Preface
A Short History of
L/L Research

I’ve been at this pursuit of UFO understanding for over 25 years now. I’ve tried to maintain a totally open-minded approach to the study, considering no piece of evidence too small or too ridiculous to consider. The theory which has gradually emerged from this approach may seem a bit wild or absurd, but it is dealing with a wild and absurd bunch of data. The one thing that recommends the theory is that almost all reports which come in day0020by day seem to fit into it very well. One thing to remember: almost everything which we now accept as normal in our present technology would have been considered a wild and absurd impossibility a scant 100 years ago. We do not know how many millennia ahead of our present understanding the UFOs might be.¹

Living the Law of One – 101: The Choice is my report to you of the research done at L/L Research over the last fifty years. It began with Don Elkins’ studies in the middle 1950s. Elkins was a thoroughgoing scientist born in 1930, a physicist and mechanical engineer and a Professor at Speed Scientific School at the University of Louisville for many years. He taught, flew charter trips as a pilot for the local flying services and spent his odd moments reading widely in metaphysics and new science as well as in the fringe areas of the paranormal and UFOs.

Elkins began his investigations by studying an area which had fascinated him for some years: reincarnation. His studies had informed him that the Eastern world, including Buddhists and Hindus, felt that souls entered incarnation repeatedly over a long stretch of thousands of years, gathering experiences and collecting the fruit of their learning and labors in the ever-growing character of their infinite and eternal souls.

He was also aware that the Jewish culture of which Jesus the Christ was a part believed that reincarnation was a fact of life. Indeed, the early church fathers carefully tried to remove all mention of reincarnation from the Bible, for reasons of their own. Some traces remain, however. An example of this occurs in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, where people were guessing who Jesus was. Some said he was John the Baptist and others said He was Elijah, “raised from the dead.”

Elkins decided to research the hypothesis that reincarnation is the way things work by means of doing hypnotic regressions of selected subjects. He induced a hypnotic trance in over 200 subjects of all ages and conditions of life and asked them questions about their experiences before coming into birth in this life.

His subjects obliged with a rainbow array of previous lifetimes of all kinds. Very few were of any high estate. For the most part the subjects reported lives as regular people and hard-working souls. Their lives might be in any century of recorded history but the details of their lifetimes were, for the most part, familiar and normal. The themes of home, family, seeking and service ran true no matter what the era or even the planet of origin.

The exceptions were interesting! In one notable session, the subject reported that he was a human-sized, white bird. It turned out that he was re-experiencing a lifetime in Atlantis, a continent which Plato described long ago as having sunk beneath the waves of the Atlantic Ocean. Other research we have done indicates that the Atlanteans, working with crystal technology, created many combined forms such as man and bird, man and lion and so forth. From this era of prehistory spring combined forms such as the huge statue of the sphinx in Egypt and many other supposedly mythological beasts.

Having determined to his own satisfaction that the theory of reincarnation was valid, Elkins turned to what, in the mid-fifties, was still a wide-open and novel area of research: UFO contact. In his spare time he either telephoned, corresponded with or got in his small plane and flew to see Kenneth Arnold, George Adamski, George Hunt Williamson, Gray Barker, Dan Fry and Orfeo Angelucci, to name only a few of the many UFO contactees with whom he talked during this period.

The UFO witnesses all told Elkins their stories of being contacted by extraterrestrials. The ships the witnesses saw differed in appearance and so did the appearance of the aliens, but their stories had areas of commonality. One contactee after another added to a growing picture of Earth as a planet moving rapidly towards a time of great transition and the shift of consciousness associated with moving into a new heaven and a new earth. They spoke of a choice related to this shift. One Pennsylvania contactee put it very simply, quoting a figure he saw in his contact: “If humankind does not wake up and choose to live differently, the end is near.”

Nowadays one cannot get a straight story about UFOs or UFO contact from official sources. Governments around the globe have put what prominent ufologist, J. Allen Hynek, has called a “ridicule lid” on UFO information. In the absence of full disclosure, a complex and intricate subculture of conspiracy buffs has arisen and the information coming from “mainstream” conspiracy sources tells a dark, threatening and fear-based story which, while in some cases true, is not at all the whole of the UFO story. Indeed, in reality there are as many “good guys” as “bad guys” among our cosmic visitors.

Meanwhile the aliens we see in the media are sitcom fictions like Mork and ALF, good guys or bad guys in science-fiction and fantasy dramas like the Asgard and the Goauld in Stargate or little green men in commercials selling products to the masses. By now we are well conditioned to think of aliens as harmless cartoon characters.

