Colin Bennett`s New Ufology
Colin Bennett Reveals His Own UFO Encounter
Dateline: Monday, January 24, 2005
By: COLIN BENNETT: Phenomena Contributor
A New Ufology
I. A most Reasonable Deception
Most UFO “researchers” (the term covers a multitude of sins) are of a scientific persuasion.
As such, they all want to measure things. For investigative tools, they all use some analytic
technique or instrumentation derived from the Cartesian/Newtonian framework as it has
developed over some 300 years. This framework was a reference system suitable for the
mechanical problems of a mechanical age. As a paradigm it did well. Its self-replicating
elements built almost everything from the steam engine to the modern computer.
But this analytic technique is not nearly good at handling abstractions, images, or information
flow. In the human sciences, the Cartesian/Newtonian frame has not been nearly as successful
as it has in the electro-mechanical or bio-chemical area.
Psychology is largely at a standstill, mainly because science still ignores the idea of
consciousness as a media machine. All modern minds are absolutely soaked with
entertainment images, yet science blinks at this and takes hardly any notice of it, preferring to
see consciousness as a processing of packets of information “traveling” very much like a
Victorian railway or postal system. The cross-synthesizing of and “talk” between images is a
phenomenon not yet studied by electro-mechanical science.
Because of such neglect, Artificial Intelligence is another example where science has not made
very significant progress in this image-oriented direction. At least in its pre-fuzzy stage AI
relies on cerebral connectivity, and does not see “mind” as a chaotic, noisy, capricious thing
which runs on imagination and self-deception most of the time. The computational power of
mind has not even been glimpsed. Mind can with ease produce many full-length musical
shows and equally as many full-length feature films per night in the dreams of a man who
sweeps the streets for a living.
The design of “intelligent” software has come up against other barriers: no software, no
matter how it finally approximates to “thinking,” will have the right to withdraw (and
subsequently replace) its labour of its own accord, which is quite different to breakdown or
wear. Also, no software has yet (of its own accord) practiced a reasonable deception in order
to conceal an operation it may desire to initiate.
But what do we mean by the idea of “reasonable deception?”
Recently, three scientists J. Deardorff, B. Haisch, B. Maccabee and H.E. Puthoff published an
article entitled Inflation-Theory Implications for Extraterrestrial Visitation in the Journal of
the British Interplanetary Society (January/February 2005 Vol. 58 1-2). These four fine minds
are at the cutting edge of UFO research. But whilst their article is very good, and they are to be
congratulated in making such a breakthrough into the straight world, it must be said that
none of these scientists have had a UFO experience. They steer therefore their
Cartesian/Newtonian lens towards such an experience and deal with it as an exercise in
scientific systems analysis, for all the world as if they were presenting the results of an
investigation into crystallography. For good measure, they add a few Relativistic assumptions
as if to correct the orbit-wobbles of their Cartesian/Newtonian model.
Now no one appreciates more than I do the necessity of the exclusion of personal experience in
order to get the article published in the first place; I would probably have done the same
myself. But this exclusion is somewhat Fortean: most (if not all) information about UFOs
stems from personal experience of some kind, yet in order to have UFO discussed in a
“serious,” context, this information is screened out from the article in the Journal of the
British Interplanetary Society! Our four valiant scientific heroes have therefore deconstructed
their own ideas in order to fit in with the accepted norm. This makes their paper appear as it
“should” appear, that is that the ideas put forward are the result of singular and isolated
scientific detective work alone, with absolutely no input from little green men. This puts
scientific “objectivity” into a rather negative perspective: this group is into presentation of
fact, and thus fact becomes transformed into media. Our four stalwarts need not blush of
course, because this happens every time we have to use language, a somewhat metaphysical
medium.
This screening is a perfect example of implicit cultural propaganda. Our four heroes could not
help going along with it, but as an essay in the structure of explanations, this takes some
beating. It reminds me of the year 1972 when the Pioneer 10 plaque, designed by Frank Drake
and Carl Sagan, was sent into deep space. The plaque showed a naked man and woman, but
the woman had no genitals and neither had pubic hair! This makes us wonder what missing
bits we may be sent in turn to utterly confuse us. Naturally enough, Drake did not include this
deceptive element of his own making as a quantitive denominator in his famous equation.
