=1 "Flying saucers"
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Flying saucers
So much has been written about flying saucers that one could logically speak of a flying saucer cult if not of a flying saucer culture. In some quarters unidentified flying objects (UFO) have been ridiculed as utter nonsense and in others the most fantastic stories of little green men have been believed.
There can hardly be any doubt that UFO's exist. Testimonials are too frequent, too coherent, and by witnesses too reputable to doubt. Let us leave the little green men in the fairy stories where they belong, and the skeptics to whom it is all an illusion or hallucination in the dry desert of their sterile negation, and see what people of other cultures may have to tell us.
Indian tradition has known UFO's for a long time. Vimanas, as we call them, seem to be as old as India herself. And the heavenly damsels, the nymphs of the clouds who travel in them, the wind-haired Gandharvas, are as firmly anchored in the Indian subconscious as the messengers from Venus are in the western mind. So far we agree with Jung and his enlightening essays on UFO's[1].
But are they really only subconscious phenomena? Here our Indian physics comes to our aid. For the West there is only one world and one physics. Things are either solid stuff (knocking on the table) or substanceless ghosts. Indian physical sciences are less primitive. They know many grades of reality, many worlds between the most physical matter and the ultimate transcendence – worlds of vital forces, universes of mind, from the dream-like fugitive physical experience to the permanent ground of ecstasy – and the more subtle the material the more powerful, luminous and true the force which stands behind it.
That stuff which flows through high-tension wires you can't see, and you have no idea of its solidity till you are careless and it knocks you over. You can't touch a rainbow either, or knock on it and say, “See, it's there”. It belongs to a more subtle world than that of our stones and trees.
So our UFO's too may belong to a world where light and lightness, the stuff those subtle physical worlds are made of, are as material as our earth. This technology we still have to acquire, though we may have made a beginning with the laser and the laser hologramme, standing wave mechanics of plasma and our new knowledge of molecular resonance.
Subtle nature is just behind the gross, solid, physical world, and there are many bridges leading from one to the other. Its subtle character explains the sudden acceleration from standstill to the speed of light which baffle UFO observers in the West. UFO's belong to the world of plasma optics, and their lentil shape suggests that they are observing eyes.
Why eyes? For a space traveller the time spent on a planet is very painful because of the drag of its gravity. Even if you have been a traveller for only a short time, a few months or years, coming back onto a planet is rather a shock. We have all had dreams in which we try to walk or make some other movement, but all our effort has little effect; the inertia we push against is so-o-o heavy! So it is with actual gravity: the heart, the muscles, have nt had to work during its absence, so now any exertion makes us feel as if were were a hundred years old – a hundred years on a planet of course, not a hundred years in space, which is like a mere half dozen years of planetary gravity.
And for babies born in space it is almost impossible, even for the shortest time, to enjoy life on a planet, so it is avoided at all cost. That is where the UFO's come in – as the eyes of a space traveller who doesn't want to drag himself wearily through the gravity field of a planet.
See also