An Interview with Andrew Collins

by Brent Raynes

Did an ancient gamma ray burst from the Cygnus star constellation accelerate human evolution? Can the human brain affect a Geiger counter? These and other intriguing questions are discussed in this exclusive and thought-provoking interview with acclaimed British researcher-author Andrew Collins as we cover a wide spectrum of controversial and anomalous subject matter from UFOs to the Holy Grail, ancient civilizations, crop circles, a thing Andrew calls “alien energy,” and so very much more!

For more information about Andrew Collins and his fascinating research and ideas, go to his website: www.andrewcollins.com

Brent Raynes: Let’s talk about the many different kinds of books that you’ve written over the years. For example, Alien Energy, that Eagle Wing Books, here in Memphis, Tennessee, just reprinted I guess a couple of years ago, and many different books that explored ancient mysteries.

Andrew Collins: I’ll start with From the Ashes of Angels, that came out in 1996. Basically this book looks at the origins of stories of trafficking between so-called angels, referred to as Watchers and Nephilim, and mortal kind, and how these Watchers were supposed to have given the arts and sciences of heaven to them. However, they transgressed the laws of heaven and were punished, and others were destroyed in a flood, including their offspring the Nephilim.

Basically what I say is that this is actually a memory of very real events that took place at the time of the neolithic explosion or neolithic revolution around, let’s say between 9000-7000 B.C., in the area of the Near East. Southeast Turkey, northern Syria, northern Iraq and western Iran. This was traditionally the Garden of Eden wherefore paradise began, and basically I say that the Watchers and the Nephilim were unquestionably the priestly elite. The shamans who controlled the advance of the neolithic revolution. They set themselves aside as a priestly elite, basically, and this was almost certainly the origins of kingship as well.

The Gods of Eden is more of the same, but also included in that was the origins of Egyptian civilization, suggesting that its roots went all the way back to 9000 B.C. That was in 1998. Then in 2000 was the first publication of Gateway to Atlantis, relating to the origins of Plato’s Atlantis, seeing it as being in the area of the Bahamas and the Carribean, with its flagship being Cuba. There were many similarities between Plato’s description of the central city, the central island and Cuba, and showing that the sunken area of it was in fact within the Great Bahama and Little Bahama Bank, and that this area had suffered some kind of cataclysm, almost certainly originating somewhere in space, relating to most probably a fragmenting comet, which caused devastation of land along the eastern United States and also within the waters of the western Atlantic. Drowned large parts of the Carribean and the Bahamas temporarily with tsunamis but then more permanently as the waters rose because this cataclysm, this event, almost certainly was a turning point in the last Ice Age which caused the waters to rise up quite rapidly, and this fits in perfectly with stories found throughout the Bahamas and the Carribean as told to the first European explorers, mostly Spanish, back around the late 15th century, and originally the islands had been all one large landmass that had been split up at this time. Some of the accounts talk about some heavenly body falling to the earth.

Then in 2002, I did a book called Tutankhamun - The Exodus Conspiracy, which was basically the complete account of the discovery of the Tutankhamun tomb by Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter in 1922 and 1923, and everything relating to the myth of the curse, etc. But most importantly I brought out the whole story of the fact that a papyri had been discovered inside the tomb and had been spirited out seemingly because of the sensitive political nature of them which they related to the exodus, and at this time the British were helping the Jews establish their own nation within Palestine, and obviously their claim on Palestine was based purely upon Biblical accounts. If this had been challenged by new evidence coming out of Egypt then it could have stifled or even stopped any talks that were going on.

Then in 2004 I had a book called Twenty-First Century Grail, which basically, aside from being a personal quest to find the Holy Grail, gives the complete and full account of the origins of the Grail, looks at it in terms of the fact that it was almost certainly the cup that Mary Magdalene used to anoint Jesus before the crucifixion, and that this was also traditionally thought to have been used to collect the blood of Jesus and that Mary Magdalene was almost certainly the person who did this and not Joseph of Arimathea. The stories of Josepth of Arimathea coming to Britain were just made up by the monks of Glastonbury Abbey to increase revenue, pilgrims, and prestige. It took the whole Grail thing into the realm of the Cathars, the persecuted heretics of southern France, their whole concept of seeing the light and how this fits in with very early concepts of Christianity found within certain apocryphal texts. Like the Secret Gospel of Mark, and things like that.

