CHAPTER FOUR Spectra

On December 4, 1971, a Saturday, we discussed the events that were crowding us and how we could best proceed toward the truth. It seemed to us that the most important line to pursue was the phenomenon of objects that disappeared and reappeared instantly. If we could be certain that the power of vanishing objects resided solely in Uri, it would simplify our problem. However, if this power was controlled by an extraterrestrial intelligence, we would be faced with one of the most momentous revelations in human history.
When Uri appeared at 3 P.M. for his laboratory session, Itzhaak and I explained our position to him as we had summarized it. Uri also made it quite clear to us that he had never been able consciously to control the appearance and disappearance of objects in this way prior to the December 1 hypnosis session.
In a sense he was quite dejected because he had always assumed that his powers were truly his own. Now he was beginning to feel more and more the presence of an outside intelligence in his mental and emotional life. But, as he admitted, all this was only a suspicion – none of the evidence thus far gave a clear-cut answer. In view of his uncertainties and our probing he agreed quite readily to our suggestion to try to make objects vanish and reappear.
I asked Uri what kind of test material he would like to work with. I told him that he had a choice of metals, plastics, glasses, organic material, etc. He thought about this for a long time and said, “Give me five pens.” I collected five ball-point pens and offered them to him. Uri said, “Why don’t you pick one of the five pens yourself?”
I picked a Parker ball-point pen that had three main parts, and I proceeded to scratch code numbers on each part as follows: plastic body, #36; metal clip case, #145; brass filler cartridge, #367299.
I assembled the pen after this procedure and placed it in a wooden cigar box. Uri sat down, very seriously, near the box, and placed his left hand over it, without touching it, for nine minutes. “Okay, I think something happened, Andrija. Open the box and see.” He said this very quietly.
I opened the box. The Parker pen was exactly where I had placed it. The experiment had failed. I reached in the box and picked up the pen; I knew instantly that the pen felt lighter. I pressed the metal cap to spring out the ball point. There was no spring action and no point. I unscrewed the metal clip case from the plastic body. There was no brass filler cartridge! I don’t think that I have ever been so amazed in my life. Bentov and I discussed the question of how this brass filler cartridge got out of its plastic-metal housing and out of the cigar box, without affecting any of those fragile materials. In order for this brass filler cartridge to disappear without damaging these housings, it would have to be taken apart atom by atom. To do this required enormous intelligent energies, unknown to man today.
I asked Uri if he had any feelings during this disappearance. “Well, I don’t think I did it. I didn’t know whether or not it would disappear. I certainly had no knowledge that only a part of the pen would disappear. I have no special feelings when this happens. It’s just like breaking metal; I wish very much for it to happen. I have no idea where that cartridge went to. All I can say is that it will come back as some kind of a proof.”
Uri then had to leave for a social engagement and said he would return about midnight. Itzhaak and I sat down to talk. He said he had to leave the next day for Europe and then was heading back to the United States. Itzhaak felt very strongly that what was happening to Uri was very much in the Old Testament prophetic tradition, and we were catching him in an early stage of development. He was also fully convinced by now that there was an intelligent power behind Uri, although I was not fully convinced. I needed more evidence. But Itzhaak had gone one stage beyond me. He was worried about whether the power was “good” or “evil.” He was so concerned that he wanted to call up his guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Transcendental Meditation teacher, and get a “ruling” on the problem. The reason that we were in a quandary about these things was that when the “voice” appeared, we had little or no opportunity to ask questions, and if we did, they were not answered. Itzhaak and I decided that since he was leaving, we would try to have another hypnosis session and see if some of our questions could be answered.
Uri returned to the apartment at 1 A.M. December 5, 1971, and agreed to the plan for hypnosis. At 1:30 A.M. the hypnotic induction was begun by me.
Uri said, “Somebody is talking through a big loudspeaker.”
Then the “voice” was heard. The tape recorder was disabled by some invisible power. We could not tell where the voice came from. It was not Uri’s voice.
Here I am. I am ready. Ask.
Itzhaak asked: “I would like to have your permission to tell my teacher, Maharishi, about you. May I do this?”
