Customer Reviews

Alien Dawn: An Investigation into the Contact Experience

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(7)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

UFOs and alien-experiences such as abductions have never been the target for a full Colin Wilson-enquiry. After his previous "From Atlantis to the Sphinx", this theme is a logical next step to the ideas he's been persuing lately. Did intelligent alien beings visit the earth in ancient times, and are they still? Were there any contacts between these beings and humans? In the lot of what has been written about UFOs and aliens, this book is as original and provocative as the best of Wilson. Although I consider myself quite well-informed about the subject, the book never bored me, and I found Wilson's scope on the subject very interesting, thought-provoking and very entertaining. Steady Wilson-readers won't be disappointed, and to the reader only interested in the subject, this book is a must.

It surprised me to read that Colin Wilson has only very recently turned himself to the study of the UFO phenonomenon. His account of it dovetails nicely from earlier investigations into the extraordinary, such as the encyclopedic and probably still useful "The Occult." Wilson's gift for synthesis shines through as he weaves the disparate threads of UFO lore with the rich tradition of paranormal and mythic studies, linking UFOs with psychic abilities, the history of goblins, and the cutting edge of quantum physics. Wilson's great credibility comes in part from an insistence that humanity possesses a number of potential mental abilities (labeled Faculty X in his work) that manifest themselves as astral projection, prophecy, telepathy, etc., without any claim to have developed them himself. I find it much easier to believe Wilson's account because he never claims to have met anyone from Venus, or to have been there himself.

The great science fiction writer Philip K. Dick would have made an interesting subject for a chapter in Wilson's book. Dick had as complex and interesting a synthesis of the UFO phenomenon and religious mysticism as Wilson presents. If you read VALIS, a late PKD novel, you get an account of alien involvement in human life that greatly resembles accounts Wilson presents. Dick's penultimate novel (I think) "The Divine Invasion," recasts the Christian narrative in terms of alien invasion. In both Dick's and Wilson's work, it becomes nearly impossible to figure out what the phenomenon are, what our perceptions are, and what the metaphors stand for. Alien encounters seem finally to be not nearly as important as the fact that they are a recent manifestation of something that's paralleled human development from before our conscious history even began.

People who study the UFO phenomenon from a purely technological and materialistic point of view, who think we're reverse engineering crashed saucers and who can identify the planets from which aliens come, may not like this book as it dismisses such accounts as too simple-minded. Having read Wilson's earlier work, I was well-prepared for his imaginative leaps and intuitive volleys. This isn't exactly an introduction to the history of UFOs as a modern phenomenon. It's more like a Talmud--a commentary on the sources that enriches and extends an already powerful and extraodinarily textured narrative.

Colin Wilson has to be one of the most interesting writers of our time. His latest book looks into the Alien/UFO question. It is not your typical UFO book. It covers the subject in a psychological format that will have you thinking about UFOs in a different light. The final chapter which is titled; "The Way Outside" is mind-blowing and worth the price of the book all by itself. This book is not to be missed!

In this fascinating book, the incredibly fertile mind of Colin Wilson analyzes the morass of data on every aspect of the UFO phenomenon. It is Wilson's synthesis of disparate sources that makes this book worthwhile, as he tries to pull together the many and seemingly unrelated unexplained phenomena such as crop circles, cattle mutilations, missing time, apparitions, poltergeists, and new theories of physics. He almost succeeds.

If you're a fan of Colin Wilson (as I am) you'll not be too put off by his unusual treatment of the subject. But if you have never considered the possibility that reality actually consists of much more than we perceive with our senses, never looked at the evidence for the existence of a spiritual world, then you might have problems following his logic. Once you accept the reality of other worlds that coexist with ours and occasionally break through to ours (ie, seeing ghosts), you can begin to understand the argument that UFOs might come from those other realities. But does that mean they are not solid objects? No, when they are in our reality, they are solid. Is there any technology involved? Yes, apparently so, but not in a way we can understand since we begin with the wrong assumptions.

Wilson draws heavily on the ideas of Jacques Vallee (also my favorite UFO writer) who relates the UFO experience to reports from past times of fairies, gnomes, elves, and "little people." In Vallee's estimation, we are wasting our time trying to figure out alien propulsion systems. We should be examining our own culture and our own consciousness to find out why we see and experience these things. Are they somehow built into us or are they built into the universe we inhabit and which our science has misunderstood?

