Beyond reason and beyond belief, then, Vallee writes as a man who possesses or, better, is possessed by, a form of secret knowledge or gnosis. Such a third way of knowing is closely linked to what he calls “the higher dimensions of mind,” which are traditionally expressed through the imagination, the realm of the fantastic, and, most recently, through science fiction. His intellectual heroes are men like Nikola Tesla, that modern American wizard who combined future electrical, radar, and radio technologies with occult ideas in ways so weird that they were genius; Isaac Newton, who practiced his alchemy and astrology behind all that orthodox science; and the hermetic philosopher and physician Paracelsus, whose texts Vallee has studied with care (FS 1:96). Indeed, with respect to figures like the last and their hermetic science, Vallee feels strongly that “whatever else these old hermeticists were doing, they should be credited as the real founders of modern thought” (FS 1:76). For Vallee, Western thought, truly serious thought beyond the surfaces of rationalism and religion, is fundamentally an esoteric project, the outlines and implications of which we have only begun to glimpse. It is still too much for us. So we hide it from ourselves.
It should be stressed that Jacques Vallee’s secret knowledge is not simply a function of his mysticism. It is also a function of the U.S. government. Of the air force, to be more precise. Vallee, after all, is a man who worked, in an unofficial capacity, for four years on an independent study of the files of a government project (Project Blue Book) with military professionals and scientists who knew things others did not, should not, and could not know. But Vallee came to realize that such people, with one very important exception, did not really know. How could they? They were naively chasing something “out there,” whose absurd, impossible behavior was also clearly “in here.” They behaved “like a well-organized insect colony whose life is suddenly impacted by an unforeseen event” (FS 1:55). Their idea of research was to form commissions composed of rocket scientists and chase UFOs with jet fighters with the intent of shooting one down. These were not profound puzzles capable of transforming our understanding of the world and ourselves. They were simply “targets.” In Fastwalker, one of his later English novels, Vallee puts his own thoughts in the mind of a puzzled fighter pilot. “What is wrong with us,” the pilot muses to himself, “that we automatically call any object in the sky a target, as if we had to shoot down anything we don’t understand?”5 This kind of military thinking struck Vallee as primitive and silly, if not actually stupid. It was certainly futile.
What Jacques Vallee came to know, in other words, could not be explained as something strictly objective or subjective. It was both. And it was neither. When Vallee writes of the paranormal—and this is what really drew me to his impossible writings—he is not thinking of purely internal states or subjective conditions, however interesting and profound. He is thinking of fundamentally anomalous events that routinely appear on radar screens. He is thinking of a potentially hostile force that deeply concerned nation-states and their militaries for decades, of an advanced future technology that has easily escaped our best fighter jets, and of a puzzling presence of truly mythological proportions that has secretly shaped our folklore, our religious beliefs, and our cultures for millennia. He is thinking of something that is mythical and physical, spiritual and material at the same time.
If the reader is now confused, then so much the better. Rational certainty and religious belief are the enemies here; confusion, our delivering angel; absurdity and suspicion, our flapping wings. Hence the fundamental weirdness of the situation at hand deserves restating.
And then underlining.
And then highlighting.
What, after all, we are approaching here is a particular moment in Western cultural history when the mystical and magical qualities of human consciousness became the object of tax-funded secret research programs, where the paranormal became a matter of national security, and where governments tracked occult forces on radar systems and chased them with supersonic planes.6 We are also approaching the idea of a future technology of folklore through which we might imagine parallel universes and holographic visions projected back through time in order to reprogram our own cultural software, with or without our present permission. In such a fantastic world, a UFO may remain a physical “object,” while at the same time functioning more like a symbol or metaphysical “window” into another plane or dimension, a portal in space-time through which we imaginally encounter not an alien race from another planet but our own evolved species from another time.
