The Key (2 page)

When I asked him outright, more or less jokingly, whether or not he was an intelligent machine, or something created by one, his reply was delightful: “If I was an intelligent machine, I would deceive you.”

The exchange continued on to cover a very wide range of topics, and over the years since, I have managed to verify so many of his claims, including some that were quite improbable at the time they were made, that I have thought it would be ethically appropriate to extend publication of his words to a wider audience.

Over my career, I have made other improbable claims, and argued as best I am able for the validity of the underlying experiences as genuine mysteries. Along with doing this there comes a powerful moral obligation to limit those claims only to what has definitely been observed, and to strive always to provide any verification that might become available.

At this point, I think that I am right to assert that I cannot make conventional sense of this man, whom I have come to call the Master of the Key. This is because his words were a key for me that unlocked many doors, and his mastery lay in the fact that they were often either brilliant distillations of complex ideas, or were entirely novel, and they were delivered with calm assurance.

He was humble and displayed a twinkling good nature. His hair was white and close-cropped, and his eyes were a light blue. He wore a dark gray turtleneck and charcoal trousers. He seemed rather slight to me, perhaps five foot eleven, weighing maybe a hundred and seventy to a hundred and eighty pounds.

While he appeared to be an ordinary physical individual, he does not seem to have been a person like me or like the rest of us, embedded in this place and time in the same way that we are. Otherwise, how could he have spoken so cogently about obscure topics such as memory-retaining gases long before there was any evidence that such things existed?

Of course, there might have been papers on this subject available somewhere, but not that I was able to locate at the time, and I looked quite deeply. I do not think, though, that the specific applications he identified were known then.

His comments on intelligent machines seemed so assured that I have wondered if he might not have had direct experience of such things. If so, then maybe he was a visitor from the future.

Or is that just a fantasy? We know that movement through time is possible, but it involves dramatic physical effects, such as faster-than-light acceleration, so one would think that it could hardly be accomplished in a hotel room, or indeed could involve anything more than subatomic particles or photons.

However, a hundred years ago there were only a few thousand automobiles in the world and just a handful of fragile and inefficient airplanes, so it would obviously be silly to discount this as a possibility, especially if superintelligent machines are used in the future to find ways of accomplishing it.

Nevertheless, if he was from the future, then it is difficult to see how he could have had as much freedom of action as he did. This is because the principle of least action, which seems universally true in nature, would seem to prevent anyone from the future reaching back to change the past. This is the principle that states that nature never expends more than the minimum amount of energy that it must in order to do what it must. That is to say, water always seeks the lowest place it can run, and likewise, you cannot create contradictions in space-time, such as killing your own grandfather.

Interestingly, though, it might well be that you can do some things in your own past, maybe quite a few things, if you don't affect your own life. We can only speculate about the extent to which the grandfather paradox impedes the ability of the future to alter its own past. In fact, if time travel is possible, then there is also an extensive science devoted to safely altering the past for what is, to the time travelers, present benefit.

It might work to slip ideas like these in through the back door of an outsider like me, then nurture them along. The closer awareness of them proceeded to the time that they actually originated, the more generally they could be dispersed. So perhaps my initial refusal to accept that the Master of the Key was real, the delay of two years before I actually even transcribed the conversation, and my long hesitancy about publication, have actually been governed by the grandfather paradox. Therefore, my various objections and hesitations are an outcome of the fact that, on some deep level, I am unable to act in any other way.

If this is true, then maybe I will meet the Master of the Key again someday when the natural progression of my life has reached the present from which he went back to engage my younger self. The other possibility, of course, is that he came from a time after my death. But if his extraordinary remarks about the soul are true, then I might still meet him in such a future. In fact, I might even
be
him.

He said something in passing that suggests an awareness of the constraints of movement through time when he said that an intelligent machine “might foment the illusion that an elusive alien presence was here, for example, to interject its ideas into society.”

If it also came from the future, it might do this, as well, to gain greater latitude for its penetration of our era. It might be that the principle of least action could to some extent be defeated if observers were deceived into believing that what was, in fact, a time machine was an intrusion from something that is completely outside of our reality, such as an alien presence.

If this is true, then Stephen Hawking's famous response to the question of whether or not time travel is possible, “Where are the tourists?” is answered. They're here in droves. It's just that they've misled us into thinking that they're aliens, and their time machines are spacecraft from another planet.

Of course, as a person who has been enmeshed in the issue of alien contact, this notion has caused me much thought. It has been obvious to me for some time that the events I described in my book
Communion
were probably beyond anybody's ability to narrate correctly. When I woke up in the midst of bizarre and inexplicable, but obviously intelligent, creatures in December of 1985, it appeared to be alien contact. But after listening to and reading tens of thousands of other narratives of such contact, and having more experience with it myself, I wouldn't be surprised at all if it was some sort of elaborate illusion being undertaken to conceal something else entirely.

I had already come to this notion in 1998, so I found his statement about the apparent alien presence around us being a form of deception quite thought-provoking, and I still do. Like most anomalous experience, though, nothing he said brings cloture to the question of what is actually behind the curtain. It just adds another layer of possibility.

What a shame it is that more people aren't open to this speculation. As long as one keeps developing the question without drawing conclusions, which seem, in any case, like a fata morgana, to recede forever into the future, it is an enormous intellectual challenge and pleasure. For this reason, I remain grateful that I had my close encounter experiences, despite the social isolation that has resulted from my discussing them.

