Another dimension to forces from beyond the grave

The remaining members of The Umbrella Academy are The Boy (Number Five); Ben, Number Six or The Horror; and finally Vanya, The White Violin, who is also known as Number Seven.

At the time when the academy members reunite following Sir Reginald Hargreaves’ death, Five is not part of the group following his disappearance into the future at the age of 13 when he is thought to have overstepped his ability to travel through time and became trapped in the future. He does however find his way back on the evening of the reunion during a mysterious electrical storm at the family estate.

Ben, or The Horror, is also an absent member of the group having died during The Umbrella Academy’s final teenage mission which resulted in his gruesome and mysterious demise. He is memorialised by a statue in his honour at the family home. His power is to manifest “Eldritch monsters” from other dimensions under his skin, which most often appear as tentacles emerging from his torso.

Finally there’s Number Seven, Vanya, who is identified as being the weakest of the children, apparently displaying no special powers as a child other than a keen talent for music.

But in fact she is really one of the most gifted members, with her abilities manifesting as incredibly destructive sound waves capable of harming people and destroying objects. As a child Vanya found her powers too much for her to control and as a result she was medicated by her adopted father from an early age to protect others from her immense power.

So, what we have here is time travel, manipulating sound waves, and the ability to change form and manifest entities from a different dimension… really entering uncharted territories here!

When I think of time travel I can’t help but picture director Terry Gilliam's fantasy adventure Time Bandits, in which 11-year-old Kevin encounters a gang of six dwarves who’ve stolen a map depicting portals in time and aim to use it to rob famous people through the ages of their wealth.

The movie seems to capture the essence of what the concept is all about... wormholes that connect different points in space and time that either open up naturally or can be induced to open through the manipulation of electromagnetic energy.

And according to a number of reports and eye witness accounts it is a phenomenon achieved by the United States as part of Project Pegasus, which operated from the 1960s through to the 1980s.

Pegasus was launched by the US government to perform “remote sensing in time” so that reliable information about past and future events could be provided to the intelligence community and military.

Run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the project allegedly created a teleportation device based on technical papers supposedly found in pioneering mechanical engineer Nikola Tesla’s New York apartment after his death in January 1943.

According to the testimony of Andrew Basiago, a lawyer, writer and environmental scholar, 140 American schoolchildren were secretly chosen to enrol in the project and be trained to serve as America’s first generation of “chrononauts”.

One of the children chosen, Basiago claims to have experienced eight different time-travel technologies during his participation in the project from 1968-72, with the main teleportation device said to have consisted of two elliptical booms about eight feet tall, separated by about 10 feet, between which a shimmering curtain of “radiant energy” was broadcast.

Tesla identified radiant energy as a form of matter that is latent and pervasive in the universe and has among its properties the capacity to bend time and space. Basiago said project participants would jump through this field of radiant energy into a vortex and emerge from the tunnel at their destination.

“One felt either as if one was moving at a great rate of speed or moving not at all, as the universe was wrapped around one’s location,” said Basiago, who claimed he can be seen in a photograph of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg in 1863, which he said he visited in 1972 via a plasma confinement chamber located in East Hanover, New Jersey.

“I had been dressed in period clothing, as a Union bugle boy,” he added. “I attracted so much attention at the Lincoln speech site at Gettysburg, wearing over-sized men’s street shoes, that I left the area around the dais and walked about 100 paces over to where I was photographed in the Josephine Cogg image of Lincoln at Gettysburg.”

Basiago also claimed to have travelled to Ford’s Theatre the night of Lincoln’s assassination on five or six occasions. “I did not, however, witness the assassination,” he said. “Once, I was on the theatre level when he was shot and I heard the shot followed by a great commotion that arose from the crowd. It was terrible to hear.”

Basiago said each of his visits to the past was different “like they were sending us to slightly different alternative realities on adjacent timelines”. “As these visits began to accumulate, I twice ran into myself during two different visits,” he claimed.

These time travellers were allegedly able to return to the present day or their point of origin through some sort of holographic technology that allowed them to travel both physically and virtually.

