ONE

We reached the edge of the cliff that extended out over the depth of the canyon, and for several minutes the man with the white hair seemed too disconcerted to speak.

            “It wasn’t long ago,” he said after he caught his breath, “I could have guided you here as well as Edmund Hillary; but, about three years ago, something happened to me that never happened to a man before or at least no man who ever survived to tell – that moment changed my very soul. You think I am old, but I am not. It took just one moment to change my hair from black to white and the white of my eyes to blue, and to melt the light of my soul so that my heart trembles and I am lost in the vision. Do you know I cannot look over the edge of this cliff into the canyon below without feeling that tremble?”

            He stood on the very edge of the cliff to speak as if his words alone were the only thing that held his tenuous grasp of the world. The cliff jutted out into the depth of the canyon and gave a clear view of the translucent black shine of a whirling vortex that spun wildly sixteen hundred feet on the canyon floor below. As I looked at the precarious position of the man and listened to him speak as I clung to the tree beside me, I dared not even glance upward at the sky in fear the rock beneath me would crumble into the depth of the roar that echoed below.

            “People have an idea that the vortex changed the man,” he began, “but an expression of something from beyond, the potential of the ultimate of essence that is inherent within man from the beginning, changed the man. Nothing in the universe happens by chance, and even though chance might at times seem to be the cause of destruction, a world of coincidence is not the world in which man lives. Alien contact, whether it be physical or by some form of communication, is a moment of synchronicity. It is the moment man awakens from his metaphorical dream into the world of self-realization. The moment of first contact will activate inherent abilities and capacities of which mankind has never before imagined – latent capabilities waiting to be understood and used. The moment will trigger the expansion of thought, and things that once seemed impossible will suddenly be possible. Neutral, benevolent, or hostile – by their mere presence, by seemingly benevolent intervention, or by the necessity to overcome hostility – an activation within man’s consciousness will occur, and man will discover the power of his imagination. This evolutionary path of man’s consciousness was placed within his essence in the beginning; there is nothing that cannot be overcome. Alien contact is a transcendental moment, an intellectual and metaphysical gift of awakening that will change the very essence of man’s conscious mind forever.”

            “The contact inside the vortex is the moment the power of imagination is unbound – the expansion of man’s nature into possibilities never imagined will occur. The moment will mark the first day of the record of human history on this planet, and from the day contact is made, the intellect of mankind will instantly rise and rapidly progress. All the forces of earth’s creation will be aligned with man. History is the proof: contact will be the most significant discovery that man has ever made and the beginning of a new use of creative power. The significance of contact is the unfurling of information, an activation of the evolution of mind: animals to humans, humans to humans, humans to the infinite consciousness that fills the void. What does the moment of contact mean? – it doesn’t matter because man leaves the moment behind forever.”

TWO

            “You must get over false notions,” said the white-haired man, “for I have brought you here to see the possibility of the event that I mentioned – to tell you the whole story with the whirling black vortex under your eyes.”

            Then he drew a stick figure in the dust and continued, “If a man deliberately enters the vortex, if a man discovers the vortex and enters with an open mind, then that man will receive a new language of spirituality if he has a soul to receive it. If he fears it or only wants something, then what he receives will be malevolent; then he should never enter because the power of the Earth itself will destroy him.”

            “We are now,” he continued, “looking upon that particularizing event which distinguishes past, present, and future – now, you look down to the bottom of the canyon – hold onto the rocks if you feel dizzy – look down through the whirling dust and into the vortex of what you see.”

            I looked down dizzily and saw a whirling mist of dust, whose edges where an iridescence that brought to mind the green ray flash that sometimes occurs just after sunset – an iridescence more delicate than human imagination can conceive. Into the center, as far as my eyes could reach, there spun the translucent shine of a whirling black storm, a vortex spinning like the entrance to another world, emanating waves of inconceivable depth, whose character of something endless opened up and expanded into forever.

            The appearance of the space around it seemed more distant than the canyon floor, and it had something very unusual about it. And although at the time, the wind blew so strong downward over the cliff’s edge, just the sight seemed to plunge my existence down into the depths below.

            “The vortex,” the man resumed, “…the particular times and places… It is impossible to predict. Its nature is more than anyone can understand. Can you hear it? Can you feel the change in the air?”

