Let’s go on an adventure with S D Anugyan!
Anyone who knows me at all knows of my lifelong fascination with the weird and the wonderful. This has now evolved into what I call X-Dimensional Practice, a fusion of mystical, scientific and artistic approaches. Long before XDP was even a gleam in my eye, I had exactly three direct encounters with UFOs, all in the 1990s. Two occurred in Oxford, and one in Mallorca.
The most tangible of the three was when I was living in west Oxford with several of the teenagers from Osho Ko Hsuan School. We had set up a half-way house The Oxford Venture for graduates of the school to further their studies in local colleges. This had occupied much of my time for a couple of years, alongside with my burgeoning Feng Shui business and a passionate interest in crop circles, many of which were occurring in nearby Wiltshire.
My room had no curtains and overlooked western Oxford as far as some of the ‘dreaming spires’ at the centre. I was reclining on my bed one misty evening, reading about UFOs – which is one of the strangest things about this, the synchronicity. At some point I put the book aside, thinking idly I wish I could actually see one one day. For all my adventures I had never seen one right in front of me.
Be careful what you wish for. As I was staring dreamily across the mist-enshrouded city, I saw something moving in the sky, fairly close. It was very slow, barely visible in the mist but looked like it had a row of red lights blinking around it. I grabbed my binoculars. Because of the mist, there wasn’t a lot more I could identify, but it did look like the lights were on a round hull.
Not trusting my eyesight totally, even with binoculars, I casually went downstairs to alert the teenagers, who could hopefully clarify what I was seeing with younger, fresher eyes.
The girls were all out, so it was only the three boys present.
“Anyone want to see a UFO?” I asked jocularly.
They were up to my room like a shot. I ambled along behind them, fairly sure it would just turn out to be a helicopter though I couldn’t hear it for some reason.
One of them was looking through the binoculars.
“I never believed any of this stuff,” he exclaimed, “till now!”
“So you think it is a UFO?” I asked, surprised.
The others grabbed the binoculars and verified that yes, it was. Across the skyline I could see other people in windows looking at the vehicle, which did look more definitely like a flying saucer now that the mist was clearing. What struck me was how calm everyone was about it.
“It’s moving north,” I said. “Shall we go after it?”
I did’t have to ask twice. Within moments we were all four out the door and leaping into my car. To complete the picture, it might be worth adding that in those days I had a Ford Capri. I knew nothing about cars and had bought it secondhand simply because the price was good and I liked the look of it. How was I to know it had a reputation not only with boy racers, but also with gangs and police flying squads on TV? Clients were often surprised when I turned up in it.
Thus we crammed into this semi-sports car and raced across the city. The boys used the binoculars to keep me informed of the object’s whereabouts. We also put on the local news. Reports were coming in all over about the craft, and the presenter was trying to make sense of it all.
It wasn’t going that fast, but kept disappearing into the mist and was becoming hard to follow.
“Oh no,” said one of the kids. “X-Files is on tonight. We’re missing it.”
I didn’t know if he were being ironic or not, and kept focused on the traffic.
In Kidlington, north of Oxford, we stopped by a phone booth to add our information to that of others on the radio station. Having interacted with the army and my letters being opened in recent months – due, I think to my interest in crop circles – I was at the height of my paranoia and told the boys, much to their amusement, not to use their real names.
Around about that time we lost the craft and gave up pursuing it. Then a caller came onto the radio. She lived in Banbury further north, had seen it, and knew what it was. They had several of them there, she said, and they were used for advertising. It was a blimp.
“What is it advertising?” asked the presenter.
“I don’t know,” she answered, suddenly puzzled.
Later, I thought about this. The craft had not done anything that a blimp could not do, so the explanation fitted. However, as the point was to advertise something, that did not make sense. I wondered if it were a Richard Branson prank, as he lived in the area. When I mentioned this to someone who knew him, she said he wouldn’t do anything like that without making sure he got the credit. The police issued a public statement that they had been warned in advance of the event, but didn’t elucidate further.
So little of this made sense, and to this day I don’t know whether it was actually a UFO – though it was unidentified and was a flying object, so I guess it was. The most interesting thing for me was a remark one of the kids made later. Like a couple of the others, he was attending Banbury Art College. Many of the students there had seen the craft and were quite excited about the whole experience, spending a lot of time talking about it. I will return to the significance of this later.
Not long after the incident, I was giving a Feng Shui workshop in central Mallorca. There was a sort of prelude the week before when I was taken to Port de Soller in the north-west of the island. My interest in the town was that it was common knowledge that there was an alien base in the sea there. Craft had been seen plunging and rising from the waves on regular occasions. Of course, a casual visit revealed nothing although the satellite array on the overlooking mountains was, I was informed, American and added an ominous feel to the area. It looked like there was radar there, the range of which would certainly extend to the alleged alien base.