The point is this: if we ourselves carry out these double-take transformations, then what can
we expect from an alien culture?
II. Noise in the System becomes Alternative TV.
For our New Ufology we may have to prepare ourselves to meet quite out-of-the-box forms of
Being, Matter and Idea, which will quite defeat our Cartesian/Newtonian clocks and
measuring rods. In his book Our Final Hour Britain’s Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees,
considers whether “we may be a simulation.” He wonders whether the entire physical
universe might be an exercise in virtual reality, so that “we're in the matrix rather than the
physics itself.”
Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, has a website devoted to this topic ( http:
//www.simulation-argument.com) considers, in the Philosophical Quarterly, (2003, Vol. 53,
No. 211, pp. 243-255) that (alien) computers “might be so powerful, they could run a great
many simulations.”
Paul Davies writes in the Sydney Morning Herald of July 22nd 2004:
“So if there exist civilisations with cosmic simulating ability, then the fake universes they
create would rapidly proliferate to outnumber the real ones. After all, virtual reality is a lot
cheaper than the real thing. So by simple statistics, a random observer like you or me is most
probably a simulated being in a fake world. And viewed from inside the matrix, we could
never tell the difference.
Or could we? John Barrow, a colleague of Martin Rees at Cambridge University, wonders
whether the simulators would go to the trouble and expense of making the virtual reality
foolproof. Perhaps if we look closely enough we might catch the scenery wobbling.”
This puts our idea of mechanical “fact” into a totally different dimension. An essential part of
the New Ufology is based on interpreting possible alien deception, and cultural confusion
within Close Encounter experiences. Indeed such an approach may shed a lot of light on many
“nut case” claims of the past, claims that have been ignored by “researchers” because of their
patent factual absurdity. Two examples out of many claimed contacts with “elementals” will
suffice as illustration. The first is George Adamski’s meeting with Orthon, the “Man from
Venus” as Adamski called him, and the second is Billy Meiers’ contact with 344-year-old blue-
eyed blond haired Semjase from the Pleiades.
Such apparently ridiculous claims are classed as “noise in the system” which is an engineer’s
phrase for “inadmissible evidence.” But the Fortean view is that such things are “banned” by
sceptical necessity and the prevailing paradigm is constructed around the bits that are left
out, for better or for worse. Such admittedly fantastic claims as those of Adamski and Meier
are not so much banned because they are “untrue” or “unreal” but out of perfectly
understandable sceptical necessity, because for one reason or another, we could not face living
with such things, and we have to limit ourselves to what we can live with and what we cannot.
Therefore in the virtual context, such “beings” or half-forms as Orthon or Semjase are
screened off rather than being “non-existent” or “untrue.” In such a context, we might ask
ourselves not what is true or untrue so much as ask what are we prepared to allow ourselves
to experience. This is a much more interesting question and one which allows subjectivities to
play the field again as a function of frequency scales within dynamic information structures.
Bigfoot too could be seen in the same framework as Orthon and Semjase. Bigfoot leaves no
food swathe, no blood from injuries or fights, no nests, or trails, no urine traces, no faecal
matter, and no dead.
Replacing the false/true switches of the mechanical paradigm by such a frequency scaling,
gives our Postmodern New Ufology model a lot more flexibility with regard to interpreting
high strangeness. Thus anomalistic events become not so much true or untrue in the old
mechanistic sense, but infrequent. A New Ufology based on this idea gives ufological studies a
chance to do for ufology what Heisenberg did for physics over eighty years ago. For
mechanistic certainty he substituted probability, and kicked off a revolution in thinking that
is still changing physics to this day.
III. A Lancaster Bomber over Powis Square.
Here I offer my own personal experience as the kind of human testimony that did not get into
the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.
It was a Sunday sometime in the midsummer of 1978. I was writing plays at the time, and I
had a play being performed at the Shepherds Bush Theatre, only a four-minute bus ride away
from where I lived in Notting Hill. Lots of lively people were always passing through my flat
(they still do!) in the Portobello Road, but on this Sunday no one called and the telephone did
not ring. I felt a bit out on a limb, which is an unusual feeling for me. I decided to go to the
theatre and see my play. I did this several times during the week as a playwright learns a lot
seeing his own work being performed.