Then in 2006, this year, I have a book coming out called The Cygnus Mystery, which shows that cosmic rays from a neutron star/black hole, a binary system known as Cygnus X-3, almost certainly influenced human evolution through creating mutations within our genes during the late paleolithic era, the exact time that there was the flowering of art, astronomy, cosmology. All of these things developed as if it affected human behavior, human intelligence at this time, and probably started the ball rolling. It then went into the whole idea of civilization building the very first temples in southeast Turkey that have just been discovered, which date back to 9500 B.C. These most incredible temples, and there’s no question about their date. Archeologists are saying this, and these were the precursors of everything that went on down in the fertile crescent, to create the first civilizations of Sumeria, Babylon, Syria, and also to Egypt where the pyramid builders really began that civilization as well.

Editor: So this book will tie in all of these historical developments to changes in the DNA.

Andrew Collins: Yeah. And, as I said, it pins down the source of these cosmic rays. Specifically to the Cygnus constellation. Cygnus is the celestial swan. But it was also the celestial bird or cosmic bird in ancient mythologies all around the world. And what I show is that not only was this cosmology relating to the cosmic axis, the sky pole, with the bird on top of it and the snake around the base of it, a dragon or serpent in many cultures. But a great many ancient sites, prehistoric and sacred sites around the world, from the pyramids of Egypt to mounds at the Hopewell culture in Ohio through to the Incas and the Maya, the Hindu temples in India, to some of the greatest megalithic sites in Britain, like Avebury, Callanish Dancer, called the Isle of Lewis, Wayland Smithy long barrow, Newgrange monument in Ireland, right through to these very first temples in south Turkey that I talked about–all of them reflect the stars of Cygnus, either through orientation or lay-out on the ground.

Editor: I think also there’s a lot of references to the Pleiades.

Andrew Collins: Not in this book, although the Pleiades are an incredibly important constellation for calendrical purposes, particularly in Mesoamerica. Probably the earliest and most enigmatic representation of a constellation which is found in a painted cave in southeast France shows Cygnus at this time in the form of a bird at the end of a pole, in association with a bird shaman. Bird shamanism is very much associated with all of this. I began to explore it all in my earlier books From the Ashes of Angels and The Gods of Eden because the swan, throughout Europe, was a symbol of the soul in death. The swan would accompany the soul into the next life, which would be seen in terms of the north. The north was the place of heaven. This same idea was found throughout the world, but with slightly different variations. In the Near East, it wasn’t the swan. It was the vulture. In China it was a magpie. Among Native American people it was the eagle, or thunderbirds. And in Egypt it was the hawk or the falcon, which were representatives of falcon headed gods such as Horus who were portrayed in the sky in the form of a falcon incorporated in the stars of Cygnus.

Editor: Now when you wrote Alien Energy, was that sort of at the beginning of your writing?

Andrew Collins: 1994. So that was the book before From the Ashes of Angels. I can’t keep going back. We’d be here all day. But Alien Energy looked at the whole idea of the fact that UFOs were manifestations of lights, of plasma that, although independent in their own sense and in theory may be produced by the earth or in the atmosphere, seem to possess intelligence capabilities. Not just through possible telepathic links with the human mind. More than that. Obviously the closer they came the more it created hallucinatory experiences within us that would also interact with the light form to produce what we call alien abduction experiences, which I believe were occurring outside normal space time. But beyond that they had an intelligent mannerism in their own right. They’re independently intelligent, and I cite various examples of people who have been lost in the middle of woods and things like this, and a light would appear that would take them virtually back to safety.

So in other words, this is alien energy. This energy itself is a consciousness within its own right. This is not to say that more traditional style UFO encounters do not exist. They do. I investigated the first ever UFO abduction in Britain, which was reported in 1977, just a year prior to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But for many years, I worked with the British UFO Research Association and the UFO Independent Network, covering high strangeness cases all over Britain. In conclusion, people were telling the truth for the most part, but what people were seeing and witnessing was often based upon their own psychism, what was going on within their own heads, how much psychic they were themselves. Because you would often find the witnesses of high strangeness cases had many, many similarities to each other. Not just in the fact that they had also experienced in their life things like ghosts, astral projection, psychometry, a feeling of information from objects, but they also had various psychological and physiological traits in common with each other. Such as, they would all burn easily in the sun, they were all ecologically minded, they had weak wrists, and many, many different traits, which we call psychogenetics. Looked at in great detail in the late 1970s, early 1980s. This was brought out in earlier material I did in magazines and journals.

