By KEN KORCZAK
Prolific British author & researcher makes intriguing case for nonhuman intelligence leveraging plasma formations as UFOs & embodied manifestations
LIGHTQUEST by British journalist & author ANDREW COLLINS is an intriguing “UFO book” for the innovative ideas it presents on the nature of nonhuman “plasma beings” — but also for the author’s contrarian views on some elements of UFO beliefs that are “sacred” to many.
The latter will ruffle some feathers among the general ranks of the ufology brethren. Whatever the case, Collins’s approach is refreshing, even when traveling some familiar ground. He waxes downright scintillating when he offers all-new ideas about “The Phenomenon.”
Note that Collins has published some 15 books. He is sometimes compared to fellow Brit Graham Hancock because he favors the topic of “alternative archaeology” speculation. He’s perhaps best known for the latter. Collins also leads tours to ancient sites like Göbekli Tepe and the Egyptian pyramids.
Among Collin’s best-known books are The Cygnus Mystery, The Cygnus Key, Göbekli Tepe: Genesis of the Gods, Origins of the Gods and From the Ashes of Angels. In this book, LightQuest, Collins effectively takes a favorite foil of ardent UFO skeptics and turns it back on them.
What we’re talking about here is plasma — as in the natural formations of plasmatic balls or orbs of light energy, some of which may form as a byproduct of certain geological processes beneath the earth’s surface and atmospheric effects akin to “ball lightening” and other rare atmospheric ionization reactions.
As Collins points out, hard-core skeptics, such as the late Philip Klass, frequently trotted out plasma as a favorite “go-to explanation” for mysterious lights manifesting in bizarre patterns across the sky and landscape.
That was the case whether it was the famous “Foo Fighters” which dogged military aircraft during World War II or the thousands of encounters with globes or saucer-shaped objects on a lonely road in some remote location as reported by unsuspecting motorists.
Klass often maintained the gullible observers were mistaking naturally explainable emissions of plasma light — including stuff like J. Allen Hynek’s infamous “swamp gas” — for otherworldly aircraft or some other paranormal phenomena. Klass often suggested that natural plasmas can act in weird and unexpected ways, giving the impression of alien intelligence operating behind them. The latter, incidentally, was a major assertion of the much-reviled-by-ufologists Condon Report completed in 1968.
Well, Andrew Collins agrees that plasma lights may often be natural formations that can be generated by earth-bound and inter-atmospheric processes. However, he contends there is much more to the story.
One of the most popular plasma formation theories is that of earthquake lights. The theory behind this is that tectonic pressures on certain types of rock formations beneath the earth can emit powerful balls of plasma energy that rise above the ground and float around in the atmosphere. This phenomenon was leveraged by American-Canadian researcher Michael Persinger Ph.D. to explain a lot of sensational UFO cases, including the famous 1979 Deputy Val Johnson incident in which his police car was “rammed by a UFO.” The object in question was a large 4-to-6-feet ball of light energy.
Note: I recently “re-opened” the Val Johnson case and wrote a 6-part in-depth series in which I uncovered 5 new witnesses, including contracting with a remote viewer to gain further incite to the object that struck Val Johnon’s car. I provide proof that the case could not have been a hoax and scads of other new information surrounding the event. You can read an installment of my investigative series for free here on Flying Saucer Journalist here: UFO RAMS COP CAR.
Whatever the case, the earthquake lights theory is on shaky ground (pun intended) — even though such plasma formations have even been recreated in a laboratory setting by applying immense pressure tools to certain kinds of rocks until they burst forth plasma emissions. But whether this happens out in nature is still a theory up for grabs. However, there are plenty of other candidates for natural explanations for observed balls of light and/or plasma formation.
One of the best discussions of this is in book titled Dark Matter Monsters by noted sociologist Simeon Hein Ph.D. (SEE MY REVIEW) He proposes a number of innovative catalysts — such as formations of coherent energy, cold fusion and more — to account for free-floating plasma orbs or plasmas of other shapes.
