DAY 1 · Part I: Prelude to Ra Contact
CHAPTER 1
The Beginning
Gary To begin our investigation into the story of L/L Research, I’ve chosen a moment in 1948 that was pivotal in the life of Don Elkins: Carla and Jim, what sparked Don Elkins’ interest in researching the UFO phenomena and the paranormal? How old was he then?
Jim Well, he was 17 years old, and it was an actual UFO case that occurred right here in Louisville, Kentucky. It was one of the first reported across the country. Don had been taking flying lessons from the Elkins-Mantell Flying School.1 (The Elkins at the school was a distant relative.)
Thomas Mantell was a captain in the Kentucky Air National Guard.2 On that particular day he was en route from Marietta, Georgia, to Louisville’s airport, Standiford Field, with three other pilots, each flying a P-51, former World War II fighter planes. They got a call from the control tower at Godman Field, Ft. Knox, saying there had been sightings of a UFO over Maysville, Kentucky, and could they alter their course and investigate to see what was going on.
So they that did that. One of them was low on fuel so he went on to Standiford Field. The two wingmen and Captain Mantell continued on, and within about 30 minutes they made contact with the UFO and discovered that it was huge, it was metallic, and it was shaped like an inverted ice cream cone with a point on top and a big round ball at the bottom. Captain Mantell said he was going to close in to try to get a better look, and as he did this, the craft shot straight up at an incredible rate of speed. Captain Mantell said that he had seen entities3 in the craft and that he was going to follow, because he wanted to find out more about what was going on and who this was.
As he passed through about 20,000 feet, he passed out because his plane, being a World War II vintage, did not have oxygen. His brain suffered hypoxia and he augered in and crashed near the Kentucky-Tennessee border. This of course killed him, and it did two things: it got interest nationally in UFOs (which had been pooh-poohed before that quite a lot—no one really thought they were real), and the second thing it did was it got Don Elkins interested in UFOs.
Carla He had been interested since he sort of woke up the way teenagers do—but not so much with rebelling against what his parents did, which he approved of. His mom was a reader in the Church of Christ, Scientist, what is normally called the Christian Science Church.4 From the age of nine onward he didn’t go in; instead he would wait in the car while the family went in and worshipped. He didn’t believe in that,5 but he thought that the theory was good. However when he got to a certain point in school, he studied the first things about science which indicated that we did not know what light and gravity were. We were using these values and a lot was depending on them, but we actually didn’t know why they worked. He became interested in what was going on and why. Just the question of why? He pursued any and all angles. The Mantell case was that which triggered and focused his research into UFOs.
Gary So prior to Mantell, he was pursuing his own truth? Asking questions . . .
Carla Yes, definitely.
Gary Once his interest was awakened to the UFO phenomena due to the Mantell case, how did he pursue and manifest his passion?6
Carla Don did everything he could think of. He learned how to fly, and using small planes he flew to different places to interview people like—who was the guy7 that did those flash cards, the stars, and all the early work in telepathy? Anyway, he was famous at the time, and Don went to see him and talk to him about it. He went to see anybody he thought might have any answers. He went to séances, he went to channeling sessions—he investigated anything that was other than normal science.
Gary So what set him on this trajectory, prior to the Mantell case, was a distinct understanding on his part of the limitations of current knowledge. He saw that there was much more beyond what we presently understood.
Carla That’s right.
Gary Do you know what Don’s preliminary thoughts were on UFOs in the beginning phases of his investigation? Had he considered UFOs or similar matters before this event?
Carla Before the Mantell case he’d considered them but only generally.
After the Mantell case, as I said, he learned to fly, and he interviewed quite a big series of people that had UFO experiences—not people that thought they might have seen something, but people who had had an experience: so-and-so came down and they had such-and-such discussion and they got on board and they went to such-and-such a place, and so forth.8
So, from the very beginning he knew that UFOs were an actuality of our experience on planet Earth and that a lot of people had had UFO experiences. He was interested first, I think, in gathering his research, and secondly in helping people to become aware that there was more to life than met the eye. He was very big on sharing this information any way that he could. He did a lot of talking to people.
Gary So you said that from the onset of his investigation into UFOs, he felt that they were an actuality on Earth. By “actuality,” does that mean that Don had reached the conclusion that UFOs were occupied and operated by intelligences from outside of Earth?
Carla That’s right.