I got to the theatre only to find it dark and closed. I felt like an idiot, because of course I should
have realized that there were no performances on a Sunday.
I traveled back to Notting Hill Gate by bus and got off the bus still feeling out on a limb. I
crossed the road to the Coronet Cinema and saw advertised a film entitled “Salon Kitty.” I
blush to recall – this was a soft porn film about Nazis and prostitutes. I got my ticket and sat
there watching this piece of crap and asking myself whether I had finally reached the age
where I went into cinemas alone to watch soft porn films!
The film finished round 11.10 pm. It was now dark, and I bought some cat food from a local
store and started on the five-minute walk home. I reached my house and was about to turn
right into the yard from the pavement when I saw a bright white light in the sky above me. It
was raised 20 degrees elevation from the horizontal plane, and was about as big as an
outstretched fist, and it was moving very slowly.
It was a most peculiar white light. If it had been say, a searchlight of that power and intensity
it would have blinded me; I would have put my hands over my eyes and fallen to the ground.
But no, it was quite pleasurably hypnotic, and it went straight to the back of my head. Almost
as if the light had prompted me to do so, I turned to the left and looked in the sky above Powis
Square, a play-park in front of my house in Colville Terrace.
I then saw something that I have not forgotten to this day. In the sky above Powis Square was
a World War 2 Lancaster bomber no less, hovering dark, silent and quite still over the square,
its nose pointing west. There were no lights on it, and its four propellers were not turning.
At this point I decided to call for help. I have to explain something here. At the time I had a
third-floor flat in the house I refer to. I had a girlfriend (we will call her Barbara) who lived in
the basement flat of this same house. Seeing her lights on to my right, I shouted to her. She
came out, and started to mount the basement stairs to come up to street level. I remember
thinking at the time in a panic-stricken kind of way that if when Barbara reached the top of
those steps she did not see what I was seeing, then I was hallucinating or someone had
slipped me something.
Then she saw the bomber, lit ghost-like by the original light which had now diminished
somewhat. Her jaw dropped and she was a very frightened woman.
The bomber-shape now began to move to the northwest as the light diminished.
To the utter astonishment of us both, the bomber now began to change shape. It changed
(“morphed” we would say today) into a huge triangle that disappeared rapidly to the
northwest.
In the sky high above the black triangle there now appeared a much smaller light than the
first light, which had now almost faded to nothing. This second light raced across the sky in
the same direction as the disappearing black triangle. Another even smaller light came out of
this light, and executed some six complete cycles of a sine wave.
The entire display then disappeared, rather like a light bulb being switched off.
Speechless, we got into Barbara’s flat. As soon as I went into her living room, horror struck
me. There was man in black sitting on her settee!
At first, at least, he was “explained.” He told me that Barbara had kindly let him in order to
wait for James, who lived upstairs and was not at home. The MIB was a handsome man,
about fifty years old and well built. He wore an immaculate suit and tie, with a lion’s mane of
tawny blond hair over a large head. He was very well spoken and he moved and gestured
rather like a rather old-fashioned stage actor. He said that his connection with James was
through Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
The MIB, on seeing two pale-faced people who obviously did not want to talk much, decided
not to stay and wait any longer and politely took his leave. I could not understand at the time
why Barbara (a most cautious and very straight woman) had let in a total stranger in the first
place.
Here I have to enter a personal note. As I said, Barbara was my girlfriend at the time, and
though I had a third-floor flat, on most nights I usually stayed with her in her basement flat.
But this night, in a state of shock, we parted without saying much after the MIB had gone. I
suppose both of us wanted to be alone for a while. This struck me as unusual because
frightened people usually want to stay together.
I collected my cats from the yard and took them to my flat upstairs. I opened the tins of cat
food, and put the food in the cat’s dishes. It was when I straightened up from bending down to
do this that I nearly fainted with a terrible realization.
I had lost some time!
It was still only 11.10.
By this time it should have been approximately 11.35.
vvOf course I did any and every kind of time check: Phone, radio, TV (there were no personal
computers then). I phoned the cinema manager and he confirmed the time the film finished. I
checked with other tenants in the building. I again went through my rough calculations. No
matter how I calculated, I knew I had lost half an hour between leaving the cinema and the
ending of the experience.
