This article was meant to go in the previous article-sorry it took me so long to get it posted here. This quote is from Jacques Vallee's Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact: "Equally fascinating to the student of close-encounter cases are the scenes in which animals are carried to the hovering disk. In one case, a god is seen holding a horned animal under each arm-a scene certainly reminiscent of many a claim of animal kidnapping by UFO occupants. Three of the cylinder seals (Here Vallee is referring to a kind of protective amulet worn by the ancient Phoenicians) show approximately the same thing: a disk above some elaborate ground structure, a human in adoration, and someone bringing a horned animal toward the center of the scene. The beings themselves fall into the following categories: 1. Human beings that Assyriologists call worshippers, priests, kings, etc. Sometimes they are wearing winged garments. 2. The gods. They are shown either emerging from the disk and wearing, in some cases, elaborate headdresses or walking outside the disk, as in one amulet where an entity seems to be wearing its hair in three long tresses on either side of the head. 3. The scorpion-men, who have large phallic attributes in one figure but in another case would more properly be called scorpion women. They are only seen supporting the disk. It would be interesting to find out where the word scorpion comes from in connection with these figures.The scorpion-men are consistently about two-thirds the size of men, who in turn are smaller than gods. (Professor Douglas Price-Williams of UCLA points out that in the Gilgamesh epic the scorpion creatures were the guardians fo the mountain of the sun. The scorpion-man in the Babylonian Enuma Elish was a monster created by chaos at the beginning of the world. Price-Williams adds: "These creatures would thus be tellurian beings, 'chthonic' as Jung would have said." 4. Various monsters, such as a horned creature or a sphinx. Why should the observation of a flying disk be represented in the context of an obviously magical ceremony that does not appear to have any traditional characteristic of Phoenician religion.?" A bit later in Dimensions Vallee talks of this: case (think of #3): "A letter from a British woman begins: At the lecture by Jacques Vallee at the London A.A. [Architects Association] on the 12th of December I was surprised by one of the slides of a Phoenician seal showing a winged sphere held up by two creatures which he described as "Scorpion-men." Perhaps I have seen such a man myself.
The letter writer continues: "It was the summer of 1968, about 4:00 P.M. She was driving from London to a place near Stratford to visit friends for the weekend. She had a companion in the car with her. Just outside Oxford they both saw a shining disk in the sky. They slowed and then stopped to watch it as it darted and dodged. Another car stopped to watch it too. Eventually it sank behind the trees. They resumed their trip, but the really striking events took place after the disk disappeared: During the drive between Burford and Stratford I had some startling, and to me, novel insights into what I can only describe as the Nature of Reality. They were connected in some way to this shining disk, and have had a profound effect on me, causing what is commonly known as personality change. I won't try to explain what those insights were since almost all the religions of the world have tried to do this and have failed. (In that afternoon I changed from an agnostic to a gnostic, if that means anything at all.). However, these insights hit me like bolts from the blue, as though from outside, one after the other. I've never had a similar experience since. The letter continues with a description of what the woman saw that evening after supper, a description that seems to be straight out of a John Fowles novel: the guests were in the sitting room, which had open French windows leading out onto the lawn, and the woman went over to the window to get a breath of fresh air. The weather, she wrote, was "very hot and close."
The woman's letter continues: "The light from the room shone in an arc of about ten feet around the window. In that area I saw, as soon as I came to the window, a strange figure. My perception of it was heightened by the state of frozen panic it induced in me. It was for me without any doubt, a demon, or devil because of my western oriented interpretation (I imagine) of the vision or creature or animal or man, or whatever it was I saw. Like the "Scorpion-man," as well as Pan, it had dog or goat like legs. It was covered in silky, downy fur, dark, and glinting in the light. It was unmistakably humanoid, and to my mind malevolent. It crouched, and stared, unblinkingly, at me with light, grape-green eyes that slanted upwards and had no pupils. The eyes shone and were by far the most frightening thing about it. It was, I think retrospectively, trying to communicate with me, but my panic interfered with any message I might have received. If it had stood to its full height it would have been about four to five feet tall. It had pointed ears and a long muzzle. It gave the impression of emaciation; its hands and fingers were as thin as sticks.
Continuing with the same woman's letter to Jacques Vallee-I am trying to break this up a bit to make it easier to read: "Eventually, convinced that I was hallucinating, I went and sat down for a while, until the panic had subsided. Then I went to see if it was still there. It was, except that it had moved further into the shadows on the edge of the arc of light. I made sure I kept away from that door for the rest of the evening, and left next day. I told no one. That it may have been connected with the shining disk I only realized after I saw that slide." I was somewhat leery of putting this in the other article-as it seems to be of such different subject matter-of course it wound up being separate anyway. But the woman's saying that she changed from an "agnostic to a gnostic" really struck me. I forgot a link that shows a theory or some thinking about what I hope the UFO phenomenon to really be about. I hope to be back with that shortly. Thanks again for all of your kind, thoughtful and intelligent comments!The first image is a picture of a cylinder seal. The image below the first is a picture called The Seance by artist Rosaleen Norton-I would like to do an article or two about her in the future. This link HERE should go to a video of Terrence McKenna talking about the UFO phenomenon that Christopher Knowles had posted at his excellent and fascinating Secret Sun blog. McKenna and his work and life have always interested me greatly and if I can ever get any energy back I would like to also do an article or two about him.