So that was basically it, plus the other important thing with Alien Energy is that it was tied in very strongly with the crop circle phenomenon which, although from my own perspective of having been involved with that subject for many years and know many of the key people involved, I would say that unfortunately 99 percent are man-made creations. I’ve now spoken to the people who actually created them. But having said that there is an X Factor involved. All the answers are not simply that people created them, plus the people who do create them have the most incredible experiences making them, they have dreams about what they should portray, they feel they have to go out certain nights, they get there and they feel presences, they see strange lights, sometimes so closely that it frightens them. And other things like this, and they are as much mystified by the subject as anybody else. So there’s a genuine phenomenon going on here, plus quite clearly whoever started the modern crop circle phenomenon was simply basing it on very real accounts of “saucer nests” found in places back in the 1960s. I followed that up and found that there were many, many cases around that time. There were lights and those lights were actually connected in local fairy lore, to do with spirits, and different things like this. All sorts of fascinating stuff.

Editor: And, of course, you got personally involved, as you describe in Alien Energy, with others doing meditations.

Andrew Collins: Yes, the orgone experiments. One of the aspects of the crop circles was the fact that we felt that this was very, very similar to the concept of an orgone accumulator, as described by Wilhelm Reich, a psychologist and experimenter basically with alternative energies which he called this energy orgone. He believed that it was present universally and that it could be manifested or brought out through certain processes. Most obviously creating different layers of organic and inorganic matter, which he would use to create boxes called “orgone accumulators.”

So even though we felt that the crop circles were essentially man-made they seemed to be producing the type of phenomena that Reich associated with his orgone accumulators. Strange light phenomena, miraculous healings, a sense of well-being, a feeling of presences in the room, and various other paranormal effects which had also been associated with prehistoric sites like stone circles, barrows, standing stones and things like this. It seemed to be that the crop circles themselves were almost creating temporary temples, as we called them at the time. They were only there for just a few months in the summer and the people could go in them and they would witness all of this strange phenomena. So we wanted to try and measure that, so we did a series of experiments within the crop circles, at dawn and sunset generally, for periods of two weeks for each year, for three years in running, 1993, ‘94 and ‘95. And did controls as well by doing the same type of experiments just out in a field, plus we did others on hilltops, sacred places, and I tried to compare the whole of it together. It was scientific, and we had a lot of scientific instrumentation to try and monitor any changes on an electromagnetic level, or gravitational changes or electrostatic changes. All sorts of things like this, and indeed we got the most incredible results. Most obviously within the use of Geiger counters. We found that during meditations, or more precisely just as meditations were about to begin, almost as if people’s thoughts were already collected together right before you said, “All right, now we’re going to begin meditation.” There were incredible increases or decreases in the amount of supposed radioactivity going on. But we don’t actually think that it was any changes in the radioactivity. What was happening is that the human brain, we believe, may well have been affecting the Geiger counters to produce results as if the local radioactivity was changing. So in other words, that was what was going on. Our brains were affecting the equipment, not that there was an increase in the amount of radioactivity in the air. Plus we also found that there were incredible low frequency signals picked up by the instrumentation during meditations, which our scientific advisor at the time, a guy by the name of Rodney Hale, was technical engineer, and he could not explain at all. It just did not make any sense whatsoever.

Also it was almost like when you were monitoring things at a multi-frequency level, lots of things were going off at the same time. Geiger counters, low frequencies, plus anomalous images in photographs that were being recorded at the time as well. Plus, as far as any psychic activity is concerned, we had good psychics working in our midst, and they were picking up things that were going on at the same time as well. So everything tied together.

We initially had gone in to test any energies within the crop circles and what came out of it was a much wider understanding of what was going on, on a scientific level, during meditations, and to show that yes, when you do meditations something profound takes place in the environment and within these meditations nearby.

