Oz Factor Explained

WE SEEM TO HAVE CONCLUDED that 'real' travel through space and time may rarely occur as the result of some, probably natural, energy field with which we may chance to come into con tact if we are unlucky. Its radiating fields appear to affect our per ception of time, space and reality to such an extent that we may even mistakenly conclude that we have 'died'. However, just as often during our look at these strange time-related experiences we have seen how the mind plays the fundamental role. Indeed, we have found that an altered state of consciousness seems to be required if we are to reach backwards, sideways or forwards in time. There is something which recurs in these cases and which appears to be the key to this altered state. I call it the Oz factor, after that magical fairy-tale land where reality is different from our own. The onset of the Oz factor is the clue that points the way towards this place that we are seeking, not a land that time forgot but instead, a land that forgot time. You cannot miss the Oz factor in operation. It cries out to you from so many different experiences where time seems to take a back seat. Here are just a few examples.

Mary Latimer from Illinois, USA, told me of the apparition that appeared in her bedroom at dawn one morning. It turned out to be an image of her grandfather, then several thousand miles away in California. He was waving goodbye at the precise moment when, it was later revealed, he had suffered a fatal heart attack and died. It was as if he had made a pit stop on the way to heaven to bypass space and time and give one last farewell to a favourite relative. However, as important as this interpretation are the feelings that Mary expressed from the moments whilst this took place: 'It felt as if time had disappeared. I was stretched out between now and eternity. There was only my mind and his mind bonded by love. The experience could have lasted fifty seconds or fiftyyears and I would not have known the difference. Somehow in this place that we inhabited there was no such thing as time. That is the lasting memory- the one truth - that stands out from all of this.'

Timelessness is one crucial element of the Oz factor, but another major thing to look for has featured often in the cases that we have seen so far. It is the sudden isolation in space, where all the normal ambient sounds and sensations disappear. Johnny Caesar, an actor and stage musician, who now has a role in the TV soap opera 'Emmerdale', told me of the night that he was electrocuted during a performance at Aviemore in Scotland. The audience thought it was part of the act when he crashed to the ground. In fact, he had been catapulted out of his normal everyday state of consciousness and into the Oz factor where he went through what is commonly called a 'near-death experience'. He saw his body from a vantage point above and the frantic efforts to save his life.

But Johnny describes what it felt like to float free of time and space: 'There was no hurting involved. It was a lovely, warm sensa tion. I saw them working on me like it was a TV screen and I was watching a play. There was no sense of sound or panic. I was not hearing, more sensing what was happening. But I was quite alert and wasjust not taking it in. I felt that it would be so easyjust to drift away.' Eventually, to all our good fortunes, a sense of purpose and desire to return reasserted itself and Johnny Caesar fought back. He made a full recovery, but in this out-of-body state he, like thou sands of others, came to see that no words can adequately describe the isolation from space and time that one is suddenly immersed within. It seems to be like taking a bath in forever.

We would not expect to discover this effect in UFO sightings, but it is there in almost all close encounters that involve more than the sighting of a light in the distant sky. Retired headmistress Eileen Arnold well illustrates this point. Her encounter was in spring 1944, three years before the term flying saucer was first invented. So what she saw that afternoon was simply a mysterious vision in the sky, quite unfettered by today's preconceptions about aliens and spacecraft which, researchers feel, heavily colour what people describe.

The mind, after all, is not a camera, but a living, active, thinking process that changes dynamically and evolves. We see not only what is there but what is filterccl thro-lgh our own perccptions, beliefs, expectations and past experiences. Often what we 'see' may not be at all what is there.

Eileen was walking down the High Street in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, returning from a prenatal check-up. The pavements were busy, the road alive with traffic as the sun shone just after noon.

Interestingly, Eileen says that she was in a 'particularly sensitive state' that day, possibly because of her thoughts of the impending birth . She was doing many things 'on impulse' and having what felt like empathetic links with other people, even strangers she walked past. Then, something made her look up and she saw a spectacular object sailing across the sky. It was unlike any UFO you might have heard about before, being akin to a giant porcupine ejecting quills into the air as it glided through the atmosphere.

Of course, this phenomenon could not drift across a busy town in the middle of the day without hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people seeing it. But in fact it seems that nobody else saw it. This isolationism is one of the most intriguing, yet most common, aspects ofthe UFO close encounter.

