Greg Bishop currently writes on the UFOMystic blog with Nick Redfern. In a previous incarnation he wrote decided to create a temporary autonomous zone called The Excluded Middle and explore those twighlight issues that others often don't.  This particular piece gives an excellent grounding to the research we're currently doing on linking the kind of hyper-dimensional language sets given to contactees like Jim Sparks which in turn relate to the visual language generated by tryptamine consciousness and the psychedelic carrier tone. Thrown into the mix are the Enochian angelic languages of John Dee and the ground-breaking work of Mario Pazzaglini. Link to UFOMystic: http://www.ufomystic.com/wake-up-down-there/alien-writing

Dr. Mario Pazzaglini was a remarkable man, as I was to find out over the next few years until his untimely death in 1999. I only met him once, at the 1997 Roswell bash. We eschewed the parades and some of the more boring lectures one day and went thrift-store shopping. Most of our talks were over the phone, and he actually provided some much-needed free therapy when I mentioned some things that were going on in my life at the time.

In 1970, he was at the Woodstock music festival, helping to run the “bad trip” tent along with a few Tibetan Buddhist friends when the hippies couldn’t handle their acid. He had been a regular in the Washington D.C. insider circuit for a few years in the mid-1960s, when he was still in college majoring in physics and mathematics. “He would have made a great physicist¯ says his brother Peter. In the late 1960s, he had changed his mind and entered the graduate program in psychology. He earned his doctorate from the University of Delaware in 1969, and lived in the small town of Newark, just a couple of miles from U.D. for the rest of his life.

He later became an expert on the problems and cures of drug abuse, serving on several committees and panels for the state of Delaware, and in his psychiatric practice, specialized in treating the severest of the mentally ill. Like everything else in the late ‘60s, he field of psychology was undergoing an upheaval as newly-minted doctors began to explore anything that would make the job of healing faster and more rewarding for the patient. Western culture tries to keep everything fragmented and separate, and one of the things all of us were trying to do was introduce connectedness back into the process¯ recalled Pazzaglini's longtime friend and psychiatric practice partner Dr. Paul Poplosky. “I think that's where some of his other interests came into play.¯

Those other interests¯ included a cornucopia of esoterra; alchemy, cabbala, tarot, and a heaping dose of numerology. He also made enough of a splash through well-concealed back channels that our buddies in the ubiquitous black helicopters occasionally shadowed him. He compiled a magickal and symbol system of his own devising which may never be cracked. In short, he may very well have been a modern-day Magus in the guise of a mild-mannered psychologist from Delaware. This was his perspective when examining the subject of UFOs.

Self-portrait of Pazzaglini with “friends.”

He attended a conference on UFO abduction at M.I.T. in 1992 and presented his research to the leaders in the field, but few of his friends ever knew about it. Most of the leaders in the abduction field basically ignored the subject. Almost no one knew he had notebooks filled with examples of strange symbols. Hundreds of his paintings and drawings filled his home. “I believe in his next life, he'll be an artist¯ says his brother.

“What is this alien writing stuff?”

Someone out there has been writing us letters for a long time. Strange symbols and printed languages turn up regularly in UFO encounter experiences. Police officer Lonnie Zamora glimpsed a strange crescent-and-arrow type design on the side of an egg-shaped craft at Soccorro, New Mexico in 1964.The account of Jesse Marcel, Jr. includes pieces of wreckage that his father, Major Jesse Marcel, brought home to Roswell in the early morning hours of July 8, 1947 inscribed with symbolic writing that, if genuine, bears little comparison to earthly communication.

Jesse Marcel, Jr.’s drawing of Roswell wreckage symbols.

“Alien writing¯ can literally change history. The Mormon faith is based on translations of strangely engraved golden plates that founder Joseph Smith claimed to have dug up after a divine visitation in 1823. As for the authenticity of “mentally received¯ messages, there is reason to believe that at least some of the symbols and symbol systems described do not originate from the psyche of the participants.