Editor: So you had gone from this earlier work, where you were looking at the production of these unusual energy levels, that couldn’t be explained, to now coming out with a book dealing with cosmic rays and how they may have affected our human evolution.

Andrew Collins: Yeah, yeah. I am not saying that these ideas are not exclusive to the other. It may well be that there is a link, which is something that we need to look for now.

Editor: How did you become involved in this kind of area of pursuit where you have pursued what a lot of people have considered far out, unorthodox?

Andrew Collins: It’s in my blood. When I was 7 or 8, I remember discussing the theories of the universe with all of the kids on the block and we’d go round and round just discussing these things all day. I tried to get people to see ghosts. We’d go down to the local park and just sort of sit out at night. We would go onto little hills trying to tune radios to white noise to see if we could pick up any UFOs that would pass overhead. By the age of about 12, I was reading the works of Sigmund Freud on dream analysis, which I couldn’t understand at all. I was very interested at an early age in astral projection. Read books on astral projection by the age of 12 or 13. But then, as a teenager, you start discovering girls and going out, and I tended to forget or ignored a lot of it for a few years until I was about 17 or 18. Then I was working in London and I happened to read something on the train going to London and back every day. I started reading pulp paperbacks on UFOs. I read literally dozens and dozens of them, all the obvious people, John Keel, Brad Steiger, Brinsley Le Poer Trench, etc. And I just wanted to get involved, so I became a UFO investigator, which eventually lead me to investigate some of the most important cases in British history from the mid to the late 1970s. It was during this time that I became aware that there was a psychic element with all of the UFO encounters. The people were as important in the encounter as the actual phenomenon observed. People were important here. That started to lead me to investigate psychism and working with psychics, and at that point onwards I was so intrigued with them I wanted to try and understand how their brains ticked. And from that point onwards I’ve worked with psychics and I always listen to psychics. I have psychics working with me on a lot of the work that I do, because I value what they have to say because it is so much more creative and enlightening than what orthodox views will give you on it. They’re not always right. In fact, they’re rarely 100 percent right, most of them being 50 percent right, or it may be even less, but it still gives you enough information to work on, to look into new areas, so I would always advocate this idea. Most of the ideas for my books, even though my books are scholarly in nature, probably derived originally from some kind of personal experience, either of my own or somebody else close to me, and it sets me off on a beeline, a train of thought, which once I become passionate about and obsessive about until I get some answers.

Editor: So you’re how old now?

Andrew Collins: I’m 49.

Editor: There is a lot of experimental work that you’ve done. I was reading in The Gods of Eden where you had studied cases of levitation and you felt that it was some way in the sound vibrations and there was the case over in Tibet where there were actual eyewitness accounts, one in which I believe a doctor had observed some stones being moved by Tibetans using all kinds of horns, drums, and things. They had it worked down to a science apparently, a science that hasn’t been passed on to us, but a few years back you used different speakers and things trying to change the weight of an object. Have you pursued that any further?

Andrew Collins: I haven’t. No. I must point out that the book reviewed all of the known accounts of sound technology from ancient sources, plus also a few more modern sources. Including the examples that you gave. I’ve not been able to confirm those stories anymore since the book has been published, which means that although I take at face value what was actually written, the fact is that I’ve not been able to confirm it. I’ve spoken to various people who study Lamaism, Tibetan Buddhism and they confirm there is a tradition of moving objects using the mind, but I’ve not been able to confirm the accounts. So I would treat it with caution until any further information is known. I have no reason to suspect that those concerned made them up, however, I would still treat with caution those accounts.

Editor: Of course, down through the years there have been stories, I think one medium that was well-known, I think back in the 18th century was D.D. Home, who levitated in front of a large group of witnesses.

Andrew Collins: It was 19th century Victorian England. Yeah, he supposedly could levitate out one window and come in another, but the problem is that when you get into this type of account, as Harry Houdini would say, it could be done through trickery, and if there is any chance at all that trickery was involved it ceases to be counted as scientific evidence of anything. It’s a case of that we can’t go and check it now. It just really remains an eyewitness account and as we know from people like David Blaine or any other modern magician a lot of these things can be replicated quite easily.