“If we were in the hologram for 15 minutes or fewer the hologram would collapse, and after about 60 seconds of standing in a field of super-charged particles … we would find ourselves back on the stage … in the present,” he explained.

Basiago also claimed the subjects used an elevator that would morph from a box into a cylinder and then passengers could step out onto the surface of Mars. He claimed to have interacted with Martians and been taken to their underground civilisation where he was taught about the various Martian typologies. Other Mars-jump whistleblowers include Michael Relfe, Arthur Neumann, William Stillings and Bernard Mendez, with a corroborating Mars colony recruit being Laura Eisenhower.

Although they have never come forward publicly, Barack Obama, Regina Dugan, Admiral Stansfield Turner and Mary-Jean Eisenhower have also been identified as possible recruits of the programme.

The concept of time travel seems far-fetched but the possibility of wormholes connecting different points in space and time is recognised as being a plausible phenomenon by many physicists… but changing events in the past or future seems difficult to comprehend unless there are also parallel universes through which the traveller is only able to affect their own version of space and time, rather than that of others.

Perhaps we each occupy our own dimension of space and time in which only we could perceive changes caused by any influence we could have through time travel?

Complexities aside, the notion of electromagnetic energy opening up doorways to different points in space and time has its advocates, whether an individual could develop the power to open these gates is another matter… but it’s certainly not beyond the realms of possibility.

Beasts from another dimension being controlled by a person is a much harder concept to imagine.

My rudimentary knowledge of particle physics suggests there are currently two models that attempt to explain how matter and energy work: the standard model and string theory.

In the standard model particles are understood to be point-like, resembling impossibly tiny dots, but under the alternative model of string theory they are seen as being tiny strings, all vibrating together to create size and mass.

But for the string theory model to hold water there would need to be more than 10 dimensions instead of the four we're used to experiencing: length, width, depth and time. Some of these dimensions could be universes with entirely different starting points to the one we occupy and could be the realm of entirely different creatures such as demons or fairies from our folklore and religious texts.

American journalist and influential UFO researcher John Keel, best known as the writer of The Mothman Prophecies, started out as a strong believer in extraterrestrials, but moved away from that to champion the existence of ultraterrestrials, who he theorised could have the ability to shape shift and take the form of anything.

The concept known as the super-spectrum, coined by Keel in his book The Eighth Tower, suggests the reason evidence is so scarce regarding the paranormal is because we cannot perceive the entities involved. Our eyes, for example, can only take in visible light, which is only a tiny sliver of the electromagnetic field. The same goes for our other senses, which are limited partly by our biology and mostly by our social conditioning.

The theory is that differences in the vibration of these entities may be responsible for the technological anomalies (GPS failing, radar picking up disturbances, cameras malfunctioning) that hinder attempts to obtain proof of their existence.

But these ultraterrestrials could be able to alter their vibratory frequencies to drop down to ours, allowing us to perceive, or view them for a short time.

Frequency is defined as a measurable rate of electrical energy flow that is constant between any two points and when there is frequency there is electromagnetic potential that can be influenced by everything around us.

We all have an electrical frequency measured in hertz, with our average body frequency believed to be between 62-78 Hz, although that can vary between different points. Higher-level brain frequencies operate at 80-82 Hz, with the frequency of the brain normally operating in a range between 72-90 Hz.

From the neck up the normal range is from 72-78 Hz but below that the range is 60-68 Hz… and everything around us can exert an influence on that and affect our state of well being.

It has been demonstrated that depressed feelings and negativism can be influenced by things such as the application of essential oils that carry higher frequencies than our own, resulting in an uplifted feeling.

Suggestions exist that every disease has a frequency, which substances with a higher frequency can alter. For example, it has been measured that holding a cup of coffee can cause a person’s frequency to drop from 66 to 58 Hz in a matter of seconds, while it can take days to restore that frequency back to its normal level. In another study, a subject’s frequency dropped from 65 Hz to 48 Hz simply holding a cigarette… smoking it saw the frequency drop to 42 Hz, the same as cancer.