Wilson provides a summary of Vallee's views on UFOs over the years he wrote about them beginning with his seminal work, Passport to Magonia. Vallee moved from France to America where he was an associate of Dr. J. Allen Hynek who is most remembered for declaring a series of sightings over western Michigan as "swamp gas." I live in Michigan and I well remember that incident. Everyone was indignant that sightings of numerous reliable witnesses were so easily (and stupidly!) dismissed, and the swamp gas excuse became a local joke. Wilson says the "swamp gas" episode was the beginning of a new public interest in UFOs. It was also the beginning of the realization that the US government did not intend to be honest with the public about UFOs.

Wilson has done a service in pointing out the similarity of UFOs to other strange phenomena. His relating them to what is usually called spiritualism is an especially good insight. There is a large and mostly unknown literature that sheds light on this spirit world. I was pleased to see Wilson is familiar with the works of Allan Kardec (also known as Leon Rivail). He wrote down what he learned from contact with advanced spirits, given through mediums, and what he learned is contained in The Spirits Book. The ideas in this book and his other writings have taken hold in Brazil, where they are the basis of the popular Spiritist movement. But Spiritism is not a "religion" as such. Most Spiritists are Christians, but they use contact with spirits (who are all around us) to help attain greater spiritual advancement. They also understand that spirits exist on numerous levels (or frequencies) and we attract spirits whose level of spiritual power is similar to our own. Bad attracts bad. Good attracts good. Spirits lie and deceive just like earth-bound humans. Wilson provides some stories of contactees who were given advance knowledge of events that actually came to pass, but then suddenly were given false information and ended up humiliated. One professor so duped by a spirit (or alien?) lost his academic job after predicting the end of the world.

Many characteristics of aliens and their powers seem to relate to the afterlife, where our own spirits go after physical death. This is exactly the conclusion of another UFO researcher, Raymond Fowler, who has spent a lifetime studying the case of Betty Andreason Luca, who was repeatedly abducted from childhood. Her aliens could go through walls, and Betty herself seemed to be taken both in and out of body. Her aliens seemed to use both technology and powers of mind. Fowler concludes that aliens come from our own afterlife, or to put it another way, they come from the invisible spirit world. They have learned how to break through to our own world. (I recommend The Watchers and The Watcher II by Raymond Fowler)

To what purpose are these aliens deceiving us? Wilson concludes that through our perception of and attempts to understand these anomolous happenings, mankind will be able to shift into a higher level of consciousness. These events help us "wake up" to a new vision of reality. This is a very different conclusion from those who see aliens as evil beings from Zeta Reticuli who intend to take over our planet.

While I loved this book, which was full of interesting stories and drew on so many rich concepts, Wilson's overall conclusions fall short. A new understanding of reality makes sense of many anomalous events, including a lot of incidents categorized as "UFO activity" but it doesn't deal with other aspects of the UFO problem. Wilson neatly avoids writing about Area 51 or the testimony of Bob Lazar who claims to have seen a flying saucer in a hangar there, where American technicians were trying to reverse engineer it. He seems to regard the Majestic 12 documents as forgeries, but does not give us any reasons why (other than a lame comment about Truman's signature). He does not deal with the obvious government cover-up of information relating to UFO sightings. None of these failures invalidate his main ideas, but we are left with an incomplete picture of the "what" and the "why" of UFOs. But maybe that just proves Wilson's thesis that it is our endless searching for answers that will bring us to a higher state of consciousness.

If you have already read Jacques Vallee, John Keel, and John Mack and so are familiar with the idea of the possible connection between alien abduction/ufo phenom and psychic/dimensional realms, then this book will be a bit of a repeat but still worth reading because it brings together all these works and adds in lots of lesser known works while at the same time summarizing the major works by the mentioned authors.

If you are new to UFO abduction and the possible psychic connection, or if you have not ever heard of any explanation for ufo/abduction other than the visitors from planets in spaceships theory, then this book will really open your eyes to a side of ufo/abduction that makes lots of sense but is not so often talked about by mainstream ufo people who prefer to think of metallic craft from other planets or dimensions travelling to our universe.

Colin Wilson writes in an easy to read manner and does not fall prey to the weakness of making assertions that rule out other evidence. IN fact, he is a generous person when dealing with other individuals and their experiences, and is good at bringing up aspects of cases or unknown cases that get overlooked in other places.

This is especially a gem given the price of used copies. I recommend this highly.