The data on UFOs is “out there,” in the sense that there is sufficient evidence for legitimate research. For example, Hynek’s “UFOCat,” a database of physical landing trace data collected at Northwestern University, contains hundreds of cases of measured landing traces. This data is sound enough that researchers can measure tripod or other landing marks in a field allegedly visited by a UFO and, before talking to the witness, know how the witness will describe the UFO’s appearance. This predictability is persuasive in indicating the reality of craft that we do not recognize as Earthly craft, landing on our planet and making dents in the ground. Someone is visiting us. Something is happening.

If you would like to read Don Elkins’ and my summary of this phase of our research, it is reported in Secrets of the UFO, which we published in 1976. It is available at your book store or through the on-line store on our web site, www.llresearch.org.

Elkins kept reading and making contacts. In 1960 he met Hal Price, the head detailing checker at the Ford Motor Company plant here in Louisville. Price had moved to Louisville from Detroit, Michigan. In Detroit, Price had been part of a metaphysical group known formally as “Man, Consciousness and Understanding” and informally as “The Detroit Group.”

Its leader, Walt Rogers, had experienced a close encounter with a UFO and, after that experience, began to receive spiritually oriented information telepathically, which he carefully recorded. He kept the handwritten information in a brown notebook. Price had a copy of this material which he shared with Elkins. In reading this material, Elkins found instructions for creating the same sort of contactee information as Rogers was receiving in Michigan. Don determined to set up an experiment using students from his physics classes. He secured twelve young men to sit in silent meditation once a week.

The instructions in the Brown Notebook were for people to sit in meditation as a group as often as possible and to speak the thoughts which came into their minds. However, Elkins told the participants only that it was to be a silent meditation group and that it was an experiment.

I heard about this silent meditation group being formed because one of the invited participants was a boy friend of mine at the University of Louisville, where I was studying liberal arts as a 19-year-old. I expressed interest in joining the group and my boy friend took me to meet Elkins, who agreed to my being a participant.

We began meeting in January of 1962. The group consisted of Elkins, Hal Price, his wife, Jo, the twelve young men and me. Over the next six months, most of the engineering students from Elkins’ physics classes began producing material. In content and tone it was very similar to the metaphysical material produced in the Detroit Group.

However, the problem was that events fell in such a way that the experiment was invalidated scientifically. Rogers himself visited the group after six months of our meetings and “channeled” to it that the extraterrestrial source which was attempting to get through to the participants of the Louisville group felt that their cosmic thoughts were being heard by the group. They wondered why no material was being produced by the meditators. This channeling from Rogers contaminated the experiment, although it prodded the young Louisville group into its next phase.

After that, the group started producing spontaneous material while in a meditative state, otherwise known these days as channeling. The data was no longer scientifically acceptable but Professor Elkins felt that the material being collected was sufficiently interesting that it was worthwhile to go on with the experiment and produce material for as long and as thickly as possible.

We at L/L Research, which Don Elkins and I founded in 1970 as we formalized our research together in this area, continue this facet of Elkins’ research to this day. We hold public channeling meetings twice a month from September through May, on second and fourth Saturdays at 8:00 p.m., here in the Louisville area. These channeling sessions are broadcast on www.bbsradio.com, weekly. We invite the public to join us by tuning in to the radio or by joining us here in Kentucky. We are still collecting that data!

We also have two public silent meditation meetings a month, on first and third Saturdays at the same time of 8:00 p.m.

In the sixties, I did not learn to channel, being genuinely fond of silence and preferring to listen to the “cosmic sermonettes” the others were producing in their channeling. However in 1974, at a time when my first marriage had dissolved and I had begun working for Elkins full-time as a librarian and researcher, the last good channel from the original Louisville group left town and Elkins asked me to learn how to channel. At his request I did so. Within a short span of weeks I was producing material.

I became interested in making my channeling better and set out upon a long study from the inside out, you might say, as to what makes for a good session. Gradually the material our group produced began to take on a character and strength that made Elkins and me more and more interested in the material. I either wrote about this phase of our research in a report called A Channeling Handbook, which is published by L/L Research and is available in print or free on our web site.

In 1980, Elkins and I invited Jim McCarty, born in 1947, possessed of degrees in education and sociology, a long-time participant in our meditations and a person extremely well suited to working with us, to join our research group. He accepted and L/L Research changed from a partnership into a non-profit charity, using McCarty’s non-profit corporation, Rock Creek R and D Labs, Inc., as our combined organizational entity. We retained the name of L/L Research as a publication name, since Elkins and I had written and published under that name before 1980 and people were already familiar with it.

