Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

  28. Thomas E. Bullard, “UFOs: Lost in the Myths,” in UFOs and Abductions: Challenging the Borders of Knowledge, ed. David M. Jacobs (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 145. This is a marvelous essay, and this volume as a whole is probably the best starting point for the historian of religions looking for a succinct and subtle introduction to the problems and promises the subject holds for the field.

  29. William Irwin Thompson, Evil and the World Order (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 81. Quoted in Jacques Vallee, “Consciousness, Culture, and UFOs,” in Alien Worlds: Social and Religious Dimensions of Extraterrestrial Contact, ed. Diane G. Tumminia (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 209.

  30. Hence the book ends with a long appendix entitled “A Century of UFO Landings (1868–1968),” which lists 200 press references and 923 reported cases.

  31. Vallee had earlier treated the Agobard case in Anatomy, 6–8.

  32. Agobard, De Grandine et Tonitruis, quoted in PM 9–10.

  33. Le Comte de Gabalis: Entretiens sur les Sciences Secretes (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1670), 304–7. Quoted and translated by Vallee in PM 12. My thanks to Vallee for scanning the relevant pages of the original French edition for me.

  34. IC 162. Evans-Wentz also helped him see connections between UFO lore and Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. Both the Tibetan and Mormon traditions emphasize “treasure-books” hidden in the ground, waiting for the proper time to be revealed.

  35. PM 35. This telepathic signaling became the major plotline of Spielberg’s movie.

  36. This material was later significantly expanded upon in light of a photostat of the original Portuguese medical report, psychological testing, and cross-examination of this case (dated February 22, 1958) and published as Gordon Creighton, “The Amazing Case of Antonio Villas Boas,” in The Humanoids: A Survey of Worldwide Reports of Landings of Unconventional Aerial Objects and Their Occupants, ed. Charles Bowen (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969).

  37. Ibid., 216.

  38. Ibid., 218.

  39. John G. Fuller, The Interrupted Journey (1966). Vallee revisits and adds to the case in PM 89–95. Vallee discusses his meeting with Fuller and the Hills in June of 1967 in FS 1:277–82.

  40. Creighton, “Amazing Case,” 200.

  41. The title of the novel is taken from the intelligence term for a “source of electromagnetic radiation moving at high speed in the outer layers of the atmosphere, which triggers the sensors of spy satellites.”

  42. The culture of NASA, for example, is informed by science fiction, particularly that of Star Trek and of Robert A. Heinlein. See C. Penley, NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America (New York: Verso, 1997). One must also mention here that incredible mix of sexual magic, occultism, and science fiction that informed the early subculture of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, via its cofounder, John Whiteside “Jack” Parsons. Heinlein was again part of the mix, as was science-fiction writer and Scientology founder Ron Hubbard. See John Carter, Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2004).

  43. Hynek had originally, in early 1965, proposed “the Little Society,” a playful spin on Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” (FS 1:134). By the spring of 1967, he had switched the name to “the Invisible College” (FS 1:270). By August of the same year, Vallee had bound seven volumes of the Archives of the Invisible College, which included letters, confidential sighting reports, and the very best material from the air force files (FS 1:310).

  44. J. Allen Hynek, “The UFO Mystery,” in FBI Bulletin 44, no. 2 (February 1975), as quoted in IC 4.

  45. Vallee had hinted at this control thesis already in PM 48–49. He returned to it again in his most recent essay, “Consciousness, Culture, and UFOs,” where he wrote the following, presumably against those authors who see benevolent forces at work in the UFO phenomenon: “We are not dealing with spiritual transformation here, but with social trance-formations” (in Tumminia, Alien Worlds, 208; italics in original).

  46. Vallee discusses the Puppet Master in relationship to Philip K. Dick’s Valis at FS 2:278. “The Manufacturer of Unavoidable Events” (“Le fabricant d’événements inéluctables”) is the title of the short story that Vallee considers to be his most important piece of fiction.

  47. Personal communication, 13 October 2008.

  48. FS 1:2. Vallee, however, had proposed to Hynek as early as 1963 that the saucer question “plunges deep into mystical and psychic theories” (FS 1:88).