Of the period whilst she watched this thing move silently above Cheltenham, Eileen records: 'There was a time lapse and an envi ronment lapse - which I don't have a name for. Time slowed. The extremely busy road altered. Trafflc and people had completely vanished but I did not even see the road and pavement . . . all I 'saw' apart from the UFO was the rooftop overwhich it appeared.'

The Oz factor in UFO cases often manifests like this. Sometimes the witnesses talk about sounds (like singing birds or trafflc noises) fading away. At other times they are suddenly alone on a road nor mally full of other cars or a pavement that should be full of people. I suspect that this tells us something important about what is taking place. Eileen Arnold's words convey the impression of her consciousness tuning out all the normal sensory input and super imposing this one vision that was entering her mind right on top of the world around her. It is rather like a ghost that may be a halluci nation,but,ifso,itisonethatgetsoverlaidontopofthebedroomin which it appears and dominates the scene. Here the spectacular UFO was somehow detected within Eileen's mind and was so over powering as an image that it blocked everything else from her awareness and effectively made the sounds and sights disappear. This moment is sometimes called by poets who have experi enced it - the 'eternal now'. In that period Eileen melded with the expcrience and everything else, including space and time, was secondary in importance.

Eric, from Essex, who spent 28 years in the police force and so, as he stressed, had passed rigid medicals and was not suffering from any sort of mental illness, described to me how it feels to have the Oz factor take over This was in one of several visions, of the past or future, that he has experienced: 'The atmosphere would abruptly change, the surroundings becoming remote. Activities around me slowed down and I felt apart from the immediate environment. When I say that the surroundings became remote I do not mean that they receded as happens in a fainting fit. I felt it was me who was leaving the prevailing conditions.'

A drama teacher from Israel told me of her frequent visionary expe riences, such as one in which she was catapulted spontaneously through time whilst reading an article about Stone-Age excava tions: 'Suddenly I was there. It grew darker and I felt myself floating or falling through space and then was rooted in this reality. It was not a dream. I was standing on wet earth. I felt this and I could see everything. But my actual surroundings from the modern day had disappeared. I did not know where or when I was. Time had lost meaning. But I had travelled somewhere else within my mind. I was there.'

The Oz factor can surface in many such unexpected places. Fred Rayser reported his experience in the summer of 1937 whilst taking part in a sprint race at Spring Valley, New York. Being an accom plished runner he was given a handicap, which in practice meant thathestarteduptohalfalapbehindothersprinters. Inaoneanda half mile event this was an almost impossible gap to close. But he tried, urged on by his family.

Fred reports how, as he rounded the final bend, things changed. His intense focusing on the one aim seems to have altered his state of consciousness and pushed him through a strange barrier. He says: 'The light appeared to change from bright sunshine to a muted glow. It was as if I had entered a translucent tunnel.' He noticed the other runners ahead had all slowed down and 'seemed to be moving in slow motion'. He weaved through them all with ease and felt himself fly past, bursting through the tape with so much adrenalin pumping inside him that he could have done the race again. Indeed he had set a record time, leaving the rest flailing, making up an unprecedented amount of space by appearing to bypass time.

The stress of a race does not compare with that of a battle. Yet Herbert Lehmann of Euclid, Ohio, relates his expericnce in October 1944 when he was part of a troop of US marines trying to capture a small rocky bluffbefore the Japanese could do so on the Palau Islands in the Pacific Ocean.

He had crawled his way to the top of the ridge before a team of Japanese soldiers made it from the other side. Both they and his own troops were firing machine guns and lobbing grenades across his prone body as they battled for supremacy. The victors would survive. The losers would all die.

Suddenly, Herbert reports: 'All sound faded until everything sounded as if it were coming from far away. It was as if my head were under water . . . I also seemed to be floating . . . I remember that I was not frightened, a condition that was remarkable consid ering all the noise and confusion around me.' Not surprisingly, he had made the same mistake as did the family who had the tele portation at Hockliffe 48 years later and assumed that he had been shot and was now dead.

But Herbert Lehmann was very much alive. He was, in a sense, shielded by the Oz factor, cocooned by these strange sensations that demarcate the shift from one state of consciousness to a time less other. Seconds, minutes, years later the effect vanished and he was back on the ridgewith thebattle subsiding. Theyhad won. The Japanese were vanquished. He would survive.

