Still, there remained a real question, and a real question that the U.S. government took very seriously for decades. Hynek worked for the government on the UFO problem for twenty-two years, from 1947 to 1969. Because of his carefulness, Hynek was often cast as a complete skeptic by the sensationalizing and frustrated media (the Michigan “swamp gas” case was the most oft-cited incident here15), but in fact Hynek, like Lieutenant General Twining, would become convinced of the reality of UFOs—a reality, however, that he was careful not to define in any naively objectivist fashion. Vallee worked closely, if unofficially, with Hynek on Project Blue Book for four years, between 1963 and 1967, and played a key role in changing Hynek’s view of the problem. During this time, they became very close friends. The collaboration between the two men helped produce Vallee’s first two books, Anatomy of a Phenomenon (1965) and Challenge to Science (1966), the latter which he co-wrote with his wife, Janine. Hynek published his own book, The UFO Experience, in 1972. This was the book that announced to the public his famous tripartite model of close encounters of the first, second, and third kinds. The two friends also co-wrote a later volume together, The Edge of Reality (1975).
Anatomy of a Phenomenon begins with a historical correction that is in some sense the key to Vallee’s entire corpus on these aerial mysteries. When Vallee wrote his first book, it was commonly assumed that the language of “flying saucers” (and hence their sightings) began in the spring of 1947, with Arnold’s famous story. Many people still assume this. Vallee begins his book in 1965 with a section entitled “As Old as Man Himself” in order to correct this false assumption. Here is the first sentence of his first book: “On January 24, 1878, John Martin, a Texas farmer who lived a few miles south of Denison, saw a dark, flying object in the shape of a disk cruising high in the sky ‘at a wonderful speed,’ and used the word ‘saucer’ to describe it.”16
“The legend of the flying disks has existed throughout history,” Vallee asserts.17 A provocative chapter of ancient sightings from around the world follows to underline this point. Ezekiel’s bizarre vision of all those fiery “wheels” (or “discs”?) that tradition has mistakenly, and rather bizarrely, called a “chariot,” along with the prophet’s subsequent “abduction,” make their standard appearances.18 But so do numerous other, lesser-known, unidentified flying objects, including large flying shields, “cloud cigars,” and various sorts of aerial armies and ghost ships. The sightings over Nuremburg (April 14, 1561) and Basel (August 7, 1566) are particularly impressive. They were so obvious and dramatic that popular drawings were made and preserved. Jung reproduced these drawings in his classic study Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky (1958), a pioneering analysis that clearly influenced later French authors like Paul Misraki, Aimé Michel, and Vallee himself.
The Basel Broadsheet of 1566 clearly shows dozens of black and white round objects in the sky. The white objects seem to be flying directly out of the sun, not unlike what happened at Fátima in 1917. The Nuremberg Broadsheet of 1561 shows a number of classic UFO shapes, including the spear, the cross, the circle, a kind of crescent-wing, and a weird tube form from which circular objects are popping out in great numbers, as if from some toy ping-pong gun. Some of the circular objects appear to be attacking a town in the lower right corner. Smoke arises ominously from this corner scene. Much later in the book, Vallee will treat the classic and most dramatic example of a flying saucer before the flying saucer: the case of Fátima again (FS 1:160–64).
Vallee points out that space travel has only very recently become a technological possibility, hence the earlier accounts were not interpreted, and could not have been interpreted, as ships from outer space.19 What I have called the alien hermeneutic, then, is a very new interpretive possibility, dependent on the imaginative universe of modern science fiction, modern cosmology, and the advanced technology of our space programs. Through the latter, we now have a way of “reading back,” which can all too easily become a kind of “believing back” or “projecting back.” Vallee, as we shall see, is very astute here, striking a balance that acknowledges the privileged position from which we can now see the past, even as he cautions us against naive backward projections from a literalizing and historically naive sci-fi imagination.
At this point in his career, Vallee was clearly open to the widely held belief that UFOs were evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations attempting contact or, more darkly, reconnaissance. This, of course, was exactly what Charles Fort had argued in his own language of galactic super-constructions. This was also the U.S. government’s initial concern (after they had ruled out Soviet technology) when they initiated their own secret studies in the late 1940s. Vallee treats the major available theories of contact, including Paul Misraki’s theory of extraterrestrial intervention in the history of religions, in chapter 7.
It is, however, the modern scientific version of potential alien-human contact that captures his real attention here.20 Vallee attributes the first truly scientific expression of the theory to Dr. J. E. Lipp, who had written a classified report in 1949 on the subject for the air force’s Project Sign.21 Chapter 2 reflects Dr. Lipp’s government-classified theory, bearing a title that could have come straight out of a Fantastic Four comic book or Star Trek episode: “Probability of Contact with Superior Galactic Communities.” Basically, Lipp had concluded that visits from Mars, the usual science-fiction scenario, was unlikely at best, since civilization there would probably be no more significantly advanced than it is here. We, after all, share the same star. Visits from other solar systems within our galaxy were more likely, he thought. The vast interstellar distances traveled in such a scenario would remain a constant problem, however, as would the second-rate nature of our galactic neighborhood: “A super-race (unless they occur frequently) would not be likely to stumble over Planet III of Sol, a fifth-magnitude star in the rarefied outskirts of the Galaxy,” Lipp cleverly wrote.22 Vallee picks up on that parenthetical “unless” and does the math. He comes up with eight billion inhabitable planetary systems in our galaxy alone.