He also made some statements about the environment that had a strong effect on me. When I met him, I was already conversant in environmental science, having coauthored a book entitled
Nature's End
, a speculative mix of fact and fiction that addressed environmental concerns.

I had also read a number of books about catastrophic climate change, ranging from Charles Hapgood's
Path of the Pole,
to Rose and Rand Flem-Ath's and Graham Hancock's books on this subject.

The Master of the Key did not discuss crustral shift as a causative factor in sudden climate change, though. He took a very different approach, addressing it instead as an outcome of distortions in the atmosphere that lead over time to a breaking point, and sudden catastrophe.

Although this process is fluently visible in the fossil record, the mechanism that leads from sudden upheavals of climate to ages-long planetary entrapment in ice remains much debated, so I was quite interested when he said, “The next ice age will begin soon, and this will lead to the extinction of mankind, or to a massive reduction in population, given your inability to expand off the planet. This planet is at present a death trap.”

I try never to allow myself to forget that every single person on earth is as valuable and important to themselves as I am to myself, and so I found this statement profoundly disturbing. I immediately wanted to sound a warning. I wanted to save us all.

At that time, the great danger of global warming was thought to be a continuous rise in temperatures that would cause earth to become so hot that it was uninhabitable—but it was also something far off, a problem to be debated now, solved later.

The Master of the Key suggested that it was a very much more immediate problem. He said that, as polar ice melts and floods the northern ocean with freshwater, the North Atlantic Current would fail, leading to a radical climate change that would unfold over “a single season.”

If such a thing happened, it would obviously bring massive suffering to mankind. Even worse, the disaster would strike hardest at our most economically active and well-educated populations in North America and Europe.

But was it the truth? In those days, I still didn't have much in the way of verification of any of the man's ideas, and this one seemed particularly radical. I was still extremely unsure about whether or not the whole encounter had simply been imagined. To keep me from just dropping the whole thing, my wife had to constantly remind me of the phone call I'd made to her.

In those days, while there was controversy about what caused ice ages, it was generally agreed that the change was a gradual one. However, I did find an article in the January 1998
Atlantic Monthly
called “The Great Climate Flip-flop,” by William H. Calvin, that suggested that the change might be very sudden.

This same suggestion appeared in commentary about ice cores taken from Greenland and the Antarctic, but there seemed to be no clear mechanism that would cause such a dramatic change so fast.

Putting what I had been told by the Master together with the research I was doing, I came to write
The Coming Global Superstorm
, which was turned into a film by Roland Emmerich called
The Day After Tomorrow
.

The film was a terrific success with the public, and served to cause many millions to consider for the first time that the abstraction called “global warming” might have unexpected and serious consequences.

For the most part, though, the press and the environmental movement condemned the film for compressing the period of change into too short a time.

A hundred and thirty-seven million years ago, there was an event that caused dramatic and sudden climate change, which must have severely impacted animal populations on earth. Thirteen thousand years ago, a sudden dump of freshwater into the North Atlantic from a gigantic glacial lake in Canada triggered a return to ice age conditions known as the Younger Dryas.

What happened on both of these occasions, and has happened on many others, is now clear. It is exactly what the Master of the Key warned might happen. The process is this: carbon dioxide levels rise, causing warming. This warming melts permafrost, which releases massive amounts of methane into the air. The methane is a devilishly efficient heat trap, and global temperatures rise dramatically. This results in rapid polar melt and a flood of fresh melt water into the ocean. Because freshwater heats and cools much more quickly than salt water, ocean temperatures rise. This reduces the difference in water temperature from north to south, weakening the natural heat pump effect that draws warm water into the north, in the form of the Gulf Stream.

It subsequently stops, while at the same time the methane, which, unlike carbon dioxide, breaks down quite quickly, disappears. The result is a very dramatic shift in climate, first to extremely hot conditions, then plunging into extreme cold, a change that can take place over a very short time.

In 2008, Dr. Achim Brauer, of the Potsdam Center for Geosciences, and colleagues analyzed sediments from a crater lake that are laid down annually, and found that the Younger Dryas thirteen thousand years ago began over a single season, which is ten times faster than previously believed, and exactly in keeping with the Master's dire warnings.

As this is being written, earth is in the process of experiencing the hottest month of June on record, June 2010. What lies ahead is even more dramatic heating, and if the methane hydrates now frozen in arctic waters should melt, that heating is going to spike just as it has in the past, and the results will be precisely the same.

The Younger Dryas is not the only time in recent epochs that an aggressive climate shift has affected earth.

Five thousand two hundred years ago, there was a lesser cooling event that caused glaciers to form so suddenly in Peru that deciduous plants at their bases are found to have been frozen so quickly that their cell walls remained intact. For this to happen, the temperature change must have taken place in a matter of no more than a couple of minutes. In other words, the temperate climate that these plants enjoyed changed extremely quickly, certainly in less than a day. The glaciers that formed on that terrible day are still there, 5,200 years later.

Also 5,200 years ago, Ötzi, the Ice Man, whose remains were found consequent to melt in the Schnalstal Glacier in the Italian Tyrol in 1991, was buried by a snowstorm in an alpine meadow. He only reappeared when the glacier melted. In other words, the snowstorm that choked that meadow did not melt again for over five thousand years.

My conclusion is that I was being warned of the presence of natural forces that we do not understand, or do not wish to understand, and, if anything, that warning has grown more and more urgent as our climate sets up in precisely the same way it has in the past just prior to such an upheaval.