Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

  Vallee’s conclusion about the sexual component of such incredible stories is something of an ironic understatement: “For Villas-Boas or Betty and Barney Hill would certainly have had a hard time before the Inquisitors if they had lived in the seventeenth century” (PM 124). We are back to the opening lines of the book, where the cries of women burned alive are promised to be preserved and defended. I would add another observation. Since Gordon Creighton believed that Villas-Boas was a Caboclo (a person of mixed Portuguese-Amerindian blood) and Betty and Barney were a mixed-race couple, what we are confronted with here is the historical fact that the two earliest full-scale abduction reports involved an explicit theme of hybridity—a hybridity, moreover, acted out on both the human and the alien-human levels—“an act of procreation between beings of different worlds,” as Creighton puts it with respect to the first case.40

  But what does it all mean for Vallee? Passport to Magonia concludes with a flurry of bold speculations and seemingly rejected hypotheses. Vallee is certain of only one thing now, namely, that science is not up to the task of explaining the UFO phenomenon. The latter, he believes, cannot be studied by itself. It is rather “an instance of a deeper problem,” which is to say that it is a paranormal problem (PM 157). So how to proceed?

  Science-fiction readers, Vallee points out, already have a working hypothesis at hand. It goes like this:

  There exists a natural phenomenon whose manifestations border on both the physical and the mental. There is a medium in which human dreams can be implemented, and this is the mechanism by which UFO events are generated, needing no superior intelligence to trigger them. This would explain the fugitivity of UFO manifestations, the alleged contact with friendly occupants, and the fact that the objects appear to keep pace with human technology and to use current symbols. . . . It also, naturally, explains the totality of religious miracles as well as ghosts and other so-called supernatural phenomena.

  Unfortunately, such a theory cannot explain the physical traces, the very real chemical, radioactive, magnetic, and medical effects of the hard data in the files. A more Fortean speculation follows: “We could also imagine that for centuries some superior intelligence has been projecting into our environment . . . various artificial objects whose creation is a pure form of art” (PM 159–60).

  Vallee rejects such speculations as scientifically groundless, but one suspects—I do anyway—that he is more drawn to this kind of impossible science-fiction thinking than he will allow himself to admit in print here. Vallee, after all, had already won the prestigious Jules Verne Prize in 1961, at the age of twenty-one, no less, for his first science-fiction novel, Sub-Space, and he would go on to publish four more science-fiction novels, the last in English, Fastwalker.41 The Jules Verne medal is now proudly displayed among his books, significantly in the section on parapsychology and paranormal studies. These hidden streams of influence flowing between the occult, the UFO phenomenon, and the literary art of science fiction run very deep indeed throughout the twentieth century. And this is before we even get to the various subcultures of American space technology, which I cannot treat here but which are well worth flagging.42

  Not yet ready in 1969 for a fully public science-fiction thesis, Vallee offers instead three final propositions, which are hardly any less bold, namely: (1) that the behavior of a superior intelligence, whether from the stars or from some other dimension of this planet, would not necessary appear sensible to our own cognitive and sensory capacities; (2) that the puzzle of time and, I assume, the possibility of time-travel, renders intergalactic or multiple-earth scenarios more, not less, likely; and (3) the subject of UFOs as a whole suggests “a myth that could be utilized to serve political or sociological purposes” (PM 162). Time travel aside for a moment, it is the last proposition that is in many ways the most radical. With the social-control thesis, Vallee suggests that the UFO encounters have every mark of feeling staged. It looks as if we are being duped. Vallee does not claim to know whether such a cosmic hoax is being perpetrated by an alien race from another planet, or by our own race from a distant time in the future or from another dimension right now. But he is willing to ask the question, which is saying quite a bit.

  The Invisible College (1975)

  The Invisible College (1975) represents a development of the ideas and theories first set out six years earlier in Passport to Magonia. There would be other developments and ideas, of course, but it is probably not too much of an exaggeration to suggest that these two books constitute the heart and soul of Vallee’s thinking on the subject of UFOs. That the first is named after a legendary land in the clouds whose existence was denied by a major representative of the church and the second after a group of contemporary intellectuals interested in paranormal matters who were meeting secretly in the late 1960s and ’70s out of fear that such interests would threaten their academic and professional standing in the universities should alert us to the “impossible” nature of their subject matter from the perspectives of faith or reason. Vallee is perfectly aware of this. He states very clearly that his speculations “will contradict both the ideas of the believers and the assumptions of the skeptics” (IC 28). Again, beyond faith and reason there is gnosis.