At this point I should say that I took the kind of decision that can cause accusations of
falsehood, deceit and deception. I decided not to rush downstairs and tell Barbara about the
missing time, since she was most upset about the incident. I should add here that Barbara was
a dour physics graduate with little imagination and sense of the ridiculous.
The next day I saw James, and remarked that he had missed his AA friend the night previous.
Puzzled, he asked me about this friend, and I described his appearance. My head spun again
when James said he had no such friend as described, adding that there was no such person in
the AA groups he attended.
Needless to say this was the second piece of information I kept from Barbara. I did note that
James, though of much smaller build, was also very well spoken and he also moved and
gestured rather like a rather old-fashioned stage actor.
The follow-through was profoundly disappointing: no dreams, no disturbing recall of aliens,
no indications of an abduction-type experience. And nothing remotely like it has happened to
me since.
The relationship between Barbara and I broke up almost immediately due to this incident. It
was as if she now regarded me as some kind of witching person who had done something
terrible to her. I had become a spider who had trapped her in a drama of conflicting
explanation structures. For the rest of her life Barbara knew that she would have a broken
world-structure in her hands. Naturally, she moved away from yours truly as fast as she
could. Barbara, by the highest standards was a brilliantly intelligent woman, but like most
scientists, she was ill equipped to deal with this kind of experience. Relativity having not yet
settled in as a common cultural reference, Barbara had great difficulty applying her imposed
Cartesian/Newtonian framework to the levels of absurdity that she had encountered.
After 25 years I still see Barbara occasionally along the Portobello Road. But she now hurries
by me, and according to reports, the man she married eventually once asked her why she
appeared to be afraid of me. She said I was “strange,” and left it at that. Her husband (not a
very bright or inquisitive fellow I am afraid to say) shrugged his shoulders and forgot about
the matter.
We live now in an age where the clocks and measuring rods of late 19th century mechanism
are being translated into streams of information which have a life almost of their own. These
streams consist mostly of powerful images generated by media and entertainment in which
“fact” in the mechanical sense plays little or no part at all. Mythological engineering now
plays a part in Western societies equal to that of mechanical engineering, and in many cases
the two (such as Star Trek) are mutually supportive. Yet the “hard” physical sciences do not
yet understand the equations of Marshall McLuhan, despite the cognitive lens of which I
spoke of earlier undergoing changes of focus, definition, and organization. By ratio and
comparison we have subjected stone-age cultures to this kind of experience. We would be
fools indeed if we thought that it could not happen to ourselves in turn.
It took me some time to realize just how complex my UFO experience was. It had a subtle
psycho-mythological substrate. When I discovered this, I was quite shaken by the
implications. I had seen a mythological animal, no less. Not a unicorn or a white rabbit with a
pocket watch, but a mythological creature for a technological Age: a Lancaster bomber, of all
things. Why is such a thing mythological? Because this aircraft was once was a flying lance of
freedom, a piece of Britain’s sacred electro-mechanical muscle, just as symbolic as the lance of
St George and engaged in an equally desperate life and death struggle with a dragon.
What I saw was a multi-faceted information-based phenomenon, and its mystical unity came
complete with a shooting star above it, no less!
All of this, of course, was not felt consciously by me at the time: This interpretation came as a
result of the deconstruction of the experience itself in bits and pieces over the years that
passed afterwards. It was only after some years had passed that I began to realize how rich in
lore and symbols was the experience.
To myself now, years later, this UFO was a liminal object that is something whose “existence”
lies between fact and fiction, like an Escher drawing. I am now aware that indeed there were
other structured levels involving time, destiny, and personality besides an “objective”
component.
I have analyzed the major features of this experience as follows:
(1) The folklore content. The transfer from the myths of pre-technological Age (knights on
horseback) to the Lancaster, a “modern” construct.
(2) The National/historical element. This aircraft represented no less than the saving of the
National life.
(3) Personal factor. I had seen a film about Nazis approximately some 20 minutes before the
sighting.
