We Are Not Alone (?)

Maitreya is coming to save us.

Maitreya?

In a word, God; the new god, the god running the UFOs and drawing crop circles and doing a lot of other stuff that modern science has not yet completely explained.

Those of us who attended the presentation at the Philo Grange last Wednesday — about 30 souls in all — have been given the news and now it’s our responsibility to spread it, to get everyone ready for Maitreya.

The UFO presentation was sponsored by the Mendocino Environmental Center through Share International Magazine and presented by Bill Allen, who lives with his wife and daughter on Greenwood Ridge. For those of us who attended the UFO presentation out of an old-fashioned fascination with flying saucers and the even more primitive love of a scary story on an idle summer evening, the discovery that it was a going to be a religious experience, a revivalist-type sermon, aimed at reaping converts to the new faith, was something of a disappointment. A few people even walked out.

“The time is very near,” Allen said. “That’s why we’ve been seeing all this activity in UFOs recently. Over the past two years, there has been a 70% increase in UFO sightings.”

There has? Jeeze, I need to get out more. I haven’t seen any of ‘em!

Allen’s lecture was accompanied by a slide show of the mysterious visitors. The photos were pretty amazing. Some were cigar-shaped “Mother Ships,” others amorphous blobs of colored light; a few resembled botched rockets gone haywire, spiraling into a fizzle.

Members of the audience found these slides convincing, to judge by their gasps, and ooohs, and ahhhs. But far better photo-shopping is done on TV commercials every day, and all those TV visuals get is a hoot of derision. Don't even mention the visual magic cranked out by the movie industry these days. Perhaps the visuals with even more believers are those of Building 7 and the World Trade Center.

UFO photos often are the result, Allen assured us, of forces the photographer was unaware of. The image couldn’t be seen by the naked eye, but turned up on the processed film. And some of the spaceships tend to be ephemeral, which is to say you can see through them. One photo snapped by a bloke through his windshield “proved” the point. A drawing of a Buck Rogers era rocket ship lying on the dashboard of the car was reflected in the glass so that a shot of the sky through the windshield made a compelling piece of evidence — to at least one audience member, that is: Ms. Olivia Allen, the preacher’s beautiful and devoted daughter.

“The very near future will prove the veracity of this wisdom,” Allen said in reference to his contention that all philosophy, science and religion is based on visits to Earth from emissaries sent by Maitreya, traveling here in spaceships of various substances from the “Etheric Plane.” What scientists call “dark matter,” the stuff they [scientists] cannot detect, seems to be a favorite material for building these inter-planetary vehicles. And, here again, I was disappointed by the enlightenment that all these ETs are coming from relatively nearby Venus and Mars; I would have thought they were more inter-galactic, more widely traveled, more cosmopolitan, if you will.

Of course the wicked mainstream press, along with all myriad other deficiencies and outright failure to fully inform the public, have turned a blind eye to UFOs.

One Peter Davenport of Seattle has created what he calls The Disclosure Project, calling on the US government to release thousands of volumes of documents of UFO sightings. Mr. Allen used a famous quote in this context, the one from Claude Cockburn, about not believing a rumor until it is officially denied, and he said, “This increase in sightings is a prelude to something big and we’re calling on the president for full disclosure…”

The Canadian government in Ottowa seems more tractable on the UFO subject. Allen said that a Canadian member of Parliament, Terry Hansen, along with the US Ambassador, Wilber Smith, “spilled the beans.” This caused the CIA to get involved — those notorious busybodies — and everything’s been covered up, with plenty of media complicity to go around, the New York Times taking the lion’s share of the blame, as usual.

“The elite media had stopped covering UFOs by 1975,” Allen said, “and the alternative media steered clear as well — this collusion is still going on, but there’s no need any longer, because the subject is given the status of a taboo and only fringe groups and silly people talk about it.”

Allen showed some more slides aimed at contradicting the debunking efforts of the media. One was a great huge cigar-shaped Mother Ship picked up by Google Earth hovering over the Australian Outback. One over Spain looked like a Lamborgini. Another lingering over Hunter’s Point in San Francisco looked like something out of Grandma’s china hutch. And one taken through the sun roof of a car looked like the flash bounced off the glass.

