No-one is entirely sure of course. But for me at least, the second side represents the importance of 10 as a number, by omission. 9 and 11, at either end, bracket 10; and 19 and 21, in the centre, bracket 20. Remember that 10 and 20 are very natural human numbers of importance, given our digits.

The third side is the most stunning. It gives 11, 13, 17 and 19 – the prime numbers between 10 and 20, in order. The remaining 7 and 5 on the first side extend the sequence of primes to include all the prime numbers below 20 occurring after 4… the first non-prime number.

The Ishango Bone

But the Ishango Bone contains three sets of numbers, in the forms of columns of scratches marked into its sides. Although there remains some academic uncertainty, it is thought that each of the three groups represents a depiction of the tribe’s knowledge of mathematical processes – astonishing, given the era. The first column is the plainest. There is a 3 next to a 6, a 4 next to an 8, and a 10 next to a 5, along with a further 5 and a 7. Leaving aside the last pair for the moment, these pairs clearly indicate multiplication by two.

What mathematical processes would you guess that the other two sides indicate, and where do the remaining 5 and 7 from the first side fit?

Update:

So. The Ishango Bone.

The second side represents the importance of 10 as a number, by omission. 9 and 11, at either end, bracket 10; and 19 and 21, in the centre, bracket 20. Remember that 10 and 20 are very natural human numbers of importance, given our digits. The third side is the most stunning. It gives 11, 13, 17 and 19 – the prime numbers between 10 and 20, in order. The remaining 7 and 5 on the first side extend the sequence of primes to include all the prime numbers below 20 occurring after 4… the first non-prime number.

The Greek historian Heterodotus visited the labyrinth in the 5th century BC. At this point, it was already nearly 1500 years old, and almost undoubtedly falling into disrepair. Even so, he was stunned by it:

“I visited this building and found it to surpass description: for if all the great works of the Greeks could be put together in one, they would not equal this labyrinth. The Pyramids likewise surpass description, but so the Labyrinth surpasses the Pyramids … The upper chambers I saw with my own eyes, and found them to excel all other human productions; for the passages through the houses, and the varied windings of the paths across the courts excited in me infinite admiration as I passed from the courts into chambers, and from the chambers into colonnades, and from the colonnades into fresh houses, and again from these into courts unseen before.”

Amenemhet's pyramid today, (c) Christiane Mueller-Hazenbos

Crypts devoted to the crocodile god Sobek ran below the surface level, equally confusing in design. Even four hundred years after Heterodotus, the Greek geographer Strabo declared that “no stranger can find his way either into any court or out of it without a guide.” Every wall was carved and decorated, and the pyramid was carved with gigantic decorative figures. Somewhere in the depths of the maze, a hidden tunnel led down and under the temple before arising inside the pyramid. Even then, the inside of the pyramid contained further mazes and catacombs. The pyramid was first explored from 1888 by the British archaeologist Flinders Petrie, and it took him two seasons to find his way through to the burial chamber.

Unfortunately, very little trace of the labyrinth survives today – even the field of limestone chips Petrie uncovered around the crumbling pyramid has now gone, carted off by enterprising locals.

GW: You mention the Morphians in your work, in the context of powerful spiritual entities. Who or what exactly are they?

AC: The best way I can explain them is to use an analogy. You watch your favourite film. You know how it begins, what happens along the way, all the good bits, bad parts, and how it ends. It makes you feel good, for it is a perfect film. Then one day you watch the movie and something different happens mid way through, causing the rest of the film to have a completely different ending, and one that is not ideal, or to your liking. In fact, everything ends in chaos, carnage and disaster. All this has come about just because one act, or moment of connection, didn’t occur for one reason or another. The whole thing annoys you, and you want to make it right, so the next time that the film comes on you watch it, anticipating the moment of change. You then interfere in order to make sure that the act in question takes place, so that the rest of the film has a happy ending. If it involves two people meeting for the first time, who go on to get married, or do something courageous, then you ensure they get together, say perhaps by making one dream about the other until there is no chance of them not getting together. If this doesn’t work, then you appear to them as, say, a spirit apparition, one they will accept as providing meaningful advice, and quite literally say to one, or both of them, it is your destiny to get together with so and so.

Then on further occasions you see the film, you realize that other important scenes are in jeopardy because connections or nexus points are not being made, resulting in even further alternative endings, forcing you to intervene, or interfere, on even more occasions. Only by keeping watch over the entire film can you ensure that it is played out properly from start to finish on every occasion.

