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Highlights of Swiss UFO Conference
by Michael Lindemann
Featured conference speaker Terence McKenna, on the other hand, said he has a really hard time believing descriptions of the big-eyed "gray" aliens because they are nowhere near alien enough for his taste. He says he's seen aliens himself, and his are really weird.
McKenna, billed as "the intellectual voice of rave culture," is a philosopher, ethnobiologist and commentator on and for the Millennium. He admits to taking a wide assortment of "naturally occurring" hallucinogenic substances, among which his favorites are psilocybin and dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. It is DMT, in particular, which affords an apparent doorway to a dimension where one can experience a form of alien intelligence McKenna refers to as "self-transforming machine elves." He's seen them quite often, he says. Moreover, he says that independent studies by a number of clinical researchers have shown an approximate 20 percent chance of seeing such "alien" creatures under DMT influence.
"I'm offering something everyone claims to want and no one can produce -- a reliable way of meeting aliens," McKenna said. He stressed that the effects of DMT, unlike other longer-lasting hallucinogens, last only about fifteen minutes. "If you heard there's a twenty percent chance you'll see UFOs if you fly right now to New Zealand, I bet quite a few of you would drop everything and just go," he said with trademark humor. "What I'm saying is, give me 15 minutes of your life and I'll give you a 20% chance of meeting aliens -- and the odds go up to maybe 40% if you increase the dose!" McKenna seemed genuinely perplexed that few UFO researchers ever seemed to take his offer seriously.
McKenna saw a flying saucer once, too -- in full waking consciousness -but it troubles him to tell the story. It was in the Amazon jungle of Brazil, where he, his brother Dennis, and a number of other associates had gone to study shamanic uses of hallucinogenic plants. It was there, in the mid-1960s, that McKenna made his first acquaintance with psilocybin. At that time, he says, he was a hard-nosed scientific reductionist intellectual. The drug experience, and many other things about his time in the jungle, thoroughly boggled his western-educated mind. His UFO sighting was a particularly impressive incident.
On the advice of a local contact, he sat down one day to watch a portion of the sky where, reportedly, a UFO might appear. After awhile, he noticed a strange, thin, horizontal cloud forming near the horizon. The cloud grew in length, then divided in two. The parts separated some distance, then moved back together again. Then the cloud appeared to move slowly toward him. McKenna wanted to rush to the nearby hut and wake his sleeping friends to come and see, but he was afraid to take his eyes off the moving cloud -- so he sat staring as it moved closer. Before long, he says, it was directly overhead, now clearly a flying saucer and so close he could see rivets in the metal. There was just one thing wrong. "I recognized this thing," he says."It looked like the end cap of a Hoover vacuum cleaner, exactly the same fake saucer as in George Adamski's photos. This thing flew right over my head, and it was as phoney as a three dollar bill. I knew it was a fake."
But was it really a fake? McKenna doesn't seem to know. For him, it was a textbook case of cognitive dissonance.
McKenna believes that the proliferation of UFO and alien encounter reports are indicative of the approach of "a transcendental object from beyond the end of history." In effect, he says, the future is breaking into the present. This inbreaking influence is emanating from something -- a "transcendental object" -- that will cause a complete disruption and transformation of reality as we know it.
McKenna has filled notebooks with mathematical calculations that show, he says, that the end of history occurs in the year 2012. He has developed a computer program that traces a "time-wave," a graph showing points in history where "novelty" disrupts the normal flow of events. McKenna says he trusts his "time-wave" computer program because it accurately predicts the past - that is, it shows precise moments of great novelty which correspond to known upheavals of geological and evolutionary pre-history as well as human history, both ancient and modern. The time-wave's ability to model the past is, for McKenna, a good reason to consider how it models the future. And it shows that history as we know it simply ends in 2012 -- plunging, as it were, into total and incalculable novelty. With the end of history so close, McKenna says, it shouldn't be surprising that things are getting pretty weird.
McKenna says that the "time-wave" equations are actually alien artifacts that were given, or revealed, to him more than 20 years ago. He's now convinced that they explain why the Mayan calendar ends in the year 2012, and why a proliferation of prophets, seers, abductees and others are all predicting massive, unprecedented changes ahead.
Excerpt from CNI News - Volume 8.1 July 5, 1995
Highlights of Swiss UFO Conference
Published by the ISCNI News Center
Editor: Michael Lindemann
