Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred
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In the standard terms of the latter field, Passport to Magonia and The Invisible College were a one-two punch that had exiled Vallee, permanently, from both the rationalist debunkers of the scientific world and the true believers of the UFO community. Reason and faith had abandoned him, and he was left alone now, very alone, in his difficult gnosis. He had become, as one later interview title put it, “a heretic among heretics.”74 There were some major well-established academics who quietly supported him, usually behind the scenes. He lists psychologists Fred Beckman of the University of Chicago and Douglas Price-Williams at UCLA, as well as theoretical physicist Peter Sturrock at Stanford University (FS 1:421). But, for the most part, Vallee and Hynek were alone in their published convictions. And they felt it. “Sometimes I get the awful feeling that I am the only human being who doesn’t know what UFOs are,” Vallee would later confess after Hynek had died (FS 1:419).
As the decade closed, Vallee published Messengers of Deception (1979), a book that argued that some of the UFO flaps were orchestrated by the military to manipulate the public. It was a book that he had a difficult time writing. The material troubled him, and he feared that it was too far ahead of its time to be fully appreciated (FS 2:418). He was right. The book antagonized his closest colleagues in ufology and left other researchers completely puzzled. Even the channeled aliens didn’t like it. They asked him, through a friend named Valerie, to change the title, which they apparently found offensive. “Let’s see how they will stop me,” Vallee answered in his usual combination of humor and intellectual conviction (FS 2:443). Aliens aside, the final result of the book for some of his closest friends was a kind of despairing conclusion that little, if anything, could ever be learned in a field so deeply intertwined with religious cults and secret military intelligence, two fields whose business is often indistinguishable from lying.75 It was a sobering conclusion.
The Alien Contact Trilogy and the Mature Multiverse Gnosis
Vallee, however, did not despair. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, he published three more books on the subject of UFOs. These became his Alien Contact Trilogy: Dimensions came out in 1988, Confrontations in 1990, and Revelations in 1991. In 1992, he then published his early journals up to 1969, Forbidden Science, as well as a study of UFO sightings in the quickly collapsing U.S.S.R., UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union, a subject connected to his earlier remote-viewing activities at SRI. Together these five books represent what we might call Vallee’s mature position—a mature position, however, that was strikingly compatible with his earlier writings. In truth, he had not changed his mind in any significant way since Passport to Magonia and The Invisible College. He had, however, become more convinced of the multidimensionality of the cosmos; he had expanded his materials into Latin America and Russia; and he had become much more sanguine about the violent aspects of the phenomenon and the intricate webs of deception that surrounded it, seemingly from almost every side.
Sections of the Alien Contact Trilogy are reworkings of earlier writings. Other parts present new material and new ideas. As a whole, the effect of the trilogy can be summed up by the dedication page to Fred Beckman in the third book: “to Fred Beckman, who urged me to look under the bed.” These indeed are scary, boogeyman books. Vallee gave up writing the last book not once but twice, so repelled was he by the cultish material.
Dimensions begins with a foreword by Whitley Strieber, the science-fiction author and self-confessed abductee, who offers a fascinating definition of the alien experience as “what the force of evolution looks like when it acts on conscious creatures.”76 All of the classic Vallean themes are present in the pages that follow: the notion of a high technology that is at once physical and psychical, the control system thesis, the present privilege of observing folklore in the making, the metalogic of alien absurdity, the emblem of Fátima, the complexities of censorship and secrecy and their shaping of the phenomenon, the likely temporal or terrestrial origins of the phenomenon, and so on. Indeed, in many ways, Dimensions is a summary of all of Vallee’s earlier books.
But there are different accents. For example, the control thesis is linked to human evolution in a quite direct way now, hence the relevance of Strieber’s opening definition.77 There are also developments around the idea of a multidimensional universe, an idea which was already present, of course, in Passport to Magonia. Indeed, this is the real point of Dimensions. The universe is not a universe. It is not One. It is a multiverse. It is a Many. Hence Magonia, “made visible and tangential only to selected people,” is now speculatively defined as “a sort of parallel universe, which coexists with our own.”78 As I pointed out with respect to the impossible possibility of time travel, such a theory is well within the parameters of possibility in contemporary physics. Indeed, it is predicted and expected by a number of theorists.79
Vallee continues to interpret the UFO phenomenon within this same expectation. The UFO phenomenon does not thus represent an extraterrestrial visitation. “Instead it appears to be inter-dimensional and to manipulate physical realities outside of our own space-time continuum.”80 He openly acknowledges those before him who came to the same conclusion, particularly Charles Fort, whose famous line he now cites: “We are property.” This is no invasion, Vallee observes in agreement. “It is a spiritual system that acts on humans and uses humans.”81 How? Through psychic processes we have not even begun to fathom, working on levels of human consciousness we know next to nothing about—hardly a positive assessment. Still, communication does take place. Contact is made. “I believe,” Vallee concludes, “that the UFO phenomenon is one of the ways through which an alien form of intelligence of incredible complexity is communicating with us symbolically.”82 Put in my own terms, Vallee has concluded that the paranormal is a hermeneutical reality.
