
calling before I picked up the instrument.
A constant struggle soon ensued for control of my physical
vehicle -- myself against unseen interlopers. I was fighting
continually against various forms of automatism. Anyone who
doubts the reality of occult things would have no doubt whatever
concerning them were they to endure an experience of this order.
I emerged from it all with a solid respect for the reality of
the occult that I have never subsequently lost.
My difficulties were extreme and I felt that I was slowly losing
my battle to retain my mastery of myself. I bitterly regretted
having ever meddled in UFO communications. The "intelligences,"
into whose realm I had broken, poured confusing rubbish into me.
There did not seem to be anyone to whom I could talk about my
difficulties without already seeming to be "around the bend."
All was not lost, however, for a great man was at hand.
Dr. Franklin Thomas was a publisher of many small UFO books as
the owner of the New Age Publishing Company in Los Angeles.
Many of these books dealt with the things I had stumbled upon.
He used to give lectures in his Glendale Boulevard book shop on
Friday evenings and I resolved to attend.
Franklin Thomas was a diminutive, slight, sharp-featured man,
wrinkled of face and generally shabby. He seemed indifferent
concerning his physical person. His lectures were delivered in
a soft, low-pitched voice but with a lucidity that I found
enthralling. He could cover the esoteric aspects of widely
divergent subjects in such a way that he constantly wrought
seemingly unconnected things into a higher synthesis. I knew
that he could assist with my problem.
He was heavily burdened in his struggling business and his
health was failing. He knew he was dying and, at a period when
he needed all of his reserves of strength, he spent as little
time as possible after his lectures talking to those who pressed
him wi th questions. He listened carefully to me. There was an
understanding nod and a knowing glint came into his eye. I
asked him help me. He agreed.
He was the most accomplished occultist I have ever known, an
adept and master teacher functioning as one of us in the
workaday world, but otherwise something much more. At a time of
loose talk about the occult and occultism, to have known and
been taught by Franklin Thomas was an occult experience in
itself.
This shabby little man had conscious control of the hidden
forces of nature, and he wielded his powers in setting me free.
I became, in a short time, complete master in my own house again
and the ability I had forced on myself to function
telepathically was brought under control. This was the first
step toward suppressing the faculty entirely.
The essence of gaining control was to confine the receptions to
a given time of day and never to depart from this regimen. Then
it became every other day, every third day, and finally the
spurious door to the unseen was closed and sealed. Every
student of esoteric matters who wishes to make genuine progress
in the development of his inner life, will find the avoidance of
psychism and psychic phenomena -- as an involved party -
absolutely essential.
During this period when I had these daily contacts and before
all such activity was halted, some information was passed to me
concerning the UFO mystery in many of its aspects. I had
learned, through Franklin Thomas, how to sort out the otherworld
telepa ths. Those intelligences which would seek to communicate
without controlling had what seemed to be the valid information.
Through Franklin Thomas and his gentle guidance, I began to
discern that the mystery required a sound working knowledge of
occult science for its overall comprehension. My knowledge of
these things was so limited that it was absurd to think that
anything of great value could be passed through me. I was an
inadequate instrument for any such purpose. Recognition of this
fact by me accelerated my phased withdrawal from psychic
activity.
During these limited contacts, information was nevertheless
passed from the "other side" that went against many of the
commonly accepted conceptions of UFOs. Later publication of
this material was to make me a sort of pariah even in the wayout
UFO field. The truth is unwelcome in this world and it hurts
because of its innate power to disturb. The entities I
contacted conveyed to me, in essence, the following basic
information:
2. UFOs have their main existence in a density that is
invisible to human beings of normal vision.
3. The intelligences behind the space ships are various orders
of etheric beings; that is, beings differently constituted to
man and normally invisible to him, yet capable of materializing
at will when necessary or required.
4. A war is in progress for the mind of man, a veritable battle
of the Earth that will determine the future course of evolution.
5. There are negative forces from beneath man seeking to drag
him down and positive forces assisting him to fulfill his
destiny in freedom.
6. There are normally-invisible living things in space that are
not space ships.
7. Space is filled with primary energy currents of which
existing earth science knows nothing.
8. Infrared film, exposed between dawn and sunrise in high, dry
locales will frequently objectify invisible objects of various
kinds living in and passing through the atmosphere.
This information permitted the formulation of a skeleton UFO
theory and also opened a pathway to obtain objective proof of
the presence of UFOs. The latter would come to hand only if the
communicating intelligences had told me the truth. I had work
to do, both of a theoretical and empirical nature.
At this point, Franklin Thomas had a serious talk with me. I
pass on now his fundamental wisdom.
This advice was followed. All psychic activity was terminated.
My experiences had convinced me that the disc occupants
communicated by means of thought transference -- telepathy in
its many variants -- and that communication with earthlings
would be unlik ely via any other method. Communication seemed
to require either that the human being surrender in some way the
function of his organism to beings that he could not see or that
new devices for manipulating the primary energy of which these
entities spoke would have to be designed.
These new cosmic electronics would use biological energy.
Experience has already shown that such devices were quite
different to, and enormously advanced over, anything possessed
by earth men. Later on, my adventures would bring me to a
remarkable personality who had made revolutionary strides into
cosmic electronics but, for the moment, I did not know where to
begin.
