Colin Wilson has noticed something strange!

9^th December

Daily Mail

Why I’m now convinced there are aliens in our midst.

COLIN WILSON is one of Britain’s most eminent authors. He has written dozens of plays and books, covering subjects from Mozart and Rasputin to Tolkien and Hermann Hesse, and has been a visiting professor at leading American universities. But it was for his studies of real-life crime, in particular serial murder, that he acquired an international reputation. Possessed of a first-rate sceptical mind, he prides himself on solving forensic problems.

It is in this context that what follows is an extraordinary testament. For here, as experts from all over the world meet in Mexico for the second World UFO Congress, Wilson reveals for the first time why he believes that there are, indeed, aliens among us.

by COLIN WILSON

THREE years ago in Washington DC, at a conference on unsolved mysteries, I heard a professor named David Jacobs lecturing about UFO abductions.

I could hardly believe my ears when he said that thousands of Americans believed they had been kidnapped by aliens, taken on board spacecraft, and often subjected to some kind of medical examination.

What was more, Jacobs said, the aliens usually destroyed all memory of the abduction, and the victims came to suspect that something was wrong only when they became aware of ‘missing time’.

After the lecture, I asked Jacobs: ‘Do you think these people are sane?’ He nodded. ‘I’ve interviewed hundreds, and most of them are as sane as you or I’

The whole thing sounded so absurd that I pushed it to the back of my mind. But a year later, when a publisher asked me to write a book about extra-terrestrial life, I decided to return to the subject.

At first what I learned made me wonder whether the human race was going insane. It seemed vast numbers of people were telling the same story: they had been taken from their beds by little grey men with huge wrap-around eyes, often floated through the wall, and taken aboard flying saucers.

Women often said that they were subjected to some kind of examination, and that foetuses had been implanted in their wombs. When they woke up the next morning, they were often puzzled by red marks on their navels, yet had no memory of anything happening during the night. But their ordeals often returned in dreams and many consulted a doctor or psychiatrist, who recovered memories under hypnosis.

AND WHAT happened to the babies? This was the weirdest part of the story. According to the women, when the foetuses were a few months old they were taken away during subsequent abductions and brought up by the aliens.

What was going on? Was all this some kind of mass hysteria? Over nearly three years, I progressed from being a sceptic to a believer.

I talked to John Mack, a friend who is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard University. He has studied hundreds of cases and has written a book called Abduction.

John assured me that it was happening. It was not hysteria or imagination. He also felt that many of those he had examined had been made ‘spiritually stronger’ by their experience.

But surely little grey men were not kidnapping human beings to make them stronger?

Mack admitted that he had no idea of their motive. All he knew was that something strange was undoubtedly happening.

I had never taken any deep interest in UFOs. But In the Seventies I had been friendly with Uri Geller and his mentor, Andrija Puharich.

Professor Puharich had written a book called Uri, in which he claimed that all kinds of miracles had happened in front of their eyes: UFOs swooping out of the night sky, metallic voices speaking from thin air, tape recorders that switched themselves on and off with messages that claimed to come from ‘the Nine’ – aliens who were anxious to help humanity.

The aliens told Puharich that they were preparing for a mass landing on Earth in the Seventies. But, of course, it never happened and Puharich’s book flopped, virtually destroying his reputation.

Now, for the purposes of my book, I decided that I had to start from the beginning and study UFO phenomena that had been appearing all over the world since a pilot named Kenneth Arnold saw nine ‘shining discs’ in 1947 and invented the term ‘flying saucer’.

The first thing I recognised, as I studied hundreds of reports was that the whole subject or UFOs had to be taken seriously; that it was not some strange fad or superstition.

There have been millions of sightings and most have been made by perfectly ordinary, reliable witnesses with no reason to lie. And the number is incredible. When an American called John Keel decided to collect newspaper cuttings about them in the early Sixties, he was astounded to receive more than 2,000 in a month.

Then the nature of the cases began to change. In 1967, 16-year-old Shane Kurz was puzzled when she woke up one morning to find her feet covered in mud and her muddy footprints going downstairs and across the street.