Vallee also develops a classification scheme for organizing UFO sightings in this first of his books. We learn from his journals that Vallee began developing this typology back in France as a kind of secret telephone code, so that he and his colleagues could speak openly with each other on the phone about UFO landings, free from worry that their rationalist colleagues would overhear and report them (FS 1:64). There were five types of UFOs in the published system of 1965: (1) those perceived on the ground or near the ground; (2) those that appear as large cylinders surrounded by cloud formations, often oriented vertically (the classic “cloud cigar”23); (3) aerial forms hovering in the sky or flying in an interrupted path, usually associated with some ground target or site; (4) aerial forms flying straight through the sky with no such flight patterns; and (5) those that appear as distant lights.24
Vallee would continue to develop and change his typologies, but his efforts would eventually be superseded by the classification model Hynek developed for the Center for UFO Studies (CUFO), which he then published in his The UFO Experience (1972). This system would be made world famous through Spielberg’s adoption of it in his movie title Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Hynek was a consultant for Spielberg and makes a close-up cameo appearance in the final landing scene). There were three kinds of close encounter (CE) for Hynek: close encounters between human and alien of the first kind (CE1), in which there is visual contact but no interaction is experienced; close encounters of the second kind (CE2), in which there is interaction but of an abstract kind (for example, car ignition failure or radiation burns, as portrayed early in the Spielberg movie); and close encounters of the third kind (CE3), in which aliens or humanoids are clearly seen. Hynek was never comfortable with what would become the category of close encounters of the fourth kind (CE4), as in an abduction or onboard experience, which is how Spielberg’s movie really ends, at the base of Devil’s Tower in Wyoming—the new mountain of
revelation. As for his part, Vallee would not only accept the necessity of this fourth category as a phenomenological descriptor; he would also add a fifth, that is, close encounters of the fifth kind (CE5), in which humans are physically harmed (or, ironically, healed) in some lasting way by the encounter.25
Space prevents me (forgive the pun) from treating the rest of Anatomy of a Phenomenon or its quick sequel, Challenge to Science, which picks up on the cultural histories, statistical analyses, and scientific reflections of the first book to advance the thesis of extraterrestrial contact further still and to develop a new typology. It is worth noting here, though, that this second book features a symbolically significant foreword by J. Allen Hynek. In it, Hynek writes of looking for the “signal” in all the “noise” of the UFO accounts and compares this detection work to Madame Curie searching through tons of pitchblende in order to isolate a tiny amount of radium, even a bit of which, of course, changed the world’s conception of matter forever. Hynek remains open to whether their own signal in the noise is of a physical or psychological nature, “or even a heretofore unknown phenomenon” (as we have already seen, this tertium quid or “thought of the third” occurs throughout the literature of the impossible). But he had concluded that there is indeed radium in the pitchblende and that “it is in every respect a challenge to science.”26 Challenge to Science picks up on such opening thoughts to, well . . . challenge science. Vallee’s general methodology and intellectual orientation, however, remained largely scientific. It was essentially science challenging science, though. This would soon change.
The Vallees moved backed to France in the fall of 1967 and settled in Saint-Germain. There Jacques quickly became disillusioned with his own little bourgeois dreams. He began to feel as if he were running away from his vision and vocation: “In which time, on which scale do I want to live? Back in the United States, Saturn rockets are climbing straight up in the sky. And here I am, wondering if I will ever own a little cottage of my own someday” (FS 1:331). He also realized that there was a real mental and cultural gap between the French and the Americans, and that the future with which he identified was being lived in America, not in France (FS 1:336).
The Vallees would soon move back to the States, first to New Jersey in November of 1968, and then, in December of 1969, to that “secret California where everything is crashing through the old barriers” (FS 1:283). But not before Vallee had had something of a revelation within the occult bookstores of Paris and the old French and Latin documents of the Bibliothéque Nationale. He bought boxes of rare esoteric books and added them to his UFO library. He encountered the books of Charles Fort for the first time. In the summer of 1968, he visited Scotland, the country of the Little People and the Good Neighbors, as he liked to call the land after its local legends. He had begun applying for a passport, not yet back to the States, but to a truly impossible place called Magonia.
Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers (1969)
It was neither Anatomy of a Phenomenon nor Challenge to Science that came to represent the deeper worldview of Jacques Vallee. It was Passport to Magonia. This third book represented a major shift in Vallee’s thinking about UFOs, and it is in many ways the most important in his corpus. It is certainly the most iconic. As the book’s subtitle—From Folklore to Flying Saucers—suggests, Vallee effectively argues in these pages that the modern flying saucer cannot be understood without taking into account the striking parallels that exist between the bizarre behavior of contemporary UFOs and the earlier appearances of various occult beings in the history of folklore, magic, witchcraft, and religion: angels, demons, elves, fairies, sylphs, Little People, leprechauns, elementals, succubae and incubi—that sort of thing. This basic parallelism between traditional folklore and the UFO phenomenon, which he would soon enrich and radicalize further in his next book with what he calls “the psychical component,” is Vallee’s grandest comparison and signal contribution to the subject.