Forbidden Science (1957–69)
I visited Jacques Vallee in his San Francisco condominium. The flat looks out high above the local buildings toward the city skyline and the iconic pyramid of the Trans-America tower. I had asked to meet him and to see his library. The latter request was very much related to the former, as I had spent time in other writers’ libraries and found this an especially direct pathway into their authorial souls. These are symbolic spaces whose details are all significant: which books are there (or not there); how they are organized; what sort of art sits alongside which books; and so on. The Vallee Collection, which spills out into rooms and hallways, did not disappoint. The present chapter is a very partial record of what and whom I encountered on two separate visits in those rooms and hallways high above the city.
Jacques Vallee was a war baby. He was born among exploding bombs, on September 24, 1939, in Pontoise, France. The doctor was unable to come over the bridge during the attack, so a local nurse delivered him amidst the sound of the first German air strike. The Nazi Panzers would soon arrive, and the Vallee family would flee for Normandy (FS 1:35). Vallee’s free associations with the cultural timing of his birth are interesting. He notes that this was the year that the film The Wizard of Oz and the superhero Batman appeared. These are hardly random associations, as Oz-like magical balls of light would float through his own later texts, Kansas and all, and a paranormal Batman would even make an anachronistic appearance, eerily, in the London of 1837, almost exactly a century before Bob Kane dreamed him up again, this time as a quasi-criminal superhero.7 Vallee also notes that this was the year President Roosevelt received a letter from Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard suggesting that atomic energy could be used to make a bomb, and that, at the time of his birth, Sigmund Freud lay dying in London, in exile—from the same Nazis that were bombing Pontoise, I would add (FS 1:446). As a young boy, little Jacques witnessed the war’s atrocities: the Germans “would fire pitilessly at the bodies of helpless Allied pilots swinging down from the bright blue sky at the end of their white parachutes.” But he also remembers affectionately how the war ended: “Soon came the mighty rumble of Patton’s tanks, behind which marched tall, laughing Americans with chewing gum in their mouths and nets over their helmets” (FS 1:37).
Vallee thus grew up in postwar France in the 1940s and ’50s, fully aware that there were forces beyond his little neighborhood and country that could have a tremendous impact on his life and world. As a teenager, he followed with fascination the amazing wave of UFO sightings in France, indeed all across Europe, in 1954. Three years later, he watched the first Sputnik satellite fly overhead, on Sunday, 24 November 1957, at 5:54 p.m., he is careful to note in his journals. The French Astronomical Society published his account of it (FS 1:11). As a young man, he studied physics and astronomy, completing an M.A. in astrophysics. In June of 1961, he began working as a government employee on the artificial-satellite service of the Paris Observatory, where he saw tape recordings of visual readings of UFOs intentionally and systematically destroyed (FS 1:48). “There were films, too” (IC 46).
It was at this time that his boss, a man named Paul Muller, received a letter from Aimé Michel, a well-known interpreter of the UFO phenomenon whom Vallee had read and much admired. Michel wrote Muller, offering to donate his rich files on UFO sightings to the observatory (Michel, Vallee explained to me, believed that he was dying of a brain tumor at this point in time and wanted these materials preserved
in an appropriate institution). “You see,” scoffed Muller, not knowing that Vallee had corresponded with Michel, “that’s another letter for the crackpot file. Although properly speaking, Aimé Michel is not really a crackpot, he is a crook.” The cruel comment stung Vallee so badly that he insists on including it in the original French: Ce n’est pas un fou, c’est un escroc (FS 1:49). He would never forget those words. He wrote Aimé Michel that same night and asked to meet him. The next January he resigned from the observatory. Later, Muller would deny in a French television interview that astronomers ever see anything but satellites, shooting stars, and planes. “A bundle of lies,” Vallee comments in his journals, “but the French public swallows it” (FS 2:349).
