The Key Read online

  I had already come to this notion in 1998, so I found his statement about the apparent alien presence around us being a form of deception quite thought-provoking, and I still do. Like most anomalous experience, though, nothing he said brings cloture to the question of what is actually behind the curtain. It just adds another layer of possibility.

  What a shame it is that more people aren’t open to this speculation. As long as one keeps developing the question without drawing conclusions, which seem, in any case, like a fata morgana, to recede forever into the future, it is an enormous intellectual challenge and pleasure. For this reason, I remain grateful that I had my close encounter experiences, despite the social isolation that has resulted from my discussing them.

  He also made some statements about the environment that had a strong effect on me. When I met him, I was already conversant in environmental science, having coauthored a book entitled Nature’s End, a speculative mix of fact and fiction that addressed environmental concerns.

  I had also read a number of books about catastrophic climate change, ranging from Charles Hapgood’s Path of the Pole, to Rose and Rand Flem-Ath’s and Graham Hancock’s books on this subject.

  The Master of the Key did not discuss crustral shift as a causative factor in sudden climate change, though. He took a very different approach, addressing it instead as an outcome of distortions in the atmosphere that lead over time to a breaking point, and sudden catastrophe.

  Although this process is fluently visible in the fossil record, the mechanism that leads from sudden upheavals of climate to ages-long planetary entrapment in ice remains much debated, so I was quite interested when he said, “The next ice age will begin soon, and this will lead to the extinction of mankind, or to a massive reduction in population, given your inability to expand off the planet. This planet is at present a death trap.”

  I try never to allow myself to forget that every single person on earth is as valuable and important to themselves as I am to myself, and so I found this statement profoundly disturbing. I immediately wanted to sound a warning. I wanted to save us all.

  At that time, the great danger of global warming was thought to be a continuous rise in temperatures that would cause earth to become so hot that it was uninhabitable—but it was also something far off, a problem to be debated now, solved later.

  The Master of the Key suggested that it was a very much more immediate problem. He said that, as polar ice melts and floods the northern ocean with freshwater, the North Atlantic Current would fail, leading to a radical climate change that would unfold over “a single season.”

  If such a thing happened, it would obviously bring massive suffering to mankind. Even worse, the disaster would strike hardest at our most economically active and well-educated populations in North America and Europe.

  But was it the truth? In those days, I still didn’t have much in the way of verification of any of the man’s ideas, and this one seemed particularly radical. I was still extremely unsure about whether or not the whole encounter had simply been imagined. To keep me from just dropping the whole thing, my wife had to constantly remind me of the phone call I’d made to her.

  In those days, while there was controversy about what caused ice ages, it was generally agreed that the change was a gradual one. However, I did find an article in the January 1998 Atlantic Monthly called “The Great Climate Flip-flop,” by William H. Calvin, that suggested that the change might be very sudden.

  This same suggestion appeared in commentary about ice cores taken from Greenland and the Antarctic, but there seemed to be no clear mechanism that would cause such a dramatic change so fast.

  Putting what I had been told by the Master together with the research I was doing, I came to write The Coming Global Superstorm, which was turned into a film by Roland Emmerich called The Day After Tomorrow.

  The film was a terrific success with the public, and served to cause many millions to consider for the first time that the abstraction called “global warming” might have unexpected and serious consequences.

  For the most part, though, the press and the environmental movement condemned the film for compressing the period of change into too short a time.

  A hundred and thirty-seven million years ago, there was an event that caused dramatic and sudden climate change, which must have severely impacted animal populations on earth. Thirteen thousand years ago, a sudden dump of freshwater into the North Atlantic from a gigantic glacial lake in Canada triggered a return to ice age conditions known as the Younger Dryas.

  What happened on both of these occasions, and has happened on many others, is now clear. It is exactly what the Master of the Key warned might happen. The process is this: carbon dioxide levels rise, causing warming. This warming melts permafrost, which releases massive amounts of methane into the air. The methane is a devilishly efficient heat trap, and global temperatures rise dramatically. This results in rapid polar melt and a flood of fresh melt water into the ocean. Because freshwater heats and cools much more quickly than salt water, ocean temperatures rise. This reduces the difference in water temperature from north to south, weakening the natural heat pump effect that draws warm water into the north, in the form of the Gulf Stream.

  It subsequently stops, while at the same time the methane, which, unlike carbon dioxide, breaks down quite quickly, disappears. The result is a very dramatic shift in climate, first to extremely hot conditions, then plunging into extreme cold, a change that can take place over a very short time.

  In 2008, Dr. Achim Brauer, of the Potsdam Center for Geosciences, and colleagues analyzed sediments from a crater lake that are laid down annually, and found that the Younger Dryas thirteen thousand years ago began over a single season, which is ten times faster than previously believed, and exactly in keeping with the Master’s dire warnings.

