by D W Pasulka
that they could see several degrees beyond the lateral extent of
our vision.34
In 1994, UFO skeptic and pop- culture expert Martin
Kottmeyer announced a startling discovery. These “wrap-
around eyes,” as they’d come to be known in UFO par-
lance, had been seen by the nation’s television audience on
February 10, 1964— twelve days before Barney’s hypnotic
session— in an episode of the science fiction series The
Outer Limits. The alien in an episode titled “The Bellero
Shield” had the same sort of eyes. In other respects as wel ,
the TV alien seemed to resemble the UFO pilots as Barney
described them.35
In 1991, not long after a flurry of works about alien
abductions had been published by Mack, New York City
artist Budd Hopkins, and others, the practice of hypnotic re-
gression came under scrutiny. A book called The Hundredth
Monkey and Other Paradigms of the Paranormal collected
skeptical essays about “fringe science.” Several chapters fo-
cused on UFOs and alien abductions. The authors of the
essays included scientific luminaries such as Isaac Asimov
and Carl Sagan. One chapter used the then- current scholar-
ship on hypnotic regression to call into question the possi-
bility of retrieving accurate memories of anything. Citing the
work of Elizabeth Loftus, Robert Baker wrote:
W H E N S TA R WA R S B E C A M E R E A L | 1 4 7
Many people walk around daily with heads full of fake
memories. There have also been a number of clinical and
experimental demonstrations of the creation of pseudo-
memories that have subsequently come to be believed as
veridical. Hilgard (1981) implanted a false memory of an ex-
perience of a bank robbery that never occurred. His subject
found the experience so vivid that he was able to select from
a series of photographs a picture of the man he thought had
committed the robbery.36
Elizabeth Loftus’s research revealed that memory is
not like a video camera that dispassionately records what
happens. Instead, it is a dynamic process more akin to the
way knowledge is generated and preserved in our digital age.
“Our memories are reconstructive,” she writes. “It’s a little
like a Wikipedia page, you can change it, but so can other
people.”37 Today, we must add that other things can also
change it— like a movie or a video game. Maybe the human
being is like a Wikipedia page, and we are not the sole editors
of our own pages.
The Hundredth Monkey was part of a backlash against
the alien abduction cultural narrative, but hypnotic re-
gression has persisted as a convention of alien abduction
investigations. As scholars of film studies have begun to
work with scholars of memory, the results may shed light
on hypnotic regression and alien abduction. A recent edi-
tion of the journal Memory Studies was devoted to scholar-
ship on memory and film. The editors write: “Over the past
two decades, the relationship between cinema and memory
has been the object of increasing academic attention,
with growing interest in film and cinema repositories for
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representing, shaping, (re)creating or indexing forms of in-
dividual and collective memories.”38
The issue devotes a section to Alison Landsberg’s idea of
prosthetic memory, that is, memories that do not come from
a person’s lived experience. The focus is on the “cinema, in
particular, as an institution which makes available images for
mass consumption [and] has long been aware of its ability
to generate experiences and to install memories of them—
memories which become experiences that film consumers
both possess and feel possessed by.”39 What this means in
the case of alien abductions is that when people access their
memories, they are accessing both features of an experience
and what they have seen that is similar to this experience–
– which is often movies about extraterrestrials. I am not
discounting the possibility that there is a real experience,
but the experience is remembered with and through the vast
corpus of media products about abductions and UFOs.
As Impossible Factual and other specialist factual pro-
duction companies create documentaries that target young
audiences and splice extraterrestrials into visuals of real
historical events, the cultural memory of these events will
change. How it will change remains to be seen, but there are
indications. The Jedi I met recently is a sign of how religious
forms change over time and across material conditions. For
the most part, potential abductees and their hypnotists no
doubt proceed with the honorable intention of trying to
access real memories of an event. Unfortunately, this isn’t al-
ways true of other players in the alien abduction game field,
who seek to commodify these narratives in the interest of
commercial gain.