Gary Because some who study the phenomena posit that they may be manifestations of the collective unconscious, that they’re not real in the outer [objective and empirical] sense.
Carla He thought that the people that had proposed those theories were very interesting, but as far as he himself was concerned, UFOs were real—as someone like Orfeo Angelucci9 or any number of those that he interviewed at the time would attest. They were seemingly occupied by human-like people that seemed to be very well-intentioned and kindly towards Earth.
He began to be interested in why they were here, not just that they were here but precisely why. It wasn’t until later that he gathered enough material to start separating things into positively oriented and possibly negatively oriented entities out there.
Gary What would you say were Don Elkins’ driving questions? What puzzle was he attempting to solve or penetrate?
Carla There was nothing for Don but the biggest, the widest, the deepest. His mind would not be satisfied with a segment of the answer. He wanted to know the answer to the puzzle of why everything worked. He thought that UFOs might have part of it so he investigated. He thought seeing ghosts and finding out things like . . . He learned how to do hypnotic regression and found out that he seemed to be able to regress people beyond this Earth experience to other experiences on and off this Earth, and so he discovered, he felt, that part of the lesson lay in—part of the puzzle pieces lay in reincarnation. He was interested in whatever—[sounds of kitty throwing up a fur ball]—whatever makes Pickwick throw up. [laughs] Sorry guys, our cats are expressing stage fright, I guess. Is Pickwick okay?
Gary Dan-D, actually.
Carla Dan-D, okay. Poor Dan-D.10
Anyway, anything and everything. But he soon narrowed it down, basically, to investigations into reincarnation and investigations into channeling. He felt that channeled messages consisted of messages from elsewhere of a positive nature, and also messages from people that had incarnated before and were no longer incarnate, like Tom Edison. He was very interested in a series of channelings by a lady in Chicago who channeled Tom Edison. Don was looking at any material that would give him more puzzle pieces to put into the puzzle.
Gary Did he have a vision of what that big picture was? Or was it completely unknown to him—all these various leads providing another piece and another piece and another?
Carla I think that it was the latter. I think that it took him a long, long time to settle down to one way of seeking the answer. I was his research partner all through the ’70s until the Ra contact began in ’80. We investigated hard UFO cases, cases around here and in Tennessee where he could get to with his rented airplane. I went to séances with him. And then I did quite a few hypnotic regressions with him. (I mean I was there when he did quite a few hypnotic regressions.) So he had narrowed it down to those methods of investigating the truth.
He felt from the very beginning that the truth did involve many of his mother’s most cherished beliefs, and that, as Christian Science believes, this is all an illusion and that spirit is the reality. (That was why Christian Science healing works, because you simply sit there and you know that what you’re looking at is an illusion, the sickness is an illusion, and you know that it doesn’t have to be there. It’s only there because your thinking is messed up. So you can make a healing that way. That’s what Christian Science practitioners do for you. Instead of doctoring physically they doctor metaphysically, and many healings have been done that way.)
So he felt that the illusory nature of the material world was the basic thing, and that reincarnation showed you were here but then you weren’t here, but you still existed. And then you came back and you were here again. He thought that the channeling was interesting because it indicated that there were others from elsewhere that had kindly thoughts toward us. It was a long time before he was able to admit that there were negatively oriented UFOs. He thought they were all nice guys. Some of them are very nice guys. But there is a segment of those who wish us active harm.
Gary And we have a very substantial section devoted to just that topic further on in the interview.
So it seems that the big picture gradually, incrementally disclosed itself to Don’s investigative efforts. You mentioned that conducting past-life regressions was among his primary modes of investigation. When did he cross paths with this technique and how did he learn to conduct it himself?
Carla I don’t know just when or where he did because it was before I knew him. When I met him in 1962, he was already conducting hypnotic regressions. In his investigative efforts he just ran across it. He got interested and he thought, “Hey, I can do this myself.” So he learned how. And he learned very carefully. I’ve never seen anybody do it better.
Gary Don, born in 1930, was 18 years old when the Mantell case happened. And you had mentioned that prior to the Mantel crash he had become aware that humanity was a species that knew very little—that there was much more. Do you know about what age that was for Don?
Carla I don’t know. I would guess whenever the first time it is that you take a class where—probably physics, probably physics. He was in a college track at Male High School in Louisville, Kentucky, and he would have run across that pretty early, probably at the age of 14 or 15.
