Remember Erich Von Daniken? He wrote a book way back in the 1970s entitled Chariots of the Gods, which put forth the gloriously crackpot theory that ancient astronauts had visited the earth in eras past, and that records of their visitation could be found in ancient artwork and texts.

Von Daniken's prose style was noted for hyperbole and the omnipresence of exclamation marks! (!) and also for its ability to irritate scientists, skeptics, and critical thinkers. But he sold lots of books. He's still selling lots of books.

The idea has a certain romance to it, and in truth, we really don't know what happened 5,000 or more years ago. We have science. We have theories. We have Von Daniken. And we have written and oral traditions.

No photographs survive that era.

So we're right back to the old "you can't prove a negative" bit. You can't prove ancient astronauts didn't visit 5,000 years ago. You also can't prove Pluto isn't made of baked brie cheese. (At least not yet you can't. And poor Pluto got downgraded from planet status last year anyway, so maybe we'll never know.)

The point is, this is where we always end the debate on UFOs: The negative proof impossibility. Same old, same old.

What got me to thinking about Daniken again was popular Hubber Bard of Ely's recent story about a glowing entity he saw long ago in a London squat and how the sighting recalled something he had personally experienced that ufologists call 'hummadruz'. A 'hummadruz' is a humming, buzzing, droning combination sort of sound that only people who experience UFOs can hear.

The sound comes up often enough in reports that it seems to be tied to alien visitations in some yet-to-be-defined way. In his story, the Bard related the sound to a mantra he had been chanting, "Om Mani Padme Hum," which of course is used in the Tibetan Book of the Dead and plenty of other places in Eastern thought too. Literally it means something like "the jewel in the lotus."

Daniken's idea that aliens from outer space literally came to to earth thousands of years ago and changed the course of mankind is a common theme in many theories of ufology, but making the connection to mantras lit something up in my imagination, something I've never bothered to write down but have thought about many times before. Here's my thought on it:

What if the visitors aren't from space at all, but rather from deep Time?

What if they are time travelers?

It's not a new idea. But the mantra tie-in gives it a bit of a twist I think. I promise by the end of this hub I'll tie it all together. (Stay with me here.)

I've had a long, weird history with UFOs and strange things in general. I'm sure that no small part of this history is due to being blessed (or cursed) with a mother who believed in weird things and claimed to have psychic abilities and powers.

That opens the door for sure. But two of my three children, one of whom barely remembers my mother and the other of whom was born long after she died, also have recurrent strange experiences.

I don't pretend to understand what this means. In my family, we just refer to it as 'it'. You have 'it' or you don't have 'it', and those of us who do try to be as nonchalant and accepting of 'it' as we can.

What other choices do we have? 'It' seems harmless enough. And most of the time, 'it' is not particularly intrusive, or useful. It's like being able to pick up bits and pieces of a radio broadcast. Intriguing, but not enough info there to really come together in any coherent way.

Anyway, my strange experience with mantras happened about five years ago. Early in the morning, as I was waking, I distinctly heard a group of people chanting, "Om Deva Shanti, Shanti Deva Shanti, Shanti Shanti Shanti" over and over again in a monotone, very fast. The 'Om' part of the chant was held throughout the rest of the phrase like a background hum, and then it would start again, immediately, over and over and over.

When I woke fully, the chanting was gone. Just like that. At the time I didn't know anything about mantras except that they had something to do with meditation, and I certainly did not know what those words meant. I wrote them down immediately so as not to forget them, and for the next several years asked around, hoping to find some explanation.

What was so disconcerting about it was that it didn't feel at all like a dream: It felt completely real, and the words were distinct and the chanting was very powerful and intense.

A few days after the chanting episode, again just as I was waking, I heard a word very clearly whispered in my ear, "Satchidananda." Then I woke up completely and of course, no one was there, no radio was on, nothing.

I wrote the word down again and began to look for its meaning, since I had never heard it before in my life as far as I could remember. I mean, you'd think you'd remember a word like that if you'd heard it before. It's an odd word.

What's especially odd about these two incidents is my two kids who have 'it' have also had episodes where they woke up hearing other languages spoken, only to discover no one around and no radios or TVs playing, and then wrote down the words to find out what they meant.

In fact, my son, who I assure you is quite sane, had two episodes in his early teens when he lapsed into some kind of trance in front of his friends and just started speaking a foreign language. On both occasions, his friends shook him until he snapped out of it, and he had at that point no recollection whatsoever of speaking that way.

Weird.

The Mahabarata is an ancient Hindu legend which is part of a group of very ancient texts called the Vedas.

Most scholars put the Mahabarata's age at about 5,000 years, but some of the Vedas are so old no one is certain of their true age, and many have never been translated from Sanskrit into English.

Without going too deeply into Hindu stories and Vedic lore, suffice it to say that in the Mahabarata there is talk of flying machines called Vimanas.

In 1918 a Hindu scholar named S. Shastry 'channeled' what he claimed to be an ancient Hindu text called the Vaimanika Shastra, which included detailed drawings of the actual constructions of vimana flying machines.

This book became popular again in the 1970s when the UFO craze was at its peak. Many Hindu scholars consider it to be bunk.