“Clouds are not what they seem,” Allen said. “Here are some slides of clouds that are actually huge spacecraft.” Anyone but an UFO expert would have sworn that the next series of slides were pictures of clouds over popular geographical landmarks like Mt. Fuji, Mt. Shasta, Monument Valley, Brighton Beach. However, these clouds did have peculiar attributes — they weren’t exactly your picture postcard type clouds, and I’ll be darned if I can look at a cloud, the way I used to, and imagine that it is anything but a UFO! Allen's changed my way of seeing!

“Authorities," Allen continued, "believe we, will be contacted by the aliens in the next 20 years. But they don’t exist, officially.”

Why do we have to wait?

“Non-interference is one of the rules of the universe,” Allen explained.

I must have been standing behind the door when they passed out the Rules of the Universe, because this was the first time I’d ever heard of such a thing. But, anyhow, Maitreya and His ETs are not allowed to just jump in and save us from ourselves because of the non-interference rule. “Before Lord Maitreya can come the way must be prepared. We have to learn to live in peace and harmony, then Maitreya and the ETs can come down and land, and share with us all their amazing technology…”

Peace and harmony don't seem poised to prevail on Earth, but we live in hope. But when it comes, I imagine it will be something like Christmas with gifts like Priuses that can fly to Venus and back on a whim, and iPhones that hover right before your face — look Mom: no hands!

At this point, about halfway in his lecture, Mr. Allen got into the crop circles phenomenon. It's going on 25 years since the crop circles sensation began in Wiltshire, England. Carl Sagan ultimately debunked the theory that these things were caused by UFOs. Sagan, in a syndicated newspaper column in Parade Magazine, revealed that two fun-loving Englishmen named Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, residents of Southampton, had come up with the idea of a crop circle hoax in a pub over a pint of stout. They went to a lot of trouble, and their circles were quite fetching, but created right there in Wiltshire. But soon, others with less artistic ability, tried their hand at it; the results looked more like a couple of drunks had a roll in the hay. A British tabloid paid 100 pounds sterling to “Doug and Dave” to go out into a grain field with a length of 2x4 board and prove that convincing crop circles could not have been made by mortals.

There were, as it happened, a couple of Brits in the Grange audience. One of them tried to ask a question, but was ignored. “We’re not going to take any questions,” Allen said. “But let’s get real: these crop circles were caused by an energy vortex in the grain.”

When Allen said this, the two Brits got up and left.

“These crop circles are a gift to us, for the New Age. It’s something no corporations can monopolize,” Allen continued.

He then showed a brief video: flying saucers zoomed over a grain field, crop circles bloomed. “This is real,” Allen said. “And it’s being suppressed. Why? To protect the public from mass panic? Well, we think there’s a spiritual message to the UFOs.”

From this point on, the presentation became more and more dogmatic, and as the various high priests and gurus of this new religion were introduced, the slides became more and more “spiritual.” A long inspirational series of bright, colorful lights ensued as the talk went into how these UFOs were like the Star of Bethlehem, and how Maitreya’s wish to clean up our atmosphere, our oceans and rivers, our landfills, all the messes we’ve made of our planet that were being ignored by the Powers That Be.

It turns out that the clergy of this new religion have been thwarted in their attempts to bring Maitreya’s good works to Earth because of, you guessed it, the damned old ruling class, the 1%, the International Community that wants Institutional Control; in short, the Rich.

“It’s all about money and control,” Allen said. “But it’s coming to an end. The Masters are in communication. All the great philosophers, theologians, and artists — they’re all the disciples of these ETs and now, the Eldest One, The One Awaited, Maitreya — He’s about to make his entry. But if we continue to sin, he will let us destroy ourselves. What we have to do now is prepare the way for Him by getting him on a major TV network during prime time …”

During this part of the lecture the slides came faster and faster, showing brilliant lights over the Temple of the Mount in Jeruselem, St. Patrick’s in Dublin, the Little Red Schoolhouse in Boonville.

“…for a worldwide telecast!”

Afterwards, there was much excited chat about the program as attendees visited the tables set up to dispense literature on Maitreya’s teachings and priorities, but this reporter was more interested in getting outside to see for myself a real honest-to-god UFO. I don’t know what it is, but a week later I still haven't seen one.