Gary Okay. In his efforts to find this big picture he discovered channeling. Do you know at what point channeled information entered the scene?
Carla I don’t. He was already doing the channeling thing when I met him. I met him in ’62—in ’61, actually. He was one of my then-fiancé’s teachers at engineering school. He was a physics teacher. He got a group together late in ’61, and we started in January of ’62.
Gary Okay. Do you know what his initial response to channeling was? Sounds like he was pretty open to considering everything . . .
Carla That’s right. He wanted to investigate further. His basic feeling was that if you have a non-provable area of investigation your best bet is thickness of information, so gather a great deal of information.
Gary Do you know specifically how he incorporated the information coming through channels into his developing theory?
Carla No, I really think that it was a cumulative effect rather than a specific one. I think that, thinking about it, he figured that if he was able to do this, if people were able to channel then there must be something that they were channeling. There was an end result. So he was aiming for the result—he was aiming for who the source was and what they had to say that would help him with his puzzle.
Gary It seems like he was someone who wasn’t afraid to stand apart from the crowd.
Carla Don was completely fearless. He had no interest whatsoever in following any crowd—none.
Gary So in the course of his efforts, he at some point learned of a group in Detroit, Michigan, that was channeling messages from alleged occupants of UFOs. How did Don first learn about this group?
Carla It was odd. Don had been called in on perhaps half a dozen cases—whenever somebody called the University of Louisville with a case, the University called Don. One of these cases was the Hoagland case that is written about in The Secrets of the UFO. So shortly after this case was investigated and recorded and written about . . . [hesitates] no, I’m wrong there. It was somebody at the university who knew of Don’s interest in UFOs, and this person also became aware of someone who had been a part of a UFO group in Detroit and had moved to Louisville to work at the Ford plant.
So they got Don and Hal together. Hal Price was the name of the guy. He was a checker at Ford, a very responsible position. You never met a more upright man of probity11—a marvelous, dignified fellow—but totally open to the possibility of channeled information because of personal experience.
Hal had been part of a channeling group: he’d seen it happen. So Hal had ahold of a body of material channeled by this group including something called The Brown Notebook.12 (The Brown Notebook must have been originally written down by hand in a brown-colored notebook.)
It was a series of short channelings to this other guy in the channeling group. One of the channelings was concerning how you could start a group like it. They explained that you got the group together regularly, weekly at least, and you sat and meditated and you waited and sooner or later the invitation would bring some channeled material. So Don got together a group of the students to do the same, and I found out about it and asked to be part of it.
Gary So Hal Price comes down from Detroit. Hal Price was part of the Detroit Group. Hal, through a mutual friend, introduces Don to this material, and Don obviously finds some value in it. Don then visits the Detroit Group—is that right? And if so, what happened then?
Carla I imagine he did visit the Detroit Group, but I think that the important thing that happened was Don’s reading of that Brown Notebook, because it was the material in that notebook where it said you can receive your own messages which made Don think, well, ya know, that would be a really good thing to try. And so he felt all along that he could bring volunteers together to conduct a scientific experiment in channeling.
He did not, at first, tell anybody that the idea was not simply to meditate but to channel. So nothing happened right at first. The significant thing that turned the group around was that Walt Rogers from the Detroit Group came down and channeled for this group (the Louisville Group) and said while channeling, “Why in the world—we’ve been trying to get ahold of you but we’ve been unable to penetrate your reluctance to speak. If you would simply open up and allow us to speak through you, we would offer you information.”
After that, the 12 guys all started opening up and trying to get information, and for a few months you heard a lot of [Carla makes unusual clucking and clicking noises] and it was so funny. It sounded like there was a whole room full of flapping window shades. But eventually they began to produce some material, and Don began to get some meager but satisfying results.
Gary So these initial 12 people were students of his, correct?
Carla Uh-huh.
Gary How in the world did he attract them to this particular experiment?
Carla Don had an incredible amount of charisma. I think any one of his students would have done anything he suggested because it was Don and it was cool. It was as simple as that.
Gary And once it was clear what they were attempting to do, they stayed on board and continued with the experiment as long as they were in school?
Carla Most of them did, as long as they were in school. You have to remember that, as it happened, this was the hippie era and it was very fashionable to meditate. So there was not something in the culture of the peer group that was, why are you doing that? It was like, oh, cool, can I do that too? So we ended up sometimes having quite a large group.
