While attending another lecture by Dawkins, I met Lawrence and Sylvia Schechter and Donald Keys, who together had created the Francis Bacon Trust. Donald Keys was an old acquaintance of Ruth’s from before our marriage. He was president of Planetary Citizens, and had served as interpreter for U Thant when the latter was Secretary-General at the United Nations. A year later, on January 6, 1988, Donald Keys lent me the remarkable book UFO Contact with the Pleiades by Wendelle Stevens, an important event for me.
I had always been interested in UFOs and the possibility of extraterrestrial civilizations. While going to school in the 1920s, I avidly read Amazing Stories, the science fiction magazine published by Hugo Gernsbach; I still have some of those issues. As a genre, science fiction got a boost when it was recognized that the nebulae—meaning clouds, because they were thought to be great clouds of dust—were actually distant galaxies. This sudden expansion of horizons stretched the imagination, and in combination with emerging technological developments, had stimulated a new playground for the mind. Even at the time, I realized science fiction would not be great literature, but it was exciting. I would characterize my early effort to make an aircraft to fly to Mars as an expression of my hunger for the unrestricted possibilities offered by these tales.
But science fiction never lived up to its early promise. In my view, the only exception was the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, which came close to satisfying my childhood appetite for such things. A rumor had it that the script of this movie was transformed from mediocre to superlative by some sort of extraterrestrial influence during its modification in Hollywood.
During our “Gee Whiz” period, Ruth and I attended a UFO convention in 1954 held by George Van Tassel at Giant Rock in the California desert, but we didn’t see any UFOs. The convention was well attended. There was an announcement that there was a visitor from Venus among the audience. Everyone was curious; but it turned out she was from Venice, California! We had also gone to a lecture in Los Angeles by George Adamski, a prominent UFO investigator.
For the most part, however, I had never come across anything other than the standard alleged UFO sightings and abduction accounts, the best of which was John Fuller’s book on Barney and Betty Hill’s UFO encounter, entitled The Interrupted Journey. Around 1988, two other nonfiction books appeared that became popular-Budd Hopkins’s Intruders and Whitley Streiber’s Communion. The latter was a best seller, but I didn’t like it at all. I had rather expected the extraterrestrials to be as superior spiritually as they must be technically, but Communion refuted this notion. The book seemed more an attempt to exploit the market for sensationalism with its lurid accounts of abductions.
In contrast, UFO Contact with the Pleiades was of quite a different order. What made it especially interesting was that it contained a transcription of conversations between the Swiss farmer Billy Meier and the Pleiadian female Semjase. Here was something completely honest, not hidden in layers of buzzwords and cultural acquisitions. As Semjase described miraculous technical achievements, she displayed an integrity and wisdom that convinced me of her authenticity.
With the cooperation of Semjase, Meier had taken many superb pictures of UFOs. I had seen similar photographs years before, and my initial reaction was the same as that of most people. The pictures were just too good to be true, as though someone were selling gold coins for a dollar apiece. However, after reading the text I could accept the pictures, but by then they were of minor importance to me. (If someone important came to see you, wouldn’t you listen to what they had to say rather than rush out and take a picture of their car?)
Why did I think Semjase’s material was true? It rang true; it touched my inner being. My interest in extraterrestrial life was revived in a new way, since this was not science fiction; it was real. More than that, the philosophy of Semjase confirmed the theme I had written The Reflexive Universe to support. She said we have evolved through hundreds of lifetimes as humans, and before that as animals, vegetables, all the way back through the Great Chain of Being—and we would continue to evolve in the future.
Many mysteries were accounted for in Semjase’s conversations with Meier. How had the high civilizations sprung up so quickly from Stone Age man, complete with systems of law, music, arts, skills like growing silkworms and weaving silk? And language—it had puzzled me when in school I first encountered Latin with its complex declension and conjugation. How could language be so complex so early in our history? The material also agreed with the accounts given by ancient civilizations of their own origins. The “gods” had come down from the sky and instructed them. The Egyptians had revered their ancestors because they seemed divine, these people from the sky who lived 800 to 900 years.
The whole notion of God, which had troubled me ever since childhood and had never been convincing to me, was clarified. An inconceivably great, creative principle expressing itself through all the marvels of nature was a certainty, but it was not the God of Israel or any other religion. The beings from the sky—these Elohim or Nefilim—were super-beings indeed, but they were not the all-knowing, all-perfect God. There were more than one of them and they were not even of the status of the Greek gods, who are identified with the planets (and rightly so, according to my findings in astrology).
It was clear to me that this contact with the Pleiadians was evidence that we earthlings are not the only sentient life. In fact, civilization exists throughout the universe. The ubiquity of life and civilization is the greatest news in the history of man. Why do people not wake up and celebrate this news? The books of Billy Meier, with no more than 2,000 copies in print, are thus far known to only a small number of the several billion people alive today.
Later, on November 13, 1989, I studied Billy Meier’s birth chart and found it exactly predicted his near death at one year of age, an event he describes in his writings. The extraterrestrials themselves, however, seemed independent of astrological factors. How could they have charts if they cruised about from one solar system to another? They must have graduated from the school of earth.
I sent one of the Meier books to John Blackwood; he was able to confirm that his own “inner voice” was Pleiadian. Soon after, he joined me at the third Amsterdam conference on April 9, 1988. At the conclusion of the meeting, he began to channel some higher source—it was like tuning in a radio—and we seemed to stumble into a conference on a planet in the Sirian system. (I say “we” because I felt as if I were doing so myself!). We apologized, but the beings from Sirius said they were expecting us, and proceeded to tell us that their job was to protect the whales, which were a higher consciousness than themselves.
In another session “they” (yet another extraterrestrial civilization) asked me about the problem of the 500 Brain Radiation range. I made some elementary comment about people of that range being different from others, since the majority are not that far evolved. To this comment came the answer that with “them,” everyone was in the 500 range! I don’t go in for channeling as a rule, but this was different. I could at least talk back.
As I approach the end of my life, I would have thought that the thrill of new horizons would diminish as my physical activity has, but that is not the case. Material as rich as the Billy Meier books challenges me and rouses my fading energies to their fullest capabilities. In my opinion, the Meier information, like the implications of quantum physics, has not yet borne its fruit. I think it will be a foundation of the religion of the future.
* * * *
Arthur M. Young, Nested Time: an Astrological Autobiography, 2004, paperback, Anodos Foundation, Cambria, CA.