  49. IC 117, 120–22. As political scientist Michael Barkun has convincingly shown, this UFO/“secret society” connection—which, as we demonstrated in chapter 1, goes all the way back to Charles Fort—will be picked up by any number of paranoid, racist, and anti-Semitic political movements in the late 1980s and ’90s (see his A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003]). This period and its troubling developments fall well after Vallee had formed his own opinions and theories. It is also worth noting in this context that Vallee, although certainly suspicious of government intelligence and official manipulation and their grossly distorting effects on the scientific study of UFOs, generally resists radical forms of conspiracy thinking, as Barkun himself notes with reference to the infamous MJ-12 document and likely hoax (ibid., 143).

  50. Later, scholars of new religious movements will expand on this list, adding observations about the clear historical links that exist between the early contactee literature and esoteric movements like Theosophy and the I AM movement, the use of channeling practices to contact various alien entities, and the different ways this material challenges the dominant scientific and religious paradigms. This literature is large, but the state of the art is probably best represented by two books: Brenda Denzler, The Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Christopher Partridge, ed., UFO Religions (London: Routledge, 2003). Denzler focuses on the tension between science and religion as competing or complementary explanatory frameworks within the UFO community. Partridge identifies the later abduction spiritualities as developments of an earlier theosophical esotericism within a New Age matrix, tracing, for example, the transformation of the “ascended masters” of Theosophy into the “descended masters” of the UFO religions.

  51. IC 137–138. Later researchers will pick up on this comparative phenomenology and add near-death experiences (NDE) to the mix. See especially Kenneth Ring, The Omega Project: Near-Death Experiences, UFO Encounters, and Mind at Large (New York: William Morrow, 1992).

  52. As far as I can tell, Vallee first suggests this in a journal entry of January 26, 1964 (FS 1:95).

  53. Quoted in Vallee, Fastwalker, 159.

  54. Vallee engages in a similar thought experiment in FS 1:161–62.

  55. This is a good example of Vallee’s resistance to grand conspiracy thinking, as noted above, in note 49.

  56. The Arpanet was named after its funding source, ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Pentagon, now called DARPA (the D is for Defense).

  57. FS 2:503. The two men would write a book together based on this early work: Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, Mind-Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Ability (Delacorte Press, 1977). For Swann’s perspective, see his remarkable autobiography, To Kiss Earth Good-Bye (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1975), especially 52–61. For two technical descriptions, complete with magnometer readings, of this initial experiment and Swann’s remote-viewing forays, see Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, “Physics, Entropy, and Psychokinesis” and “Remote Viewing of Targets,” in Quantum Physics and Parapsychology: Proceedings of an International Conference Held in Geneva, Switzerland, August 26–27, 1974, ed. Laura Oteri (New York: Parapsychology Foundation, 1975).

  58. Targ and Puthoff, Mind-Reach, 19.

  59. Ibid., 21.

  60. Ibid., 27.

  61. Targ and Puthoff describe this same event, I gat
her, in Mind-Reach, 47–48. It appears that it was Price, not Swann, who performed this particular remote viewing.

  62. Russell Targ and Harold E. Puthoff, “Information Transfer under Conditions of Sensory Shielding,” in Nature 252 (October 18, 1974): 602–7.

  63. FS 2:122. For the language of the techgnostic, I am indebted to Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998).

  64. Targ and Puthoff, Mind-Reach, 42. Puthoff, Swann, and Price all had connections to Scientology in the early 1970s. For a balanced discussion of the Scientology piece and Puthoff’s break with the religion in the mid-1970s, see Jim Schnabel, Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America’s Psychic Spies (New York: Dell, 1997), 198–200.

  65. FS 2:196, 504–5. Vallee felt that the SRI group never really followed through on a systematic implementation and testing of this address approach (FS 2:289, 480).

  66. For a precise description of what became known as Coordinate Remote Viewing (or CRV) that privileges the metaphysics of nonlocal mind and humorously preserves the apparent impossibility of using a randomly generated number as a global address, see Paul H. Smith’s Reading the Enemy’s Mind: Inside Star Gate, America’s Psychic Espionage Program (New York: Forge, 2005), 277–79.

