Alien Dawn: An Investigation Into the Contact Experience by Colin Wilson
A Review by Gene Stewart
This is a dangerous book. It can shatter reality for you and leave you wondering what’s real. In fact, its title refers to a new beginning, a new day unlike the old ones. Like when Dorothy steps from black-and-white Kansas farmhouse into Technicolor Oz — all bets are off, and nothing is predictable if you keep using the same old references.
Colin Wilson’s survey of the UFO phenomena led him to read and digest more than 200 books. Alien Dawn presents much of the thinking all that research prompted, and the conclusions he drew. In one way, what he found surprised him, even shocked him. He’d had no idea of the range of paranormal and metaphysical things he’d have to take into account. In another way, though, the more he looked, the more familiar the ground seemed, as long as he remembered to think in a certain way.
Changing our thinking is what it’s all about, like a Zen koan.
A koan is a Zen mind bender intended to shock the monkey mind, to make us blink and realize a higher, clearer way of thinking. It works by offering us self-contradicting, mutually exclusive situations and images that we simply cannot imagine in our everyday mind. The sound of one hand clapping is a famous one.
UFOs, Wilson found, as he followed the likes of Jacques Vallee and John Keel, each of whom get a chapter of their own, present a kind of koan for humanity. They’re meant to wake us to larger realities. Yes, plural.
Wilson found that UFOs fit into a spectrum of strange events ranging from faeries and poltergeists to mysterious creatures and gods. To make sense of all this, he focused on contactees. Those are people who claim to have experienced beings or minds neither human nor of our everyday world.
This covers more ground than you’d think. It includes visionaries, saints, delusional schizophrenics, and UFO contactees, Spiritualists, automatic writing, seances, poltergeists, disembodied voices, and the wee folk. All such things come to us as stories told by people claiming contact with the Other.
The nature of the Other seems, at best, iffy. As Wilson puts it: “…men…begin to receive apparently supernatural communications assuring them they are destined to become messiahs, and perhaps save the Earth. Often, certain ‘signs’ are given — for example, prophecies of the future that prove accurate. But, if the recipient of the message is naive enough to commit himself to total belief, what follows is chaos and confusion — for example, some prophecy of a tremendous disaster, or even the end of the world, which simply fails to materialize, leaving the ‘avatar’ feeling rather foolish.” (p. 13, para. 1)
There is an element of the Prankster in much of this material. Things happen that not only seem to make no sense, but almost mock our notions of what’s sensible. Vallee considered it “…the first great collective intelligence test to which mankind has been subjected…” (p. 88-89, para. 5, last sentence) He also thought that UFO phenomena, the whole range, was symbolic communication from a vastly complex mind of some sort.
Wilson observes, “…the UFO entities are trying to make individual contactees drop their rationalistic attitudes in favor of unconscious acceptance… they might be trying to hypnotise us…” (p. 107, para. 6)
Carl Jung considered it, “…the romantic — and religious — craving for ‘another reality’.”
Are we projecting our lust for the New Jerusalem, for Utopia, each time we see a UFO or meet MIB? Wilson thinks it’s possible.
If this isn’t freaky enough for you, hang on, it gets wilder, and yet begins to look familiar, too.
Wilson discusses how modern science has taken us through materialism and back to the Romantic Era’s notion of reality as a vast sea of potential, of unseen energy we might learn to use. He points out that the universe, as we’ve learned about it, has become less connected to what we regard as common sense, and more like a manifestation of mind. (p. 271, para. 5)
Are UFOs, along with so many other paranormal things, “deconditioning us from unquestioning acceptance of consensus reality?” (p. 272, para. 5)
Check this: “The universe, as we know it, is built and experienced entirely within our heads, and until that mental construction takes place, reality must wait in the wings.” (p. 278, para. 2)
Reality, science is telling us with increasing certainty, is a dance of potential energy until observed, when it condenses into matter and meaning. A mind observing a collapsing wave function is what creates, literally, reality.
We may be very important beings indeed. Keep your eyes peeled. Observing makes it so.
And if you’re bored or depressed by your everyday life, things will seem meaningless to you. That’s a delusion. We’re too superficial. We need to push quotidian reality away and rise above it in order to find meaning and fulfillment. The more we’re hooked into material things, the less meaning or importance we feel, and the flatter things get.
And here’s where the weird gets familiar, because that’s what the ancient mystical insights have told us all along, for thousands of years. In Zen, it’s Samsara — the world of greed, anger, and ignorance that keeps our attention trapped on the material world. In the Hindu tradition, it’s called Maya, the grand illusion of the European alchemists. What we think of as reality is but an illusion we create in our own minds, to allow us to navigate the dance of energy that surrounds us. We need to peer past that distraction to find the essence.
A glimpse of higher realities can be enough to transform a person, too. Seeing a UFO, for instance. A hint of wider, wilder things opens up each mind it encounters. Soon, there may be enough of us who know that left-brained science isn’t enough. Soon there may be reached a threshold and suddenly the majority will at least be open to a wider world.
Once that happens, major changes are inevitable.
It’ll be, literally, an Alien Dawn.
“The most urgent necessity at the moment is to create a new philosophy based upon the recognition of underlying reality.” (p. 291, para.2)
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