If Dimensions is the most metaphysical of the trilogy, Confrontations is the most disturbing. Its subject matter is a collection of cases, mostly from Latin America, that involved the chasing, wounding, even apparent murder of human beings in the presence of UFOs. Fort had declared that “We are fished for.” Confrontations suggests something equally discomforting, namely, that sometimes “We are hunted for.” I am not being metaphorical here. Some of the cases Vallee treats in this second book are dramatic examples of hunters being hunted, oddly in ways remarkably similar to their own hunting techniques (more weirdly still, there are other classic encounter cases of fishermen being fished for).
Deer hunters in the Parnarama region of Brazil sit in hammocks in trees at night and use flashlights to hunt for deer in the brush below. In the early 1980s, these deer hunters began reporting incidents of being caught in the bright beams of “chupas” hovering above them. One was chased and “hit” by the beam all night long, after which he developed odd purple marks all over his upper body. Another, named Raimundo Souza, was not so lucky. His hunting partner described how when Raimundo struck a match in their hammock one night, a chupa immediately appeared above them, as if the match had revealed their position. The partner climbed down in terror and hid in the bushes all night long. The next morning he found his partner dead on the ground, with purple marks on his body. Vallee is careful to note that the cause of death in such cases is seldom clear. A fear-filled heart attack and subsequent fall could have easily killed Raimundo. It was the number of these cases, and the absolute sincerity of the witnesses, that impressed Vallee. And why wouldn’t they be so open and transparent about what they had experienced? “Nobody has ever ridiculed these people. Their intelligence has never been insulted by the pundits of the New York Times or the arbiters of rationalism of Le Monde.”83
And then there was the Brazilian wave of 1977, a wave from July to September during which UFOs appeared every evening around the island of Colares. They arrived from the north or emerged directly out of the immense mouth of the Amazon every single night for three months. The horror of the events virtually emptied the island. Everyone who could leave did, including the chief of police. Vallee describes the b
izarre scene:
The objects were never alone. On numerous photographs taken by journalists they are seen accompanied by smaller probes. They exhibit a variety of shapes that would drive an aeronautical engineer to insanity. They range in size from starlike objects to things as big as two 737s end to end. . . . There was a superior technology at work over Colares, and all the observers could do was to film it and watch in awe.84
Dr. Wellaide Cecim Carvalho de Oliveira chose to stay. She shared with Vallee the odd symptoms she treated over and over. Her patients all had the same story, which was basically a version of that of the deer hunters. A weird immobilizing beam about one inch in diameter would hit them, always on the upper body. Blackened wounds of red or purple would appear immediately. Hair would fall out the next day. Within a week, they were fine, though. The doctor witnessed a UFO too, but her experience was completely different. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. “She hoped it would land and take her.”85
As for the photos the journalists took and the reels of film the Brazilian military recorded (in full view of the population), Vallee states that the latter are now buried in some military drawer and that an unnamed American firm purchased the entire set of photographic negatives from the Brazilian newspapers: “Somebody in the United States owns a collection of records that contains the proof of the reality of the phenomenon”86
If Dimensions is the most metaphysical of the trilogy and Confrontations the scariest, Revelations is the most depressing. Here Vallee takes a hard look at the orchestrated hoaxes, media manipulations, and “hall of mirrors” that define so much of the discussion—including that around the famous cases of Hangar 18, Majestic 12, and Area 51—and effectively make any open public research well nigh impossible. The signal is not only lost in the noise. It is completely drowned out by the noise. This was a return to and amplification of the earlier thesis of Messengers of Deception.
In 1992, immediately after his Alien Contact Trilogy was complete, Vallee published two more volumes: UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union: A Cosmic Samizdat and his early journals, Forbidden Science. The former book treats about forty cases that were being discussed in the Soviet Union after the waves of 1966–67, 1977–79, and 1989. Vallee had already played a rather central role in ufological circles in the Soviet Union in the summer of 1967, when he published with Russian science-fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev a pro-UFO article in a Russian magazine more or less equivalent to the American Popular Mechanics. The piece was picked up by Trud, a major labor union newspaper, and republished in its August 24th issue of that same year, which promptly sold over 22 million copies and went on to become something of a collector’s item.