Sound technology, I’m pretty certain, that it existed in the past. I don’t have any doubts that it did, and we’ve also been able to replicate it to some degree, but only in lifting very minuscule objects so far, the size of something like a pea. But I do believe that it is something that in time we will understand it better from a scientific point of view.

Editor: Where are you headed with it now, or what you would like to see accomplished.

Andrew Collins: Well, having worked with UFO encounters for almost 30 years now there’s nothing in any of the cases that I’ve covered (some of the ones that I covered were the most bizarre that ever took place in Britain) there’s nothing that firmly proves that what was occurring was of extraterrestrial nature. Nothing. Yes, you’re dealing with intelligences that are not terrestrial in nature. Whether they come from inner space or outer space is another matter altogether. Surely from the point of view of extraterrestrial intelligence I would like to see, before I die (which will hopefully be a very long time away from now) proof of the existence of life outside of this planet. The so-called concept of panspermia of life everywhere, that life is being produced in other parts of the universe and being brought here through means of probably some kind of object such as a meteor, a comet, or an asteroid, and I think that we’re getting very close to that now. This is an area that I go into in the book, which is about to come out in October, called The Cygnus Mystery, which contains all of this stuff. There is a whole chapter all about panspermia in there, and we’re getting very close to it now I think.

Not mentioned within that text, but certainly mentioned within the introduction I’ve done is the subject of the Red Rain of Kerlala. In 2001, over a period of three months, this red blood like liquid fell as rain over parts of southwestern India, in the province of Kerlala, and it was examined by scientists in India, who after they had dismissed more obvious mundane possible explanations like it was sand from central Asia, that it was the blood of bats caught in some weird maelstrom up in the upper atmosphere, or it was spores of some kind of plant that got up into the atmosphere, that it may well have been of extraterrestrial nature. When it started it was found to be cell like in appearance and would divide under hostile environments, such as oil, and come alive and divide, and it was unquestionably cell-like in appearance. Recent work has been done at the University of Cardiff shows that it has a form of DNA which they cannot apparently identify. More work is being done now and the results of which will be published later on this year. Hopefully. It is possible that these cells are of extraterrestrial origin because just two hours before the first of this red rain fell a loud bang was heard in the air, many reports of that, and it could have easily been a meteor hitting the upper atmosphere, basically disintegrating and releasing this cell like matter in the upper atmosphere that eventually got caught up in the currents and was drawn down within rain clouds and drops of rain itself.

What’s important about this is that even this turns out to be a pure terrestrial matter in origin, the fact is it is being taken very seriously by the scientific community. Articles have been published in peer reviewed journals on this. New Scientist in Britain is following the story all the way through. This marks a great change I think in the way that we consider the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence, and I firmly believe that probably within the next 20 years or maybe even earlier we will have proof positive of extraterrestrial life. And when that happens it will create a domino effect which will allow us to view so many different things in a different way, everything from UFO encounters to the origins of life on this planet to all sorts of weird, high strangeness things going on on this planet.

So I look forward to that.

Editor: How about the subject of the Holy Grail? You wrote a book on that also, and you had the Grail in your possession?

Andrew Collins: Okay, there isn’t just one Grail. There are many Grails. I and my wife Sue became essentially Grail keepers of Britain’s most authentic Grail Cup for a period of two years. This is known as the Marian Chalice and is also known as the Hawk Stone Cup or Hawk Stone Grail, and it was actually discovered behind a stone statue of an eagle in a cave, on an estate in northwest England. It’s made of green alabaster. It’s actually a censer of Roman origin. Probably first century. Almost certainly comes from the Near East. In fact, there are only three places that are known in the world that produce green alabaster, one of which is in Jordan, on the border between Jordan and Israel, and another place which I think is in Turkey. In Roman times this was highly prized. This green alabaster. It is linked in tradition we think with the cup that Mary Magdalen used to anoint Jesus and also to collect the holy blood. But anyway there’s various Grails around. There’s the Grail in Valencia, Spain, and another one in Florence, Italy.

