UFODIMENSIONS ARTICLE :.

VISITORS FROM BEYOND                                     Graham Hancock

Continued .....

According to the Hills, their captors were small humanoid beings with 'rather odd-shapes heads, with a large cranium, diminishing in size as it got toward the chin. And the eyes continued around the sides of their heads'.

Similar images of alien faces have become a staple of far-fetched films and TV shows such as the X-Files, and it could be argued that the Hills and other alien/abductees were simply borrowing these images from popular culture.

But how do we explain the appearance of such figures in the art of our prehistoric ancestors?

Personally, I have never had any great interest in the UFO phenomenon and have always regarded alien abduction stories with a mixture of indifference and scepticism. Yet to my utter astonishment, I found myself seeing almost identical 'alien' faces during my ayahuasca visions in the Amazon.

It was one of the most perplexing and disturbing moments of my time with the Peruvian shamans. The creatures in my vision didn't look friendly - on the contrary, they were terrifying and sinister, a harsh, commanding presence.

I also saw what could easily be described as space ships, rotating in the sky and pulsing with life, and had the distinct feeling that I wasgoing to be taken up into them.

In other words, I was having what could easily be interpreted as an alien-abduction experience - while in the grip of the same kind of visions that inspired our ancestors to create their cave paintings tens of thousands of years ago.

Could it be that spirits, fairies and aliens are really all manifestations of the same supernatural entities, and that human beings can perceive them when - knowingly or unknowingly - they enter the right kind of trance?

If so, then we might expect there to be an overlap in the way that people are said to have interacted with these beings over the centuries. And sure enough, when I examined the evidence, I was taken aback by the extent of the common ground.

Consider, for example, the way that alien abductees describe ascending to UFOs. They talk of floating, levitating or gliding upwards, often enclosed inside a beam of light, like ropes or wires, that fasten onto their bodies and haul them into the sky.

Almost exactly the same language appears in the testimony of shamans, gathered by anthropologists, as they describe their psychic journeys into the spirit world.

A typical account comes from the Kalahari in Africa, where a shaman describes how performing a ritualistic dance enables him to see 'lines or strings of light that go up into the sky ... they are white in colour or shiny like silver metal ... you just float away with that rope'.

Other shamans - from as far apart as Siberia, Australia and North America - talk of these 'ropes' or 'cords' being let down by boats, birds or 'flying shields'.

As I read these accounts there were often moments when I wasn't sure whether I was reading a shamans testimony or a UFO report.

I discovered parallels of a far more disturbing kind when I looked at the many cave paintings throughout the world which depict what appear to be wounded men.

Shot through with arrows and spears like prehistoric St Sebastians, these are believed to symbolise the suffering of shamans undergoing the journey into the otherworld - an ordeal described vividly by tribes who still practise shamanism today.

They portray it as an agonising process in which shamans must undergo a symbolic death and then resurrection.

They talk of black devils who thrust lances through the shaman's head, pierce his neck and tongue and dismember his body before throwing the pieces in different directions.

These accounts forcefully remind me of my own sensations of being smashed and dismembered when I carried out my early trance experiments in Bath. But they are also very similar to the distressing experiences reported by supposed alien abductees.

These abductees consistently describe being subjected to painful and incomprehensible surgical procedures. Some of the most disturbing stories have been reported by Dr John Mack, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who interviewed many people who believed they had been abducted.

His patients included 'Catherine' who described a metal instrument 'maybe a foot long' being inserted about six inches into one of her nostrils.

'I could feel something breaking in my head,' she claimed. 'The alien broke something to get it through, to get into my brain. I don't know what it was. I want to know if it's going to heal.'

Another of Mack's patients, 'Eva', saw a grey spaceship, panicked, blacked out, then found herself on a table in a room with two beings inspecting her. 'I was in a foetal position, my back to them. They were doing something to my spine. My entire spine was tingling and cold. It was awful. It felt as though they were going inside my body with some very sharp instruments and inserting it between my flesh and my skin.

In yet another extraordinary link, John Mack's research also reveals the frequency with which abductees describe aliens as having both humanoid and animal characteristics.

As Mack puts it, the aliens 'appear to be consummate shape-shifters', and often make their first appearance as owls, eagles, monkeys or even deer before transforming into something more closely resembling human form.

Once again, we are back with the therianthropes first seen in prehistoric cave art. So what are we to make of this dense web of connections running from prehistoric shamanism through religion, folklore and fairytales to UFOs?

To date, scientists have been unable to offer any convincing theory. Some have tried to suggest that the links are somehow generated by a 'library' of extraordinarily details mental images, sensations and information which as hard-wired into our brains.

They speculate that it is the same library for all of us, and that it can be accessed only in altered states of consciousness.

In that case, however, we would need to explain not only how such an eerie and otherworldly mental archive was compiled in the first place, but also why it is so important - presumably to our survival - that evolution has gone to the trouble of retaining it.

Certainly, if its contents are purely imaginary, it is very difficult to see how it would have conferred any evolutionary advantage - rendering us vulnerable in the real world as we concentrated on non-real things instead.

On the other hand, if the shamanic view of the world is right and supernatural beings are real and can give us guidance and help in our lives on earth, then we can see immediately how knowing about them would have vastly increased our ancestors chances of survival.

In my view, it is beyond serious doubt that spirits, fairies and aliens are each locally customised adaptations of the same extremely puzzling and mysterious core phenomenon, perceived according to the prevailing culture and preconceptions of their time.

Of course, if we do accept that such spirits are real, and that they have found ways and a variety of quasi-physical forms - of which 'aliens' are only the most recent - in which to manifest themselves in our material universe, then this poses some equally difficult questions.

What business do they have with us? Why are they here?