By the time Vallee arrived in the Soviet Union in January of 1990, then, he discovered that he was something of an underground legend, and that Passport to Magonia had been circulating for years in samizdat form, that is, in a retyped version secretly distributed among trusted friends and close colleagues. He learned that many Soviet intellectuals were comfortable with his control-system thesis, which they had picked up from The Invisible College (“invisible colleges are second-nature to us,” one of them noted, no doubt with a smile87). He also discovered that they were more than familiar with the polymorphous or shape-shifting nature of UFOs (one case featured a UFO that “divided itself into eight parts that reunited into a single block, turned into a torus, then a cylinder”88); that they were quite comfortable with various parapsychological ideas; and, finally, that they were even guessing that these sightings might express “another form of our existence here.”89 UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union is very much about this cross-cultural mirroring, about this “intense feeling of a mystery shared.”90
Indeed, Vallee discovered here more or less exactly what the visionaries of the American Esalen Institute had discovered in the 1970s and ’80s in their own travels through the Soviet Union, namely, that this was a land especially rich in occult and mystical traditions. Vallee quotes a pair of healers who held a particularly provocative thesis about why. “We’re ahead of you in the study of the paranormal,” they told him in complete confidence, “because the Western churches killed all your witches in the name of their dogma. You only have yourselves to blame if you have fewer gifted psychics. You’ve eliminated their genes from the gene pool.”91 Historical (and biological) questions aside, such a comment captures beautifully a certain Russian mystical anthropology that came to impress Vallee deeply.
Confirmations continued to mount in this frozen land as Vallee met with various researchers, scientists, and journalists and visited places like the City of the Stars, the Russian space center where cosmonauts were being trained. He was surprised to learn that some of his Russian colleagues were speculating about the multidimensional nature of the universe and some supercivilization’s manipulation of space and time through their own psychotechnology. The Russians were doing more than speculating on psychic technology, though. They were also using their own to investigate the encounter scenes. More specifically, they were employing something they called “biolocation,” which was essentially a form of dowsing for fields of energy that they believed were left over from a living organism’s previous movement through a particular area (what Myers had called a phantasmogenetic center). Vallee, who was never really convinced of the legitimacy of this technique, was puzzled by how completely even otherwise skeptical intellectuals accepted the realities of such biofields and the legitimacy of such biolocation techniques. He was also amused by how badly the Western press muddled this particular issue. When the New York Times picked up on one Russian sighting and subsequent site visit that included the biolocation technique, they printed it as “bilocation,” thus rendering an already puzzling news event virtually meaningless.92
His early journals, as already noted, appeared under the title Forbidden Science in 1992. They came out in a second edition in 1996. The epilogue to the latter edition is a concise summary of his mature gnosis, which was still defined by an impossible double conviction: in the metaphysical reality of Magonia, and in the foolishness of accepting the standard ufological readings. The ufonauts, he wrote now, “continue to behave like the absurd denizens of bad Hollywood movies,” and their “technology is a simulacrum—and a very bad one at that—of obsolete human biological and engineering notions” (FS 1:419). The encounters and abduction stories still struck him as staged. Alien camp.
Still, he continued to insist that the phenomenon is a real one, that it possesses a physical as well as a psychical component, that it has been with us for a very long time, and that it operates through a multidimensional universe of which our own familiar space-time is a subset (FS 1:420–21). This is an insight Vallee comes back to constantly, even as he walks through his beloved Paris: “A few hours in these narrow streets are enough to convince me that the true meaning of existence lies in parallel worlds for which this city provides a secret metaphor” (FS 2:488). It was French author Jacques Bergier (whom we will meet below, in chapter 4, as the coauthor of the immensely influential 1960s Fortean classic The Morning of the Magicians), who pushed Vallee in the 1970s to see that the main lesson to learn from the UFO phenomenon was that the universe we live in is not single, not one (uni-). It was Bergier who gave Vallee the word multiverse. He also encouraged him to think about how such a multiverse might become a stage for elaborate control systems.
In turn, Vallee suggested to Hal Puthoff in 1978 that both UFOs and Puthoff’s continuing remote-viewing work at SRI may be related to the manipulation of other dimensions. He also thought that Western esoteric traditions “flow from the same idea” (FS 2:422). It is certainly true enough that, at least since Giordano Bruno, speculation about multiple worlds has been entertained in this broad tradition.93 It is probably not until Edwin A. Abbot’s delightful Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1894), however, that the model of multidimensionality has been this explicit.
In another fascinating move, Vallee connected this insight to the superior cosmic be
ing American science-fiction writer and literary gnostic Philip K. Dick experienced and wrote about in his novel Valis. With Dick’s Valis (or Fort’s mysterious X), we could hardly be any closer to the impossible vision of Jacques Vallee, with all those shape-shifting aliens and their intentional reprogramming of our religious software: “It is at the level of multiple universes and control systems of consciousness that the UFO phenomenon becomes scientifically interesting, not at the simplistic level of a search for the ‘propulsion system’ of unidentified flying objects” (FS 1:431). Jacques Vallee was thinking of Philip K. Dick, and of Valis.94
Sub Rosa: The Three Secrets
It should be patently obvious by now that the models of reading and writing the history of religions that Jacques Vallee ascribes to are fundamentally esoteric ones. For the sake of summary and some semblance of a conclusion, I would like to isolate—perhaps artificially but I hope also helpfully—three secrets within this thought. Two of them are structural. We have encountered them before, many times in fact, but never quite named them. The third is biographical. I have kept it here, like some precious buried treasure, for the end.