Somewhere in Dreamland

“I think we're not gonna crack stuff like UFO abductions and that sort of thing unless we admit the psychedelic evidence. And if we do admit it, suddenly the whole thing begins to look very very different.”

I sat up to gain my bearings, as my attention ebbed from the dizzying tide of celestial bodies to the voices flowing from the car radio.

What on earth was this guy saying?

Questions about time, space, the origins of consciousness, and alien life swirled in my brain. I suspect anything of sufficient mystery and interest would have captured my attention at that time. I was looking for a distraction. It was after midnight in the desert, and I was just a runaway teenager, seeking answers to life’s greatest mysteries by the dashboard light. Being homeless and on the run can be very isolating. It is difficult to find comfort of any kind in a situation like that. The voices of late-night talk radio kept me company on those cold nights when worry and fear kept me from sleeping.

I used to imagine how amazing it would be to have conversations with interesting, albeit eccentric people, musing on esoteric topics like aliens, time travel, or the nature of reality. Little could I have known, that over 20 years later, I’d find myself doing just that.

After many strange adventures, good and bad, I found my way back to college and stayed for many years, earning my doctorate. I walked a straight line, studying and earning degrees in archaeology, information technology, history, and education science. Still, I never stopped exploring the boundaries of the status quo.

Over time, I discovered that the academy had some dark secrets, corruption, and political motivations. I found that shadowy organizations, wealthy individuals, and multinational corporations were funding projects at important research institutions and universities around the world. These “hidden hands” tightly held secrets while institutions operating in the public trust were not being transparent about their intentions, donors, or discoveries. While this may not be news to most of you, it was to me at the time.

I started examining these issues after leaving academia. I wanted to know what they were hiding. Popular beliefs range from the mundane to the fantastic; evidence of giants, extraterrestrials, ancient technology, and so on. I felt humanity had a right to know the truth because by keeping it cloaked in secrecy, all we’d gain is increasingly extraordinary speculation, misinformation, and a framework of distrust for society as a whole.

I eventually started writing on topics considered too threatening to the established historical narrative. For almost a decade, I appeared on many shows, contributed articles to websites and magazines, spoke at events, and published books. I was fortunate to get to know the very authors and researchers I had read when I was younger. I found myself sitting on the other side of that late-night radio microphone, speaking to George Noory. I was now an eccentric guest on Coast to Coast AM. Was this what they mean by “synchronicity?”

In my quest to discover what’s behind the doors of perception, I found that the fringe was not the Bohemian playground of ideas my younger self once idealized. Instead, I found it also had a level of corruption that went far beyond the obvious snake oil salesman. This fringe had been infiltrated long ago by disinfo agents and worse. My quest was about to become even more difficult than I had envisioned.

After big tech began cracking down on free speech, some of my earlier writing was censored and my web presence was attacked with bots. I thought perhaps my quest was a fool’s journey. I decided I was tired of playing the fool, so I went back to teaching. Say what you will about that. I would probably agree with you. Nevertheless, I am quite happy to have found an institution of higher learning that allows me to be me and is small enough for me to make a greater impact on students.

During my lectures, I encourage open thought, imagination, and boldness. Socrates can best explain part of my teaching philosophy: “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” While I love teaching, I started to find myself grading term papers during the day and then spending the rest of my evening researching aliens and demons in the historical record. The gravitational pull of the “other side” was too strong to ignore. I had to find a way to balance both pursuits.

While I am a professional academic with some letters after my name, I lay no claim to possessing ultimate truths. I am not here to convince you of anything. I am not a guru. I am not a psychic. I have no magical powers or abilities. I am not the reincarnation of some special historical figure. I am not selling you salvation through Messianic figures, either human or alien. I am just a fellow seeker and curious person, trying to understand this strange thing we call “consciousness.”

Topics like the Anunnaki, demons, aliens, UFOs,Göbekli Tepe, Nazi occultism, the lost city of Atlantis…

A skeptic may ask, “Why would an educated professional even entertain such nonsense?”

“No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess,” Sir Isaac Newton once observed.