  It was Hynek who suggested that they call themselves “the Invisible College” in order to capture the deeply felt sense that they were pursuing a kind of forbidden knowledge, that they were after a new form of science that was not yet acceptable to the powers that be.43 The same year Vallee’s book appeared Hynek explained the history of the expression in, of all places, the FBI Bulletin. The FBI had requested the piece, why, Hynek was never sure (FS 2:251). Vallee provides his readers with the relevant passage in his own introduction. Here is Hynek writing for the FBI now, as quoted by Vallee at the beginning of The Invisible College:

  Way back in the “dark ages” of science, when scientists themselves were suspected of being in league with the Devil, they had to work privately. They often met clandestinely to exchange views and the results of their various experiments. For this reason, they called themselves the Invisible College. And it remained invisible until the scientists of that day gained respectability when the Royal Society was chartered by Charles II in the early 1660’s.44

  And so Hynek, Vallee, and their confidential colleagues met too, throughout the late 1960s and early ’70s, working quietly in the background and refusing to be intimidated by either the conservative attitudes of their professional colleagues or “those three fierce paper dragons, Bizarre, Magic, and Ridicule” (IC 114–15). They also hoped for their own Charles II, who never appeared, and for their own Royal Society, which never materialized.

  It is not difficult to see why. The group’s basic theory as publicly explained by Vallee is a difficult truth for most people to swallow. No, I take that back: it’s an impossible one. What he was arguing, after all, is that UFO appearances may be part of a huge “control system,” a kind of mythological thermostat on the planet designed to adjust and control the belief systems of entire cultures over immense expanses of time.45 As he described it in his journals, this control system “acts upon human consciousness, preventing it from going beyond certain limits” (FS 2:454). Vallee seems to have in mind a kind of cosmic Puppet Master, a “manufacturer of unavoidable events,” as he puts it in one of his short stories, who pulls the strings of history from above and prevents us from developing our own psychic potentials.46 The religious doctrines and mythologies of the human imagination are the main object of control and adjustment here. Put crudely, we are being manipulated by our own belief systems, which are in turn being implanted, influenced, and guided by “alien” forces well outside our conscious selves.

  The precise nature of this “outside” is debatable, and Vallee never stops suggesting that that outside may still be a human one, that is, I gather, that we are all part of some immense form of Mind or Cosmic Consciousness that is playing tricks on itself. This, of course, is basically what Fort suggested with his playful suggesti
on that he himself was an inconsistency, or a consistency-inconsistency, in the mind of some super-imagination. Either way, the implications would be disturbing for the reasonable or the believable. It is not an easy thing to entertain the possibility that one’s deepest-held beliefs are mechanisms of control, that one is bound, defined, and restricted by one’s own, largely unconscious, categories, that one is secretly a puppet or, to employ the more modern neuroscientific reductionism, that we are all biological robots programmed to believe that we are not robots.

  Vallee, it turns out, had long felt part of an esoteric intellectual community. Originally, he seems to have understood this community as stretched out through time and available to him in books and old manuscripts. Later, he and Hynek decided to turn this historical textual community into a contemporary social one. Vallee then gave their esoteric community an exoteric form. He turned their private discussions into a public book. He never, though, lost his sense of the forbidden nature of what they were up to. He never lost, that is, his gnostic orientation to the world. In the foreword to the 1996 edition of his published diaries from the late 1950s and ’60s, he is especially sensitive—and, in my opinion, especially correct—about how the subject of their Invisible College’s study lay well outside—that is, offended—the acceptable academic categories of knowledge and possibility:

  This diary was written by a young scientist as he wandered into the minefield of the paranormal, a taboo subject among academics and a source of some fascinating questions: What should a small group of researchers do when they find themselves confronted with a phenomenon that does not follow the recognized laws of nature? How far should they go in alerting their colleagues and the public in the absence of definite proof? Can they really hope to influence an academic community that is notoriously enamored of the status quo and intimidated by political intrigue? (FS 1:1)

  Toward this end, Vallee had offered five working theses in The Invisible College. First, he points out, humorously but accurately, that “unidentified flying objects are neither objects nor flying.” They commonly materialize and dematerialize at will and often synchronize with the subjective states of those witnessing them (for example, they are sometimes “announced” precognitively in dreams), which eliminates the simplistic term “object” from any proper description. Moreover, they maneuver in ways that violate the most basic laws of possible flight patterns, which renders a term like “flying” equally suspect. Second, UFOs have been active throughout human history, always appearing and acting in the cultural terms of the place and time. This, of course, is essentially the thesis of Passport to Magonia. Third, the structure of space-time as we know it implies that the question “Where do they come from?” may be meaningless, and may be better asked as “When do they come from?” That is, UFOs may come from a place in time, in the future, no doubt, perhaps even our own future. Fourth, the key to the UFO phenomenon “lies in the psychic effects it produces (or the psychic awareness it makes possible) in its observers.” Vallee writes here of lives deeply changed by encounters with UFOs and of “unusual talents” developing with which their possessors may find it very difficult to cope (a clear analogue of Myers’s supernormal powers and Fort’s wild talents).

  Fifth and finally, Vallee sees meaning in the absurdity of the narratives, a meaning he will call the metalogic of the encounter stories. Such a metalogic, which appears as absurdity from the outside, more or less guarantees that the encounters will be rejected by the elite members of the target society (that is, by professional academics and scientists), even as the symbols conveyed through the encounters are absorbed at avery deep and much more lasting unconscious level. The absurdity of the extraterrestrial explanation, in other words, is a kind of intentional ruse or cloaking technique that allows the phenomenon to accomplish its real work, which is symbolic and mythological.