Collins grasps the various plasma concepts and takes it all a step further — or perhaps I should say, several miles further — by suggesting that these natural plasma emissions might actually play host to bona fide nonhuman and intelligent life forms — or “Light Beings” — who leverage the plasma state to enter our normal dimensional plane of existence for short or sometimes extended periods of time.
If it sounds farfetched, I say read the book: Collins does a credible job of providing a solid theoretical model of how a natural plasma formation could be the “temporary body” of trans-human life forms. He enlists the theory of quantum entanglement and also invokes physicist David Bohm’s “implicate order” as a supporting framework for how all this could come together.
He also trots out a fascinating scenario in which DNA-like structures have been scientifically observed to form spontaneously inside certain kinds of light formations. Collins’ theories are further fortified with case studies — both famous incidents, such as the Barney and Betty Hill abduction, and the amazing events which took place at the Rendlesham military base in the U.K. — as well as lesser-known cases of abduction that are not widely known.
One of those lesser-known cases found especially captivating. Collins describes for us a bizarre encounter that occurred in the summer of 1994 on top of England’s famous Neolithic site, the human-made “chalk mound” known as Silbury Hill near Avebury, Wiltshire.
Silbury Hill is well known to be a mega-hot location for sighting UFOs. Wiltshire, of course, is practically ground zero for crop circle formations and the most famous location in the world for that phenomenon.
Anyway, Collins tells of a couple, “Paul” and “Sonya,” who decided to spend the afternoon climbing Silbury Hill. As a splendidly inviting summer evening approached, the couple decided to stay until dark so they could enjoy some stargazing.
After nighttime set in, Paul and Sonya were stunned to see two “glowing spheres” approaching them. As the objects came closer, they discerned each sphere was dangling beneath them pyramid or tetrahedron-like structures.
But what really baked their noodles is what they could see inside the spheres — there appeared to be a human form in the center of each one! They looked like people of short stature, about four to 4.5 feet tall, who were sitting in meditation, like monks sitting in a lotus position.
It appeared that “meditating aliens” were riding around inside light spheres that — for some reason — were floating about the English countryside. What Paul and Sonya saw next was even more amazing. I won’t say anymore because I don’t want to give too much away. This is one of the stories in LightQuest that makes this an intriguing and worthwhile read.
ROSWELL IS A SHAM, SAYS COLLINS
In LightQuest, Collins also takes on the most hallowed of UFO icons, the famous Roswell UFO Crash. It was on a 2009 trip to Roswell, New Mexico, that Collins found himself touring the Roswell International UFO Museum and Research Center.
Among the displays were facsimiles of the Roswell Daily Record issue of July 8, 1947, with the headline that blasted out to the world that the U.S. Army had recovered a “flying disk.” Collins opted to continue reading deeper into the paper and then moved on to the July 9 headline which issued the infamous “correction,” stating that the “flying disk” had now been determined to be a “weather balloon.”
But then, buried on Page 3 of the July 9 issue, Collins spotted something that caused him, in his words, “great confusion.” It was an interview with Mac Brazel, the rancher who first encountered the debris in the desert and reported it to the military.
To make a long story short, Brazel made two damning statements to reporters:
-> That he discovered the wreckage on June 14 — a full 23 days before eyewitnesses claimed to have seen “a big glowing object” shaped like “two inverted saucers faced mouth-to-mouth” that may have exploded over the skies of the desert on July 2. — and this is proposed to be the “flying saucer” that crashed. Thus, the eyewitness account does not match the timeline of when Brazel found the debris.
-> Mac Brazel, in no uncertain terms, describes that what he saw scattered on the ground was “bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, and rather tough paper and sticks.”
Note that 10 days after Brazel found the wreckage on June 14, pilot Kenneth Arnold made his historic report of sighting nine, shiny unidentified flying objects cruising near Mt. Rainier. So that was June 24.
Arnold described the objects as sort of boomerang-shaped but that their flight pattern resembled the way a “saucer skips across the water.” The press leveraged this description to coin the term “flying saucer,” even though Arnold never said the objects he saw looked like flying saucers.