Just three weeks after McCarty joined us, I went into trance during an “intensive” or advanced teaching session, after accepting contact with an entity calling itself the Ra group. Whereas all previous material had been consciously produced and all subsequent material has also been consciously produced, when I was a channel for the Ra group I went into a sleep-like or trance state at the beginning of each session and the material was produced without my conscious awareness.

This Ra Material has a profound clarity and internal consistency. It presents a startling picture of the universe and humankind’s place in it, a picture which lies at the core of this report.

On the television science-fiction serial, Stargate, as well as in Egyptian myth, Ra is known as the hawk-headed Sun-God. The Ra group is careful to erase any notion of a connection between the myth and their group. They describe themselves as “humble messengers of the Law of One” who come from elsewhere than Earth. They tell a story of having found, in a Pharaoh known as Akhenaton, someone compatible with their teachings, which are philosophical rather than religious. As you can see from the “Law of One” name, their philosophy is that all things are one. The universe and all things in it are one system. There is one Creator and a unified creation.

Akhenaton’s teaching that there was only one God was revolutionary. Millennia before the time of Christ and Mohammad, the Egyptians and most of the rest of the world believed in a pantheon of many gods, each with their own area of rulership. Nonetheless Akhenaton, having supreme authority as Pharaoh, was successful during his lifetime in converting many to monotheism. His body wasn’t even mummified before the priestly caste began reverting to the traditional Egyptian belief in many Gods.

Also, according to the Ra group, they appeared physically to the Egyptians and assisted in the building of the Great Pyramid. They tell of building this, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, by thought but making it look as though it was built by the hands of humans. They wished to create a place of initiation and healing. The powers of this pyramid were intended to be used by all those who came to it, regardless of their estate in life. However, after Akhenaton died, the wealthy and powerful among his successors limited the use of the pyramid to the elite classes of royalty, courtiers and priests. This was far from the intention of the Ra group. Realizing that their intervention had resulted in unintended consequences, they withdrew physically from Earth and began seeking other ways to help us.

Why does the Ra group want to help planet Earth? Even in 1350 B.C.E.—over 3300 years ago—during Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty, the Ra group, as part of what they call the Confederation of Planets in the Service of the Infinite Creator, could see that we were almost at the end of our 76,000-year cycle of incarnations. They could see that we had not, in all of those 72,000-plus years, managed to begin truly to love each other. They knew, although humankind did not, that the Earth was almost ready to be harvested. Time was short.

When the Ra group was able to contact our research group in 1981, they were grateful for the chance to share their story and their thoughts. Don, Jim and I poured every effort into working with this contact, which even at the time we recognized as special.

This Ra contact ended in 1984, when Don Elkins died. McCarty and I continued to hold meetings and gatherings, offer channelings and teaching opportunities and pursue our oddball research. We pursued it because we found the research compelling and helpful. We collected it in Books I through V of The Law of One, sometimes known as The Ra Material. In addition to these very special trance sessions, we have collected and archived over a 1,500 of our group’s conscious channeling sessions over the years until the present day.

This body of material, which is available on our web site, has made my life better. Studying it, thinking about it and trying to live its principles have absorbed my interest for over four decades now. The Ra Material offers solutions to many of the mysteries of the universe. It places the living of this present life into a larger and much more satisfying context. It offers a picture of the universe and our place in it which is exciting, enlivening and full of a powerful potential. And it does all this without asking me to release my mystical Christian faith, or asking anyone else to relinquish their faith or belief systems, or lack thereof. Rather than invalidating religious beliefs, the Ra group and other groups within this Confederation place them in a larger context and treat them with great respect.

It is rather like thinking, all your life, that you are in the only store in town and then discovering a “You Are Here” map which shows you that this store is one of many in a very large mall. It is liberating and invigorating to begin to get this larger picture and start to put the pieces of it together.

At any time, please feel free to stop reading this book and refer instead to the original material that this book summarizes. The material in The Law of One sessions and in the archives of our conscious channeling sessions is available at no cost on our website, www.llresearch.org.

Because the original material is so hard to read, many people have asked that I write a book that explains it more straightforwardly. This writing is my attempt to bridge the gap. I hope you enjoy the read and the ride!

Carla Lisbeth Rueckert
Louisville, Kentucky
November 1, 2008