  As this is being written, earth is in the process of experiencing the hottest month of June on record, June 2010. What lies ahead is even more dramatic heating, and if the methane hydrates now frozen in arctic waters should melt, that heating is going to spike just as it has in the past, and the results will be precisely the same.

  The Younger Dryas is not the only time in recent epochs that an aggressive climate shift has affected earth.

  Five thousand two hundred years ago, there was a lesser cooling event that caused glaciers to form so suddenly in Peru that deciduous plants at their bases are found to have been frozen so quickly that their cell walls remained intact. For this to happen, the temperature change must have taken place in a matter of no more than a couple of minutes. In other words, the temperate climate that these plants enjoyed changed extremely quickly, certainly in less than a day. The glaciers that formed on that terrible day are still there, 5,200 years later.

  Also 5,200 years ago, Ötzi, the Ice Man, whose remains were found consequent to melt in the Schnalstal Glacier in the Italian Tyrol in 1991, was buried by a snowstorm in an alpine meadow. He only reappeared when the glacier melted. In other words, the snowstorm that choked that meadow did not melt again for over five thousand years.

  My conclusion is that I was being warned of the presence of natural forces that we do not understand, or do not wish to understand, and, if anything, that warning has grown more and more urgent as our climate sets up in precisely the same way it has in the past just prior to such an upheaval.

  He left the subject with this admonition: “The greater part of human industry and culture, along with the species’ most educated populations, will be destroyed in a single season. This will happen suddenly and without warning, or rather, the warning will not be recognized for what it is.”

  I suppose that the clearest warning will be the appearance of methane bubbles in arctic waters.

  In July 2010, Professor Igor Semiletov of the International Siberian Shelf Study, said, “Methane release from the East Siberian Shelf is under way and it looks stronger than it was supposed to be.”

  This could well be the warning that he referred
to, and I would be very surprised to see it heeded in any way. We will, however, find out what it means, most likely under conditions of extraordinary upheaval and human suffering.

  If the Master of the Key would be heeded, we might at least be able to develop contingency plans that would to some degree ameliorate such a disaster. But he will not be heeded. In fact, most people who might be in a position to act on the warnings he has given us will not do so, because the existence of the man cannot be explained and he apparently cannot be recontacted. Even if he could, I doubt that the importance of his message would be acknowledged.

  Despite the general denial in science that there could possibly be anyone here from another world, be it another planet or some other seemingly impossible place, I know quite prominent scientists whose work has benefited significantly and in useful ways from contact with inexplicable visitors, perhaps from other worlds. But if even scientists this prominent were to come forward with the truth, they would be drummed out of their careers.

  This is a misfortune, but it is also, I believe, something that has been constructed by the same presence that is behind the whole mystery, be it alien or human, or even nonphysical in origin.

  Whatever it is, quite clearly its knowledge is far in advance of ours, and this is probably why it is so secretive.

  In the May 6, 1977, edition of Science, T.B.H. Kuiper and Mark Morris offered the speculation that aliens coming here would keep themselves well hidden, because the only motive of people so advanced as to be capable of such a journey would be to discover what new knowledge we might have to offer, and “by intervening in our natural progress now, members of an extraterrestrial society could easily extinguish the only resource on this planet that could be of any value to them,” which would be the uniqueness of the human experience.

  Even if the only difference between us and visitors from another world was that they possessed a technology that could control gravity, the gap between us would be very great. But there could be other things that would make it even greater.

  For example, my experience between 1985 and 1993 with creatures that appeared to be alien was associated with a surprising side effect, which was simultaneous contact with the dead, who would appear along with the visitors, and not as ghosts. They would seem to be completely physical.

  Perhaps, if we had a clearer understanding of the soul, the gap between us and this mysterious other intelligence would narrow, and perhaps that’s why the Master talked so much about the soul, attempting to get me to understand it in a new way.

  He said that “souls are part of nature,” and that “the science of the soul is just another science. There is no supernatural, only physics.”

  Science does not believe this. Science believes that we can’t detect the soul because there is no soul. But the Master saw it as part of nature, even to the extent of being exploitable as a resource by those with the skill to do this.

  Modern western culture has a schizophrenic relationship with the soul, very much as was true during the Roman Empire, when an educated elite developed that included the soul among the superstitions of the uneducated, and dismissed it, along with the gods, as nonsense.

  Similarly, few western scientists and intellectuals consider the soul a viable idea. Where is it? What form might it take? How could anything bearing consciousness continue to exist after the seat of consciousness, the brain, has ceased to function?

  The Master of the Key takes a completely novel approach to the whole idea. He denies the existence of the supernatural, saying that only the natural world exists, some parts of which we understand and some parts of which we don’t.