However, the next three weeks produced worldwide breathless headlines of the remarkable Kenneth Arnold sightings of “flying saucers” which the pilot had estimated were traveling at 1,200 mph. Collins argues that it was only after three weeks of sensational press reports of the new flying saucer phenomenon that Mac Brazel casually made the statement, “Maybe I found the remains of one of these.”
Collins suggests that Brazel was merely making a sort of jokey, off-the-cuff remark because the sensational “flying saucer” story had been dominating the press for three weeks.
And it was those three weeks that were between the time he discovered the debris and the time he reported it on July 7 to Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox. Brazel waited three weeks to report because the wreckage he found simply wasn’t that impressive.
Again, I won’t give away more except to say that Collins starts with the troubling statements of Mac Brazel and the dicey timeline of events, and he proceeds to reel out problematic item after item associated with the “Roswell Mythology” that blossomed over the ensuing decades.
I’ll say that reading Collins’s view on Roswell might give even the most ardent of Roswell UFO story advocates pause. Agree or disagree, it’s a well-made argument based on copious amounts of meticulous and granular data points— a hallmark of the Andrew Collins style across his 15 books.
HYPNOTIC REGRESSION OF ALIEN ABDUCTEES
I also think Collins gets some things wrong in LightQuest, such as his conclusion that hypnotic regression is, by-and-large, unreliable in retrieving memories of “lost time” events as the result of abduction scenarios.
Admittedly, for a long time, I was in complete agreement with Collins about the quality of information gleaned via hypnosis — but I’ve since changed my mind.
One reason my view evolved was reading the works of Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, especially his book, Abduction. Mack makes a powerfully persuasive argument in support of hypnosis as a legitimate investigation tool and spells out why. In Abduction, Mack said the criticisms of hypnotic-obtained accounts “cannot be supported.” There is also the first-known UFO abduction case of Barney and Betty Hill. They were hypnotized by the world-renowned hypnosis expert, Dr. Benjamin Simon.
I would urge all to read or review the marvelous book, Captured: The Barney and Betty Hill UFO Experience written by the niece of Betty Hill, Kathy Marden, along with co-author, the famed and late UFO researcher Stanton Friedman.
The Hills were extensively hypnotized by Dr. Simon who was an hardened nonbeliever in UFOs. Furthermore, I read the transcripts of Betty & Barney’s sessions, and I found several incidents in which Dr. Simon actively prompted them to admit that what they were seeing was not real and the product of fantasy.
In other words, Simon’s bias was the opposite scenario of what skeptics accuse UFO hypnotists of doing! The skeptics say that the UFO-believer hypnotist is consciously or subconsciously “inserting” or “seeding” the idea of aliens and UFOs into the mind of the subject, as in: “So after you saw the UFO, did you see aliens?”
But as I said, Dr. Simon did the exact opposite with the Hills. At times he urges and even implores Barney Hill to admit or realize that what he perceived was “a dream or fantasy” — but he could not shake Barney loose.
Finally: I say try my “transcript comparison test.”
That is, find a script of a subject who relates UFO memories under hypnosis and compare it with the account of a person who is telling his or her story from fully awake conscious memory and who has never been hypnotized.
If the scripts are not labeled as “hypnotism-obtained” and “fully awake memory obtained” — I defy anyone to discern a significant difference. The fact is that hypnotically regressed UFO witness stories are indistinguishable from the narratives and tenor of stories of UFO experiencers who are never hypnotized.
So, I think Collins is mostly wrong on the hypnotic memory recovery issue — but again, he makes worthy arguments based on intelligent information and data points. Whatever the case, LightQuest is a top-notch read for anyone interested in the UFO phenomenon.
Even those well-versed in ufology and who have consumed scads of UFO literature over decades (like me) may learn something new or maybe see this most enigmatic and confounding of subjects in a new light (pun intended).
NOTE: For more in-depth of UFO books, please see: KEN-ON-MEDIUM