by D W Pasulka
parition or UFO sighting. Haraway’s question clarified this
connection. The movie contains the elements of the UFO
event and leverages them better than a real- life event could,
reaching millions of people with its visual film experience.
But it’s not just a virtual experience provided courtesy of cel-
luloid and bytes; it is a real experience. We know that media
can bypass the conscious mind and flow straight into the
unconscious mind, where it forms memories and occupies
its own place. This suggests that the realism of fictional
characters and narratives must be re- examined, first as actors
within the unconscious but also as potential y real and au-
tonomous agents. The psychic component of UFO and ap-
paritional events once experienced by the few can now be
experienced by millions, due to media technologies. The
beings real y are in our heads; for those born in the 1950s
and beyond, these beings first entered our minds when we
were children watching shows about UFOs and aliens and
continue to live there now that we are adults. As Clark points
out, “We should consider the possibility of a vast parallel
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coalition of more or less influential forces, whose largely self-
organizing unfolding makes each of us the thinking beings
we are.”23
N. Katherine Hayles suggests how events and media
populated with Jacques’s morphology of elements can inhabit
our universe. The underlying issues involve the very com-
plex dynamics between deeply layered technological y built
environments and human agency in both its conscious and
unconscious manifestations. Recent work across a range of
fields interested in this relation— neuroscience, psychology,
cognitive science, and others— indicates that the uncon-
scious plays a much larger role than had previously been
thought in determining goals, setting priorities, and other
activities normal y associated with consciousness. The “new
unconscious,” as it is called, responds in flexible and sophisti-
cated ways to the environment while remaining inaccessible
to consciousness, a conclusion supported by a wealth of ex-
perimental and empirical evidence.24
This insight il uminates the role that the “book en-
counter,” and now the “media encounter,” plays in the eval-
uation of anomalous events, from their initial interpretation
to their subsequent narrative elaboration into stories, films,
urban legends, and lore. Much of this process takes place be-
yond conscious awareness, so it functions invisibly— that is,
it is camouflaged.
Jacques’s early work anticipates these developments. His
work on ARPANET, the prototype of the internet, occurred
within the rich, mind- bending environment of Silicon
Valley in the 1970s. He was steeped in information studies,
computer science, and studies of remote viewing and te-
lepathy. These studies were not separate. Some of Jacques’s
early publications focused on the effects of burgeoning
T H E M AT E R I A L C O D E | 1 75
new technologies on the human mind and experience. His
research on remote viewing within the medium of the in-
ternet and what was then called “computer conferencing”
was published in several venues.25 One of the advantages of
the internet and computer conferencing, he wrote, was that
it provided a way to date and timestamp observations made
by separate individuals who were far removed from each
other in space and time. In effect, the technology confirmed
the impressions and thoughts that people would happen
simultaneously.
Vallee also suggested that the human interface with the
burgeoning technologies would shift the experience of time
and space and reveal a more accurate model of time and
space and of consciousness:
The theory of space and time is a cultural artifact made pos-
sible by the invention of graph paper. If we had invented the
digital computer before graph paper, we might have a very
different theory of information today. . . . What modern com-
puter scientists have realized is that ordering by space and time
is the worst possible way to store data. . . . If there is no time
dimension as we usual y assume there is, we may be traversing
incidents by association; modern computers retrieve informa-
tion associatively. . . . If we live in the associative universe of
the software scientist rather than the Cartesian sequential uni-
verse of the space- time physicist, then miracles are no longer
irrational events . . . at a time when we are beginning to suspect
that computer- based network communication may create al-
tered states conducive to psychic functioning.26
In other words, experiences that currently appear un-
canny and inform religious experience, like synchronicities
and powerful, meaning- filled coincidences, would be
seen to have been generated by an associative process
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that worked like a search engine. They would no longer
appear to be miraculous because they would be generated
through a field of technological– human interface and ex-
change. One example of this is the social bot– generated
synchronicity. I had been working on this phenomenon
when I decided to reach out to Jacques and tell him of my
findings. My work had thus far been exploratory. I was
collecting synchronicities that people had experienced
on social media that involved advertisements and social
bots. There were so many, and experiencers reported that
they were no less powerful than the conventional types
of synchronicities that I had encountered in my previous
work on Catholic devotional cultures. Jacques alerted me
to articles he had written about this topic in the 1970s. Of
course, this was prior to the rise of the social bot, and the
experiences that involved new technologies had changed
since his original research. Jacques had wondered, “Is it
possible to promote coincidences and peculiar effects by
systematically creating physical [information] structures?