David Halperin looks at the case of the Walt Disney
Studios’ 1995 Alien Encounters from Tomorrow Land,
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which was a television program and a theme park ex-
hibit. Now defunct, it featured the testimonies of real alien
abductees, carefully edited by the producers. (Apparently,
some of the testimonies included explicit references to
sex with aliens that never made it into the program or
the theme park.) The producers used “experts” like artist
Budd Hopkins, who used hypnotic regression to access
memories of abductions, and included footage of military
bases, thus lending the project an air of credibility. The
program and park deployed many of the mechanisms and
techniques that help foster belief, including employing the
genre of the documentary, prompting Halperin to remark
that it stank “of dishonesty and manipulation.”40 A closer
examination of the production reveals what Halperin was
writing about.
The documentary opens with narration: “Intelligent life
from distant galaxies is now attempting to make open con-
tact with the human race, and tonight we will show you the
evidence.”41 That evidence is presented via the mechanisms
of belief— that is, formal techniques that lack real- world sub-
stance. Michael Eisner, CEO of the Walt Disney Company, is
featured in a realist montage. Standing within what looks like
a military base, he says:
In a top secret military instal ation somewhere in the United
States, there are those who believe that the government is hiding
the remains of an alien spacecraft that mysteriously crashed to
Earth. But more and more scientific evidence . . . reveals that
the idea of creatures from another planet might not be as far-
fetched as we once thought.42
The film then displays newspaper clippings, including
one of former president Jimmy Carter’s testimony about his
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own sighting of an unidentified aerial object, as the voiceover
cites scientific evidence for ongoing alien visitations. It even
shows pictures of what appear to be cel s mutating, the impli-
cation being that aliens are working with humans at the level
of genetic engineering. The film also airs what it cal s “com-
pelling footage of home videos” of what look like balloons—
the type that Scott Browne identified in his research.
The most disturbing aspect of the production— and what
probably most provoked Halperin’s wrath— was its insistence
that many Americans would likely experience alien abduc-
tion in the next five years and that they could prepare for,
even acclimate to, this inevitability by visiting the exhibit and
ride at Disneyland. The ride, called “ExtraTERRORestrial
Alien Encounter,” was produced by Disney “imagineers.” It
is a vivid il ustration of how the mechanisms of belief can
be adapted to a corporeal- virtual experience. As spectators’
bodies are transported through the “ride,” they are treated
to experts displaying evidence of alien encounters, some of
which terrified the youngest participants: as Budd Hopkins
shows children cards featuring aliens, they scream and hug
their parents in terror. Halperin notes that Hopkins cal s this
“moving.” Something said by one of the ride participants
relates to what I heard from the computer programmer who
is involved in creating immersive virtual environments and
who sometimes has a hard time judging real memories from
virtual ones: “I THOUGHT I DREAMT ABOUT GOING ON
THE EXTRATERRORESTRIAL RIDE, BUT IT WAS REAL
AND IT WAS TERRIFYING. I’M HAVING FLASHBACKS!” 43
Things like this contribute to belief in fabricated UFO
phenomena. They influence memory. In a context in which
people have a hard time distinguishing credible sources from
“fake news,” the implications are disturbing. A 2015– 2016
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study by the Stanford History Education Group looked
at the online reasoning of youth about civics and “the
ability to judge the credibility of information that floods
young people’s smartphones, tablets, and computers.”44 The
researchers studied middle school, high school, and college-
level young people. Many of the participants were unable
to distinguish between sponsored content and content
supported by legitimate sources. “The students displayed a
‘stunning and dismaying consistency’ in their responses,”
the researchers wrote, “getting duped again and again”— and
this despite the fact that the investigators weren’t looking for
high- level analysis of data, just a “reasonable bar” of distin-
guishing fake accounts from real ones, activist groups from
neutral sources, and paid ads from articles. “Many assume
that because young people are fluent in social media they are
equal y savvy about what they find there,” the researchers
wrote. “Our work shows the opposite.”45
I recalled a story that Tyler had told me about his own
involvement with the media.
“Right before a shuttle launch, I told a prominent news
reporter that his story reminded me of Scooby Doo and that
it’s not very accurate. He told me, ‘That’s OK. I only have
three minutes.’
“I told him to give me an hour, and we could make that
three minutes much more profound and better. He wasn’t
interested.
“You can bring them to water and even stick their heads
into the water, but you can’t force them to drink. It’s like they
don’t want to know and would rather go thirsty.
“They say they do it because the public wants it served
up that way, or the public is not that bright, or there’s not
enough time— but it’s bigger than that. It’s a deep flaw in the
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way things are presented to the public, and no one wants to
change or fix it.”