As for time-slips pure and simple, the Oz factor is found there too. Joan Forman talked with C.H. d'Alessio who was walking the streets of London one evening in 1975 when he seems to have been projected into the future. He saw strange cars floating past on cush ions of air and roadways with a synthetic, silvery feel to them. He was utterly convinced that for a few moments he touched base with the next century and experienced this part of the city as it would then be. During the episode he felt all the traffic sounds disappear, everything became muted, time lost its hold on him and he was in the same oddly calm and trance-like state that Herbert Lehmann had felt.

Indeed, if you think this through, you may have already con cluded that it may be possible that Eileen Arnold's fantastic porcu pine drifting over Cheltenham was a vision of some future aerial technology of our own. We must expect that if time-slips backward are feasible and precognition of tomorro~s trivia by way of d reams can occur, that literal slips through the fabric of time into some future environment might also be a possibility.

My term Oz factor is only one that is convenient. Many psychologists and philosophers have noticed this same effect from their own studies of human experience and tried to define words of their own. Read the works of Jung, Freud, indeed almost anyone who has looked at the fringes of human adventure, and you will find that they have come across it. Phrases like 'the peak experi ence' or 'cosmic consciousness' have in the past been applied where the timelessness and spacelessness ofthis abilityis detected.

However, it is diffilcult not to seem mystical when speaking like this. What I wanted to do was to anchor this state of mind very firmly in real experience. I have surveyed what witnesses say in this wide range of paranormal phenomena, both obviously time related (such as time-slips) and not so obviously related (such as near-death or UFO close-encounter visions). The pattern is the same and you can readily build up this portrait of the state of con sciousness which seems to facilitate their occurrence.

That is the first step. Giving it a neutral name to capture its essence of magical transportation was the next move forward, hence the Oz factor.

We must move on from here. It helps a little to saythat the Oz fac tor is a set of symptoms denoting an altered state of consciousness in which the normal bonds of time are freed and the mind senses the universe as it really is and can wander through those corridors offorever.

However, it is very probable that there is a physiological change within the brain which corresponds with the Oz factor. We know that various emotional states are related to the flow of certain hor mones that can affect our neural network. Secretion of adrenalin is obviously important in stress situations and can boost physical strength, for example.

We do not know exactly what parts of the brain or what chemical agencies correspond with emotions such as love, but recall that we found very early on that emotion was a key to all strange experi ences. Without some sort of emotive link time and space barriers will not be defeated and more relevant information will gate crash into your consciousness past the doorman that we have set up to protect ourwaking selves from the intrusion

As we probe deeper into the workings of the brain, thanks to new techniques such as the CAT scan, allowing us to map brain activity in a person who is asleep, awake, in a coma or doing just about any thing, then we can piece our way towards a recognition of what is involved. By that process we may eventually isolate the chemicals and the parts of the brains that are stimulated and that correlate with the Oz factor state.

There are already some promising signs from work by psycholo gist Dr. Serena Roney-Dougal who has been assessing the actions of the pineal gland, long thought by mystics to be a source of the hid den 'third eye' and which, they suggested, allows spiritual insight. A chemical trigger, via naturally secreted hormones such as sero tonin, which is already receiving some attention, may provide a way forward.

For example, in several well-studied cases where animals have been known to detect an earth tremor some time before it happens (they enter a sort of Oz factor state and go eerily quiet in the hour or two beforehand) it has been speculated that serotonin emissions in their brains are stimulated by very small levels of some radiating energy that emerges from the changes within the earth as the tremor builds up towards its peak. It may be possible to imagine a time when this process can be understood and controlled and an earlywarning system applied to suitable humans to serve as living, breathing earthquake detectors. Then it will look as if we have harnessed precognition.

Of course, that will not really be what is happening. But then, if theOz factor is similarly a product of chemical reactions, the inter-relationship between what is physical and what is p~sychic, may ultimately prove to be irrelevant.

What we need to do to make time travel practical is conduct physiological, psychological and parapsychological studies to find what it is that causes Oz to come about. If we can isolate these things, then we will be well on the way towards producing a device that can stimulate time travel.

This will probably be something that can induce the Oz factor more or less to order and give our mind the gentle push that it may need to set sail across the oceans of time and space. When that is possible, and it will be in the near future, then a whole new genera tion of explorers will be set free. Unlike Columbus or Magellan they will not be confined to the boundaries of earth - all of space and time will be at their disposal.