Newton, often regarded as the father of modern science and one of the founders of the scientific revolution, was also an occultist. Newton wrote at length on subjects like alchemy, astrology, and eschatology over his lifetime. Few people knew about this side of Newton’s research until his alchemical papers came up for auction in 1936. The economist John Maynard Keynes bought the papers and later said:

“Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.”

I am reminded of that late-night radio show guest from decades before my journey came full circle. It was the late Terrence McKenna, speaking to the late Art Bell in 1997. In the interview, McKenna and Bell have the following exchange:

Terrence McKenna: “The rise of the internet, virtual reality, nanotechnology, possibly alien artifacts, all that and more. One image I carry into this thing, Art, you know those mirrored balls they hang in dance clubs that send scintillations racing around the walls, well the scintillations are distortions of the thing…so as we approach this transcendental object at the end of time, there will be more and more breakdown of ordinary reality and more and more distorted scenarios of what it is.”

Art Bell: “That clearly is a process that is underway now.”

Art Bell often spoke about what he called, “The Quickening,” an acceleration of our experiences, awareness of time, our relationship to technology, and our collective future. Terence McKenna's psychedelically inspired theory of time and history, “Timewave Zero,” presents time as a spiral. As time progresses the spiral inevitably gets smaller. Historical events can be plotted on the spiral and as the spiral becomes smaller it suggests that time will align itself with other events. This implies that the events become more frequent and increase in intensity. Time is constantly being aligned with previous events until a certain point when a singularity is reached.

Matthew Watkins, a mathematician and Honorary Fellow in Exeter University's mathematics department put together a critique of McKenna's Time Wave Theory. It has become known as the “Watkin’s Objection;” a classic example of a mainstream academic debunking a radical new theory? Not quite.

Watkins developed his critique after emailing McKenna to offer his mathematical services to help clarify or elaborate the Time Wave Theory. Watkins was inspired to reach out to Mckenna while finishing his Ph.D. because it was McKenna who first got Watkins interested in thinking about prime numbers.

McKenna corresponded with Watkins and in the months that followed, Watkins claims he “tried to ‘get inside his [McKenna’s] worldview" leading to “some very strange thoughts!” Watkins continues: “These strange thoughts were the beginning of my interest in number theory (a branch of mathematics I had previously been largely unfamiliar with), culminating in the recent (June 2010) publication of The Mystery of the Prime Numbers (Volume 1 of the Secrets of Creation trilogy)" (Watkins, 2012)

Indeed, McKenna had some strange thoughts, as have many honest and grounded scientists and researchers. Strange ideas have value. We can admit that without agreeing with or endorsing the idea itself. There is value in seeing nuance and many potential dimensions of a problem. However, people often cast aside thoughts that deviate from the norm for fear of “rocking the boat.” I say, let’s discuss these strange ideas, like our ancestors did, sitting around a fire with our eyes fixed on the cosmos.

Censoring dissenting voices does not advance our knowledge. It only creates distrust and knowledge filters. Let the free flow of ideas inspire others to ask new questions about old problems. We need to stop being afraid of rocking boats and being judged by those that are too afraid to navigate the sea of possibility that will raise humanity to its highest potential.

From the Mojave Desert to the college lecture hall and beyond, I have experienced something like “the Quickening,” but the journey is far from over. I ask you to come with me and have the boldness to explore ideas on the boundary of reality. In the playful spirit of the sci-fi series, Star Trek, I invite you to come with me on a mission: “to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before!”

I don’t know what we’ll find, but I’m sure it will be interesting.

-Heather

Bibliography

Keynes, John Maynard. 2010. Newton, The Man. In: Essays in Biography. London: Palgrave Macmillan.2010.

Terence McKenna with Art Bell from 1997. May 12. https://archive.org/details/TerenceMckennaWithArtBell/TerenceMckennaWithArtBell97-05-22-TimewaveZero.mp3.

Watkins, Matthew. 2012. Accessed 2022. https://web.archive.org/web/20111021160643/http://www.realitysandwich.com/watkins_objection/.