This might be the real one or it might not. The Holy Grail itself is almost certainly a concept. But I’m sure that along the way certain physical artifacts have been brought out to represent that and they became revered, sacred artifacts. There’s no question that the Marian Chalice if it had been discovered in Mediaeval times they would have built a cathedral around it. They would have had pilgrims coming there and charging them a lot to see it. It’s a very, very sacred relic, but we had it for a period of two years and it was just too much of a burden on our lives. They say that the Grail keeper must have just one focus in their life and that is to do everything within their power to protect the Grail, and in a way that’s how our life had to revolve around the fact that we had this thing in our house. We took possession of it from Brian Phillips who wrote a book on it called The Search of the Grail, which came out in the late 1990s. He actually found it in a lot of a descendant of the person that discovered it back in 1917. He found that various things were going wrong in his life and he actually blamed it on this Grail and he wanted to get rid of it, and so we happily took it into our possession, but eventually we gave it back to him.

You just couldn’t leave the house.

Editor: Afraid that someone might break in?

Andrew Collins: Yes, exactly. This was not worth it. We had two years of being Grail guardians and that was enough.

Editor: I know that you said that you do a lot of meditating.

Andrew Collins: Yes, we took it to a number of sacred places in Britain, including Glastonbury, a place very much associated with the Grail tradition. We did some key meditations with it there. I feel that we brought it alive. Much of the story of this is contained within Twenty-First Century Grail.

Not too many people can actually say that they became a Grail guardian in their life.

Editor: Let’s talk a little more about your upcoming book The Cygnus Mystery.

Andrew Collins: Right. My current project is The Cygnus Mystery. Cosmic rays from the Cygnus constellation influenced human evolution in early history and affected human behavior and caused germ-like mutations over a longer period of time, probably about 2000 years. Now this might seem a whacky idea but as I was writing the book I discovered that a scientific think tank, known as the Meinel Institute of Las Vegas announced that they also now believe that something similar was going on in paleolithic times. Their candidate is a planetary nebula in the constellation of Draco, which is next door to Cygnus. Very, very close. This they worked out through an examination of the levels of Beryllium-10, which is a bi-product of cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere and changing oxygen and nitrogen into the secondary element of beryllium. Which falls to the earth and is retained within sea levels and ice cores, and measurements of this can determine the level of cosmic rays. There’s no question that towards the end of the paleolithic era the level of cosmic rays hitting the earth had doubled. So to suggest that this may have been involved in mutations leading in changes to human evolution is not a mad idea. Plus I found out that as early as 1972, Carl Sagan, the great scientific writer, spoke about exactly the same thing, the idea of cosmic rays influencing human evolution, in his book The Cosmic Connection. He went back to the subject in 1977 in his book The Dragons of Eden.

It’s something that I believe influenced the foundations of world religions as well. You will find this Cygnus link within Christianity, within Islam, within Hinduism, within Near Eastern religions like Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran, the Sabians, the Chaldeans of the Bible, even certain Shiite Islamic groups strongly related to this. It’s behind the whole concept that heaven was in the north and that we come from the sky and that we return there in death. Somehow this is all mixed up with this whole idea of cosmic rays influencing human evolution, influencing human intelligence, but mixed up with the whole idea of panspermia as well. This connection with the cosmos. Something which is very, very important, and I think that as we go on we will begin to realize that it is more and more important.

Editor: When the tsunami hit how there was like a super wave that came through that was very powerful and a lot of people said it was just a coincidence, but still do you think there was something more?

Andrew Collins: Right. Basically what happened was that after the Southeast Asian tsunami a gamma ray burst of quite incredible power hit the earth. This was extremely short-lived. Lasted a matter of seconds really. (One author) has proposed that in advance of it there was some kind of gravitational super wave and that this would have affected the geological structure of the earth to trigger an earthquake of the type that would have formed this tsunami that caused this disaster. Now that’s a theory. I am afraid that it’s no more than that. Plus there have been other gamma ray bursts, including a much longer gamma ray burst this year that lasted 2000 seconds. The one at the end of 2004 was only a few seconds in length.

It’s an interesting idea, but it’s unproven.

Note: Andrew was in the United States participating in the production of a dvd documentary on his ideas outlined in his forthcoming book, The Cygnus Mystery. To view a 1-minute intro Quicktime clip of the documentary beginning, click here.