Consciousness could be defined as the process by which
informational associations are retrieved and traversed.”27
Jacques not only accurately predicted the types of anom-
alous experiences people would have using digital
technologies but also indicated that these experiences
would influence theories of consciousness.
I found that the partial answer to his question is “yes.”
The following example highlights the real effects of “faked”
synchronicity on an experiencer. This experiencer is a fan of
Jacques and completely understood that his synchronicity
experience was “synthetic,” as he termed it. Significantly,
however, it was no less profoundly meaningful for him be-
cause of that:
T H E M AT E R I A L C O D E | 1 7 7
I was trying to encapsulate my sense
that our new internet
marketing mechanisms have duplicated the synchronicity en-
gineering that Vallee suggests might be part of the mechanisms
of the cosmos allowing interaction/ co- creation between mind
and everything else. Yesterday morning I had commented
on my friend’s posting of several Michelin Man/ Bibendum
images. Then, later that night, as I was looking at a random
webpage, I noticed, through the cookie- detecting/ Facebook-
enabled targeted advert there appeared on the sidebar my new
avatar: an advert for Michelin tires featuring Bibendum him-
self making a “thumbs- up” gesture. It real y felt like a signifi-
cant synch for me at that moment— DESPITE my knowing full
well the likely advertising mechanisms operating behind the
scenes to make it happen. So basical y, a modern technolog-
ical mechanism that approximates the possibly innate nature
of Universe as described by Jacques Vallee as the cosmic bul-
letin board/ associative universe that “reads” our “intentions”
or desires to be connected to certain things/ information.28
Experiences of synchronicities, as Nietzsche pointed out
in the nineteenth century, are the engines of religious belief
and practice. They function this way for practitioners within
UFO cultures as much as they do for members of Catholic
cultures. Nietzsche was warning against the easy adoption
of the “religious” position regarding them, and he suggested
that one instead focus on how the human mind has reached
its highest ability, that is, to ascertain the interplay of chance
and interpretive skil . In other words, he suggests that rather
than leading to a dogmatic religiosity, these experiences
should instead lead to a state of wonder about existence. His
aphorism ends on a decidedly mystical note:
We do not want either to think too highly of this dexterity of
our wisdom, when the wonderful harmony which results from
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playing on our instrument sometimes surprises us too much: a
harmony which sounds too well for us to dare to ascribe it to
ourselves. In fact, now and then there is one who plays with
us—beloved Chance: he leads our hand occasional y, and even
the all- wisest Providence could not devise any finer music
than that of which our foolish hand is then capable.29
For Nietzsche, Chance assumes the role of Providence.
Even as he naturalizes the powerful experience of synchro-
nicity, he elevates Chance and highlights the truly uncanny
experience that it can produce, an experience so strange that
one hesitates to attribute it to human action or causal events.
Like David Stinnett, Jacques naturalizes synchronicities. For
Jacques in particular, synchronicities reveal the reality that
consciousness is based on information:
If you believe that the universe is a universe of “information,”
then you should expect coincidences. You should expect, since
we are an information machine— that’s what our brain is, it’s
primarily an information machine and consciousness gives
us the il usion of a physical world and there is an il usion of
time— if this is the case, then you can expect coincidences. It’s
like putting a keyword into Google or Yahoo!; you put it in
and get a lot of relevant information back. That doesn’t seem
strange to me because that is the way that information has
been organized. Maybe the universe is the same way. If it is
this way, then coincidences are nothing strange. It is just an
indication that this is the way that the universe functions.30
Jacques’s early work and worldview presaged what
would arrive in the 1990s and beyond, the “biotechnical
imaginaries” promoted by synthetic biologists of
Silicon Valley and their financial backers.31 Noting that
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bioengineers affirmed that “life can and should be treated
as ‘programmable matter,’ ” scholar Gaymon Bennett writes
that the language and assumptions of contemporary syn-
thetic and biotechnologists now appear unsurprising as the
success of industries of biotechnologies help their associ-
ated ideologies and worldviews become accepted. When
bioengineer Drew Endy had “playful y shown that cel s
could be made to store information in a manner reminis-
cent of binary code,” it appeared that the code of matter had
final y been cracked.32 Life, matter, and bodies did indeed
appear, as Jacques suggested, to function like computers.