I did know, in a fashion that permitted of no contradiction,
that if ever UFOs were to be understood and comprehensive
theoretical approaches made to the subject, I would have to
resign myself to years of study and research. This endeavor
would, by its very nature, lie outside the boundaries of
official science. Despite the resources and facilities that
they commanded, the official scientist were getting nowhere in
penetrating the UFO mystery, and my brushing personal
involvement with the technology behind UFOs taught me why they
failed and would continue to fail: humans were looking in the
wrong places for their answers, and they were looking in the
wrong way.
Man, to their mode of cognition, was $2.98 worth of chemicals
organized in a complex way. Complexity of organization was held
to be the only difference between man and the chair on which he
sat. I was already interested in the energy that propelled me
acr oss the room. When I asked learned physicians about this
energy and what it was, I found that they became angry. Already
I was beginning to think that there might be a functional
identity between my personal power source -- the biological
energy that drove me across the room -- and the energy that
drove the discs across our skies. Learned, able men with the
highest academic qualifications were evading confrontation with
both.
Franklin Thomas continued to tutor me in his quiet way.
Everything he taught me concerning occult knowledge was given to
me in such a way that I could dovetail it with something I could
personally observe in the outer world. When I reported having
noticed something different about a common feature of our
environment -- thereby illustrating that I had dynamically
understood and applied his teachings -- he would give me
something more.
He steered me to the work of Dr. Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian
philosopher, scientist and founder of the Anthroposophical
Society. The scope and sweep of this universal genius was
staggering. As I plunged into Anthroposophy, I realized that I
was in contact with a body of New Knowledge and a methodology
for penetrating the unseen worlds that was wholly healthy and
demanded the best that was in me for its pursuit and application.
My whole life began to change.
Gone forever was the craven search for "messages" from spacemen.
Dr. Steiner had presented in modern scientific form, for
modern consciousness, the necessary cosmo-conception and valid
indications for the renewal of human life and culture along
functional lines. His work was not confined to things normally
deemed of the spirit. He went deep into such seemingly
compartmentalized realms of thought as medicine and economics,
pedagogy and biology, pharmacology and zoology, drama,
philosophy, and agriculture. Everything he touched, he renewed
and revivified.
Jules Saurwein, the Paris savant who had known all the great
thinkers of the times, deemed Steiner the most impressive figure
in European cultural life in the 20th century. With my mounting
suspicion of orthodox conceptions, I contrasted the two or three
lines devoted to Steiner in the encyclopedias with the
overwhelming, massive literature he left his fellow humans. I
could not square the incomprehension and the sequestration of
Steiner's genius with the inflated biographies in the same
encyclopedias out lining the lives of the life-killing
developers of nuclear weaponry.
Franklin Thomas presented me with a monumental book entitled "
Man or Matter" by Ernst Lehrs, Ph.D., one of Steiner's own
students. An electrical engineer and mathematician, Dr. Lehrs
presented in this book not only the history of man's cognitive
impasse -- out of which has sprung the Great Impasse of ufology -
but also the method of surmounting these difficulties. All of
it was presented in a healthy and modern way on the bedrock laid
by Goethe and later modernized and expanded by Steiner.
Lehrs spread himself out over such seemingly unrelated
disciplines as optics, biology, meteorology, geology, botany,
and mechanics, unifying these diverse fields in a functional
approach so that one could see the inner connections they all
bore to each ot her. This book had a decisive influence on me.
I had already begun field research in UFO photography. I was
putting to the test the fundamental suggestion for photographing
invisible presences in the atmosphere of the earth that had been
given to me during the final phases of my experiments with
psychic communication.
"Man or Matter" acquainted me with the Goethean approach to
optics, light, and color; and, the more I experimented, the more
Goethean I became. Lehrs also dealt in detail with the visual
ray or eye beam -- a ray of biological energy by which
consciousness is carried outside the body to objects in space.
Armed with this knowledge, some simple occult exercises, and
conventional cameras with conventional infrared film, I began
the practical field work. The knowledge involved and methods
employed will now be described.
Excerpt from:
THE COSMIC PULSE OF LIFE
Chapter 3: Finding a New Pathway
by Dr. Ralph E. Lapp
1. UFOs are space ships but their vibratory makeup is not fixed
in the physical-material density. They are mutants.
"You have reached a point where you have a sort of assignment --
a task to discharge. I cannot tell you where it will lead -- to
discovery or to disappointment -- but I can tell you with
certainty that success, if it is to come to you, demands that
you cut off all psychic activity and abandon it entirely.
Everything for you, henceforth, must be in the full light of
consciousness, with no communication of any kind with any unseen
forces, no matter what their purported wisdom. Contact must be
with your own High Self -- Your Atma -- and nothing inferior to
that."
Return to Liber Caeruleus Master Index
THE COSMIC PULSE OF LIFE
(c) 1976 Trevor J. Constable
Revised and Enlarged Edition:
(c) 1990 Trevor James Constable
Published through special arrangement with:
Merlin Press, Tustin, CA,
by Borderlands Research Science Foundation
PO Box 220, Bayside, CA 95524
(707) 825-7733
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