Now think of that film as the timeline of the universe from the moment of first creation to its final destruction. On some level the cause and effect of that universe is predetermined because there is no such thing as linear time beyond normal space-time. The past, present and future all co-exist with each other in a non-linear manner, and non-local actions can take place in all three mediums, all at the same time. In other words, the future can influence the past and present. The present can influence the past and future, and the past can influence both the present and the future. See this in symbolic form as a figure of eight with one loop signifying the future, the other symbolising the past, and the point of crossover in the middle as the here and now, with both loops able to flow into each other on a constant never-ending, cyclic basis.

Thus everything that happens in the universe is essentially predetermined on one level or another, and although there can be some variations in the basic plot, the universe has to end in a specific manner otherwise it cannot collapse back down to a state that will enable the creation of the next universe. It is like an arrow that is fired from a bow towards the bull’s eye on a target. A butterfly getting in the way would not affect it’s flight, but a more hefty obstruction, like a bird or unexpected gust of wind, could mean that the arrow misses the target altogether. If this was the timeline of the universe, then its ending would not be the right one, meaning that everything would be different not just in the next created universe, but in all others that either will or have existed, including the one you are in today, for the creation of universes in a cyclic, non-linear process.

So having established just how delicate the fate of the universe might be, then it makes sense to consider that if there were highly intelligent, pan-dimensional entities out there, then one of their principal concerns would be ensuring the timeline of the universe. In whatever capacity they could, they would make sure that nexus points are met and actions are fulfilled, in order that the universe’s pre-destined inevitability is achieved. If such beings do exist, then their state of existence would be virtually beyond comprehension, and if they are involved with the human race, then quite obviously they would be able to take any shape or form they required in order to convey the information necessary to affect human decisions. This is one of the reasons why they might be called Morphians, for in classical mythology Morpheus was the god who could appear in whatever guise he wished in order to convey messages to people in their dreams.

Morphians would be able to influence human consciousness on a subconscious level, by appearing as familiar figures of your dreamscape or mindscape, or by existing as channelled entities, such as ancestor spirits, spirit totems, shamanic animals, angels, aliens, gods, goddesses or fairies. Since Morphians would exist beyond space-time, they carry information that is both from the future and the past, and sometimes it might be necessary to reveal knowledge of future things. They might even inspire people with ideas of future science, religion, culture and technology, which needs to be developed sooner than later in order to make sure it takes its rightful place in society at the correct time. Someone like Leonardo da Vinci is a prime example of someone who might have been fed future knowledge from Morphians, or even the English bard himself, William Shakespeare, the person who single handedly created the English language we know today. These are the sort of people who could, feasibly, have experienced Morphian contact during their lives, either as inspired ideas, significant dreams, waking visions, or simply artistic expression. It all works the same way.

More often or not Morphians are likely to appear to people either in dreams or as visions in order to trigger a person into taking a certain predestined course that will quite literally be world changing in its eventuality, even if the person never comes to realise this during their lifetime. Morphians intercede in order to kick start a person’s future destiny. Such people are the real chosen ones, simply by the fact that their own future actions are marked out even before they are born into this world, for the future already exists in some form or another. They might have a big role in life, or simply a small but essential one. For instance, they might be destined to give birth to someone who will go on to have an even greater destiny on earth, so their life must be ensured as well as the son or daughter who will go on to execute the pre-determined events that will be important to the evolution of the human race, and possibly even to the survival of the planet itself. In all honesty we all play some higher purpose in our lives to one degree or other, meaning that everyone is affected or influenced by Morphians at some point in their lives.

As to the identity of the Morphians, we can see them as pan-dimensional beings of pure energy, operating on a quantum level. They might even be a necessary part of the fabric of the universe, without any kind of individuality. Their role is simple. They ensure that the destiny of the universe, and every planet and life form within it, is fulfilled from start to finish, alpha to omega, from beginning to end. How do they appear to human beings without their masks? I suspect they appear as shades, shadows, human like forms that absorb spectral light, so that they will appear like holes in the fabric of matter. Yet perhaps this is simply another mask they wear, in my eyes only. Peel that away and you will find something else, which can equally be disbelieved. In human archetypes, Morphians are the dark man, the trickster, the cosmic joker, and the fool or jester. Can they be contacted? Perhaps. Can they be bargained with? Maybe. Are their actions always beneficial, and in harmony with the greater scheme of the universe? Probably not. But we are never meant to know who or what they are. We will only ever think we know them, even if they don’t exist at all.