            In a few minutes, the scene began to alter. The edges of the vortex began to open and grow more indefinable, and the whirling storm seemed to disappear while streaks of lightning erupted around us where none had been before. These streaks spread out in a great gyratory motion and seemed to form an entirely new vortex like a portal of something vast. The canyon walls trembled to their core, and the rocks began to splinter. I threw myself upon the ground and clung to the roots of a nearby tree.

            “This,” I said in the upheaval of the storm, “this can be nothing else than the opening of an entrance to another world.”

            “That is what it is sometimes called,” he said. “Astronauts call it a hole beyond the seeds of light. You can see into it now, the vortex, look now. Gaze over the edge and look into it as I tell you a story that will tell you how I found out what I know.”

THREE

            “Myself and two others were on that first mission exploring the surface of Mars when we encountered something like you see now. We were keeping close to the lander to take advantage of our two-hour supply of oxygen when we saw it – the red dust rising from the surface on the other side of an ancient channel. We never set out on the surface without a plan to return to the lander well before we reached our reserve supply of oxygen, but this time we decided to remain out and get a closer look at the vortex. If it hadn’t been for that decision, we never would have gotten so close. The three of us crossed the channel and came within 100 meters of the vortex. Then something happened most unusual, something that we had never seen before, and I began to feel uneasy without knowing exactly why. We saw a rust-colored cloud rising on the horizon coming towards us with amazing speed. Moments later the storm was upon us, and the Martian sky was so completely red that we could not see each other in the rusty darkness. We made it back to the lander in the flashes of lightning, and we stood entirely silent for some moments completely engulfed in the great cloud of red dust. No one will ever know what my thoughts were at that at that moment. I saw the violent whirl of the vortex overtake us, but once inside it was completely calm and still, and around us in every direction it was a whirl of red. Then overhead there burst out, all at once, a circular spot of deep blue, and through it came a ball of light so intense that it blazed my eyes to a blue luster. It may sound outrageous, but what I tell you is the truth, I began to think how magnificent a sight it was to see, and how insignificant I was in such an incredible display of power.”

            The man sighed deeply and stood on the cliff’s edge with the wind whipping wild through his long white hair. He began to speak again, “I shall never forget that sensation of awe tinged with fear, and the admiration with which I saw the craft appear. It was spinning with such bewildering speed that its ebony sides appeared perfectly smooth. It touched down within the clouds of red dust with streams of fire and gold, and there, in the liquid azure blue atmosphere in which we stood, we made contact.”

FOUR

“Contact. It was a gift of sound, touch, and thought. Where did they come from? That question doesn’t even matter because what was given was received. We made contact – this is the truth of that moment. Was it physical contact? I do not know, but it burst forth like lightning, and the power of that contact was in the intention of the act itself. The intention was a moment of epiphany that opened the power of imagination and brought the whole of mankind closer to creation.”

            “The contact was a mental process, it occurred through an exchange of information; it was an act of consciousness and a psychological catalyst. The contact was a kind of intelligence that was difficult to understand. It is possible the extraterrestrials read our deeply buried thoughts and memories as communication, but the contact removed the limitation of thousands of years of human experience, and our minds expanded into new ways of thinking.”

            “Some people thought that we merely created the alien contact in the fantasy of our own minds. However, this was not the case, people ignored the reality that an entirely new intelligence beyond humankind’s capacity to understand might exist. And in the epiphany of that contact, in the center of the black hole storm, we needed only the power of imagination for the reality of creation to be revealed.”

            “On Mars, the extraterrestrial contact was a true gift, a gift that forced me to discover the nature of myself. It makes no difference if the alien beings are more technologically advanced; what matters is that day on Mars was the day mankind advanced.”

FIVE

“It might have been an hour, or maybe longer, when the vortex, its sides becoming less and less steep, made three or four wild gyrations in rapid succession and then it exploded into an infinite distance, and bearing my two fellow astronauts with it, at once and forever, it disappeared into the void of space above. The lander, next to which I stood, was frozen in the same spot. The Martian sky was clear, the winds had diminished, and the Earth was rising on the horizon. I found myself on the surface of a vast plain where once a Martian sea had been. In a few minutes, I reentered the lander exhausted and speechless from the encounter. Those who recovered me upon my return to Earth were old friends of mine, but they didn’t know me any more than they could have known the beings I encountered on Mars. My hair was white, the full of my eyes were turned blue, and they said my countenance had changed. I told them my story, just as I have told you, but they did not believe it.”

            And then done speaking, the white-haired man dove off the cliff and disappeared into the winds of the dissipating vortex. And I looked on in wonder.