  67. For Mitchell’s positive assessment of Geller, and much else relevant to our present concerns, see his remarkable autobiography, with Dwight Williams, The Way of the Explorer: An Apollo Astronaut’s Journey through the Material and Mystical Worlds (New York: Putnam, 1996).

  68. Jonathan Margolis, Uri Geller: Magician or Mystic? (New York: Welcome Rain Publishers, 1999), 11.

  69. See Jeffrey J. Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), chapter 14, “Superpowers: Cold War Psychics and Citizen Diplomats,” and chapter 15, “Sex with the Angels: Nonlocal Mind, UFOs, and An End to Ordinary History.”

  70. For emblematic histories written by insiders, see: Dale E. Graff, Tracks in the Psychic Wilderness: An Exploration of ESP, Remote Viewing, Precognitive Dreaming and Synchronicity (Boston: Element, 1998); Joseph McMoneagle, The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy (Charlottesville: Hampton Roads, 2002); F. Holmes Atwater, Captain of My Ship, Master of My Soul: Living with Guidance (Charlottesville: Hampton Roads, 2001); and Smith, Reading the Enemy’s Mind. For a science writer’s balanced account, see Schnabel, Remote Viewers.

  71. Joseph McMoneagle, Mind Trek: Exploring Consciousness, Time, and Space through Remote Viewing (Charlottesville: Hampton Roads, 1997), 27–34.

  72. Personal communication, April 29, 2009. May, an accomplished and broadly published expert on low-energy, experimental nuclear physics, joined the SRI team in 1975. He directed the research program there from 1985 until 1991, after which he shifted his affiliation to another U.S. Defense contractor, where he continued his involvement with government-sponsored parapsychology until 1995, when the Stargate program out at Fort Meade was finally shut down. May’s importance is signaled by the fact that he presided over an astonishing 70 percent of the total funding and a full 85 percent of the data collection for the government’s twenty-two-year involvement in parapsychological research. This and the fact that he has since worked closely with his counterparts in Russia and is a coauthor of a forthcoming work that will no doubt become the definitive study of the remote viewing story on both the American and Russian sides: Edwin C. May, Alexei Yurievich Savin, Boris Ratnikov, Joseph W. McMoneagle, and Victor Rubel, ESP Wars from Both Sides of the Iron Curtain (forthcoming).

  73. “About the Author,” in Joseph McMoneagle, The Ultimate Time Machine: A Remote Viewer’s Perception of Time, and Predictions for the New Millennium (Charlottesville: Hampton Roads, 1999).

  74. “Heretic among Heretics: Jacques Vallee Interview,” http://www.ufoevidence.org. Similarly, Targ and Puthoff began their Mind-Reach with a definition of “heresy” that described the history of science as “paradoxes becoming commonplaces and heresies becoming orthodoxies” (Mind-Reach, 1), in other words, Fort’s historical cycles of the Dominants and the damned.

  75. FS 2:480. Vallee likes to quote Churchill on this key point: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she must always be protected by a bodyguard of lies.”

  76. Whitley Strieber, foreword to Vallee, Dimensions, vii.

  77. Ibid., 291.

  78. Ibid., 128; italicized in original.

  79. See, for example, Michio Kaku, Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension (New York: Anchor Books, 1994).

  80. Vallee, Dimensions, 136; italicized in original.

  81. Ibid., 284–85.

  82. Ibid. 288–89; italics in original.

  83. Jacques Vallee, Confrontations: A Scientist’s Search for Alien Contact (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990), 217–18.

  84. Ibid., 221.

  85. Ibid., 224.

  86. Ibid., 225.

  87. Ibid., 129.

  88. Ibid., 133.

  89. Ibid., 122.

  90. Vallee, UFO Chronicles, 141.

  91. Ibid., 115. Gerald Heard, the British-American visionary who helped inspire the founding of Esalen (and also wrote an early book on UFOs), had speculated along almost identical X-Men or evolutionary lines. See Kripal, Esalen, 92.

  92. Vallee, UFO Chronicles, 5.

  93. For a lovely treatment of this history, “from Plato to NATO,” see R. A. S. Hennessey, Worlds Without End: The Historic Search for Extraterrestrial Life (Charleston: Tempus Publishing, 1999).