For those interested in reading more about the concept of Morphians and their influence on human destiny see my article on that subject at http://www.andrewcollins.com/page/articles/Gods, Grails and Morphian Contact.htm

GW: You must have had some pretty odd experiences over the years. Can you tell us a bit about that, how you first got involved in researching mysteries and strange happenings, and how that led to the Green Stone quest?

AC: My very first recall of being interested in unusual things was a strange fascination with fairies, those in music, and those in films. When I was about five I had a big crush on Tinkerbell from the Disney film adaptation of Peter Pan (1962). I imagined myself flying into the night like Peter Pan. Gradually my interest shifted away from the denizens of Neverland to angels. I remember in Sunday School asking the teacher what angels were, and being told to shut up. Angels were the only thing that fascinated me in religious education.

Andrew Collins (c) Buster Todd Photography and Design

I became obsessed by fantasy characters like the blind angel Pygor in the film Barbarella (1969), and Angel, a character in X-men comics. In his normal life Angel had his wings strapped to his back, which I thought was a cool idea, no one knowing that you are really an angel in disguise. I wanted to be an angel like him, so imagined that I too had wings, which were released once I was in bed. I would then be free to soar into the sky, via my bed, and meet with Angel and the other X-men to go off on space adventures.

I recall walking around the block where I lived in Mount Close, Wickford in Essex, constantly discussing metaphysical ideas with kids in the street. I was about seven or eight at the time. I organised UFO skywatches (with a radio attuned to white noise), ghost hunts, and attempted astral projection and dream incubation. I also conducted psychological tests on other children. For instance, I would call them into a garage and in the darkness ask them to stare at a scrunched up rubbish sack, which in those days was made of thick brown paper. I would then get them to tell me what they thought was there. In the partial darkness, most of them would scream at what they thought they could see. I was interested in the imagination, and our reactions to it.

I went to the library to order books by Sigmund Freud on dream interpretation, but they went back unread as they were too difficult to understand. I also created my own secret club, based on UNCLE, the organisation in the TV series “The Man from UNCLE”. To be admitted entry I wanted people to say the Lord’s Prayer backwards, but this got watered down to saying the alphabet backwards, which was still difficult enough for a kid of ten.

One day at junior school somebody reported seeing a UFO land in the area of an old abandoned railway building next to the train line, so I organised for the boys of the class to meet me at the location in question after school, armed with torches and penknives. Every single child turned up, and together we searched high and low for any space aliens, but none were found.

I was so disappointed when years later I reached secondary school and found that hardly anyone was still interested in the paranormal. I was now on my own, thinking and talking about things that other kids just found freaky or weird. It was probably for this reason that I couldn’t keep a girlfriend, even though they seemed to be attracted to me. I quickly realised that to get on I needed to ditch the paranormal and get stuck into football, girls and misbehaving. It was only after I had started work at a shipping company in London, that I began gorging mass market paperbacks on UFOs, ancient astronaut theories, and, eventually, the paranormal.

I wanted to get near the aliens that I knew existed, and were making contact with various people through UFO close encounters. I wanted them to see me, acknowledge me, speak to me. I thus became a UFO investigator and started to investigate everything from sightings of mysterious lights in the sky to strange daylight discs, and even aerial phenomena that seemed to interact with the witnesses involved. Very gradually the cases got more and more bizarre, until I began to realize that those who experienced the closest encounters were generally always psychic. So I devised a questionnaire to determine the level of psychism in a witness, and very slowly I built up a unique profile of the most likely close encounter percipient. Not only did the questionnaire relate to psychic abilities and experiences, but it also included various physiological and psychological traits that these people seemed to have in common.

It was then that I met the Day family of Aveley, who in 1974 had been driving through the lanes of West Essex near their home when they witnessed a mysterious oval light in the sky. Shortly afterwards, the car engine failed, the lights extinguished, the radio died and the noise of the tyres rolling over the road suddenly ceased, all just as the vehicle encountered a luminous bank of green mist stretched out across the road. The next thing the family recalled was being over half a mile further along the same road, feeling nauseous and knowing that something untoward had just occurred. When they reached home the family realized that three hours were missing from their lives. Disturbing dreams followed in which the two adults recalled being examined on mortuary like tables in bright rooms by strange beings that were looking over them. At the same time, the family changed in many ways, giving up meat, alcohol, cigarettes, becoming conservation minded, and gaining various psychic talents, including the ability to see auras around people.