And this was only the beginning of the cruelty and the censorship. Years later, Vallee would learn of how the Condon Committee papers—a study commissioned by the air force in the fall of 1966 at the insistence of Michigan Representative Gerald R. Ford to study the UFO problem at the University of Colorado8—were locked up by the university and then transferred to a private home, where, it was rumored, they were subsequently burned (FS 1:51). He would also learn about what happened in the radar room in July of 1952, when seven UFOs, on two consecutive weekends, no less, were buzzing around Washington, D.C., and F-94 fighter jets were scrambling in the sky. This is how Michael D. Swords, the biographer of Major Donald E. Keyhoe, one of the early founding fathers of ufology, described the scene: “The case was huge. It made banner front-page headlines. Radar at Washington’s National Airport had tracked a cluster of objects over restricted airspace near the Capitol building. Visual confirmation came from commercial flights and jets scrambled by the Air Force. The government was agog from the Pentagon to the President.”9 According to Vallee, an officer in the radar room ordered two men to go outside and take pictures. They did. The photos were developed on the spot. They clearly showed what everyone else was seeing outside, that is, luminous objects darting about in the sky. The photographs were immediately confiscated and the men in the room ordered to say nothing (FS 1:151). Later, some of Allen Hynek’s files at Northwestern were stolen by a group of individuals. No one ever found out who they were (FS 2:402). There is no end to such stories of cover-ups, confiscations, even suspicious deaths.10
It was because of stories and scenes like these that Vallee finally decided to publish his private journals. A crucial historical event had occurred, he believed: whole “new classes of phenomena that highlighted the reality of the paranormal” had appeared in the historical record. The government and the military, moreover, had deliberately denied and consciously distorted the data with the result that scientists, much less the public, never had “fair and complete access to the most important files.” In short, “the public record was shamelessly manipulated” (FS 1:4). Vallee points out that this had been widely assumed and often alleged, but never effectively proven. His published journals, he feels, prove it (FS 1:3).
Vallee’s interest in UFOs began during the European wave of 1954. From France to England to Italy, the headlines and airwaves were filled with stunning and confusing reports. Falling “angel hair” was particularly common in Italy, as it had been at Fátima forty years earlier with the perfectly timed, monthly apparitions of a being from the sky (FS 1:128). During the three-month wave of sightings, Vallee gathered newspaper clippings and glued them into a book. It was the next year, though, in May of 1955, that he finally observed a UFO for himself. His mother saw it first. She screamed for her husband and son to come out into the yard. Her husband, who scoffed at such things, would not budge. Her son, though, rushed down into the yard: “What I observed was a gray metallic disk with a clear bubble on top. It was about the apparent size of the moon and it hovered silently in the sky above the church of Saint-Maclou.” The next day his best friend Philippe told him that he saw the same thing from his house half a mile away and even had time to watch it with binoculars.11
After reading Aimé Michel’s Mystérieux Objets Célestes in the summer of 1958, Vallee struck up a correspondence with the author. Michel had argued that such beings, if real, must be so superior to us that anything we think about them carries the intellectual weight of an eight-year-old boy staring at the equations of Einstein’s blackboard. Yes, a young Vallee answered back, but even the eight-year-old may grow up and outsmart Einstein. Moreover, perhaps their superior evolution carries superior methods of education; perhaps, he implied, they can teach us. Besides, from the reports that were circulating in the newspapers, they appear to be “morphologically human,” and this “implies a similarity of level between us and them” (FS 1:22–23). Whereas Michel had already begun to despair of any effective communication with such alien forms of intelligence, Vallee was hoping for an evolutionary education, for a cultural mutation.
In November of 1962, Vallee and his wife, Janine, traveled to the United States on the Queen Mary. Once they had landed and adjusted, they moved first to the University of Texas at Austin, where Jacques worked as an astronomer on a project to develop the first computer-based map of Mars. Here the Vallees also expanded their use of IBM cards to organize their UFO data with a sense of relief. After all, they did not “have to hide anymore” (FS 1:71). They would soon move on to Chicago, where Jacques worked as a computer programmer and, eventually, completed a Ph.D. in computer science at Northwestern University. There he worked as a research assistant for an astronomer named J. Allen Hynek, the director of the Dearborn Observatory at the university. Within two years of meeting him, Vallee would describe Hynek as a “mystical man,” and this despite Hynek’s public persona as an arch-skeptic. He would also muse, with some marvel, how Evanston was the home of Fate magazine, “that popular standard of occult lore” (FS 1:132).
