UFOs Are Real!

Little Green Researcher Tells All!

John White '61 builds career on explaining the Unexplainable

CONFERENCE IS A CONFERENCE. At heart they are all the same. Lights go up, lights go down. Slides need focus. Voices need amplification. This conference, on a weekend last autumn outside New Haven, Connecticut, had all the appearances of a normal conference. People came from around the country. They were earnest and committed, taking notes, huddling in hushed cabals in hallways, having drinks in the hotel bar. They gave lectures, ran videos during breaks. They wore flash-silver bolos and scratchy blazers. They were fat and rail-thin, elderly and approaching middle-age. There were even two Dartmouth undergraduates down from Hanover.

Aliens, however, were the subject. And not just on the projector screen—for this conference, this gathering of the tribe, was close encounters of a confused kind; conspiracy theorists, blurry photographs, and "alien hunters" had invaded the conference rooms and hallways of the Holiday Inn. This was two days of hybrids and "grays" and crop circles and alien abductions and Native American traditions, two days about the Unidentified Fear of the great Out-there.

At times the conference veered into the surreal. A heated discussion ensued about the architecture of spaceship design, how in the 1950s flying saucers looked like cat-milk saucers, but how recent aliens have been piloting craft in the forms of isosceles triangles or giant cigars or even, as one woman stood and related, a mile-long glowing hula-hoop spinning up a beach. Speakers told, in the ritual of Alcoholics Anonymous revelations, of their own abduction: "Hi, my name is Dan and I was abducted. "Edgar Mitchell, the pilot of Apollo 14 and sixth man to land on the moon, added his voice to those who believe in the presence of extra-terrestrials on earth.

Presiding over "The UFO Experience—What Are They? Why Are They Here? Where Do They Come From?: A Weekend with Researchers and Contactees," was John White '61. "It's a weekend of educational lectures," said White, dressed in a chalk-striped dark suit set off by a bright blue Jetsons-ish spaceship necktie. "But the conference is equally a supportive place, where people aren't exposed to ridicule. 'Star People,' those who believe their true home is not Earth but some other planet, find the conference helpful to them. People 'come out of the closet' here and share their experiences."

Out of the house is White. He says he has experienced extrasensory perception. He has walked barefoot across a ten-foot pile of burning coals in Connecticut. He has seen a UFO, in upstate New York. ("It was rectangular, self-illuminating, and hovered about 150 feet above the ground. We were about a quarter of a mile away. Then it instantly changed dimensions by a factor of three, becoming three times as long. We chased after it but came upon a swamp and wood lot which blocked us from seeing it again. It didn't have a Martian license plate, but I was absolutely convinced it was of non-human origin.")

Paranormality as an interest was spurred in his sophomore year at Dartmouth. White was white bread, an ordinary student from Connecticut, English major, ROTC, a social member of the mostly Jewish Pi Lam fraternity. One evening while studying in his room in South Frayerweather, he had a "nadir experience." He remembers "falling into a deep meditative reverie. I saw myself dead and my offspring dead. Death came at me at 186,000 miles a second, and I knew of my own mortality. I saw the vast, existential process of human evolution. This was intense, a sort of spontaneous mystical experience, and it had nothing to do with my physics homework."

After leaving Hanover White married and raised four children. He clocked four Vietnam-era years as a naval antisubmarine warfare and nuclear weapons officer, taught high school, and wrote speeches and edited a newspaper for Northeast Utilities, which supplies Hanover and most of New England with electricity. Toss in his research on demonic possession and auras and clairvoyance, though, and soon White was humming with a fascination about human consciousness. He started writing books, and his side career became his life. He is now a leader in the field of "ufology," the science of whatever the hell is going on out there. "John is really a father figure for ufology," said Michael Mannion, a lecturer at the conference and a writer on UFOs. "I first read one of his books in 1975. He's been at the forefront of research and information dispersal. " White has more interests than just aliens. He has authored 15 books on everything from New Age spiritualism to kundalini yoga to a guide for death and dying. He has written a children's book and agented a hundred other books, edited anthologies, and for 11 years has hosted this conference.

Although UFOs are the sexiest thing he works on and a cash-cow (he sells loads of audio and video tapes of his UFO conference lectures) White is more interested in homo noeticus, a term he created in 1973 to describe a higher, more peaceful form of humanity that might be emerging. "Psychic development is not the same as spiritual growth, "he points out. "Spirituality is what really matters in life. After nearly four decades of exploring the paranormal, I can say it is an endless process. None of the answers really satisfies the human quest for understanding the meaning of existence. Only God is ultimate and only God-realization or enlightenment satisfies the quest for happiness, wisdom, and certitude. Don't mistake psychic abilities or ETs for God; they're not."

Still, among the acorns at his paranormal conference, John White was the oak tree. He was calm and supportive when someone interrupted a conversation to rattle on about the latest happenings in the sky over a UFO hotspot. He laid a reassuring arm across the shoulders of a bit-too-earnest visitor. He quietly introduced each new speaker, kept civility even while currents of anger—most of it based in conspiracy theory—threatened to overload the conference's circuits. Charges of government cover-up, especially with the celebrated 1947 spaceship crash in Roswell, New Mexico, flashed across the screens in lectures with titles like "Cosmic Watergate: New Evidence of Crashed Alien Technology." We learned that "grays," as the aliens were called, impregnated unsuspecting women to create "hybrids." Some lecturers painted aliens as benevolent beings that are watching over the earth, caretaking. One woman exhibited photographs from the annual crop circle season in England, where unexplained, intricate, football-field-long patterns are found in wheat fields.

White shrugs off suggestions that he might be misguided. "I have a great deal of respect for science, so if something doesn't accord with science, right away a warning flag goes up in my mind. However, science is not the last word on reality. Some aspects of ourselves and our world go beyond the physical into the metaphysical. I've had psychic experiences which I can't reproduce in the laboratory. I try to keep an open mind about claims of the paranormal, neither believing nor disbelieving, but just looking for data which can confirm or disconfirm the topic. For me there's a fine line between having an open mind and having a hole in the head. I'm sure I've strayed over it a time or two."

Holes in the head or not, some things, nonetheless, had been confirmed. As he wrote in The Meeting of Science and Spirit, "The evidence is in: UFOs are real." White believes in alien abductions, in crop circles, in "amoebalike aeroforms" that fly at thousands of miles per hour but can be the size of a coin.

"The raised eyebrows and shaking of heads doesn't really bother me," White says. "I know people say, 'What weird space is this guy coming from?' I think I have developed a pretty good sense of humor, so if someone gets to teasing me, I can laugh along with it. I'm not lost in lala land. Look, some stuff is just a pure hoax. I wouldn't waste one minute on a psychic hotline. You need what I call an SCD, a spiritual crap detector. But people counterfeit something only if there is something real behind it. The question is what is real."

The quest, as White says, is endless. The answer will remain—no matter how many conferences or books or glowing hula-hoops spinning up the beach—a mystery.

After nearly four decades of exploring the paranormal,

JAMES ZUG wrote about Richard Hovey in theDecember issue. Aliens have yet to visit hisapartment in New York. Contact John Whiteat .