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the Oahspe bible or the Book of Urantia, two accounts of early history similarly "inspired" by
divine intelligence. The Oahspe bible is an account of the origins and antiquity of mankind and
contains many references to the Red Men. It was recieved "psychically" by John Ballou Newbrough
about 1881, and it originated with Shining Beings whom he called angels.
It is futile to engage in a debate concerning the truth or falsity of the statements made by Joseph
Smith. We are looking here for indications of a higher order, and we can define as a miracle any
event, real or imagined or even faked, which creates certain paranormal but verifiable effects. The
transformation of an ordinary farmboy from rural New York State into an unchallenged leader of
multitudes is an unusual fact that deserves attention even if we doubt the story. When we trace the
turning point of this man's life to the sighting of a strange light and to contact with an entity inside
the light, I believe the account needs to be preserved along with those we have already found in
other faiths and other lands.
Evans-Wentz was intrigued by Joseph Smith's very first vision, which was not an apparition of
Angel Moroni but of two entities whose names he was not privileged to learn. This took place as the
fourteen-year-old Smith was praying in a wood, as related in the book The Pearl of Great Price:
I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which
descended gradually until it fell upon me.... When the light rested on me I saw two
personages, whose brightness and glory defy all descriptions, standing above me in the air.
One of them spake unto me.
As the translator of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Evans-Wentz recognized that the role played by
Smith in bringing out the Book of Mormon was similar to that of the Tertons, the "takers-out" of
secreted scriptures in Tibet. However, the Book of Mormon claims to be the "sacred history of
ancient America." It states that the Indians are the remnant of an Israelite tribe that settled in
America six hundred years before Christ. This is a difficult statement to take seriously in the light of
modern anthropology. Thus we are again confronted with a mixture of certainty and absurdity, of
fact and fantasy. Were such messages deliberately given to isolate the believers from the society
around them?
In an article published in the April 1974 issue of Occult magazine, Jerome Clark and Loren
Coleman point out that the history of Mormonism also contains many references to three mysteious
beings said to be three of Christ's American Apostles, who asked to be allowed to remain on earth
until his Second Coming. The three "Nephites" have been seen several times since the days of
Joseph Smith and form an interesting and colorful counterpart to the Three Men in Black of modern
UFO lore. These Nephites are sometimes seen singly, and they perform miracles and healings. In
one of the stories quoted by Clark and Coleman, a Utah woman named Squires, who was expecting
the return of her husband and had seen no one around her house while drawing water from the well
a minute before, suddenly found herself confronted with a gray-haired man wearing a long white
beard, who requested something to eat and soon remarked that "she was not well." When she
acknowledged that indeed she was suffering from a pain under her shoulder, the unknown man
replied: "God bless you, Sister. You will never want for anything again. You will always be blessed
with plenty." He walked out the door, but when Mrs. Squires followed him outside he had vanished,
and she could not see where he had gone. The date of the incident is given as the summer of 1874.
Her health and money problems disappeared soon after, and she lived to the age of eighty-nine.
A Unified Theory of Apparitions
In many UFO stories of the olden days, the witnesses thought they had seen angels from God and
for this reason never bothered to report their experiences. Others thought they had seen devils. The
difference may be small. Commenting on the childhood experiences of Edgar Cayce and Uri Geller,
a British researcher named Peter Rogerson has reminded me that similar stories were common in
accounts of mediums of various kinds. He wrote to me that:
Andrew Jackson Davis, "The Poughkeepsie Seer," claimed to have met a mystical personage
who gave him a staff in which there were little boxes which gave "cures to various
diseases." The account follows the classical pattern of the evolution of the shaman. Mircea
Eliade in his book Shamanism records the words of various shamans and how they became
aware of the shamanistic powers. Accounts are often of the nature "I was washing by the
river when a great ball of fire came down from the sky, it entered me, then I knew I was to
become a shaman."
Since the publication of my earlier books, I have recieved many interesting letters along similar
lines. "Until now I thought I had seen a messenger from Heaven," writes one witness. "I understand,
having read your book, that I had witnessed a UFO." Some of the stories are strange yet consistent
enough to become the nucleus of a new religious movement if the witness were of the proper
psychological inclination. Perhaps only one close encounter in ten thousand starts a new faith, a
new sect, or a new belief. When the right combination of social and psychological conditions is [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]