No. He has no interest. But you must await further information in the U.S. You shall receive instructions from us. You have to meditate by yourself on the fourteenth of December, 8 P.M., New York time. The day will be raining. That is your power, the rain. Do not repeat this to anyone.
Andrija, you shall take care of Uri. Take good care of him. He is in a very delicate situation. He is the only one for the next fifty years to come. We are going to be very, very far away. Spectra, Spectra, Spectra: That is our spacecraft.
Andrija: “How far away is it?”
It is fifty-three thousand sixty-nine light-ages away.
Andrija: “How far is a light-age?”
There are some books on your planet left by our people. Uri will find in the years to come. Your questions will be answered. Keep them, keep them, keep them. They will materialize themselves away after they have done their work. Do not ask any questions about the Israel situation. It will come out of him [Uri] alone. Do not worry. Do not worry. Do not worry. By the way, your little toy the pen part – is right by me; I will return it to you in time to come. I am sending Uri back to you now. Farewell!
Uri woke up with a headache and was very much dazed. I told him what had happened. He didn’t remember a word of it. I told him that the tape recorder had jammed and we could not record. He placed his hand over the tape recorder, and it immediately began to work perfectly. Since Uri was still dazed, I drove him home.
At 2 A.M. December 6, 1971, I was talking to Uri about the above session, but he could not remember anything. While I talked, he kept doodling unconsciously. When he was finished, I saw that he had made a drawing of a big room, which he felt he had been in. As we went over the drawing, he suddenly began to remember the details and said that this was a spacecraft from “Spectra.”
On the morning of December 6, 1971, Itzhaak left for Lod Airport to go to Europe and the United States. I spent the morning logging tapes and notes and getting camera and tape recorders in order. At ten-thirty I went into the bathroom to bathe and shave. I turned on a small battery-operated Sony AM radio. I was shocked to find that every radio station but one was blocked out by a tone signal. I assumed that this was some radio alert system such as the Conelrad system in the United States. One station at dial 860 kc setting continued to play American music with Hebrew commentary. After about ten minutes of this I called up Uri to ask him what was going on. He checked his radio and reported that all stations were operating normally. He suggested, half in jest, that maybe Spectra was teaching me some lessons in science. After about fifteen minutes of this strange radio effect, all the radio stations came through with their regular programs. Although I was not aware of it then, I was to learn in time that this was, indeed, a science lesson, the first of many.
At noon I went over to Uri’s apartment, and his mother made a great Hungarian meal for us. There I again met Uri’s best friend, sixteen-year-old Shipi Strang. I soon discovered that Shipi was a precocious lad. We set up a game among the three of us in which two of us would try to guess what the other was thinking. It turned out that I could receive telepathic signals perfectly from Uri when Shipi was with him. We tried numbers (one-digit, two-digit sets, three-digit sets); colors; and words in English, Hebrew, and Greek. I was truly prodigious in my telepathic abilities! I tried to figure out why. When Uri and I had done such tests before, I could not perform this well. Uri confided to me that when Shipi was around he had extra “power.” Somehow the two of them, Uri and Shipi, were doing something for me as well. Shipi went home at 6 P.M.
Uri and I were invited to Iris’s home for dinner. The three of us decided to go to old Jaffa for the evening, and en route we had to pass the area where Uri had lived as a child, where he had enjoyed his Arab garden. As we reached the corner where Uri had lived, he slowed the car, then stopped at the intersection and waited. Suddenly a round, white, luminous spacecraft with side fins (or wing stubs) flashed across the north-south street heading from west to east. This was seen by the three of us. It was very low and moved without a sound. I checked my watch. It was exactly 9 P.M. The sighting lasted about two seconds. The sky was overcast with low heavy clouds, and the light from the craft reflected brightly from the cloud cover. We drove on in silence. No one felt like going to Jaffa anymore. Instead we decided to go to the Dizengoff to have coffee.
About 10 P.M. a heavy downpour started with a high wind of some fifty miles per hour. We abandoned our sidewalk cafe and entered a covered shopping arcade. Finally we tired of this and made a run through the driving rain to get to my car parked on the street.
