DOASKDOTELL BOOK REVIEW of Brown’s Cosmic Voyage and Corso’s The Day After Roswell

Author (or Editor): Brown, Courtney, Ph. D

Title: Cosmic Voyage: A Scientific Discovery of Extraterrestrials Visiting Earth

Fiction? N

Publisher:  Dutton

Date: 1994; 1996

ISBN:  0-525-94098-7

Series Name:

Physical description:

Relevance to doaskdotell    extraterrestrials

Review:

Book Review of Cosmic Voyage: A Scientific Discovery of Extraterrestrials Visiting Earth

By Courtney Brown, Ph. D. New York: Dutton, 1996, ISBN 0-525-94098-7

And Philip J. Corso, The Day after Roswell

I start a page on my site intended to review some of the literature on claims about extraterrestrial visits and possibly extraterrestrial intervention in the origin of man (see Walt Becker’s novel The Link) at various points around the world, maybe even the rise of Atlantis and before that Lemuria. 

Before anyone cackles at this topic, compared to the rest of the site, I think that ultimately I can show that our ideas about individualism and morality relate back to religious and spiritual ideas and even scientific controversies over creationism or the reason for civilization.

Courtney Brown is reported to be a political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta, and founder of the Farsight Institute.  His book has a slick organization, consisting of diaries of “remote viewings” and subsequent discussions about various topics, but his actual material is often discursive and murky. 

Nevertheless, some of his claims are interesting. Purportedly, the federal government and private industry have set up a Monroe Institute to study the paranormal, with a major property in Faber, Va., a short distance off of US 29 about 25 miles south of Charlottesville.  I have driven by what I believe to be the property, and seen a large estate, apparently shielded by an almost impassable access way. I did not see the gray shed that he mentions. 

Anyway, his fundamental claims are that there was indeed a flourishing civilization on Mars, and that remnants of it survive underground today and may have provided some of our own ancestry (I wonder about the Basques here).  More important is the inter-galactic civilization of the Greys, who sometimes manifest themselves as the stereotyped big-eyed genderless aliens of “alien autopsy” lore.  But the Greys reportedly really live in “sub-space”—a multidimensional existence that can cross time.  It may be like claiming that a human being exists in his dreams as well as in his everyday world.  It may even be like claiming that other structures in our universe that undergo a death and rebirth cycle (supernovae and new stars) are in some sense conscious of themselves.  Some of his writing reminds me of Clive Barker’s idea of “reconciliation” as presented in his novel Imajica.  I actually take this seriously. On no fewer than two occasions I believe I have witnesses Greys myself.

The technique of “remote viewing” (“SRV”, a bit akin to astral projection) is approached in several stages, supposedly taught in training sessions at the Monroe Institute and sometimes even to selected members of the military.  The first is a transcendental mediation technique, complete with special mantra and the use of certain pitches and sounds, the second a series of special tape listening sessions, and the last is the Scientific Remote Viewing itself, which I can best describe as sounding like a way of recording dreams (the 1984 film Dreamscape).  The information conveyed (and her I recall Jeffrey Mishlove’s 1976 book The Roots of Consciousness and the Bell Theorem concerning the relationship between information and energy, as well as Itzhak Bentov’s Staking The Wild Pendulum in 1977 and Orest Bedrij’s One) falls into six categories, the most important being “monitored, viewer blind and monitor front-loaded,”  and fitting together like an IT systems test plan. A couple of other terms: “aesthetic impression” (“AI”) and “analytic overlay” (“AOL” ironically!!) as a mental conclusion of an SRV session.

Brown gives his insights on a variety of topics, including religious leaders (Jesus and Buddha) as well as a rather non-committal account of the Roswell, New Mexico “saucer crash” in 1947.

Now, on “Larry King Live” on March 6, 2001 someone says that the CIA stopped playing with remote viewing in 1995.  Well, I have my own ideas, the self-effacing rituals—tribunals-- that could really make it work to be developed in fiction.  With the CIA you never know, do you.  Anyway, that manor in Virginia still looked interesting in 1997.

The Day After Roswell, by Col. Philip J. Corso (Ret), New York, Pocket Books, 1997, ISBN 0-671-00461-1.