Research from disciplines as diverse as cognitive science,
history, and film studies reveals what Stanley Kubrick knew
intuitively: media technologies are not external to our bodies
or minds, but inhabit them in specific ways. Kubrick’s vi-
sionary science fiction has proven to be a reality— not when
it comes to space travel, but when it comes to foreseeing the
screen as a type of conduit to consciousness.
✦
5
THE MATERIAL CODE
From the Disembodied Soul to the
Materiality of Quantum Information
[The phenomenon] has a technological basis. But we
cannot ignore the fact that the emotions it generates in
the witnesses are religious in nature.
— Jac q u e s Va l l e e 1
Everything works, in my opinion, as if the phenomenon
were the product of a technology that followed well-
defined rules and patterns, though fantastic by ordinary
human standards. Its impact in shaping man’s long-
term creativity and unconscious impulses is probably
enormous.
— Jac q u e s Va l l e e 2
DRIVING BACK FROM BIG SUR to San Francisco, Jacques
Vallee, Robbie Graham, and I stopped for lunch at a dock-
side restaurant in Santa Cruz. The sun sparkled on the waves,
the day was gorgeous, and I was enjoying the coastline and
the salty air. As we sat and gazed at the view, I realized that
the restaurant was serving as a debriefing station. For the
past week, we had been immersed in a smal , intensive
seminar with people who studied UFO phenomena and
religious events associated with the paranormal. There
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had even been a sighting of a UFO while we were there,
although none of us had seen it. A small group of sky-
watchers, sitting on the rocky rim of the Pacific Ocean, had
spotted a bright, shiny, starlike object dancing about in the
sky on the night of our arrival. Jacques and I interviewed
one of the people who saw and photographed the object.
He had recently been through a life transformation and he
interpreted the sighting as confirmation that he was on the
right path.
After lunch Jacques drove me to meet my brother in
San Francisco. When he dropped me off, he gifted me
with several of his books, one of which was The Invisible
Col ege: What a Group of Scientists Has Discovered About
UFO Influence on the Human Race. The invisible college,
Jacques wrote, was J. Allen Hynek’s name for a small group
of researchers, scientists, and academics who studied the
phenomenon under the cover of anonymity. Hynek, an
academic and an astronomer himself, in the 1970s was
the scientific consultant to the US Air Force program to
study UFOs, called Project Blue Book. The term “invisible
college” harked back to the scientists who affiliated with
Robert Boyle in the early 1700s, at a time when science
> was considered a suspect and potential y demonic practice.
The group is thought to have been a precursor to the Royal
Society of London, the oldest established scientific institu-
tion in Europe.
In my brother’s car, I opened the book. Jacques had signed
and dated it: October 2014. The copyright page showed that
it was original y published in 1975 and had been reissued
in July 2014. I was struck by the last paragraph of Jacques’s
preface to the 2014 edition: “Because these questions are as
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open today as they were in 1975, we have decided to reprint
this book and to place these burning issues before a new gen-
eration of interested readers.” The book I held in my hands
was a key, though I didn’t know it at the time.
It was three years later, after my trip to New Mexico,
after my work with Tyler and James, that the realization
dawned on me. Jacques’s early work, which brought re-
search on the proto- Internet together with remote viewing
and extraordinary mind– body states, clarified a new frame-
work for understanding the technological y sacred. On the
one hand, the emergence of the internet and cyberspace
spawned a lexicon that used sacred and spiritual termi-
nology.3 Some computer coders even imagined that human
consciousness could be downloaded into a nonbiological
container, like a computer, and become unfettered, free,
and even immortal.4 On the other hand, Jacques’s work
was unique in that he highlighted how the UFO was asso-
ciated with the sacred, but he also suggested that it worked
like technology. His early work revealed that UFO events
function like contemporary artificial intelligence, “under
the radar,” and almost invisibly— as in the case of contem-
porary social bots.
Jacques’s concept of the UFO event as a technology is
a recurrent theme in his work. For Jacques, secrecy and
camouflage are integral to the efficacy and persistence of
this technological phenomenon, in much the same way as
technologies like social bots effect cultural change, that is,
completely under the radar of consciousness. That is where
it is most effective, and judging by the life and technologies
produced by invisible people like Tyler, I final y understand
how this is so.
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