"It's all in the egg"

"My observation of the Universe convinces me that there are beings of intelligence and power of a far higher quality than anything we can conceive of as human; that they are not necessarily based on the cerebral and nervous structures that we know, and that the one and only chance for mankind to advance as a whole is for individuals to make contact with such beings." - Aleister Crowley

Okay, here's where things get weird.

First, a few examples of what I'm talking about, before I try talking about it.

Copper Medic

In his book Confrontations, Jacques Vallee devotes a chapter to "Copper Medic," what he describes as his favourite case of UFO visitations. He writes that "what attracted the interest of local unfologists wasn't so much the repeated sighting of a small, egg-shaped UFO on the Chapin's property as the strange material they claimed to have recovered at the site."

It's not the strange material which attracts my interest, but the description of the UFO. In the first incident from 1969 the Chapins, who were then in their mid-60s, had just killed a rattlesnake. Jane Chapin was going to photograph the body "when she suddenly saw something behind the tall grass, among the trees":

She thought it was a trailer, then realized it was oval, about the size of a VW Beetle. It appeared cream-colored to her. Clint, who saw it from a different perspective, thought it was gray. Both saw how the object lifted up, paused for a brief moment, then disappeared at amazing speed. An oval depression, smaller than the object itself, was found in the ground, as if a large weight had rested there.

The Chapins had several more encounters over the years, sometimes losing consciousness, vomiting and urinating, when they would be hit by an "invisible barrier" radiating waves of heat. Their last encounter was in 1980, shortly before Clint's fatal heart attack. Jane wrote Vallee about it:

We were looking at a road that had been cut through our property and we turned to go down the road, west, and there was a skinny thing in the road, and his egg was not 25 feet from us... and he took four steps toward us and my hand fell on my gun and he turned around and walked back. He was in a gray suit, and he left no print or prints of the egg. Clint could not move either... the thing vanished, then the egg went up in the air and turned west, and we both looked at the back of the egg and it opened like a horse trailer door. He was four-foot tall and skinny, maybe 90 pounds. I don't know what he wants... well, maybe he will take me to where Clint is.

One of the local investigators reported, of one appearance, that the object "rose up off the ground a few feet, then took off like a shot up the canyon, swaying but not striking small trees as it went." But Jane Chapin admitted to Vallee she had lied: the object had flown off into the trees, passing through them as though they didn't exist. When he asked why she hadn't told that to the local investigators, she replied, "I could see they wouldn't believe me if I told them the truth. They were such nice people. I didn't want to shock them."

Lonnie Zamora

Zamora's sighting is one of the most famous in UFO literature. On April 24, 1964 Zamora, a police officer in Socorro, New Mexico, investigated a sudden, loud roar from an unpopulated gully. "I could see dust fly up," he recalled. "I thought there was something that night have blown up, since there’s a dynamite shack over there." He drove his patrol car to the top of a hill to check it out. About a half mile away, he saw a white object that appeared from the distance to be a car turned upside down, and two figures who looked to be four feet tall. Zamora radioed he was going to investigate, and drove a bumpy road on which he temporarily lost sight of the object. He stopped on a Mesa, got out and and looked down.

In the gully about 20 feet below him, the “thing” sat silent. The two figures had disappeared. Zamora advanced closer.

"It was egg-shaped with one end, which I figure was the front, sort of tapered," Zamora says. "It was white and smooth, with no windows or openings of any kind. It was sitting on legs about four feet tall and seemed to be about the size of a car."

A sudden roar from the "egg" almost deafened Zamora. Thinking it might explode, the officer turned and ran for some bushes. Glancing back, he saw the object rise straight up. He dove into the bushes and covered his head, then peeked up.

"There was no noise," he says. "It was about 20 feet off the ground, just hovering. There were markings in red letters about a foot high on the side. It looked like a crescent with a vertical arrow pointed upward inside the crescent and a horizontal bar beneath that."

When State Policeman Sam Chavez arrived on the scene, he and Zamora entered the gully, and found a smouldering mesquite bush and six imprints in the ground where the "egg" had resisted. Zamora's character was judged unimpeachable, and there was no credible accusation of a hoax. He also made no claims for what he had seen. Three years later he told a reporter, “I’d like to know what the hell it was. I wouldn’t say it was from space or from here either. If it’s a new plane. It sure is good. All I know is I saw the thing and that’s it.”

Levelland and White Sands

On the night of November 2, 1957 near Levelland, Texas, independent witnesses repeatedly saw oval and elliptical objects near roadways. One witness was "Sheriff Weir Clem, who was searching the roads as a result of earlier reports and saw a reddish oval cross the road, illuminating the pavement." Within a few hours of the Levelland reports, "an Army jeep patrol at White Sands, N.M., reported an egg-shaped UFO that descended to a point about 50 yards above the bunker used during the first atomic bomb explosion, and a major wave of UFO sightings continued for 2-3 weeks."

