By KHRYSTA IMPERIAL RARA
But for his children, he has always been the Halloween Man.
“Every Halloween since I was little, he was always on almost every television talk show,” his son Jolan Alexander, 40, says. “You could just imagine (what) the kids in school say.”
There are several urban legends going around about this man. Jolan remembers that on two separate occasions, two different people told him that his father used to play with the San Beda baseball varsity team and that he threw a ball that “went farther away than any of our pitchers.”
He recounted the incident to his father who assured him that he had never thrown a baseball in his entire life.
Jolan’s father is Jaime T. Licauco, internationally renowned researcher and writer on psychic phenomena.
Licauco, or Jimmy to his friends, has been researching, teaching and writing on esoteric knowledge and the paranormal for 35 years. Or even longer, if he had indeed lived as a Tibetan monk, an Egyptian high priest and a Japanese scholar in past incarnations, as various psychics have told him.
As a scribe and keeper of information in those past lives, Licauco says he had kept esoteric knowledge hidden from the people, so he is now sharing this information with the public to balance off his karma. He does this through his DZMM radio program that airs at 7:30-8:30 p.m. every Sunday, his weekly column in a national daily for the past 25 years, his books and regular seminars.
Licauco pursues this mission of information dissemination with unparalleled passion.
“At a time when psychic phenomena were dismissed as clever tricks or superstition, or the work of the devil…it astonished us that a business management guy whose background and training were certainly technical, scientific and logical would record such paranormal psychic occurrences as truthfully as possible with the least value judgment,” Anvil Publishing assistant general manager Karina Bolasco told guests at Licauco’s recent 70th birthday bash.
Licauco graduated magna cum laude with a degree in A.B. Philosophy and English from San Beda College in 1962. His alma mater recognized him as The Most Distinguished Alumnus in 1989 and bestowed on him the Bedan of the Century Award for Literature in 2001.
He has a master’s degree in business management from the Asian Institute of Management and 25 years of management experience in various Philippine firms.
Last March, he was listed among the most influential and trusted personalities in the Philippines based on the Reader’s Digest Asian Trust Poll.
People seek Licauco’s advice mostly on unexplained hauntings and manifestations of departed souls and other beings. And he never tires of explaining the theory behind ghostly occurrences. After all, he teaches that death is but a change in frequency and everybody goes through several lifetimes to learn all there is to discover about life.
“I used to be terrified of death while growing up and even as an adult. Maybe because we don’t know what comes after. Then after knowing, the fear is not completely gone but it no longer terrifies me,” he confided. “It doesn’t overwhelm me anymore.”
For a long time, he tried to keep his personal psychic experiences to himself. But in recent years he began to write and discuss them openly in keeping with the Zeitgeist (spirit of the times).
For instance, after a healing session with faith healer Jun Labo in the early ’90s, Licauco went into a trance in front of several witnesses, spoke in straight Tagalog, which he rarely does, and channelled an entity that Labo immediately recognized.
“The entity gave Jun Labo advice and called him ‘Anak’,” Licauco recalls. “When I opened my eyes, I was surprised to see Jun teary-eyed.”
Labo was convinced that Licauco had channelled the late President Marcos who gave him the political advice that he (Labo) had prayed for. The healer said Licauco had sounded and spoken like Marcos. Only Labo knew that Marcos used to call him “Anak.”
Licauco sometimes blurts out things that eventually turn into reality, like when he told Vice President Jejomar Binay that he wouldn’t win if he ran for president “because it is not your destiny” but he stood a good chance of making it if he ran for the second highest position in the land.
He told the then Makati mayor that “somebody totally unexpected would win the presidency.” At the time, then Sen. Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III was not yet in the running.
A visit to the 23-hectare mystical hill of Ciudad Verdadero in the border towns of Lucban and Sampaloc in Quezon province early this year disclosed a secret that Licauco hesitates to write about. As he stood with his hands and forehead against a huge boulder on the hill, he fell into a trance.
“I saw a creature with a bald, big head, big black almond eyes, small nose, small long hands and greyish rubbery skin. It looked feminine but was flat-chested, beautiful and not scary. She seemed to be floating. There were four other small winged beings around her. Two seemed to be floating on both sides of her head and the other two were at her waist level,” he recalled.
The creature welcomed him but said he couldn’t go further down the boulder. “Next time, I will accompany you to see our place,” she promised.
The experience lasted less than a minute. Later, when he mentioned it to UFO enthusiast Roy Alvarez, he was told that extraterrestrials run a laboratory deep down the boulder. A resident also confirmed the presence of ETs in the area.
“I have known Jaime Licauco as a world researcher and spokesperson for over 25 years in the fields of the paranormal, the para-physical and what I call ‘future science’ – the guidance of new scientific directions and discoveries by means of higher consciousness,” his friend, Dr. J.J. Hurtak, founder and president of the U.S.-based Academy for Future Science, wrote in a recent email to VERA Files.
Hurtak described the Philippines as a land of “direct contact with higher dimensional intelligences.” He stressed that Licauco “will play an important role” in preparing people “to accept the great historic privilege that is coming to humanity–the acceptance of the reality of cosmic cultures and the role of humans as cosmic citizens in a greater story of ongoing creation.”
Hurtak and Licauco first met in 1984 during the first World Conference on Alternative Healing that Licauco organized in Baguio. Three years later, when Licauco was in San Bruno, USA, Hurtak drove there to tell him that because of political turmoil in the Philippines, he had been instructed by higher intelligences to evacuate Licauco and his family to Hawaii if he was in any danger.
That his father is working with cosmic forces will be another urban legend that son Jolan will have to deal with. Plus the fact that despite his age, Licauco will continuously work to raise people’s consciousness.
“I haven’t done my magnum opus yet, maybe a book on this whole field or a superstrings theory to synthesize all of this. I would also like to write a screenplay or direct a movie and collaborate with someone sensitive enough to depict all of this,” Licauco quipped.