(4) The screening filter. I applied some screening myself as what I thought at the time was a
necessary measure. I did not tell Barbara about the missing time, nor did I tell her about James
not knowing the MIB. What I was being screened from in turn is anybody’s guess.
(5) Atmosphere. Just like the one-minute’s silence before the bugles sound at the Cenotaph on
Remembrance Day. Although there was no sound, there was also the feeling I had when the
only Lancaster still flying appeared on the Hyde Park horizon in 1995 during the 50th
Anniversary of D Day. I had the feeling that all our lives had been saved by such things as this
aircraft.
(6) The spectacular hi-tech “alien” manifestation of an ancient almost holy thing such as a
Lancaster. I had also the creepy feeling that this “hi-tech” dimension was designed for the
framework of my human understanding.
(7) The “objective” content. The UFO moved, accelerated, had a shape-change, and was
accompanied by no less than three kinds of light phenomenon. As I have said, I had a witness
not normally disposed to the appreciation of such things.
All of these elements form a powerful multi-dimensional information construct in terms of
images and situations. Instead of pods on stilts with insect brains, the “aliens” (and what I
saw was certainly not of this world) gave this holistic dimension as “communication.” I had
always rejected what I always thought to be the hopelessly crude Victorian Station Master’s
idea of detecting “signaling codes” from outer space by electromagnetic emanations. This
mechanical metaphor was derived from an Age of lighthouses and railways and postal
services and a box-like Euclidean space in which parcels and passengers traveled in
quantifiable numbers and units from point A to point B. According to the Theory of Relativity,
this would surely result in the greatest dead-letter box of all time. The novelist Hermann
Melville’s character, Bartleby (whose whole personality was annihilated by working in a dead-
letter office of mere Earthlike proportions) would be doubly amazed.
Certainly my “encounter” convinced me that we live in a vaster framework of being and
existence than we could possibly imagine. I had the sobering thought that this manifestation
was the kind of thing George Adamski and many others saw. This kind of technology, not far
removed from holographic TV, could produce a “man from Venus” at the drop of a hat. It
would be an equally sobering experience for scientists to find that their discoveries were part
of a multi-dimensional media/gaming entertainment system of many levels of focus,
development, and application.
The model in my mind which emerged from this experience is that of an islander from a far-
flung Pacific culture that has not invented weaving or the wheel, waking up one morning and
seeing a sail-rigged ship with paddle wheels and a single funnel pouring smoke into the sky.
I was that islander, and by analogy, and with a little tribal re-scaling, I think I saw such a ship.
Twenty-five years later I was to write a book about George Adamski, Looking for Orthon. I
think the book began that night in Powis Square.
Colin Bennett
About Colin Bennett: Colin Bennett was born in Robin Hood’s Sherwood Forest, within arrow-
shot of the Sheriff of Nottingham’s castle. He left school after studying science and
mathematics, became a professional musician, then a mercenary soldier before winning a
scholarship to read English at Balliol College, University of Oxford.
After leaving Oxford, he had several plays performed on the professional stage in London
including the Royal Court Theatre before retraining as an electronics engineer to cure what he
calls “a bad dose of left-liberal decadence.” After his reconstruction, he then ran his own
electronics consultancy and printing firm. He has had two novels published, and now lives
within a spear-throw of Portobello Road, London, and hopes he has done with
reconstructions. He is frequently consulted on security, conspiracies, and computer hacking.
He now heads a team who spend all their time running the Combat Diaries web site www.
combat-diaries.co.uk.
He is the author of Looking for Orthon (Paraview Press) a biography of George Adamski. His
following book, on the life work, and ideas of Charles Fort, was Politics of the Imagination
(Head Press). This won the Anomalist Award for Best Biography, 2002.
His third biography is due out in March 2005. This is An American Demonology (Head Press)
the story of Captain Edward Ruppelt, who headed Project Blue Book in the early 1950s. This
Project was the official United States Air Force investigation into the UFO phenomenon. Both
the above books are available on Amazon.
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UFO OFF HAWAII BEACH IntelDesk.COM GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE DESK
DateOctober, 1, 1994 LocationEwa Beach, Hawaii, United States
Summary: Unidentified Object appeared suddenly. Resembled a modern day U.S.N.