When I first met the Day family in August 1977, car stop alien abduction cases were unknown in Britain. So this was a first. I investigated the case, and arranged for John Day, the father of the family, which included three young children, to see noted London hypnotherapist Dr Leonard Wilder. He put John under hypnosis and a full onboard experience was recalled. However, right from the start, John’s attitude towards his experiences were different to your stereotypical abductee of the sort that might be found in a Budd Hopkins book. John continued to believe in the truly alien nature of what had happened to him and his family, but felt there might be alternative explanations to the accepted nuts and bolts spacecraft scenario. This is a stance he continues to adopt, even today. It also persuaded me to look at other alternatives to the most obvious abduction explanations within books such as Alien Energy (1994) and The New Circlemakers (2009).

The New Circlemakers

After the sessions with Leonard Wilder, both John and his wife Sue agreed that I could continue the hypnosis at their home. This we did, and very quickly, through the vocal chords of both adults, I found myself speaking to a second personality that claimed to represent the alien intelligence behind the abduction back in 1974. At last I had achieved my aim – I was finally in direct communication with the aliens, or what I thought were aliens. I listened to what they had to say, which was usually about flight propulsion systems, different UFO cases, events to come and the fate of our planet, recording the whole lot on tape. Lots of strange events accompanied these Friday night sessions, with me even seeing a tall entity in the living room on one occasion. On another night, after I was left alone to sleep in the same room, I suddenly heard the pots and pans in the adjoining kitchen banging about of their own accord. It scared the life out of me!

As 1978 came, the strange events and weird nocturnal experiences that surrounded the Day family only increased, and we all agreed that we needed advice from a parapsychologist. Shortly afterwards, Sue Day dreamt that a parapsychologist would soon turn up to answer our call. She got the initials “G.P.”, thus suggesting that this person was a practising doctor. Two weeks later I received a call from Graham Phillips, a parapsychologist originally from the Midlands, who was now living in Walthamstow, East London. He had been working on poltergeist cases in the home counties, and had become baffled by the number of percipients who had also witnessed mysterious lights, either in their homes, or out in the open. He wondered what the connection was between balls of light and poltergeist, and so sought the help of the British UFO Association (BUFORA). Their spokesman put him in touch with me. On our first meeting Graham and I chatted non stop until five in the morning, even though we both had day jobs to go to back then. Graham had realized that there were physiological and psychological traits in common with key witnesses involved in poltergeist cases, enough for him to be able, like me, to create a psychic profile. What was so interesting is that his traits crossed over with mine enough for us to realise that we were on to something important. He called this subject of study psygenics, short for psychic genetics, which we agreed related to the genetic make up of the person in question, something that was passed down through the female line, generally.

So convinced were we that psygenics, and psychics in general, were the key to the mystery of UFOs, poltergeists, as well other paranormal abilities, including astral projection, remote viewing and psychometry, that we decided to create an organization that would bring together these different ideas under one umbrella. It would be called Parasearch (nothing to do with the copy-cat Parasearch, based in the Midlands of England), and its voice would be a new glossy newsstand magazine that we would launch called Strange Phenomena. Its first issue appeared during the first half of 1979, and Graham invited me to join him, full time, on the magazine’s production, which took place in his spacious ground floor flat at 19 Oaks Crescent, Chapel Ash, Wolverhampton. So I gave up my shipping clerk job, even though I was now a company director, and departed for the Midlands.

Much happened during this period, as Strange Phenomena’s first issue was an instant success. Suddenly, we found ourselves in touch with all sorts of people from the occult and paranormal world, including Israel Regardie, the well known author and former member of the Golden Dawn, to Doris Stokes, the country’s top psychic medium, and Alex Sanders, the king of the witches, his wife Maxine Sanders, Aleister Crowley’s executor Gerald York, writer Richard Cavendish and esteemed ghost huner Andrew Green. As the issue had also included a call to psychics everywhere to register their dreams and visions in our database, in case they came to pass, we now found ourselves in regular communication with some talented psychics who all wanted to be on our books.