Other studies show that negative thoughts lower our frequency on average 12 Hz. Positive thoughts raise it by an average of 10 Hz, with prayer and meditation shown to raise it by an average of 15 Hz.

In many legends from folklore and religious texts light beings are a common theme and the search for Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster and other mythical creatures continues to baffle us today. Could they be creatures that normally manifest themselves at frequencies we simply cannot perceive?

Imagine if disease lowered our frequency to a point where our bodies could no longer function and the life force within us was only able to survive outside. Could that be what happens when we die? But conversely if we were able to raise that frequency could we then develop the ability to access higher dimensions while still being part of our biological form?

If I think of it in this light the concept of an astral plane begins to make some sense… and, operating at our normal frequency, we have an incredibly limited perception of it.

So could beings exist within other dimensions that we are unable to see? Perhaps… and they could possibly be able to exert some physical influence on us with greater awareness of the super-spectrum.

But as for Ben being able to manifest Eldritch monsters from his torso? That's a difficult concept to imagine, it would seem more likely that any creatures from the other dimensions manifesting in this way would be the ones exerting the control.

But there’s another possibility, CRISPR has made gene editing more viable than at any other time in human history... and think about the wonders of nature that exist on this planet that could be edited into our DNA.

Ever heard of the “mutable rain frog”? Discovered in the Ecuadorian rain forest in 2006, the frog is able to morph the texture of its skin – from spiny to smooth – within a matter of minutes.

According to a Livescience report, the frogs can visibly change their skin in a matter of seconds, completely changing texture from spiny to smooth in a few minutes. This change is so rapid that when the first researcher captured the frog to photograph it she thought she had mistakenly taken the wrong frog specimen – the spines had disappeared.

The team also identified a second frog species, the “Sobetes robber frog”, capable of the same shape-shifting behaviour. This indicates that this phenomenon could be present in many amphibian species and is possibly just unrecorded as it happens so quickly.

A more common example is the cuttlefish which is capable of mimicking its background environment by changing the colour, pattern and texture of its skin which it achieves by altering skin pigments to change the way it reflects light. This is all controlled by neurons in the brain that transmit impulses and information to the rest of the body.

Another marvel of nature is the “mimicking miracle octopus”… a cephalopod found in the shallow Indo-Pacific waters from the Red Sea in the west to New Caledonia in the east. Like the “wunderpus”, it is a master impersonator able to take on the appearance and behaviour of venomous or bad-tasting creatures to foil would-be predators.

What’s most unusual is the range of the mimic octopus’ repertoire… most animal mimics impersonate just one creature but the mimic octopus can impersonate several, and can switch between them rapidly.

Like other mimics, the cephalopod changes its colour to disguise itself but can also contort its body to take on the appearance and behaviour of several creatures, including the lionfish, jellyfish, sea snake, shrimp and crab.

Then there are porcupinefish and pufferfish that can puff themselves up rapidly when threatened to more than double their size by inflating their stomachs with water or air… they also produce a deadly toxin, far more poisonous than cyanide, to ward off predators.

Imagine what gene-editing techniques could come up with by taking DNA strands from a morphing cephalopod and chopping them into human DNA… if super soldier apes and buffed-up beagles have been serious experiments, who knows what could be taking place in the bowels of the Dulce facility under Archuleta Mesa on the Colorado-New Mexico border?

A final possibility for Ben’s powers could be mind control, where he implants an image of an Eldritch monster into the subconscious of those around him and uses telekinesis to unleash a physical force on them.

Our lack of understanding of such things makes CRISPR and the concept of the super-spectrum difficult to grasp, but it’s a safe bet to presume that someone somewhere in a secret facility is experimenting with them and could have created a morphing human with cephalopod characteristics… it’s something that couldn’t be ruled out completely.

So, what of Vanya, The White Violin? Read Part Six of this series for more on the incredible power of sound and the secret government projects that have tried to unleash it.