I drove Iris, then Uri, to their homes, then returned through the blinding rainstorm to my apartment in Herzliyyah. As I drove, I realized that something was happening to me. I was experiencing a budding talent for telepathy and clairvoyance. The thing that bothered me about it was that it was as if I had no part in it. I hadn’t earned it; it was a “gift.” I could now sympathize when he said, “But it’s not me that’s doing it!”
The apartment looked toward Tel Aviv over the Haifa Road. The rain lashed at windows blurring all vision. I sat there for a couple of hours. Perhaps I was hoping to see another luminous craft flash by. But nothing happened. Finally I went to bed, fully awake, thinking thoughts I had never dared think before. Was there really some kind of civilized life out there in space, nursing mankind along in secrecy? While I could muse on these possibilities as an exercise in imagination, the problem of scientific proof seemed insoluble.
On the morning of December 7, 1971, I had an excited call from Jacov. He had some information to deliver in person. Uri and I drove to the Hilton Hotel to meet him at 12:45 P.M. Jacov told us with intense excitement that Israeli scholars had cracked the meaning of the word “Dakashem.” It was the name of a town in Egypt that had not been used in this form for some four thousand years. The modern name of the town was Khashem El Galala. On a military map of Egypt its coordinates were 892 891. It was believed that “Dakashem” was the code name for the Egyptian invasion plan. Jacov informed us that enough details of the information we had submitted were verified so that it was now being taken seriously. A request was made for Uri to meet and talk with some of the staff officers who were working on the problem. None of this pleased Uri, as he did not want to get deeply involved in this military exercise. As we parted with Jacov, Uri said he had reservations about a meeting with the army people.
I wanted to go and see the spot from which Uri and Shipi had obtained the picture of the spacecraft hovering over the army headquarters building on Friday, December 3. Just before we reached this area we had to cross the Joppa-Haifa Road at Arlosoroff Street. At the Joppa-Haifa Road we were stopped by the traffic signal. While waiting for the light to change, Uri asked for my wristwatch, the Universal Geneve Chronometer. The time was 1:32 P.M. He pulled out the stem to reset the watch hands to 12:00 hours. He requested that I say out loud to him three numbers. I said “4, 6, and 9.”
He then gave me the watch and asked me to place it face down on my left knee and to place my right index finger over it. This I did. He then asked that I pick one of the three numbers that I had selected earlier. I said “9.” The traffic light changed, and Uri drove onto the Ayalon Bridge. As we crossed under the power lines on the bridge, Uri said, “Now turn the watch over and see if anything happened.”
I turned the watch over. It was set exactly at 09:00 hours! I asked Uri what he thought this meant. He said he had a strong feeling that this was a rendezvous time for a meeting with a spacecraft. I must confess that the mere thought of a bonafide sighting or a meeting with an extraterrestrial being sent shivers running through me. Uri and I inspected the street comer where they had taken the picture. The view of the Israel army headquarters was perfect. This area made Uri rather nervous, so we did not linger very long. We made arrangements to have dinner with Iris that evening. I drove Uri back to his apartment and then returned to my apartment at Herzliyyah. I lay down to nap for a couple of hours.
I got up about four o’clock feeling very refreshed. Suspecting that I had better be ready for anything that evening, I packed my equipment carefully for portability and easy access. I checked out my Super 8 Nizo Braun movie camera and loaded it with a fast-film cartridge, Ekta 160. Then I loaded my Hasselblad camera with 3000 ASA Polaroid film for any night sky pictures such as I had taken in Brazil. But this time I had a Sonnar 250-mm telephoto lens. I put a fresh Hitachi 120 minute cassette for audio recording in my TC 120 tape recorder. I also attached a supersensitive microphone and preamplifier for recording very low level sound. By six-thirty I was finished with all my technical preparations.
I phoned Uri at seven to tell him I was ready. It was then that Uri told me that Iris was with him and that something unusual had happened. He reported that both he and Iris were wearing wristwatches. While waiting for my call, each of the watches had had the hands advanced exactly one hour by some unknown and invisible agency.