Gary So, quick mechanical question: How often would the group meet, and when would they meet?
Carla It met on Sunday night at eight o’clock, once a week.
Gary Were their objectives clear? Did Don make clear this is what we’re doing, and this is why we are doing it?
Carla No, he just said he thought it would be interesting if we got together and had silent meditation, and I joined it because it was silent meditation and not for anything more.
Gary While conducting these experiments, did Don or others receive any negative feedback from the community, from his professional colleagues, or from family members of the students, or from neighbors, etc.?
Carla If he did, I don’t know about it. You have to, again, always remember that Don was an incredibly pleasant, affable, charming, wonderfully sociable guy. He knew how to be with people, talk to people, and teach people; and generally he was so well-thought-of that it was basically, well, you know he’s a little strange, but he’s really interesting. That was the reaction that people had, rather than condemning him or telling him he was crazy. I’m sure people did, but I just didn’t hear about it.
Gary Even nowadays we live in a Western world with a much more accepting, tolerant society, but nevertheless it’s still difficult now to stand apart from the crowd. In that time it must have been much more so. It sounds like he inspired some trust and confidence in other people.
Carla He did indeed.
Gary How did Don refer to these sources being channeled, and did he develop anything resembling a friendship or a sense of familiarity with these sources?
Carla To reply to the first part of the question: He was always extremely careful to refer to and treat the information as part of a scientific investigation. He never tried to tell anybody anything. He would just share information if asked. When he did open up it was because somebody asked him to, so he didn’t put himself in the position of banging on the door of popular belief. He simply would tell people what he was investigating when asked. He was always very careful to keep it scientific, saying “allegedly this” and “possibly that.”
Now as to the second part of the question, in having a personal relationship with them: I think that he did. I think he identified with those entities from the Detroit Group who spoke of love being the answer and that we are all—again like his childhood teachings—we are all illusions. This is all a grand illusion, and we’re not really here. We’re really spiritual—that’s our actual reality. And I think that was something that was his first piece in the puzzle: his realization that the information he sought wasn’t going to come from here because this was all an illusion. It was necessary to seek beyond scientific limits.
Gary In session 12, question 11 of the Ra contact,13 Don asked which group was contacting his channeling group in 1962. Ra replies saying that it was the Confederation. Do you know if Don is referring to his or to the Detroit Group’s formal channeling experiments, or to another incident at that time?
Carla No, it was the Detroit Group’s channeling.
Gary That completes our section of Don’s life and work up to the point of meeting you [Carla]. Now we focus on your meeting and beyond.
Notes
[1] “Capt. Thomas Mantell started in business [on March 21, 1947] as part owner of a GI flying school. Elkins-Mantell Flying School, Bowman Field, Louisville, KY. He was federally recognized in the Air National Guard about the 16th of February, 1947. He started flying the P-51 about May of 1947 and built his time to around 70 hours up until his death. He was a flight leader. His military time was approximately 2,300 hours, his civilian time was around 700 hours.” ↩
“Tyler’s Report pp 36–39,” National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, accessed September 1, 2015, [www.nicap.org/docs/mantell/mantell_accrep_tyler.pdf].
[2] “Captain Thomas Francis Mantell Jr. (30 June 1922 – 7 January 1948) was a United States Air Force serviceman and a World War II veteran. Mantell was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for courageous action during the Normandy landings, and an Air Medal with three Oak leaf clusters for heroism. . . . On 16 June 1942, Mantell joined the U.S. Army Air Corps, finishing Flight School on 30 June 1943. During World War II, he was assigned to the 440th Troop Carrier Group which air dropped the 101st Airborne Division into Normandy, France on 6 June 1944. After the war, Mantell returned to Louisville, joining the newly formed Kentucky Air National Guard on 16 February 1947.” ↩
Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. “Mantell UFO Incident,” accessed September 1, 2015, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantell_UFO_incident].
[3] “Richard T. Miller, who was in the Operations Room of Scott Air Force Base in Belleville, Illinois, also made several profound statements regarding the crash. He was monitoring the radio talk between Mantell and Godman Tower, and heard this statement very clearly: ‘My God, I see people in this thing!’ Miller added that on the morning after the crash, at a briefing, investigators had stated that Mantell died ‘pursuing an intelligently controlled unidentified flying object.’” ↩
1948, The Death of Thomas Mantell, UFO Casebook, accessed September 1, 2015, [http://www.ufocasebook.com/Mantell.html].