The workshop I was to give was in the central semi-desert plains. The night before I was kept awake by a mosquito that had slipped through the netting. Try as I might, I couldn’t get it, and every time I was dropping off to sleep it would land on my skin and wake me. I was exasperated because I had a long weekend in front of me and needed my sleep. It struck me that while Native Americans talked of symbols and medicine derived from various animals, the mosquito surely had nothing to give. Eventually, just to do something, I got up and walked outside to have a pee. As I stood there, the stars were arrayed magnificently in a way I never experienced in the UK, and I stared at them in awe.
I had long been obsessed with astronomy. The first time I bought a small telescope was in London, which I brought to an Osho celebration that same evening. Setting my new toy up in the garden while people were dancing around me, I aimed it at Jupiter which was high in the sky and looked through the eyepiece. For a moment my mind went absolutely still. The sight of this beautiful gas giant and its moons floating in space like an exquisite array of jewels was so unexpectedly delicate, that – for a brief moment – there were no thoughts. One look through a good telescope at an interesting patch of sky, and you’ll wonder why anyone ever feels the need to take drugs.
Over the years, I spent all my spare cash on telescopes, culminating in an expensive top-of-the range model which I took on an earlier visit to Mallorca. After a few nights on the island I realised the telescope was pretty much useless in England, and I sold it. I was sort of regretting it at this point, standing looking up at the magnificence before me, whilst incongruously peeing.
As I was looking at the sky there was a sudden glow of light in one area. It looked like it was only a couple of kilometres above the island. Then it was as if a door opened and a shining object shot through, and down towards the sea to the north-west, the portal closing behind it immediately.
“Oh there’s the three o’clock shuttle to Soller,” I remarked to myself.
When I returned inside to my bed, the mosquito had gone, and I realised what its ‘medicine’ was: to keep one awake when one would be asleep, which seems obvious, but to retain consciousness when the brain is moving into the deeper rhythms of sleep is no easy matter. Without the mosquito, I would never have witnessed what I did.
Neither of the two encounters described so far are quite as outlandish or life-altering as one might expect. Indeed, there was a certain mundanity to them. This is unusual, in that what I have come across time and time again with these encounters is that they affect people in profound and often transformative ways. Over the years as people told me their experiences, it was the one common factor I could identify. So to this day I feel the greatest respect for those who entrust me with their stories, for they are sharing something very significant. Hence, my interest in the influence of the Oxford UFO on the students, that it had clearly had an impact on them and, presumably, how they perceived the universe.
Reading one of the best books on the subject, Daimonic Reality by Patrick Harpur, I came to understand that sightings of such phenomena are almost a desperate ploy by the cosmos, to be noticed, for the experiencers to realise there is much more in heaven and earth than in their current mind-sets. One may not need to experience such things if that mystery is already embedded and integrated; or, when experiencing it, there is no sudden paradigm shift shocking the system. I would probably fall into this category.
Yet my other encounter, which happened before the others, had an enormous impact on me, life-changing really. Due to its nature, it’s likely to be of no interest to researchers or anyone other than those of a mystical persuasion.
It took place in east Oxford, where the Ko Hsuan teenagers and I were for one year before moving to the western side of the city, though place is insignificant as the encounter happened when I was in my bed. Not even a mosquito to set me wandering! It is hard to describe the experience but I shall try.
One way to describe it is to say that I woke up inside a flying saucer. Another way is that I had a vivid dream. Another… Well, you can choose whatever explanation makes you comfortable. All I knew was that I was being treated to an unparalled insight into UFO phenomena. As it was happening, the UFO was inside me as much as I was inside it. The whole division of inside and outside had disappeared, along with other dualities such as truth and fiction, good and bad, far and close, life and death.
Insights poured into me at an extraordinary rate, one of which was revealing the horizontal shape of UFOs being at right angles to the light which beamed down onto witnesses, being represented by a cross with its horizontal bar and vertical axis. Associated with that was the Light of Eternity. The parallels of encounters with shamanic initiation have been commented on frequently, right down to the witnessing of one’s body being disassembled, the lesson being that one is not the body.
Time had become meaningless, but I would guess that only a few minutes had passed on this plane. When I emerged from the experience, so much of my mind-set had dissolved. ‘Go within,’ I had always heard, but now that was meaningless in the light of there being no in and no out. Everything is meditation.
Over the next days people felt there was something different about me, but I could only smile and say nothing. It is only now, with the distance of some years, I can relate some of it with any degree of accuracy. But I feel it is because of what happened that the later two encounters were fairly mundane in my view, as I had already opened up to a greater mystery.
It also gave me the tools with which I could manage unusual situations over the subsequent decades, especially as people would come to me for help. My novel Secrets: An Oxford Tale, published in 2015, is an attempt to give an overview of the UFO phenomenon. Although the story is fictional, the individual experiences described are not. This year I intend to publish another book, shorter and more intense than Secrets, focusing on one woman’s experience in particular. The book is doing honour to the idea that whatever is going on here, it is much more interesting than extraterrestrials.
Image thanks to www.pexels.com
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