Andrew Collins and Graham Phillips at Harvington Hall.

In the midst of all this activity, Graham and I started to be surrounded by a series of seemingly inexplicable events. They began on Sunday, 23rd September, 1979, when I visited the home of the Sunderland family in Flint, Clywd, North Wales. Marion Sunderland, the mother of the household, had invited me up to North Wales to meet her children, in particular her eleven-year old daughter Gaynor. In July 1976, whilst out playing with her brother Darren in the local countryside, she had witnessed a UFO descending into a nearby field. Gaynor and Darren had approached the object, hiding in the undergrowth when they felt they were close enough to see what was going on. They both witnessed two human looking entities, one seemingly male and the other female, alight from the craft and walk about in the meadow. Then, somewhat disconcertingly, they began to walk over to where Gaynor and her brother lay in hiding, as if the entities knew they were there. Perhaps not unnaturally, the children got up and ran away. Yet this was just the beginning of a whole series of communications between Gaynor and the alien couple. The entities would appear to her at night and on three occasions at least they took her off to their home world in some kind of astral state. UFO writer researcher Jenny Randles eventually wrote a book on the subject called Alien Contact: Window on Another World (1981).

All the Sunderland children seemed extremely bright and attentive, and I could find no fault in Gaynor and Darren’s claim to have encountered the landed object in the field with its two human like entities (I questioned them on more than one occasion about the experience). After it got dark, Marion felt we should go outside into a local field, as she was sure that something was occurring out there. Here Gaynor seemed concerned about what she saw as an entity attempting to break through into our universe from another dimension. She felt that we needed, mentally, to push back this entity to its own world. So Gaynor, Marion and myself linked hands and attempted to do just that. This was my first introduction to the concept of parallel universes, and yet Gaynor seemed to believe in them just as day follows night. It was an incredible insight into her somewhat altered perception of reality.

After Gaynor, her brothers and younger sister had gone to bed, Marion and her husband Fred chatted with me in their lounge. Marion, an upfront but level-headed psychic in her own right, admitted that she felt that my presence there that day was somehow important, and that something wanted to prove something to me. Then, a little later, around midnight, quite out of nowhere, a small object fell vertically from the height of the ceiling. It bounced on to the mantelpiece in the middle of the room, and tumbled to the ground. No one had moved, so all eyes flicked between each other with mystified expressions on their faces. In fact, I had been looking directly at the fireplace when the incident occurred, so saw that there had been no sleight of hand involved. I got up and found two pieces of a tooth, which I handed to Marion. She recognised them immediately as a milk tooth that had been dislodged earlier that day from the mouth of her son Barry, aged 10. It had been placed on a sideboard away from the fireplace to remind her to put a sixpence under Barry’s pillow before the night was over. Now, inexplicably, the tooth had fallen from the height of the ceiling on to the mantelpiece. Since no logical explanation could be found, I was left baffled yet excited by what had occurred that night.

This unusual incident proved to be the first of a sequence of strange events in the coming weeks that would, eventually, lead Graham and I to embark on a quest, our first ever psychic quest, to retrieve a small green stone, identified with the Philosopher’s Stone of the alchemists and buried, allegedly, somewhere in the Midlands of England after the disastrous Gunpowder Plot of 1605. It is a story told in my books The Sword and the Stone (1982) and The Seventh Sword (1991), and in Graham Phillips’ book The Green Stone (1983). What happened during this period helped launch our careers as historical writers as we strove to understand the complexities of the Green Stone saga and its implications to history.

Andrew Collins in Warminster, 2008

Strangely, the subject doesn’t go away, either. Just recently I have been researching the Green Stone story again, and have realized that the deeper you look into its background, the more the whole thing comes together to make a bigger picture that we simply didn’t see at the time. I hope to write more on the subject soon, giving the whole thing a brand new perspective. Watch out for this, as it will be very special indeed.

GW: Andy, thank you so much for taking the time to share your work and insights with us. It’s fascinating stuff, and I look forward to reading Beneath The Pyramids later in the year.

For more information on Egyptology, the hidden passages beneath Giza, psychic questing, crop circles, the Morphians, the Nephilim, Cygnus, the whole Green Stone / Meonia quest, the Black Alchemist, and all sorts of other fascinating material, go check out http://www.andrewcollins.com.