All these manipulations that had occurred on this day seemed like the portents of a coming storm. I asked Uri what he thought the advancement of the clock hands meant. He felt that instead of encountering a spacecraft at 9 P.M., as he had predicted earlier, it would now occur at 10 P.M. that night. We ended this phone conversation by agreeing to meet at Iris’s apartment in Tel Aviv at 8:30.
When we met at Iris’s apartment, it seemed that Uri had not yet eaten dinner. Iris asked Uri what he would like to eat, something that was easy and quick to make. Uri asked for three hard-boiled eggs. We all went into the kitchen to help make the meal more quickly. Iris took three fresh cold eggs out of the refrigerator and placed them on a counter top. Then she walked over to get a pot, filled it with water, and placed it on the stove. She then walked back to the counter to pick up the eggs and screamed with fright. The three eggs were boiling hot, and inspection proved that they were now hard-boiled! After some confused discussion we agreed that this was a sign that we had better hurry up. But, of course, none of us had any idea as to where we were supposed to hurry.
Uri ate his three eggs while Iris had some tea and I drank some coffee. We sat around the table looking at each other. No one knew what to do. Then Uri jumped up and said, “We must leave now!” Iris started to clean up the kitchen. Uri shouted, “There is no time! Let’s go!” He led the way out, and I followed. Iris fumbled with the door lock. As she turned to go down the stairs, she felt an invisible presence give her a shove. She frankly confessed that she was getting nervous.
As soon as we got into Uri’s car, and I had made sure that all of my equipment was secure, Uri drove away from the curb with a screaming acceleration and drove out of Tel Aviv madly. He would reach an intersection and insist that I choose the direction in which to turn. This drive was very much like the ride in the Jeep in the Sinai a few days before. By this method of navigation we stayed on secondary roads and back roads. I had no idea where we were going or where we were. I sensed that we were generally heading through the suburbs of Tel Aviv toward the east in the direction of Lod Airport.
Just before 10 P.M. we were driving past an open area that looked like a dump, surrounded by new high-rise apartments. Suddenly I commanded Uri to stop. All three of us simultaneously heard a sound like one cricket continuously chirping. Uri stopped the car. I led the way toward the dump, and we climbed up an embankment that looked like a levee. As we reached the top, we all saw, in the direction of the chirping sound, a blue stroboscopic light pulsing at about three flashes per second. We kept walking toward the blue light and the cricket sound, over a wet muddy area freshly bulldozed. We stopped about a hundred yards from the source of the light and sound and whispered to one another.
Uri forbade Iris and me to take another step forward. He said, “Only I am allowed to approach it.” I asked if it was permissible to take a movie film. Uri said, “Go ahead and shoot but don’t move.” Uri then moved forward alone and disappeared from view as he went down into a hollow. I started to take a movie of this strange night scene, knowing that I would be lucky if I could record the blue light. Then Iris began to tremble and cry next to me, so I stopped filming to give her support. As I held an arm around her, I saw the luminous dial of my watch glowing in the night. I thought it said 10 P.M.
Iris calmed down. We stood and watched the powerful blue light flashing; the cricket sound had ceased. Now we heard only the pock-pock-pock sound of the stroboscopic flash. I looked around. There was no one in sight in this vast dark field. Would Uri ever return?
Then about thirty yards away I saw Uri coming out of the hollow. He was slowly walking toward us as though he were carrying a book in his upturned palms. I picked from his palms the brass filler cartridge that had vanished from the inside of my Parker pen three days before! I quickly flashed a pocket light on it, and there I saw my code: # 367299. I was overwhelmed by the meaning, the immense meaning, of this small object. But I quickly put it into my pocket and tended to Uri. He seemed to be in a trance, in a sleepwalker’s state. Otherwise, he appeared pretty much as he was when he had left us. I asked him what he had seen. He looked at me in anguish; he could not speak.
Iris and I led Uri over the bumpy mud field to the car. Finally Uri spoke: “Andrija, please let’s get away from here.” I drove the car to a quiet area about a mile away. Uri asked me to park. He was still in a daze, but I just had to persist in finding out what had happened. He told me the following story, which I tape-recorded on my TC 120.
