Lo! ETHERIA!
The following is a selection from "The Ether Ship Mystery (and Its Solution)" by Meade Layne, oft-forgot godfather of modern UFOlogy and one of the last great mystic-scientists. A complete version of "The Ether Ship Mystery" is printed by Borderland Sciences, available through its online catalog.
Etheria is here – if we know what here means! Along-side, inside, outside of our world. Because our world, that is, the so-called dense matter of the objects in our world, is a rarefication. It is spaced out like a vast net – a net with enormous meshes. Imagine, if you will, a net of wire with meshes a mile wide. Would not wind and water flow through that net as if it did not exist? A little friction, very, very little!
On the strands of those meshes we live. That is the so-called dense matter of our world. We look out across the mesh and do not see anything in it, or hear or feel anything in it, and so call it empty space. Meaningless words in the abysses of folly! We see, hear, feel the other strands of the mesh, and call our world solid , firm and material! Call it a real and substantial thing! But the “spaces” of the mesh are a thousand and ten thousand times greater than the substance of the strands. What is in these spaces of the mesh of our “matter”? Space? Space is not nothing. Space is stuff, is matter. What kind of matter? The matter which makes the ethers. More dense – not less, but more dense by far than the rarefactions of our world. The matter of the Etheric world! Inside the molecules, inside the atoms, other atoms – still other atoms inside of those, or ten thousand Chinese eggs each inside of another. If you think that this is imagination, or that there is no room for these interpenetrating universes – ask the physicist and the mathematician. They will tell you there is nothing in the omniverse but room; and room, again, is space, is stuff, is basic world-stuff, mindstuff, life-stuff; and there is no emptiness anywhere – And that is why Etheria is here! But it is also everywhere. All heavenly bodies have an etheric realm.
A few lines more and we shall have done with the more practical and pressing aspects of our subject. The etheric “ships”, as everyone knows, are of many types, not all of them Discs by any means. Some are long and cigar shaped; many are shaped like balloons or dirigibles; some have wings or wing-like attachments. Many of them appear to change shape while in the air. Their color varies also and has also been seen to change. Some of them resemble fire-balls; others are accompanied or followed by smoke, vapor, and luminous appearances. Some are translucent, or seem to glow from within. They travel at all speeds, from zero (stationary) to thousands of miles and hour. They also vary widely in size, from a few feet or yards in diameter to nearly incredible dimensions; we have reports considered trustworthy of at least one craft ten miles in length. They have a curious way of disappearing suddenly when in plain sight, and also of rapidly dwindling in size without withdrawing in distance. It is well to bear all these items in mind, since any single explanation must obviously cover all of them; it is not enough to invent some theory for the discshapes alone and then imagine what that the whole matter is accounted for. Now, under the “etheric explanation” which we are presenting here, our understanding is briefly this:
ETHERIC EXPLANATION OF FLYING SAUCERS
All of the types of craft just mentioned come from the same source. All are constructed by Etherians. Their variety arises from the fact that many of them are experimental, and that different types of them serve different technical purposes. These craft are built in matter of the etheric plane and are imperceptible to us, since they exist in what we call “empty space”. They enter our plane or our level of perception by a process of materialization. The extremely dense matter which fills in the pattern of etheric stresses is replaced by matter of the kind that is visible to us – or better, its vibration rate is lowered until it becomes visible. A little like slowing down a very fast fan until one can see its blades. This is closely similar to what happens in the phenomenon or apportation (where objects, of any kind or size, are “miraculously” transported into and out of sealed rooms, sealed containers and the like). Many people, and most scientists, take no stock in this alleged phenomenon, but it is well attested and cannot be surrendered on that account. Neither the pattern nor the molecular filling is destroyed; the object becomes invisible because the atomic motion is speed up, and it can pass through other matter (a wall, e.g.) because of this same fact. This is equivalent to an increase in density when an object on our place is being apported from one place to another. To an Etherian, an object materializing on our plane would dematerialize on his; to us it materializes in our field of perception, and dematerializes when it returns to its etheric state.
If we understand this, we are on the way toward accounting for many odd items of behavior, such as have been mentioned above.
It is probably well known by this time, that several of these ether ships have fallen, and their contents carefully studied – although with utmost secrecy. We cannot enter here upon this part of, which has been printed in other BSRA publications; we wish to refer only to the “little people”, dwarfs about 30 inches in height, whose bodies were found within the Discs. We have reason to believe that the Etherians, who must operate on their bodies just as they do on the etheric substance of the disc in order to accompany them choose to materialize in small forms, simply for the convenience of operation and flight. This, like everything else set forth here, is according to our best knowledge and belief at this writing. We repeat, that we are offering the first words and not the last on this extraordinary problem.
The propulsion of the etherian craft is beyond the present concepts of our science – yet we have a good clue to its nature, and shall comment on it on a later page. (There is no motor, propeller or other mechanism inside the fallen discs, so far as we have been able to learn.) We must add the extraordinary fact, that under certain conditions, or at certain states of materialization, or at certain altitudes and pressures, the substance of the ether ships is jelly-like and actually does change in shape and apparent size. (The outer skin of the fallen discs, however, is harder than steel, and of unidentified substance.)
It is our information that certain types of the ether ships are and have long been used for interplanetary travel. Those who persist in the belief that they come from visible planets of our system, will eventually seize upon this as a confirmatory fact. But the ether ships do NOT originate on visible planets, as we have said. Interplanetary travel is simply one of their innumerable uses, and this fact should not mislead us. The craft are made in Etheria, and Etheria is in and around all visible objects. It is also the home and motherland of our plane, all the objects we see about us derive from that source, and our own bodies also. We ourselves are Etherians by ancestry and descent; for Etheria is the home of the human race. That we should be so grossly ignorant of it is strange indeed.