"Alien Dawn" is one of the best books on the UFO/Abduction phenomenon that I've read yet, not because it offers anything really new to the subject, but because of the sheer scope of everything that is covered in it. Colin Wilson brings to the table so many different topics such as OOBEs (out of body experiences), time slips, remote viewing, hypnosis, quantum theory, holographic and parallel universe theories, synchronicity, crop circles, Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster (that's right!), and many more, and somehow manages to make all of these relevant to the UFO/Abduction phenomenon in an amazingly clear and concise way. Not only that, but the man has clearly done his research. Just look at the bibliography. Just about every major work in the field is cited (Vallee, Mack, Hopkins, Fowler, Hynek, Adamski, Good, etc.). I was simply amazed at how much ground is covered here! It's a perfect summary for anyone who's new to the subject and who doesn't have the time or patience to search out all of the individual books cited within, and it's also written in such a way so that it never becomes tedious or boring, even if you're already familiar with many of the topics at hand. In the end, this book won't give you all of the answers you're looking for, but at least you'll feel like you're on the right track. At the very least, it will leave you asking yourself more questions (and as Colin Wilson would argue, that's the whole idea!).

As with all of the books by this author that i have read donot let the title fool you. It may seem sensationalist but the core, as always, is not the enigma itself but our perception of it and how it relates to world in which we live. Backed by a truly enormous bibliography as in other reveiws the last chapter is indeed as always the best, however to grasp the meaning you have to read the rest.

This is one of the best of the many books I've read on the subject, in large part because it's ao packed with information that one begins to see just how complex the subject of UFOs really is. Wilson is a master synthesizer, but also a great, original thinker in his own right, not to mention a fine, entertaining and thought-provoking writer. All of these qualities shine in Alien Dawn. I recommend the book both as an introduction to the subject, but also to readers already familiar with the field, because there's undoubtedly something they didn't know in here.

The prolific English writer Colin Wilson has had a long and successful career investigating and writing about a wide range of subjects centred around the paranormal, the occult, human psychology and societal "outsiders," and is author of several best-selling biographies. In this 1999 book, he turns his eclectic and analytical mind to the subject of UFOs and the "contact experience." The result is as lively, original and thought-provoking as most of his other work, and well worth reading for anyone interested in this curiously persistent set of phenomena.

Wilson is renowned for deeply researching his source material prior to pulling it all together into a tentative hypothesis, and for this project he read more than 200 books on the subjects under scrutiny and conducted a number of interviews. The pervasive and very physical UFO phenomenon with all its attendant strangeness; the evidence for the reality of alien abduction (substantial and compulsive, according to the author); cattle mutilations; "Bigfoot" and crypto-zoology; crop circles; out-of-body experiences; quantum physics, new ideas of inter-dimensionality and the nature of time; the complexity of human consciousness and spiritual awareness are investigated and examined with knowledge and insight.

The author seems particularly impressed with Jacques Vallee's unorthodox theories, formed over several decades of careful field investigation and the application of scientific methodology. Between 1965 and 1995 Vallee wrote an impressive series of books detailing his evolving ideas on the UFO issue, all of which Wilson has obviously read and studied.

The result is a mostly interesting book of commentary and analysis which invites the reader to expand his/her paradigm of what constitutes "reality". Ultimately no hard-and-fast conclusions about the meaning of these diverse phenomena encroaching into our lives is offered, beyond acknowledging that they are mostly "real" and should not be dismissed because they do not fit the conventional paradigm of reality. Wilson once again returns to expounding his ideas about low-pressure and high-pressure human consciousness, and the possibility we are living in an "information universe" where everything is interconnected (not dissimilar to Michael Talbot's "Holographic Universe" model - though Talbot's work not cited in the text, his book is quoted in the bibliography). In this respect, Wilson is more focussed on the spiritual and experiential aspects of the whole alien-contact issue and its meaning, rather than the reductionist preoccupation about whether they are objectively real or not, in a nuts-and-bolts way.

Colin Wilson is a very good writer - one of the best. His prose is intelligent, literate, racy and informative, and very easy to read; his books are always enjoyable and usually page-turners. This one would be a good starting point for someone in no way familiar with the subject matter, or conversely for someone who has read so much on the subject that they feel they now can't see the wood for the trees and might benefit from an informed, knowledgeable summary which tries to bring the diverse and complex strands together into a more coherent narrative. The book's content and concluding ideas are in fact much wider and more encompassing than the slightly new-agey title might suggest, and indeed a better title for the book might have been chosen by the publisher - so don't be put off by it. It's good, and worth reading.

This is not your average UFO book, and it offers some new insights and detailed information not found anywhere else. It was clean, easy to read, and yet informative. There was no "fluff". I rate this book as a 4, and not a 5 because it held no awe-inspiring and jaw dropping information, however, it is most certainly a good read as I have indeed marked the pages quite substantially. I do recommend that this book be read.