  94. For a powerful personal synchronicity or “intersign” that Vallee read in the light of Dick’s Valis, see FS 2:212–13.

  95. “Dr. Jacques Vallee Reveals What Is Behind Forbidden Science,” 4. http://www.21stcenturyradio.com/ForbiddenScience.htm, accessed on January 8, 2008.

  96. Murphy adopted the phrase from the scientists who attended the two UFO symposia sponsored by Esalen in 1975 and 1986. The first was held offsite and in secret, partly to protect the reputations of some of the elite scientists who attended. Another invisible college.

  97. For examples of Vallee’s precognitive dreams, see FS 2:131, 221, 353, 409–10, 441, and 466. For his experience of “intersigns,” see FS 2:212–13, 330–31, 343, 442, and 491. Freud wrote of dream symbolism as “overdetermined.”

  98. Penciled inscription by Hynek in his personal copy. Both Hynek and Vallee knew Hall, whom they visited at his Philosophical Research Center in Los Angeles (FS 2:64). Indeed, Vallee begins the second volume of his journals with a quote from Manly Hall, whom he describes as an “admirable friend” (FS 2:7).

  99. FS 1:233. According to Vallee, Hynek was also especially fond of Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy. A comparison of Huxley’s neo-Vedantic perennialism with Manly Hall’s Western esoteric perennialism would be interesting and useful here.

  100. FS 1:206. There are clear allusions here to the science-fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, whose fictional universe is structured along similar lines.

  101. “Consciousness, Culture, and UFOs,” in Tumminia Alien Worlds, 206.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1. Jim Schnabel, Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America’s Psychic Spies (New York: Dell, 1997), 35–36. For this opening story, I am relying on two communications I had with Méheust: one a personal conversation on May 25, 2008; the other an e-mail communication dated June 12, 2008. He has also read and corrected the present retelling.

  2. This is the sort of thing I was referring to above, in chapter 1, note 105.

  3. The counterculture was counter to culture to the extent that it insisted on the primacy of consciousness as metaphysically prior to culture and, subsequently, as the most effective creator of new culture. This was the thesis of the man who invented and first theorized the term anyway. See Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (New York: Anchor Books, 1969).

  4. I am indeb
ted here to Richard Shweder, who has written eloquently of a certain “ontological polytheism,” of “reality posits,” and of a cultural psychology whose goal is to show how psyche and culture “make each other up.” See his Thinking Through Cultures: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991).

  5. Since 2004, Méheust has also produced a number of works of cultural criticism around the paranormal, including Devenez savants: Découvres les sorciers: Lettre à Georges Charpak (Paris: Éditions Dervy, 2004), and a few “popular” works for his publishers, including 100 mots pour comprendre la voyance (Paris: Les Empecheurs de Penser en Rond, 2005) and Histoires paranormales du Titanic (Paris: J’ai Lu, 2006). Space and time (not always absolute in the present pages!) prevent me from treating all of these works here.

  6. For a one-hundred-page essay by Méheust on Michel’s life and thought and an unedited collection of this correspondence, see Aimé Michel, L’Apocalypse molle: Correspondance addressée à Bertrand Méheust de 1978 à 1990 (texts inédits) (Cointrin, Switzerland: Aldane editions, 2008). For a collection of Michel’s essays edited and annotated by Jean-Pierre Rospars, see Aimé Michel, La clarté au coeur du laybyrinthe: Chroniques sur la science et la religion (Cointrin, Switzerland: Aldane editions, 2008). See also Michel Picard, Aimé Michel: Ou la Quête du Surhumain (Agnieres: JMG, 2000).

  7. Bertrand Méheust, “Le veilleur d’Ar Men,” in Michel, L’Apocalypse molle, 12.

  8. For the fullest statement of Michel’s understanding of the physical phenomena of mysticism and what they portend about the future of the body, see his Metanoia: Les phénomènes physique du mysticisme (Paris: Albin Michel, 1986).

  9. Méheust, “Le veilleur d’Ar Men,” 15, 18.

  10. Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians (New York: Stein and Day, 1964). Pauwels was the primary author here. The text is written in his voice, with the clear acknowledgment that the ideas were the product of a five-year study and friendship with Bergier. The constant focus of the text on physics as a kind of modern mysticism is one of many features of the text that point to Bergier.