One of the difficulties in verifying the authenticity of an alien script is that if it resembles an earthly language or known terrestrial symbols, is it necessarily a “true  one? Perhaps the reason for this is that all input into a human consciousness is filtered through an individual’s learning, experience, culture, and prejudice, and the messages must necessarily be rendered in a form that is understandable to the receiver as well as others. The flipside of this reasoning is the obvious possibility that the receiver might be delusional, hallucinating, or simply hoaxing the account. While it takes little skill to devise an alphabet with a one-to-one relationship to the experiencer's native language, a representational pictorial symbol system or one with no discernible grammar or syntax (at least one which seems to possess an internal logic) is more difficult to fake.

Humans receive alien writing in many ways. Some say that the symbols come from angels¯ or teachers.¯ By far the most common method of reception is by channeling,¯ but the messages can also be the result of a close encounter wherein the participant sees and remembers symbols or languages shown to him while wandering about inside (or inside what is perceived to be) an extraterrestrial craft. An early example is the case of Herbert Schirmer, who in 1967 claimed to have been taken aboard a ship near Ashland, Nebraska. On the uniforms of the beings he encountered was a symbol that resembled a winged serpent. This theme is obviously not exclusively extraterrestrial, as it was known to the Greeks and Romans, as “dragons  in Chinese and European lore, as well as to the new world cultures of Central and South America. There is the possibility that Schirmer may have incorporated it (consciously or not) into his account. An interesting sidelight is the fact that the Mayan culture held the belief that Quetzelcoatl, the feathered serpent, had taught and bequeathed to man a system of pictorial writing.

Dr. Mario Pazzaglini made a 16 year study of examples and possible sources of alien writing, and chronicled them in his book, Symbolic Messages. He collected hundreds of samples and classified them into distinct categories: 1) Alphabetic consisting of 20-30 symbols, where each symbol is a consonant or vowel; 2) Syllabicusually 50-60 symbols, where each symbol represents a consonant/vowel combination; 3) IdeographicUsually 500-600 symbols, where each symbol represents an idea or word; and 4) SymbolsConsisting of single and complex insignia types. These categories must necessarily derive from a human understanding of representational visual systems, and in fact most claimed alien writing examples fall into these categories.

aUI language taught to John Weilgart (he claimed) by spacemen.

Pazzaglini conducted a limited experiment wherein participants were asked to conceive their own “alien language.  The results without exception showed that, left to their own devices, people tend to concoct alien alphabets that bear a one-to-one relationship to their native language.

In the realm of the written word, one of the earliest concrete examples of what was purported to be an extra-human communication was channeled by medium Edward Kelley and his boss, Elizabethan Court Astrologer and all-around magician John Dee, from 1582 to 1589. Dee said that an angel¯ had dictated to him (through Kelley) a system of symbols to be used in a ceremonial context, and would provide the user with a higher understanding of magical and alchemical concepts than human-based writing. The system was called Enochian¯ and is still in use by occult practitioners today.

Enochian symbols.

It communicates concepts through the juxtaposition of symbols and their relationships to each other, and does not appear to be derived from any written language. Enochian is claimed among its adherents to affect the reader/ user on important subconscious levels as well. This aspect of alien writing has also been mentioned by UFO contactees and abductees.

  Alien writing channeled by Pazzaglini.

Pazzaglini’s own alien writing doesn't resemble anything else that UFO witnesses have reported, with one exception. There seems to be a spiritual, if not graphic kinship with the scribblings of Betty Anderasson and her family, and this may explain the fascination he had with this case. Andreasson, whose abduction experiences were chronicled in the Andreasson Affair books by Raymond Fowler, has produced hundreds of pages of a cursive script that almost defies analysis. After comparing Andreasson's drawings to various medieval alchemical symbols, Pazzaglini was able to translate one possible sentence out of hundreds. It read: “If you want to make light solid, show it to the moon.¯ While this probably makes little practical sense, it does make for a beautiful sort of poetry.

Pazzaglini once told me that he was in contact with leading abduction researchers who promised to send him examples of alien symbols, but he never got them. Perhaps it was because they wanted to keep the symbols secret to verify the authenticity of future claims, or maybe it was simply their egos getting in the way. Another study of alien writing has yet to be published, which is unfortunate. Pazzaglini had to self-publish his own monograph. Admittedly, the study of alien writing would make little sense to a publisher with an eye on the bottom line, but as a contribution to an understanding of extra-human experience, it should be welcomed.