Collins has recently rediscovered and entered a previously unknown cave system beneath the Pyramids of Giza. Its had long been rumored in myth and legend, and in 1817 Henry Salt, the then Consul General to Egypt, discovered its entrance west of the Great Pyramid. He and Italian explorer Giovanni Caviglia searched for several hundred yards before giving up, yet in that short time,  entered three large, interconnected chambers. Salt’s memoirs were never published and the site was lost, and it has remained no more than a rumour ever since. Following some incredible detective work in 2008, Andrew and a team entered Salt’s catacombs and for the first time in modern history, uncovered this lost world. It is the subject of his upcoming book “Beneath the Pyramids” (Fourth Dimension Press, 2009), where he will reveal all sorts of fascinating discoveries and their implications for our understanding of ancient Egypt.

Andrew Collins on investigation in Giza

GW: Thanks for agreeing to talk to us, Andy. You’ve had a long-established interest in Ancient Egypt, and you’ve made some startling discoveries about its history and underworld. What was actually going on out there?

AC: In 1985, I listened as a friend told me that he had experienced a dream in which he had disappeared beneath the plateau at Giza and entered a fantastic room with green stone walls and strange hieroglyphics. It was part of a huge underground complex, existing in the area of the Sphinx. We came to refer to it as the Crystal Chambers, but others call it the Hall of Records. We pursued his dream by conducting remote viewing and astral experiments in a meeting hall we converted into a mock Egyptian temple at a place called Malyons, in Basildon, Essex. The idea was for my colleague, Bernard, to attempt to enter Giza’s chthonic realm in astral form and try to ascertain its design and greater purpose.

The results of those sessions blew my mind, convincing me that there was something very important awaiting discovery beneath the sands of Giza. Yet I remember thinking at the time there is nothing I can do with this material – there is no one I can convince to do anything about it.

Some twenty-four years later I was in a position to do something about it, and in March 2008, with the help and support of the Edgar Cayce Foundation, our team uncovered a whole complex of caves and chambers beneath the Giza pyramid field that have been lost for nearly 200 years ago. They are likely to be the physical basis behind the idea of a Duat, or underworld, existing in Giza, something that ancient Egyptian creation myths and funerary texts allude to quite specifically. At its heart is a birth chamber, a chamber of first creation, called the Shetayet, quite literally the Tomb of God. Yet tomb as a term is inadequate. It is more like a place of rebirth, or ascension, in order that a person might become as they were in the beginning, quite literally starstuff. The Shetayet was the role model behind all later tombs, sarcophagi and coffins in ancient Egypt, which were designed to replicate its ability to transform the soul into what was known as an akh, a glorious spirit, or ascended being, at one with the chthonic womb’s celestial counterpart. This was thought to exist in the region known to astronomers as the Cygnus Rift, which is located on the Milky Way in the area of the constellation of Cygnus, the swan, known also as the Northern Cross. It was for this reason that, in my opinion, the Pyramids of Giza were positioned so as to mimic the astronomical positions of key stars in Cygnus.

The whole story is revealed in my book called Beneath the Pyramids: Exploring Egypt’s Lost Underworld for the First Time. It will be out in the States in September and the UK in November.

GW: You mention Cygnus, and there’s a strong vein running through your work about the origins of humanity and modern society, from the impact of Cygnus X-3 and the real nature of Atlantis right through to the Biblical Nephilim. How do you see the evolution of modern man and civilisation?

AC: I believe in Darwin, and the evolution of the species. However, there is something going for creationism as well. Both come together to create a metaphysical solution to life on earth that seems to be affected by waves and cycles of creativity. This said, I believe that human evolution has been influenced over the past 200,000 years or more by exterior forces, most obviously cosmic rays, both from deep space objects in our own galaxy and others much far away on the other side of the universe. Sometimes this influence is brutal, with the effects, for instance, of supernova that might well have blasted the earth with deadly cosmic radiation on several occasions. In contrast, the influence of cosmic rays can be more subtle, emanating like a pulse or signal from specific astronomical sources.