  It is a characteristic of human thought and culture that we deny the parts of nature that we don’t understand. Voltaire dismissed fossils as fish bones tossed aside by travelers. The existence of meteors was once considered an absurd fantasy. Eight days before the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, the New York Times published the opinion that it was time to stop nattering on about the absurd notion of flight using heavier-than-air machines. Both the Times and Scientific American initially claimed that the flights must have been a hoax.

  Such denial is a human habit of mind, and it remains as deeply ingrained in us as it always has been. Despite the many experiences I have had with ghosts and such, I myself have always been skeptical about the soul. Where would it get its energy? What sort of material reality could it possibly possess?

  For this reason, as I sat face-to-face with my visitor, I initially found his commentary on the soul off-putting.

  The reason was that, despite all the evidence I had in my own life, including an extraordinary moment of out-of-body travel that had taken place in 1986, I had no way to understand why anything would survive the death of the physical.

  However, he took an entirely unexpected approach. First, he used the phrase “soul-blind” to describe us. I’d heard it before, and I couldn’t disagree. But were we soul blind because there’s nothing to see, or because of some appalling human insufficiency?

  When he said that the soul was, simply, a part of nature, I found myself thinking that things like radio had also always been part of nature, but for a great long time we couldn’t even conceive of them, let alone detect them. And he was saying, essentially, that the issue with the soul is also one of detection. This would correspond with his assertion that “conscious energy” is essentially electromagnetic in nature.

  But how would that work? Are such fields plasmas? If so, what holds them together? What are the physics of the soul?

  In the mid-nineties we were living in San Antonio, Texas, and were invited to the home of a friend who was taking many photographs of what are known as “orbs” in ghost-hunter and parapsychological circles. I thought that the great masses of objects that were appearing on random shots he was taking inside and outside his house must be condensation or dust, or something else along those lines, that was very close to the camera lens. But when I went to the house and we took shots of exactly the same spot with two different cameras from different angles, the objects showed up in both pictures. This means that they were not tiny specs near the camera, but larger objects three or four feet away, which was very perplexing.

  Later, I went out into the back garden and felt an absolutely distinct presence. It was my mother, long since passed away. It was as if she was right there. It was palpable. I stood there, my eyes closed, communing with her. I didn’t know it, but another member of the group took a picture of me at that moment.

  In the picture, above me and perhaps ten feet in front of me, is a glowing orb. It isn’t enormous, more like a sort of a spark, but why does it happen to be there? Is it an indication of the persistence of the soul after death? It is certainly true that it seemed to me that my mother was there.

  The Master of the Key made an interesting case for souls being part of material reality, basically for the idea that consciousness could remain coherently structured while in an energetic form.

  Over the years, there has been so much evidence gathered that ghostly apparitions are associated with magnetic fields that there is little point in my advocating on its behalf.

  Listening to the Master appears to have broken a barrier in me. I became much more sensitive to the presence of the dead than I had been before I listened to his ideas about what they were.

  I began to see the dead quite frequently and would find myself communicating with them. Recently, for example, my wife’s father came to mind in away that felt more like a sort of penetration of my consciousness than an ordinary thought or memory. I told her that I could feel his presence, and that he wanted badly to communicate with her. When he was alive, their relationship had been seriously strained, and he seemed to want to make amends.

  There was also a woman with him, but it wasn’t Anne’s mother or her father’s second wife. Anne told me that there hadn’t been any other women in his life.

  Her father then said to me, “Tell her it’s Marcelle,” so I did so. Anne was genu
inely startled. She said, “He did have a sister. That’s my aunt Marcelle. I met her only once in my life. I haven’t thought about her since.”

  I would be remiss if I said that I could prove that Anne had never mentioned Marcelle to me, but she says, I think correctly, that she never did.

  If this was the only incident in my life of a communication with the dead, I would take it with a grain of salt. But it is not the only one.

  We have an Australian friend, Glennys MacKay, who is quite a powerful medium. She’s strictly no-frills and she asks only that she be given something belonging to the person who wishes to have a reading. She doesn’t want to know anything about the person, not even their sex.

  Seeing a chance to make a test, Anne gave her a lock of our hairdresser’s hair. She held it for a moment and then said, “I hear somebody calling, ‘Howie, Howie.’” There was a bit more, which Anne dutifully wrote down. But since the hairdresser’s name is Jay, it seemed a waste of time.

  Nevertheless, she let Jay know the outcome. When she did, he said, “Oh, my God, that was my dead sister. She always called me Howie. My real name is Howard.”

  I thought of the Master’s explanation that the soul is conscious energy, and also his disturbing suggestion that such energy is accessible to technological manipulation, and that it can be exploited by those with the means to do so, and I remembered the way that the dead and the visitors seem to show up together.

  Once a man telephoned me and explained that his seven-year-old boy had awakened with a number of these creatures in his bedroom, and his older brother had been with them. The older brother had said to tell their parents that he was all right. Moments later, his wife had observed a huge light race away from the house.