Echoing Hayles and other critics, Bennett writes that the
biotechnologists “took information to be fundamental y
immaterial.”33 Although this assumption is incorrect, that
does not mean that it is wrong to say that matter functions
like a code, or like information.
H U M A N S AT E L L I T E S A N D
D NA : T H E M AT E R IA L I T Y
O F I N F O R M AT I O N
Like Jacques, Tyler believes that the phenomenon is techno-
logical. He believes that it interfaces with humans directly
through biotechnological antennae— cel ular functions or
even human DNA. In this sense, he assumes, humans are
technologies. Tyler does not believe that information is im-
material, but he posits a model of the universe in which in-
formation and matter exist at different frequencies.
In the search for extraterrestrial life, humans are the pre-
ferred sensors. Tyler said:
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SETI [the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence] seems to
look in all the wrong places with the wrong sensors. I guess
any search is better than no search but it won’t come from a
laser detector. The best detectors are humans like you and their
net results and may be certain light frequencies or the study
of physical relics. The wavelength of optical lasers is unlikely
to find anything. But it sounds good and can obtain funding.
Tyler believes that human beings are designed to inter-
face with the phenomenon, but only under certain conditions,
and some human beings are better able to “connect” than
others. I knew that Tyler had a unique job, and I learned
that part of the job description was that he was to be placed
in certain locations. Apparently, Tyler’s mere presence was
supposed to facilitate certain required events and processes.
His immediate bosses didn’t know how this functioned or
happened, yet it was true. The more I learned about what
Tyler did and why, the more I realized that the skil s he
possessed weren’t normal and were not even spoken of. They
were just acknowledged. They were, in effect, real because
they were useful. I was reminded of my student, José, whose
training as a Marine squad leader included learning about
and using a “sixth sense.” He and his team used it because
it worked, not because they believed in it. A similar process
seemed to be involved in Tyler’s case. He explained that he
beli
eves not only that the phenomenon is a technology but
also that humans are receptors of the information provided
by the phenomenon, and some humans are more capable of
receiving the signal than others.
In his opinion this was a spiritual process:
From a Christian religious perspective, humans interface
with God through the practice of worship and prayer with a
T H E M AT E R I A L C O D E | 1 81
mechanism called the Holy Spirit. My view and philosophy
starts with that as my framework. It is further developed
than this, though, in that I believe that the human body and
mind act like a computer. A computer is the best model for
how it all works. It’s hard not to see that as a viable model
if you study the human anatomy and the processes of life.
The human spine when dissected under live conditions looks
much like a very elaborate electrical circuit, with color- coded
wires as nerves and blood vessels. The first time I observed a
long incision for scoliosis surgery, I remember how much the
spine, when opened up in surgery, looked much like the elec-
trical panel inside an expensive satellite. You hear scientists
speak about our brain as the central processor and our nerves
as the motors to our muscles. The power source to the body is
our energy, which is obtained from the food we eat, which is
created by the energy in sunlight. Some would say our RAM
is the prefrontal lobe and our hard drive is housed in our hip-
pocampus and the mother board is likened to our skeleton,
which provides the structure to our body. A peripheral might
be our arms and legs. The mouse has already become our
index finger.
Tyler continued by describing the energetic processes of
the human body:
DNA stores biophotonic particles as data where it is transferred
through our body very much like optical data in fiber- optic
wiring. When human DNA, as a molecule, is stretched out it
is about two meters long so that it has a natural frequency of
150 megahertz. DNA also has a code which follows the same
logic and rules as human language as it relates [to] syntax, se-
mantics, and grammar. If true, this leads one to assume that we
have a programmable body via DNA.
If we assume this model of human physiology, then it’s
reasonable to think the human body, given its computerlike
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