Aircraft Carrier except that it was about five times the size.
Date Reported: 10/1/2005 7:29:23 AM Sighting Time: 4:00 pm Day/Night:
Dusk/Evening
No. of Witnesses: 1 Duration: 10 seconds
Appearance /
Description of Object(s) An aircraft carrier except it was about 5 times as large.
Size of Object(s) Humongous about five time the size of our USN aircraft carriers.
Distance to Object(s) & Altitude100 ft. Description of Area / Surroundings Beach
shoreline.
Full Description & Details
This event occurred at approximately 4:00 pm to 5 :00 pm on a Friday evening. I know
that it was a Friday because I had to go to work the next day and because I remember it as
being the start of my work week. I worked a weekend shift rotation while employed with
the City and County of Honolulu HI. My previous employment was with the U.S. N. as a
Radioman (Radiations And Directional Intercept Operations Manager). I had a very high
Top Secret and Nuclear clearance during my 20 year career in the U.S.N. During my
entire active duty career I had a couple of incidences that I will not reveal because I believe
that they happened as a result of employment in the Navy. What I witnessed in Ewa
Beach Hawaii however forever changed my mind about unexplained Unidentified Flying
Objects. I can easily identify U.S.N. and foreign navy aircraft carriers and how they
operate. The object that I saw was about 5 times the size of our modern day Aircraft
Carriers and was hovering about 5 feet over the water. My cousin's house in Ewa Beach
was approximately 100 ft away from the shoreline. We were sitting outside on a picnic
table enjoying the cool Hawaiian breeze when I saw immediately right in front of me
about 100 feet away the largest aircraft carrier that I had ever seen floating about 5 feet
above the air. This incident lasted approximately 10 seconds. When I was sitting on the
picnic table I had my neighbor friend's 19 year old daughter sitting besides me. We were
both sitting on the picnic table across and facing my cousin and her husband. When this
clearly metallic looking craft suddenly appeared out of no where, the first thought that
came to mind was the fact that there was no wind or air displacement that would
normally be associated with immediate movement of such a large craft. I could clearly see
the exterior of the gray metal iron works rivets holding the large sheets of 10 gauge metal
sheets that comprise the makeup of a aircraft carrier. The exception being that this
particular aircraft carrier had a large approximately 10 foot high by 20 foot port window
glass which clearly contained humans standing inside in a group and observing the
Hawaiian scenery as if they were on a sightseeing tour. The group appeared to be a mixed
assortment of men, women and children all dressed in civilian clothing. I do not think that
they knew that I could see them. As soon as they realized that I could see them and that
their masking/invisibility capability had failed them they all jumped away from the port
window and the object/ship immediately zoomed away ala warp speed. Again there was
no movement of air or sound of their departure. I was in the Navy for twenty years and
had never seen any UFO's. I served from 1972 through 1992. I have experienced being on
board a guided missile destroyer operating off the coast of Russia during the cold war and
being buzzed by Russian Mig 21's and know what it feels like to have a jet's wind drag hit
the ship and the concussion/explosion associated with the overflight of a jet aircraft
buzzing right over our destroyer. This is what was missing with the UFO Aircraft Carrier
it did not have a wind drag or movement of air for such a large object. The air
displacement for an object 5 times larger than our present day aircraft carriers would have
started a mini tornado. This event was also witnessed by a famous Hawaii Radio Talk
Show host by the name of Larry Price. I know this because enroute to work the next
morning I was listening to the Hano Hano Show and Larry Price asked his co-host
Michael Perry to rate his credibility. At first Michael Perry kind of joked with him about
his credibility but later realizing the seriousness of the question attested to Larry Price's
high credibility and high standing in the community. Larry Price then shared his
experience on the air and with the tourists that were part of their Hano Hano Show that
morning and later asked if any of the radio listeners had had any similar experiences to
call in so that he could know that someone else had also witnessed the same thing. I did
not call in, but there was another gentleman from the Island of Maui that called in and
admitted that he also had seen the same object. We all agreed to the appearance and
disappearance of the object and its characteristics. Can sighting be explained as any
conventional man-made or natural object? This object is not USN or manmade to my
knowledge. But the occupants appeared tobe humans.
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