Indeed, the lead cover story of the first issue of Fate was written by none other than Kenneth Arnold, the American businessman and pilot who, around 3:00 p.m. on June 24, 1947, saw nine silver, crescent-like disks flying in formation near Mount Rainier in Washington State. This is the event that, by all accounts, initiated the public craze around UFOs. Remarkably, Arnold’s essay is completely devoid of sensationalism or exaggeration. In it, he simply describes what he saw, and saw very clearly. This was a no-nonsense kind of guy. To prove his credentials, he discloses his pilot’s license number (33489), describes his high-performance Callair airplane, and even gives the reader the plane’s national certificate number (33355). Not exactly the stuff of high fantasy.
Here are the reported facts. Arnold was helping with a search for a downed marine transport plane. He was cruising at about 9,200 feet on a beautiful, clear day when a “bright flash” or reflection caught his eye. He could not find the source at first but eventually located what he described, in the precise language of a trained pilot, as “a chain of nine peculiar-looking aircraft flying from north to south at approximately 9,500 feet elevation and going, seemingly, in a definite direction of about 170 degrees north to south.” Their high speed or precise formation did not immediately bother him, but the fact that they did not have tails did. “The more I observed these objects,” he explained, “the more upset I became, as I am accustomed and familiar with most all flying objects whether I am close to the ground or at higher altitudes.” He tracked them for two and a half to three minutes and noticed that when they were flying straight and level, “they were just a thin black line.”12
When he landed to refuel, he reported the sighting to the authorities, as he feared the objects might be of Russian origin (this was, after all, Washington State, and military officials had long suspected that any Russian spy plane incursion would come from the northwest over the Bering Strait). In an interview with journalists (they were waiting for him on the ground in Pendleton, Oregon, when he landed again), Arnold compared the flying objects to speedboats in rough water, to flat shiny pie pans reflecting the sun, and to saucers skipping across water. A journalist by the name of Bill Bequette picked up on the last metaphor and coined the expression “flying saucer” (despite the fac
t that the crescent craft Arnold reported were not saucer-shaped at all). A new English expression was born. So too was an entire mythology, one thankfully not organized around “flying pie pans.”
When Vallee arrived at Northwestern University, Hynek was the government’s chief scientific consultant on the air force’s Project Blue Book, the successor of two earlier projects, Project Sign and Project Grudge. Project Sign had been established in the fall of 1947, after one of the most well-known UFO flurries in U.S. history (including Arnold’s original sighting and the infamous Roswell incident in New Mexico, which followed just two weeks after Arnold’s sensational news), when Lieutenant General Nathan F. Twining concluded that the saucers were indeed “something real and not visionary or fictitious.”13 The real worry here was best expressed by Major Keyhoe. Keyhoe, noting the tendency for the saucers to be sighted over military and nuclear facilities, put the matter in its scariest terms: “It looks as though they’re measuring us for a knockout.”14
Project Sign was replaced by Project Grudge the next year, which was then revised again as Project Blue Book in 1952. Like its earlier incarnations, Project Blue Book was about studying UFOs and assessing their potential threat to national security. Most ufologists, however, including Vallee, argue that it was mostly about not studying the phenomenon too deeply, downplaying or simply ignoring the most difficult cases, and calming the public. In short, it acted primarily as a public-relations campaign, not as a serious research initiative. By this time, the air force seems to have concluded that, whatever the damned things were, they were not a threat to national security, not an immediate one anyway. They were right about this.
Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred Page 21