“When I left you, I climbed down and then up a slope, where I saw this light clearly. There was a large cypress tree behind it. I also saw the blue light clearly against the tree. The light was pure blue. Then I went into a hollow and lost sight of the light. As I climbed out of the hollow, the light loomed over me. I walked without any thought or feeling. Then I put out my hands, and in them there appeared your pen cartridge. I don’t know what happened next. My mind was blank. The next thing I know I saw you and Iris. How long was it?”
“You were out there about four minutes,” I reported.
“It seemed like hours,” Uri replied.
Iris had been very quiet; I asked her what she had seen. She reported that she had seen and heard the same thing as I had. She was very sure of the blue light and the cricket sound, but was not sure of what was below the blue light. We dared not state what we suspected, but were not sure of – the possibility of there being a hull under the blue light.
We decided to return to Tel Aviv to go to a coffee shop and talk it all over. Uri insisted on driving. Iris talked to Uri in Hebrew, trying to get him to recall what had happened. I sat in the back seat, going over all the events of the day. But the almost preposterous thought kept coming back to me: “That was not anything supernormal that we saw in the field. It was all some kind of hallucination. Maybe that blue light was all hallucinated. Uri had fooled me. He palmed that cartridge off on me by buying a duplicate. But then how did he know my own serial number?” So my thoughts went on in circles. Since Uri and Iris were in a loud animated conversation in the front seat, I thought that I would tape-record some of my thoughts. I was sure they would not notice me. I reached in the dark for my tape recorder and pressed the forward and record buttons. They were jammed. I turned on my penlight and looked at the recorder. The cassette on which I had recorded Uri’s impressions of the experience in the field had vanished! I felt this was an object lesson to my doubting Thomas attitude. I showed this effect to Iris, and she confirmed that I had indeed tape-recorded my interview with Uri some twenty minutes earlier.
We went to the coffee shop and ordered some snacks. We tried to make some sense out of our experience. Skeptical though we were, we seemed to agree on all the details I have recorded up to the point where Uri left Iris and me and walked toward the blue light. But none of us could really accept the possibility that the blue light might be associated with a UFO. Uri could not clearly remember what he had seen in the field after he walked toward the blue light. But I could see that something was gnawing away at him. He told Iris that he was very tired and upset by the evening and wanted to retire. Iris was very understanding and agreed that he should get some rest. We drove Iris to her home. As soon as she was gone, Uri said that “we must work some more tonight. I remember much more than I let on before Iris. I just don’t want her to take all this seriously. I want her to forget it. You and I will have to keep this matter secret until we can get some sign that others can know. But I tell you I know it is real. When I was out in that field, I realized for the first time in my life where my powers come from. Now I know for sure they are not my powers. Oh, I know that I have a little bit of telepathy and psychokinesis – everybody has some. But making things vanish, and having things come back, and the red light in the sky in the Sinai, the blue light tonight, that is the power of some superior being. Maybe it is what man always thought of as being God.”
We drove back to apartment 61 in Herzliyyah Heights. Somehow the shock of Uri articulating his real feelings wiped out my doubts; it also gave me a strange sense of helplessness.
When we got back to the apartment, Uri asked me to bring out my very large steel camera trunk. He took my Nizo movie camera encased in a plastic bag, which still contained the film cartridge with which I had filmed the event in the field; he locked the camera in the trunk. He asked me to open the trunk in fifteen seconds, which I did. There was the Nizo camera in the intact plastic bag, but when I opened the camera, the Ekta 160 film cartridge was not there. It had vanished.
To a research man the idea of losing data was unthinkable, but to have it vanish was sickening. As I write these lines long after the event, I have in my possession but very few bits of evidence. There are the photographs taken in Brazil of the lights in the night sky. There is Uri’s photograph of the UFO in daylight over the Israel army headquarters. And there is a photograph taken over West Germany from an airplane of three spacecraft. (This latter photo will be described later. )
However, every magnetic tape cassette on which was recorded the “voice of Spectra” (and the voices of other beings later recorded) has vanished. With such sparse evidence it was apparent to me that I could never try to convince another human being of my experiences. The secret of Spectra was safe because they had leaked out just enough information to convince me of their reality, but not enough for me to ever convince any other human being