I think our earliest ancestors got on to the more subtle effect of cosmic rays a long time ago. They sensed and experienced cosmic radiation not in the open air, but deep underground, where in Europe the Palaeolithic cave art exists. It was down here that our ancestors first realized the existence of some kind of cosmic source influencing their lives, and over time they came to realize its direction. To me the most obvious source for the more subtle cosmic pulses is the neutron star, and possible microblazar, pulsar, black hole and quark star, called Cygnus X-3. It is around 30,000 light years from here, in our own galaxy, and sits invisible to the naked one right within the mass of stars forming the galactic plane, the centre line of our own Milky Way galaxy. This area of the sky has been universally considered the place of cosmic life and death, the stars of Cygnus being seen as a bird of creation that is present in stellar-based creation myths across the world. However, there might easily have been other cosmic sources of similar pulses, all having some kind of subtle effect on human consciousness. Such knowledge among our ancestors led to the world’s first sky religions, along with the yearning to reach the stars, almost as if there was a knowing somehow that we came from the stars, and would ultimately return there in death.

Cover for "Beneath The Pyramids" by Andrew Collins

GW: You’ve just done a new book on crop circles, and certainly this year’s formations are amazingly precise and beautiful. Who or what do you think is behind them?

AC: Ninety-nine percent of modern crop circles are human made, yet there is still a mystery. Constantly, they are surrounded by reports of mysterious lights being seen, along with strange effects on electrical equipment, human bodily systems and the mind. Crop circles act in exactly the same manner as prehistoric sites, such as stone circles, barrows or dolmens, and are thus to be seen as temporary temples existing for just a few months, or even just a few weeks, before their destruction.

Those who make the crop circles, the human circlemakers, experience some extraordinary things when they go out at night. They witness strange lights, experience time slips and shamanic visions, and believe that they are guided to do what they do. These individuals are like the surrealist painters of the 1940s and 1950s channelling their higher mind or the spirit world to create beautiful art. This is what is taking place in the fields of Wiltshire each summer.

Having said all this, my book The New Circlemakers shows that crop circles have been around for at least 400 years. In England they were known as devils circles or fairy circles until the advent of the modern flying saucer craze, when suddenly they became “saucer nests”. In the past a lot of superstition surrounded their presence. People would avoid going inside them, lest they be struck down by illness or ill luck. The best recorded case of crop circles before the modern era is the mowing devil of Hertfordshire, which levelled wheat in circular patterns as fire was seen over the field in question. This event occurred in the seventeenth century, and shows that even by this time crop circles were being associated with infernal spirits. I have also found a very interesting report of crop circles in native American folklore. The Chippeways, an Algonquian tribe from Michigan and parts of Canada, preserve a legend in which swirled circles of grass were caused by a star car carrying beautiful maidens. Such stories show the relationship between circles and unusual aerial objects long before the modern UFO era. That connection is still very strong today.

GW: You’ve been described as the godfather of psychic questing. What actually is questing, and what sorts of things can happen on a quest?

AC: Psychic questing is working with raw psychic information given by a person and taking it on to some kind of ultimate goal, be it the retrieval of an artefact, or the solving of a landscape or historical mystery. The key to success is accepting that such information is genuinely inspired, and that it has come through for a reason, either from the person’s higher mind or from some kind of external influence.

The difference between spiritualism and psychic questing is that you go with the flow and follow the instructions of the psychic information. If it reveals a location, then you are meant to be there. If it tells you to create more energy by doing a specific ritual, or sketch, then you do it. You see the information as one part of an unfolding storyline that gradually makes more and more sense until eventually you achieve your final goal.

I tried to introduce Living TV’s Most Haunted programme to psychic questing, telling them that they would probably get much better results if they more closely followed the information being given by the psychics. However, they didn’t seem bothered, which is why the programme has got so boring these days – just the same old thing week in week out. Live questing on TV is definitely the way forward, provided that you are working with the right type of people, and the correct psychics.

GW: You’re running a psychic questing workshop in Avebury this year. What will that involve?

AC: I am doing a psychic questing weekender at Avebury Village Hall on Saturday/Sunday, 19/20 September. For more information go to http://www.andrewcollins.com.

It will include a crash course on how to do psychic questing, along with accounts of recent questing successes both in this country and in Egypt. Plus I shall be doing a special presentation of the Green Stone, or Meonia Stone, story, as it is 30 years since its discovery. This will include some brand new material, plus a meditation to link with the events of 1979. There will also be a coordinated psychic artefact retrieval, which proved such a great success last year. Yet this year, we shall make it a little more interesting, by changing the rules slightly. Test your own psychic abilities. Maybe someone out there is the next super psychic.

The second half of the interview can be found here.