But if we take a longer view, and by longer I mean MUCH longer, we find that in the beginning (of the Hindu concept of time) vimanas were not mechanical craft, they were powered by mantras. (Whew! It took awhile to get to this connection, didn't it? You must be exhausted! But wait, we're not done...)

The Vedic conception of Universal time is vast and incomprehensible to ordinary mortals. For example, a period of one day in the life of the God Brahma is equivalent to 4,320,000,000 years on earth, and Brahma's night is just as long. There are 360 days and nights in one year of the God Brahma. Here is a further explanation by author Stephen Knapp:

Each day of Brahma is divided into one thousand cycles of four yugas, namely Satya-yuga, Treta-yuga, Dvapara-yuga, and finally the Kali-yuga, which is the yuga we are presently experiencing. Satya-yuga lasts 1,728,000 years, and is an age of purity when all residents live very long lives and can be fully developed in spiritual understanding and mystical abilities and remarkable powers. Some of these abilities, or mystic siddhis, include changing one's shape, becoming very large or microscopically small, becoming very heavy or even weightless, securing any desirable thing, becoming free of all desires, or even flying through the sky to wherever one wanted to go on one's own volition. So at that time, the need for mechanical flying machines was not necessary.

As the yugas continued, the purity of the people, along with their mystical abilities, decreased by 25% in each age. The age of Treta-yuga lasts 1,296,000 years. During that age, the minds of humanity became more dense, and the ability for understanding the higher spiritual principles of the Vedic path was also more difficult. Naturally, the ability to fly through the sky by one's own power was lost. After Treta-yuga, Dvapara-yuga lasts 864,000 years, and Kali-yuga lasts 432,000 years, of which 5,000 have now already passed. At the end of Kali-yuga, the age of Satya-yuga starts again and the yugas continue through another cycle. One thousand such cycles is one day of Brahma. Now that we are in Kali-yuga, almost all spiritual understanding disappears, and whatever mystical abilities that remain are almost insignificant.

It is explained that it was not until the beginning of Treta-yuga that the development of vimanas took place. In fact, Lord Brahma, the chief demigod and engineer of the universe, is said to have developed several vimanas for some of the other demigods. These were in various natural shapes that incorporated the use of wings, such as peacocks, eagles, swans, etc. Other vimanas were developed for the wiser human beings by great seers of Vedic knowledge.

In the course of time, there were three basic types of vimanas. In Treta-yuga, men were adept in mantras or potent hymns. Thus, the vimanas of that age were powered by means of knowledge of mantras. In Dvapara-yuga, men had developed considerable knowledge of tantra, or ritual. Thus, the vimanas of Dvapara-yuga were powered by the use of tantric knowledge. In Kali-yuga, knowledge of both mantra and tantra are deficient. Thus, the vimanas of this age are known as kritaka, artificial or mechanical. In this way, there are three main types of vimanas, Vedic airplanes, according to the characteristics of each yuga. [From www.stephen-knapp.com]

Two points are of special interest here: One is that conceptions of time are very vast and elaborate in in Vedic lore, and the other is that in the oldest, most deeply ancient time, vimanas were powered by mantras, not mechanical power systems.

How can that be so?

That would take a whole bunch of hubs to explain, but suffice it so say, in that system of knowledge, it could be so. Our culture is very good at looking outside ourselves and measuring and thinking rationally. That culture is very good at looking within. At some point, the two overlap in amazing ways.

Within, without, it's an artificial distinction when you get right down to it.

So here we are, living in the end times of a marvelous dream that soon will start all over again. We've got UFOs dropping in on some of us (vimanas?) accompanied by mantra-like sounds (hummadruz or om mani padme hum or shanti shanti shanti?) and what does it all mean?

It's nothing if not dream-like and marvelous. And I wonder if, in looking for the answer in mechanical explanations of craft and aliens and genetic experimentation we aren't missing something more subtle and more amazing yet.

My mantra dream was an inside out moment. Instead of a dream during sleep, it was a reality during waking that made waking feel like a dream Suddenly the lines were blurred, and not only that, suddenly I was on a quiet quest.

What did it all mean? Who was chanting these things? What did the chant mean? What does it any of it have to do with UFO sightings, experiences that interrupt our waking 'reality' and make that reality seem more dreamlike, while simultaneously all our dreams take on a vividness and a reality henceforth unknown and unfamiliar?

"Satchidananda" translated from the original Sanskrit means something like, "Existence-consciousness-bliss." It is a synonym for Parashakti: Lord Siva's Divine Mind and simultaneously the pure superconscious mind of each individual soul.

It is perfect love and omniscient, omnipotent consciousness, the fountainhead of all existence, yet containing and permeating all existence.

In other words, the mind of god is your mind and my mind and permeates everything, all matter, all time, in perfect love and perfect consciousness, always. It is more real than reality. It can whisper in your ear, and wake you from one dream into another, just like that.

What does a UFO experience do the experiencer?

It changes that person's understanding of reality forever. Mantras also do this too. The first UFOs (vimanas) were powered not by hydrocarbons, but by mantras. If Lord Shiva whispered in your ear one morning, would you wake up?

I did finally find my mantra, and lots more. The video below is really beautiful---Watch for the UFOs in it, they show up with the purple parts.

Shanti Shanti Shanti.

Om.