John Fowles, "A Maggot", Graham Hancock's "Supernatural" and alien contact

(This post was first published November 2005)

I agreed with Jacques Vallee when I read the following in his 1988 book "Dimensions":

Many descriptions of UFO phenomena force us to deal simultaneously with ... the physical (or technical) and the spiritual (or divine) ....

It has been captured in the most complete and most artistic form in John Fowles's extraordinary masterpiece, A Maggot, published in 1986.

My only correction is that "A Maggot" first appeared in 1985. A first edition has a special place in my library and my literary sensibilities.

In the paperback edition of "Dimensions" an interview with Vallee has him, in my view at least, stating the obvious:

... one of the greatest living writers in the English language publish(ed) a masterpiece dealing entirely with the problem of alien contact ...

What does "Ann the Word" and "A Maggot" have to do with each other? Rather than spoil the journey for those who want to discover both, and by way of haunting invitation, I'll simply pose the Chinese "koan" from Cao Xueqin's "The Dream of the Red Chamber" (per David Hawkes translation) I used by way of introducing my book "Hair of the Alien":

Entering "The Land of Illusion":

Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true;

Real becomes not-real when the unreal's real.

And from "A Maggot" (page 359):

Q. Why stop you?

A. The maggot.

Q. What maggot?

A. That floated in the inner cavern, like a great swollen maggot, white as snow upon the air.

Q. What is this?

A. Yes, like a maggot, tho' not. Its great eye shone down upon us, my blood did curdle in my veins; and I must perforce call out in my fear, ignorant that I was.

John Fowles has now left us on his own spiritual odyssey, perhaps to his "maggot" - a gateway to some greater place of knowing. The Sydney Morning Herald, sourcing the Guardian, November 9, 2005, indicated "the novelist who brought sexiness and popular appeal to the serious literary novel, has died from heart failure (at 79) near his home in Lyme Regis, southwest England."

Take a look at Eileen Warburton's biography of Fowles if you are interested in some matters pertinent to the creation of "A Maggot".

Surprisingly researcher Graham Hancock takes a similar journey in his new book "Supernatural - Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind", published in the UK in October 2005. While examining the nexus of spirits (via shamanism), fairies (in part via "The Secret Commonwealth" and Vallee's "Passport to Magonia") and aliens (via alien abductions) Hancock presents some fascinating material and perspectives for those who have not yet looked into these interesting areas. While suggesting that these experiences may represent mankind receiving "contact" via altered states of consciousness with "real" entities beyond the physical, he does not really confront the physical dimensions of the mysteries he confronts.

While asking many of the same issues and questions (invoked by shamanism, fairy lore and alien abductions) in my own new book "HAIR of the ALIEN" (published in the US in July 2005) I squarely confront the issue of the physical dimensions of these issues, most potently expressed, I suggest, in the physical evidence I present with the alien DNA paradigm.