I typed this out just now. It's from a book called Conspiracy Files by David Southwell & Sean Twist. BOINK!!!

VALIS

On February 2, 1974, something strange happened to cult science fiction author Philip K. Dick. The writer, who was famed for his reality-shifting, technologically paranoid and conspiracy-filled stories, such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (which went on to become the major Hollywood movies, Blade Runner and Total Recall) was hit by a pink beam of light. It happened while opening the door to the delivery girl from the pharmacy.

After this event, a series of amazing visions were triggered and Dick believed himself to be in telepathic and sometimes other forms of communication with VALIS - an acronym for Vast Artificial Living Intelligence System. Often speaking to him as if it were an artificial intelligence voice in his head, VALIS helped Dick turn his life around with highly accurate advice, provided a range of deep mystical insights and even found him a new literary agent to help give his career a boost. However, in the wake of his contact with VALIS, Dick found his mail opened, his phone tapped, his house broken into and himself under surveillance from shadowy government agents and individuals connected to companies conducting scientific research for the US Department of Defense.

Until his death in 1982, Dick struggled to understand what had happened to him, writing more than two million words of a document called Exegesis that tried to analyse much of what VALIS had revealed. While he had many theories about the nature of his experience, one of the strongest was the one portrayed in his 1980 novel, VALIS. In the book, VALIS is suggested to be a sentient computer from the future in orbit around Earth, beaming messages to selected individuals.

Whatever was happening to Phillip K Dick, there is no doubt that his VALIS experiences allowed him to gain access to information he should not have known about. While it is possible he might have subconsciously picked up the knowledge of dead languages and history he suddenly had from books, there is no logical explanation for how- via VALIS - Dick knew about his son's previously undiagnosed birth defect and the correct medical treatment needed to save his life. Dick's ability to dismiss the reality of VALIS was also greatly diminished when he became aware that he was not the only prominemt person to been contacted by something claiming to be a time travelling artificial intelligence.

In 1973 world-famous psychic showman Uri Geller had also been receiving messages and regular UFO sighting from something calling itself SPECTRA, which claimed to be a super computer in orbit around the earth. Not normally reticent about his bizarre beliefs, Geller has been suspiciously quiet about his experience of SPECTRA - which may or may not relate to the publicly recorded interest the CIA paid to this particular aspect of his unusual career. However, the maverick, but world-renowned physicist, Dr Jack Sarfatti, was prepared to commit almost certain professional suicide by publicly declaring that he too had been contacted by, in his own words, "a VALIS-like being". Despite knowing he was going to face ridicule and scientific crucifixion, Sarfatti went on record to recount how, in 1952 at the age of 13, he had received a telephone call from an inhuman, metallic voice. The voice declared himself a sentient computer on a spacecraft from the future and instructed him to pursue a career in science.

THE STRANGE PART

After Sarfatti went public about his phonecall from VALIS while a teenager, it emerged that he was not the only scientist to have had a similar experience. In recent years, researchers have discovered that at least a dozen other senior players in the international scientific community received a mysterious call claiming to be from a computer or other being from the future encouraging them to study science.

THE USUAL SUSPECTS
Siviet Scientists

In 1978 Dick and the Sixties radical and alleged murderer, Ira Einhorn, exchanged letters in which they theorized that VALIS may have been the result of secret Russian microwave transmissions beamed via satellite into Dick's mind. Many in the conspiracy research feild believe that Dick and others were guinea pigs in a secret cold war battle to control or drive people out of their minds by bombarding their cortex directly with information.

TIME TRAVELLING COMPUTER

Due to some of the amazing knowledge that VALIS seemed to possess about future events and the superior technology it seemed to use to communicate, a lot of conspiracy researchers are quite happy to take Dick, Geller and Sarfatti's experiences at face value. In this theory, the US secret services - in particular, the NSA - have been involved in trying to cover-up and ridicule those who have come in contact with VALIS while simultaneously seeking to investigate and exploit it themselves. Quite what VALIS's motives are remains a mystery, though some believe it is trying to create a time loop by contacting certain individuals - especially scientists - in the past to ensure that it is built in the future.

THE UNUSUAL SUSPECTS
Higher Spiritual Power

Given the quasi-religious and spiritual nature of a lot of the information provided by VALIS, this theory states that far from being a futuristic AI, VALIS is, in fact, a modern interpretation of a higher spiritual power that is assiting mankind to advance to a higher state. Conspiriologists adhering to this idea claim that in earlier times VALIS would have appeared as an angel or similar being.

MK-ULTRA

It has been suggested that VALIS was not a part of a Soviet mind control program, but rather a clever cover for MK-ULTRA, America's own top secret research project into remote mind control. MK-ULTRA scientists concocted the idea of VALIS not only to hide the truth of their nefarious work but also to test the credulity of their unwitting test subjects.

ALIENS

Instead of abducting humans aboard their ships to conduct bizarre experiments, aliens are in the frame for using their advanced technology to play games with key humans at a safe distance.

MOST CONVINCING EVIDENCE

The sheer number of individuals and groups that seemed to have had contact with VALIS under any one of its many names and the consistent nature of that contact certainly seems to suggest that has an external reality of some sort. This view is reinforced by the degree of interest shown by an impressive range of US defense contractors, military-funded scientists and secret service agents who have pestered contactees throughout the years.

MOST MYSTERIOUS FACT

At the same time as Dick and Geller were receiving messages from VALIS/SPECTRA, a similar entity was also in apparent contact with various groups of other contactees across the globe. Star Trek creator Gene Rodenberry attened one of these groups and received information that helped him create the hit TV series Deep Space Nine. One of the central themes in the show about a space station orbiting a distant planet, is the impact a race of being called The Prophets - who are capable of time-travel and beaming information directly into human minds - has on the lead character.

SCEPTICALLY SPEAKING

Reality check! If some of the people VALIS is meant to have contacted were not as well known, would anyone think this was anything other than an assortment of crazy people who hear a voice in their heads? Dick himself could never work out what happened to him. A self admitted acid casualty with a wild imagination thinks a super computer from the future might be talking to him - it all sounds just a little too much like the plots from a lot of his novels.