Such a folklore approach was not entirely new. As Thomas E. Bullard points out, the attempt to relate ancient mythology and UFOs goes back to the origins of the ufological literature, which was rife with interpretation of things like the Hindu vimanas or mythical sky “vehicles” representing ancient spaceships. There are many forms of this “ancient astronaut” thesis, some of them perfectly outrageous, some of them oddly suggestive, if never quite entirely persuasive.
Even an elite figure like Carl Sagan could speculate very seriously about a “central Galactic information repository,” with advanced civilizations employing starships in order to explore the Milky Way and monitor the evolution of life and culture within different solar systems. He calculated how often each technical civilization might be visited by another in such a scenario: about once every thousand years. He imagined “colonies of colonies of colonies,” and he deftly used the mythical memories of contact with European colonizers from North America and sub-Sahara Africa in order to suggest that other “contact myths” may encode ancient encounters with galactic astrononauts, who “would probably be portrayed as having godlike characteristics and possessing supernatural powers.” After teasing his readers with an utterly bizarre ancient fresco from central Sahara depicting, in the words of a French archaeologist, “the great Martian god” (just a human in ritual mask and costume, we are reassured), Sagan zeroes in on a series of Sumerian myths as particularly suggestive of extraterrestrial contact. “Sumerian civilization is depicted by the descendents of the Sumerians themselves to be of non-human origin,” he writes. “A succession of strange creatures appears over the course of several generations. Their only apparent purpose is to instruct mankind. Each knows of the mission and accomplishments of his predecessors. When a great inundation threatens the survival of the newly introduced knowledge among men, steps are taken to insure its preservation.” As for the gods themselves, they are associated with individual stars, the cuneiform symbols for god and star being identical.
“Such a picture is not altogether different from what we might expect if a network of confederated civilizations interlaced the Galaxy,” Sagan concludes, noting, of course, the hypothetical nature of his thought experiment. Then he immediately speculates about a possible interstellar base on the far side of the moon and suggests one possible reason for intervening in another planet’s evolution: “to head off a nuclear annihilation.” These, of course, are all standard tropes in the ufological literature, not to mention science fiction, which Sagan also approvingly cites, this time in the person of Arthur C. Clarke.27
But Bullard recognizes that Vallee is doing something different here: in his terms now, Vallee’s “message was actually subversive of this standard view and the beginning of a new perspective on UFOs, one that diminished them from the answer for all mysteries to just one offshoot of a large mystery encompassing religion, mythology, folklore, and paranormal experience.”28 This is exactly right. Vallee has shared with me that when he wrote Passport, he thought of himself as following in the footsteps of Charles Fort. “Let’s face it, he was right.” Vallee, though, was especially interested in what Fort missed, how his method could be developed and advanced further.
He was also deeply influenced here by his training in advanced mathematics and his awareness that mathematical theorists commonly think about the impossible. Mathematical theory, Vallee explained to me, often has to confront the fact that two contradictory theories can explain the same data. A solution is inevitably found not by choosing one of the contradictory theories, but by going to the next, third level. Similarly, he remains convinced that the UFO phenomenon will never be solved by the believers or the rationalists. More or less exactly like Fort, he thinks that we have to reject the dogmatisms of both religion and science and confront the phenomenon on its own terms (in the study of religion, we would say that the phenomenon is sui generis, that is, “of its own genus” or “its own thing”). We cannot begin by assuming what UFOs are. We cannot begin by assuming that they can be reduced to normal physics
or normal psychology. Obviously, they cannot be. They are their own thing.
Much like Myers and Fort before him, Vallee’s is also a strong comparative method. He works with both hard and soft data—metal and chemical physical traces, photographs, spatial and temporal coordinates, medical reports, police investigations, and richly complex first-person narratives of sightings and abductions. He insists that the enigma of the UFO cannot be understood by restricting the data to, say, American cases, or European cases, or, for that matter—and this constitutes his real originality—to the second half of the twentieth century. Only a wide sweep through space and time can provide the broad comparative perspective necessary to decipher the mystery.
He thus sees his task as one of collection, classification, comparison, and, finally, theorization. The latter, moreover, must always remain open and tentative and, in the end, perhaps even literally impossible, for, as his friend and colleague Aimé Michel used to insist, a full theory may well be completely beyond the reach of the human brain with its present cognitive and sensory capacities. The reader might recall that Vallee had once debated with the older master on this very point in his first youthful letter. He appears to be coming around to his old friend’s position now. He thus ended his most recent essay, in 2007, with the following lines from William Irwin Thompson:
We are like flies crawling across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: We cannot see what angels and gods lie underneath the threshold of our perceptions. We do not live in reality; we live in our paradigms, our habituated perceptions, our illusions; the illusions we share through culture we call reality, but the true historical reality of our condition is invisible to us.29
Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred Page 22