[4] Founded in 1879, Boston, Christian Science has been described by its discoverer and founder, Mary Baker Eddy, as a return to “primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing.” Adherents subscribe to a radical form of philosophical idealism, believing that reality is purely spiritual and the material world an illusion. This includes the view that disease is a mental error rather than physical disorder, and that the sick should be treated by a form of prayer that seeks to correct the beliefs responsible for the illusion of ill health. In Christian Science, sickness is viewed as absence of “right thinking” or failure to connect to Divine Mind. ↩
(An endnote written by our good friend Sam Womelsdorf, heavily borrowed from the wiki article cited below.)
Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. “Church of Christ, Scientist,” accessed September 1, 2015, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Christ,_Scientist].
[5] In this paragraph, Carla seems to indicate that Don did agree with the church doctrine (which includes the tenet that all illnesses are caused by improper thinking), but that he did not believe in their methods or practices or forms of worship. Jim adds, “His mother, as a reader, would have been in charge of preaching this church doctrine and combining it with Scripture. I think that is where Don got his idea about the mental aspect of experiencing reality. He just didn’t associate it with anything in the Bible.” ↩
[6] To read more about Elkins developing study of UFOs, see the June 4, 1978 interview he gave Louisville’s Courier Journal newspaper. An excerpt: ↩
When I first started checking out the contactee reports, I must admit that my sympathies were very much with orthodox scientists: I suspected the early contactees were charlatans because I did not have enough background in the study of "Ufology" to think differently. Their stories didn't "compute" in any orthodox sense.
But the more contactee reports I read from people all over the world—people who did not know each other and had shown no previous desire for publicity—the more I was struck by the similarity of the messages the contactees said they had received.
The Courier Journal – “UFO Prober”, Bruce Swain with Don Elkins, L/L Research, June 4, 1978, www.llresearch.org/interviews/interview_1978_0604.aspx
[7] It was J.B. Rhine, the “father of parapsychology” from Duke University. ↩
[8] In a lecture Don Elkins gave at Jefferson Community College on April 21, 1981, he said: ↩
I’ve been at this business for a long time. I got interested in UFOs in 1948. Maybe some of you remember Tom Mantell, who was killed flying an F-51 because a UFO was sighted flying near Fort Knox. I was a student pilot in the Elkins Mantell Flying School at Bowman Field when he got killed. So I was greatly interested in UFOs starting in 1948. I didn’t really get to devote much time to research in that area, and related areas, until 1955. In 1955 I really went to it and I’ve been researching the subject ever since.
In a footnote to the transcript of Elkins’ lecture, Carla added, “Getting his degree as a Mechanical Engineer and serving in the Korean War took up his time for a few years.”
“The Spiritual Significance of UFOs,” Don Elkins, April 21, 1981, www.llresearch.org/speeches/speech_1981_0421.aspx.
[9] “Orfeo Matthew Angelucci (Orville Angelucci), (June 25, 1912 – July 24, 1993) was one of the most unusual of the mid-1950s so-called ‘contactees’ who claimed to be in contact with extraterrestrials.” ↩
Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. “Orfeo Angelucci,” accessed September 1, 2015, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orfeo_Angelucci.
[10] In 2016 Jim added: ↩
Pickwick is our 19-year-old orange tabby kitty who still chases his tail but has no chance of catching it because it is too short. He loves everybody and is our goodwill ambassador.
Chloe is our nine-year-old black cat with shiny fur. She is our hermit cat who really doesn’t like company.
Chloe’s brother is Dan D. Lion, also nine-years-old, and is a grey tabby kitty with no tail because of a run-in with a raccoon five years ago. He is a lover with a huge purr.”
[11] Carla’s way of speaking highly of another often involved superlatives. ↩
[12] Hal Price reported that Don’s response to The Brown Notebook went something along the lines of, “This is the glue that puts it all together for me.” ↩
The Brown Notebook is available in the “Origins” section of LLResearch.org http://www.llresearch.org/origins/origins_toc.aspx.
L/L Research hopes to eventually publish a conversation with Hal Price from a chance meet-up in 2013.
[13] From this point forward all references to particular session and question numbers from the Ra contact will be in the format of “session number.question number” (e.g., 12.11). This format was first implemented by Tobey Wheelock. ↩