Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience by Colin Wilson Page A
Authors: Colin Wilson
Tags: Paranormal, Alien, Occult, Abduction, ufo, extraterrestrial, spring0410, Reality, UFOs, contact phenomenon, high strangeness, out-of-body experiences, skeptic
Ads: Link
have had very little effect on this vast material universe, and that, if it died out at this stage, it would be with a whimper rather than a bang. So why did the universe bring it into existence in the first place?
This may sound like the familiar complaint of poets and philosophers: why does God permit tragedy, etc.? But that is to miss its point. For the question is not based on the assumption of a benevolent god, but upon such matters as ‘extraordinary coincidences’ in physics, and the ‘Large Numbers Hypothesis’ of the cosmologist Paul Dirac.
Barrow and Tipler ask: if life had to come into existence, does not this at least suggest that it must eventually go on to colonise the whole universe? The question sounds as if it contains some element of religious optimism, so again it must be emphasised that it is strictly logical and scientific. If the laws of nature brought life into existence—laws that sometimes look as if some superintendent has been monkeying with the physics—is it not conceivable that the same laws dictate that life will never die out?
Of course, it is also possible that the laws contain some principle that dictates that life must die out—for example, when the universe reaches the limits of its expansion, and begins to contract. Yet it is hard to see that this makes sense. Think of an ordinary explosion—a bomb, for example, or a volcano. It creates only chaos. But, when the universe came into existence fifteen billion years ago—as most cosmologists think it did—with a big bang, it produced huge stars, whose immense inner pressure produced the heavy elements, which in turn produced life. Now life may be an accidental by-product, like fungus on a wall, but it is also intelligent and adaptive and enduring. So what Barrow and Tipler call ‘the Final Anthropic Principle’ could be correct after all.
But perhaps this discussion is taking us too far away from the simple facts with which we began—such as crop circles, abductions, and entities that claim to have come from the stars. Let us take a deep breath and return to the facts.
3
HOW TO GET PEOPLE CONFUSED
In the third week of November 1996, I was in Los Angeles, filming part of a television documentary at the famous tar pit of La Brea—which can be found, still bubbling ominously below a watery surface, in the grounds of the George C. Page Museum. Thousands of animals died as they wandered incautiously into the oily swamp to drink the water, including giant sloths, mammoths, mastodons, and sabre-toothed tigers. But, as far as the television programme was concerned, I was less interested in these animals who had died over tens of thousands of years than in the evidence of a sudden mass extinction around 11,000 BC. The evidence seemed to show that more than a dozen species had been simply wiped out over a period of a mere twenty-five years. That suggested some sudden catastrophe, such as the impact of a giant meteor, or some convulsion of the Earth’s crust that caused earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
Now my own suspicion was that a professor of anthropology named Charles H. Hapgood had correctly diagnosed the cause of the extinction. He had first suggested the theory in a book called Earth’s Shifting Crust, in 1959. What Hapgood suggested was that the crust of the Earth was a thin skin, which rested on a liquid mantle rather like the skin that forms on boiled milk or gravy. The build-up of ice can induce a sudden wobble that causes the crust to slip on the mantle; the result is that whole continents move. Lands that were subtropical, like Siberia, move into colder regions, while India and Africa, once buried under ice sheets, slide towards the equator. Einstein was so impressed by the theory that he wrote an introduction to Hapgood’s book.
Now it has been known for a long time that movements of the crust cause continents to rearrange themselves—England was on the equator during the Devonian period, about 400 million
This may sound like the familiar complaint of poets and philosophers: why does God permit tragedy, etc.? But that is to miss its point. For the question is not based on the assumption of a benevolent god, but upon such matters as ‘extraordinary coincidences’ in physics, and the ‘Large Numbers Hypothesis’ of the cosmologist Paul Dirac.
Barrow and Tipler ask: if life had to come into existence, does not this at least suggest that it must eventually go on to colonise the whole universe? The question sounds as if it contains some element of religious optimism, so again it must be emphasised that it is strictly logical and scientific. If the laws of nature brought life into existence—laws that sometimes look as if some superintendent has been monkeying with the physics—is it not conceivable that the same laws dictate that life will never die out?
Of course, it is also possible that the laws contain some principle that dictates that life must die out—for example, when the universe reaches the limits of its expansion, and begins to contract. Yet it is hard to see that this makes sense. Think of an ordinary explosion—a bomb, for example, or a volcano. It creates only chaos. But, when the universe came into existence fifteen billion years ago—as most cosmologists think it did—with a big bang, it produced huge stars, whose immense inner pressure produced the heavy elements, which in turn produced life. Now life may be an accidental by-product, like fungus on a wall, but it is also intelligent and adaptive and enduring. So what Barrow and Tipler call ‘the Final Anthropic Principle’ could be correct after all.
But perhaps this discussion is taking us too far away from the simple facts with which we began—such as crop circles, abductions, and entities that claim to have come from the stars. Let us take a deep breath and return to the facts.
3
HOW TO GET PEOPLE CONFUSED
In the third week of November 1996, I was in Los Angeles, filming part of a television documentary at the famous tar pit of La Brea—which can be found, still bubbling ominously below a watery surface, in the grounds of the George C. Page Museum. Thousands of animals died as they wandered incautiously into the oily swamp to drink the water, including giant sloths, mammoths, mastodons, and sabre-toothed tigers. But, as far as the television programme was concerned, I was less interested in these animals who had died over tens of thousands of years than in the evidence of a sudden mass extinction around 11,000 BC. The evidence seemed to show that more than a dozen species had been simply wiped out over a period of a mere twenty-five years. That suggested some sudden catastrophe, such as the impact of a giant meteor, or some convulsion of the Earth’s crust that caused earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
Now my own suspicion was that a professor of anthropology named Charles H. Hapgood had correctly diagnosed the cause of the extinction. He had first suggested the theory in a book called Earth’s Shifting Crust, in 1959. What Hapgood suggested was that the crust of the Earth was a thin skin, which rested on a liquid mantle rather like the skin that forms on boiled milk or gravy. The build-up of ice can induce a sudden wobble that causes the crust to slip on the mantle; the result is that whole continents move. Lands that were subtropical, like Siberia, move into colder regions, while India and Africa, once buried under ice sheets, slide towards the equator. Einstein was so impressed by the theory that he wrote an introduction to Hapgood’s book.
Now it has been known for a long time that movements of the crust cause continents to rearrange themselves—England was on the equator during the Devonian period, about 400 million
Similar Books