She began to show signs of pregnancy – but that was impossible, because she was a virgin.

UNDER hypnosis by Dr Hans Holzer, she remembered being summoned from her bed by some inexplicable compulsion, being taken aboard a spacecraft, and being impregnated by a humanoid alien. When she struggled, the aliens rubbed some ointment on her body that made her sexually excited.

A month or so later, her pregnancy vanished as suddenly as it started.

That was the beginning of an apparent wave of abductions. And throughout the Eighties they became increasingly frequent.

Budd Hopkins, a New York artist, wrote a book about ‘missing time’ and received hundreds of letters from people who were certain they had been abducted. He is now a world expert on abduction and his meticulously documented cases are disturbingly convincing.

French astronomer Jacques Vallee, studying UFO sightings in the Fifties, came to a very strange conclusion: that the aliens were attempting to accustom human beings to the idea of beings from space coming to Earth.

But were they beings from space? After 20 years, Vallee reached an even more amazing conclusion: they were not. Rather they existed in a kind of parallel dimension, more like poltergeists than aliens.

Their craft, a kind of UFO, can do things that no normal spacecraft can do. They can turn at right angles at a thousand miles an hour, appear and disappear at will, communicate with those they abduct by telepathy. I have known Jacques Vallee for many years, and I found his evidence overwhelming. There is a sense in which the UFO entities behave like the traditional ghosts – except that they are very obviously not ghosts, but highly evolved beings.

If they are so highly evolved, why are they bothering with us, who must strike them as little better than Neanderthals?

Slowly, as I researched my book, which will be called Alien Dawn, I began to see what I believe to be the only explanation.

Ever since I wrote a book called The Outsider, 40 years ago, about the mystical states of man, I have been convinced that mankind is on the point of some great evolutionary change. We possess inner powers that we scarcely begin to understand, but which were glimpsed by the Romantic poets of the 19^th century.

Now I became totally convinced: the aliens are interested in us because we are what they were once. I believe that the task they have given themselves is to act as midwife to us as we go through the next stage of our evolution.

What first convinced me was the number of cases in which people who have had UFO encounters have been deeply changed.

A woman who stopped her car to look at a UFO as she was driving to Oxford said that, for the rest of the drive, it was if a mental explosion was taking place. Knowledge and insight seemed to flood into her mind. She told Vallee: ‘All I can say is that in the course of a few hours, I changed from an agnostic to a gnostic.’

I, too, have come across dozens of such cases. Sometimes the change is interesting but minor.

0NE British couple who later realised they and their family had been abducted experienced personality changes. They became vegetarians. The husband suddenly became interested in art and religion. A smoker gave up overnight. Their backward child became brilliant at school.

In other cases, there has been a deep and permanent inner transformation of awareness.

An American, Beth Collings, realised that not only had she been abducted since childhood, but so had her father, her grandfather and her children. And when she asked a grey alien why he was inserting a needle into her navel, he replied: ‘For the sake of change.’

H. G. Wells once wrote a novel suggesting that humans were slowly being changed into ‘Martians’ by some higher beings who were bombarding our genes with cosmic rays from space. I have come to believe that Wells was showing the amazing prophetic insight that was part of his genius.

I rang Andrija Puharich, not long before his death, to ask him what he was working on. He told me that he was studying super-normal children. ‘You wouldn’t believe how many of those kids there are out there,’ he said. ‘They seem to be on genius level. I know dozens, and there are probably thousands.’

I have also come to believe this. I am convinced that the aliens are using many methods to ‘seed’ the human race with different types of being: alterations in individual consciousness, genetic engineering, even the creation of people who do not realise that they have two personalities – as a human being and as an alien.

The aliens know that the human race is at a dangerous point in its development, that we are creating a chaos that will be hard to disentangle.

Nostradamus foretold that the coming millennium would bring about some frightening changes.

But If I am right – and the study of a vast body of evidence I have compiled has convinced me that I am – then we are also close to a change that will alter the course of human history.