  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. The phenomenon has so far posed no apparent threat to national defense and seems to be indifferent to the welfare of individual witnesses. . . . But its impact in shaping man’s long-term creativity and unconscious impulses is probably enormous. The fact that we have no methodology to deal with such an impact is only an indication of how little we know about our own psychic world. (IC 30)

  “Our own psychic world.” This is the central teaching of The Invisible College. By psychic, Vallee does not mean “psychological.” He means “the interactions between consciousness and physical reality.”47 Thus if Passport to Magonia was about constructing “a picture of a different level of existence, a reality that seems to cut through our own at right angles . . . what I call the reality of Magonia” (IC 6) (recall Couliano’s Flatland thought experiment with which we began these reflections), then The Invisible College is about exploring “the psychical component” that appears to be a common core result of human exposure to UFOs. This is the book’s most important, and most daring, contribution. Vallee notes that it came only gradually to him, as the frequency and richness of the close-encounter cases became both overwhelming and inescapable. The amount of evidential data was just too great.48

  It is not simply the psychical component, however. Vallee also intuits profound similarities between UFO abductions and “the initiation rituals of secret societies.”49 Moreover, he suggests a similar phenomenology at work in both UFO encounters and the modern out-of-body experience (OBE), particularly as the latter is mapped by the American businessman turned metaphysical writer Robert Monroe.50 Monroe’s books are especially provocative for their elaborate descriptions of out-of-body states, literally thousands of which Monroe experienced throughout his life. Vallee cites three descriptions from Monroe’s notes, from the nights of September 9, 16, and 30 of 1960, in order to gloss the meaning of the UFO encounters. Note both the fantastic nature and the disillusioning honesty of Monroe’s descriptions:

  I suddenly felt bathed in and transfixed by a very powerful beam. . . . I was completely powerless, with no will of my own, and I felt as if I were in the presence of a very strong force, in personal contact with it. It had intelligence of a form beyond my comprehension and it came directly (down the beam?) into my head, and seemed to be searching every memory in my mind. I was truly frightened because I was powerless to do anything about this intrusion.

  The same impersonal probing, the same power, from the same angle. However, this time I received the firm impression that I was inextricably bound by loyalty to this intelligent force, always had been, and that I had a job to perform here on earth. . . .

  It is an impersonal, cold intelligence, with none of the emotions of love or compassion which we respect so much, yet this may be the omnipotence we call God. . . . I sat down and cried, great deep sobs as I have never cried before, because then I knew without any qualification or future hope of change that the God of my childhood, of the churches, of religion throughout the world was not as we worshipped him to be—that for the rest of my life, I would “suffer” the loss of this illusion.51

  As a comparative point, Vallee then offers the story of the twenty-eight-year-old French legionnaire on duty in Algeria, who in March of 1958 saw an immense UFO (one thousand feet in diameter) descend within a few hundred feet of him and “zap” him with a beam of gorgeous, ecstatic, emerald light. He became depressed when it departed. He later recalled how in the presence of the object time seemed to run very slowly, as if he were in another world.

  Though a real admirer of an author like C. G. Jung, Vallee seriously questions the usual psychologization of these experiences: “Are we faced here with something more than a projection of Jung’s archetypal images, a psychic technology whose applications know few if any limitations in space and in time?” He can see no better way to explain the data and the clear “pattern of manifestations, opening the gates to a spiritual level, pointing a way to a different consciousness, and producing irrational, absurd events in t
heir wake.” This, he suggests, is a technology “capable of both physical manifestations and psychic effects, a technology that strikes deep at the collective unconscious, confusing us, molding us—as perhaps it confused and molded human civilizations at the end of antiquity” (IC 140).

  He is quite serious about that word: technology. And he relates it to another: physics. A chapter dedicated largely to the Marian apparitions at Fátima, Lourdes, Knock, and Guadalupe follows in order to study what he calls, rather shockingly, “the physics of the B.V.M.,” that is, the physics of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He arrives again at the same conclusion:

  We are faced with a technology that transcends the physical and is capable of manipulating our reality, generating a variety of altered states of consciousness and of emotional perceptions. . . . The B.V.M. may dress in golden robes and smile radiantly to children, but the technology which “she” uses is indistinguishable from that of gods and goddesses of other tongues and garb; it is also indistinguishable from the technology surrounding the UFO phenomenon. (IC 153–54)

  A psychic technology. The physics of the Blessed Virgin Mary. A technology that transcends the physical and is capable of manipulating our own individual and collective realities. These are jarring phrases that strike at the very roots of the way we separate and divide our experience of the world into subjective appearances and objective realities, into “religion” and “science.” There are three final points to make with respect to such phrases before we graduate from The Invisible College.

  The first is to suggest a double whammy. What Vallee, after all, is most interested in here in his fourth book on UFOs is building a bridge between the UFO data and the evidence that has been amassed for psychical phenomena over the last two centuries, beginning, as we have seen, with Myers and the S.P.R. This is a truly incredible proposal, as either subject alone is sufficiently outrageous to merit complete exclusion from the boundaries of intellectual respectability. Vallee happily ignores such exclusions and treats the two damned fields together, essentially doubling (if not squaring) the provocations of his thought.