The Worcester Egg

Early morning February 3, 2000, Georgina Wells saw an "extremely bright," yellow-glowing egg shape from her bedroom window. It began a slow descent, seemed to land out of sight, and then "came back into view and was really bright again and shot off into the sky and vanished. I have never seen anything go that fast before." Perhaps the most exceptional aspect of this report is that Wells claims a helicopter was monitoring it the entire time. "I stood up and watched it," Wells says. "It was not a police helicopter with its spotlight as there was no light-beam."

So what's with all the eggs?

There are many more examples. (And not just of the exterior appearance of UFOs. Abductees often describe rounded, milky interiors.) Still, I don't want to get carried away with this. Some UFOs, after all, have also been called "cigar-shaped." If Freud had been a ufologist, I expect he would have said that sometimes a cigar-shaped UFO is just a cigar-shaped UFO. But in the popular imagination, UFOs are principally "disc-shaped." And to speak of discs evokes manufacture, as though they were cobbled together with nuts and bolts, even if those nuts and bolts are cast from exoterran metals. So analogies are important in themselves, because they can restrict or liberate our assumptions of the true - as opposed to the black budget - phenomena.

What's more, regarding UFOs as egg-like also may render less myserious some of their observed, bizarre attributes. For instance, on numerous occasions, UFOs have been seen dividing into several equal-sized and identical parts, and recombining into a single unity. It beggers our understanding how a manufactured craft could be engineered to accomplish such feats, and perhaps just as significantly, what would be the purpose. However, we do see something like it in the natural world, in something as commonplace as cell division. But we may not think to look there if we get hamstrung by the paradigm that UFOs, if they exist at all, must be spacecraft. We'll be more likely to see correspondences in nature if we adopt the analogy of an egg, rather than a "disc."

And there may be something more, still.

Back to Crowley

Remember Lam, and Aleister Crowley's "Amalantrah Working"? Using sex magick with his partner and psychic sensitive Roddie Minor, Crowley claimed to have opened a dimensional portal, through which passed Lam, whose portrait appears an archetypal grey, though Crowley drew him "from life" in 1918, many years before the greys entered our cultural consciousness. Before Lam appeared, Minor channelled messages from a spirit-wizard called Amalantrah, who told Crowley to "find the egg." Ian Blake, who has much of interest to say about Crowley, Lam, and the egg metaphor here, writes that "one of the earlier versions of the Amalantrah Working ended with the sentence, 'It's all in the egg.' During the final surviving version of this Working, in reference to a question about the egg, Crowley was told: 'Thou art to go this way.'"

Kenneth Grant, Crowley's last student, who was given the portrait, is author of "The Lam Statement." Grant's purpose was to "regularize and to examine results" of contact with Lam, by "entering the Egg of Spirit represented by the Head." As Blake writes, "in the late 1980s ... Grant allegedly received 'strong intimations' to the effect that Crowley's portrait of Lam 'is the present focus of an extraterrestrial - and perhaps trans-plutonic - energy which the OTO is required to communicate at this critical period.'"

The Typhonian OTO, which follows Grant's teachings, "is concerned with effective transmissions and communications from 'outerspace' for the purpose of opening Gateways. The Typhonian 'deities' denote specific operations of psycho-physical alchemy which involve essences or elixirs secreted (thrown out and/or considered unclean) by the human organism."

And we should note that the purpose of Jack Parsons' "Babalon Working" was a birth, Using Enochian sex magick and his "elemental" partner Marjorie Cameron, Parsons was intent on collapsing our reality by introducing into it the incarnation of "Babalon." ("Wicked" in the angelic language said to be given Elizabethan John Dee.)

In a letter to Crowley, quoted in Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons, he wrote "For the last three days I have performed an operation of birth, using the air tablet, the cup, and a female figure, properly invoked by the wand [penis], then sealed up in the altar. Last night I performed an operation of symbolic birth and delivery."

And from his poem, "The Birth of Babalon":

What is the tumult among the stars that have shone so still till now?
What are the furrows of pain and wrath upon the immortal brow?
Why is the face of God turned grey and his angels all grown white?
What is the terrible ruby star that burns down the crimson night?
What is the beauty that flames so bright athwart the awful dawn?
She has taken flesh, she is come to judge the thrones ye rule upon.
Quail ye kings for an end is come in the birth of BABALON.

Is it any more bizarre than the thought of extraterrestial spacecraft, to consider that Crowley and Parsons may have succeeded, the portal widened, and the ritual birth represented by egg-like manifestations? Well, yes, because it presumes the efficacy of magick, which is a big leap for most of us. But perhaps, even though it's more bizarre, it's also more likely.

One final thought. Lonnie Zamora repoted seeing "markings in red letters about a foot high on the side. It looked like a crescent with a vertical arrow pointed upward inside the crescent and a horizontal bar beneath that." To those who regard UFOs as nuts and bolts spacecraft, perhaps these markings would be regarded as the designation of an extraterrestrial authority. Their "flag." But it's quite anthropomorphic to presume aliens would think in such terms.

But if we consider ritual magick, the symbol resembles a "sigil," used for the invocation of angelic and demonic entities. I haven't searched yet for a crescent with a vertical arrow within it and a horizontal bar beneath it. But I wonder what the implications would be if one were found.