I’ve always expected Hollywood to do the Roswell story big.  In fact, Viacom did a Cable Film in 1995, and there is Timothy Johnson’s documentary, 6 Days in Roswell (2000). (I saw the first of these films years ago but I haven’t seen Tim’s film yet, so I’ll let his website speak for itself.) It megabucks were to be spent on this by, say a Dreamworks or a New Line Cinema, maybe this book could be a good driver for it. (There was an NBC TV movie in 1996 about the “Majestic” coverup group—and the name of the film escapes me now, bit it was not convincing.  And we’ve all seen the black-and-white videos of the alien autopsies with the serious questions about their authenticity.)

Corso claims to have gotten into the Roswell incident tangentially at first, when he supposedly saw the carts with “alien bodies” being shipped through Fort Reilly, Kansas. Later he would be assigned to the Pentagon and mysteriously assigned the task of watching the documents on this incident. He would worm his way into the intelligence community, which he describes very skillfully as a perpetual motion machine. The Cold War—something that so much shaped my own young manhood and my two attempts at coming out as in DADT Chapter 1 and 3)—is viewed as a layer build upon secret missile defenses against the aliens.  Then, most of the late twentieth century technologies would suddenly spring up like mushrooms as a result of technology harvested from the crafts and surreptitiously passed on to business.  The most interest of these would be semiconductors, and eventually the PC and Internet revolution that makes this web site possible.  If so, this is a big irony—that the outcome would be personal self-expression and the gradual demise of organizational politicking, rather than settlement of other planets—something that requires big time politics.

I can’t yet judge the reasonable of his claims.  There are some problems with his dates (1961, Jan. 20, marked the start of the Kennedy Administration but in one place he seems to think that this time is still in the Eisenhower years.)  I do know from documents that I saw in the Pentagon (when I was stationed there in 1968) that the Cold War dangers were even greater than most of us know.

I have personally seen perhaps one UFO (a red and green object hanging in the sky) over Tonopah, Arizona in April 1978. All the others were probably just satellites. 

And I’ll say, if I somehow became president, and found the “truth” I would go ahead and “tell.”  (Do Ask, Do Tell.)  Well, what “telling” means an alien invasion?  Well, personal honor is an absolute, isn’t it.

Six Days in Roswell (1999, at the 2000 Minneapolis-St. Paul international film festival), from Benevolent Authority Films, directed by Timothy B. Johnson, is a narrative documentary (85 min, PG) of a homebody’s (Richard Cronfeld, apparently playing himself) taking a bus trip from his native Minneapolis to Roswell for the UFO festival in July 1997. In fact, the protagonist’s domestic personality is most striking: he lives at home and takes care of his ailing mom, works in an electronics shop and expects little—never having left Minnesota until this trip comes up.  Getting abducted would make him somebody. Cronfeld is homey enough to have to barter-work off his camper rental in Roswell (to avoid paying $200 a night).  

In 1998, I visited Roswell myself, including the UFO museums and the Roswell crash site 30 miles away. I also visited the Alien Inn near Area 57 in Nevada in 2000, and I’ll say that at a rest stop along I-8 on the way to Yuma on that trip I lost an hour with no explanation. I’ve seen one other major UFO myself, above Tonopah Arizona (above the Fry saucer city, now dismantled), a red and green triangular hovering thing back in 1978.  In 1992 I drove past the biological research lab at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio.  And I visites rgw SAC museum in Omaha in 1982.  So I’ve been to these places and the film makes it pretty real.  It’s all on location, down to the shot of downtown Minneapolis from Burnsville on I-35 as they’re “on the way.” 

The film presents the theories—the 1994 release that the Air Force was using crash dummies, for example, and that there had been various secret Cold War experiments. There is a curious pro-government demonstration in one scene.   The mylar-metal of Jesse Marcel is mentioned. There’s an off-off-off-Broadway musical that dramatizes the aliens.  I can’t say how convincing it all is, but it’s a good introduction for the novice.

When will the Roswell story attract the attention of the big-money producers at Disney or at AOL Time Warner studios? This seems like a good topic for Oliver Stone, or maybe Jerry Bruckheimer.

The History Channel has presented a Roswell: Case Closed program, which seems to explain Roswell in terms of the Air Force experiments. However, the Sci-Fi Channel offers a two-hour film The Roswell Crash: Starling New Evidence (2002, dir. Melissa Jo Peltier) narrated by Bryant Gumbel. This film presents some recent soil or site evidence from the Foster Ranch, as well as more “eyewitness” accounts of the government’s behavior after the incident, as if the government is waiting for witnesses to die off. I would like to be able to do a detailed comparison of the two sides and come to an objective conclusion. Maybe, some day.