by Colin Wilson
But as early as 2 January 1878, a farmer named John Martin, of Denison, Texas, had been out hunting when he saw a moving object in the northern sky, dark in colour, and of considerable size. It must also have been moving fast, for, after he had looked down to rest his eyes, he discovered that the object was already overhead, at a great height, and ‘looking like a large saucer’.
Even this is by no means the first. The Chronicle of William of Newburgh, a thirteenth-century monk, tells how, in 1290, in Byland Abbey in Yorkshire, the abbot and monks were at a meal when a ‘flat, round, shining silvery object’ flew over the abbey and ‘caused the utmost terror’. And Flying Saucers on the Attack (1954) by Harold Wilkins (which, in spite of the sensational title, is a serious and comprehensive study of UFOs) lists no fewer than 150 reports of strange lights and objects in the sky, from 200 BC to 1912. A typical description by the Roman Julius Obsequens in 90 BC speaks of ‘a globe of fire, golden in colour’, in the area of Spoleto, which ‘fell to Earth, was seen to gyrate . . . became greater in size, and was seen to rise from the Earth, was borne east, and obscured the disc of the sun with its magnitude’.
Even Alexander the Great saw a UFO. In 322 BC, he was besieging the city of Tyre when ‘a large silver shield’, with four smaller shields behind it, circled over Tyre; it shot a beam of light at the city wall and blasted a hole through it. The other ‘shields’ then fired at the defence towers. Alexander lost no time in taking advantage of this supernatural intervention and invading the city.
The very first report that sounds like a UFO sighting dates from ancient Egypt around 1500 BC. A papyrus now in the Vatican describes how, in the reign of Thutmose III and his queen Hatshepsut, a ‘circle of fire’ came from the sky, and its breath had a foul odour. A few days later, in the evening, the sky was filled with the circles of light, which then ascended and vanished towards the south.
Then, of course, there is the Bible. Vallee’s musician friend Misraki had suggested in his book The Extraterrestrials that the vision of the biblical prophet Ezekiel, around 600 BC, of ‘a great whirlwind’, with ‘a fire infolding itself’, might well be a vision of some kind of UFO.
So it seemed to Vallee highly probable that flying saucers have been visiting our planet for a long time. And, in view of the Fátima sightings, it is hardly surprising that he should feel that these visitants might be associated with religion. Vallee’s feelings were not unlike those of Andrija Puharich after hearing voices talking from the air, and seeing tape recorders working of their own accord; he felt that there was definitely some ‘unearthly’ component. And, since Vallee was beginning to suspect that UFOs might not be visitors from outer space, he was left with the supposition that they might be some form of paranormal phenomena associated with the Earth.
A few years later, such speculation was commonplace. In 1967, a newspaper serialisation of von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? was entitled ‘Did God Drive a Flying Saucer?’ And a space engineer named Josef Blumrich, after rejecting the idea as nonsensical, then took another look at the prophet Ezekiel, and decided that his visions, when studied in detail, did sound like a spaceship; he carefully reconstructed it, with diagrams, in The Spaceships of Ezekiel (1973).
But, when Vallee suggested the idea to Hynek in 1963, it was virtually new. And, as far as the air force and their Project Blue Book were concerned, it would have sounded like insanity. Their two chief ‘investigators’, Captain Hector Quintanilla and Sergeant Moody, had no scientific training, and no interest in the nature of UFOs. Quintanilla told Vallee, ‘The mission of the air force is to identify, intercept and destroy any unauthorised object that violates US air space’. As to Moody, he regarded people who claimed to have seen UFOs as nuts. When Vallee asked Quintanilla how he accounted for worldwide sightings, Quintanilla replied that that was not their business.
Vallee wrote satirically of Sergeant Moody: ‘Moody deserves a Nobel Prize for fudging his bold UFO “explanations.” Thus he is the discoverer of a new species of birds with four blinking lights’ It was also Moody who once decided that a certain observation was without merit because “the reported object did not match any known aerial maneuvering pattern”’.
Yet as he studied reports, Vallee began to feel a sneaking sympathy with Quintanilla and Moody. Some UFOs, he noted, changed shape, others disappeared on the spot; and UFOs that were seen on the ground did not look adapted to interstellar flight. They sounded more like a joke than a serious phenomenon.
Hynek’s position caused Vallee mild exasperation. He noted that Hynek preferred to sit on the fence, arguing that there was not enough evidence to present to the National Academy of Science. It was not the money he received from the air force that kept Hynek in line, but the fear of losing access to the air force’s files on the sightings.
Vallee had by now finished a book about UFOs, Challenge to Science, but publishers were not interested; one turned it down on the grounds that it would simply not appeal to an American audience. In April 1964, he went to see the Chicago publisher Henry Regnery, who asked, ‘Do you fly to Mars and Venus, like George Adamski?’ Vallee said he didn’t. ‘Do you explain them away as clouds and atmospherics?’ Vallee said he didn’t do that either. ‘Then that’s final’, said Regnery. ‘You don’t have a book about flying saucers’.
But he agreed to pass on the typescript to his daughter, who could read French.
It was at the end of April that Hynek was called away to New Mexico, when Lonnie Zamora saw his flying egg, with its two occupants. Hynek was impressed, and Vallee delighted—he noted that the Socorro landing sounded exactly like something out of the French files for 1954. Vallee now decided to begin a new book, to be called Anatomy of a Phenomenon. When this was accepted by Regnery, Hynek wrote an introduction—then changed his mind, because it might compromise his position with the air force.
In December 1964, Vallee received a letter that filled him with excitement. It was from a captain in the Italian Air Force, who was working at the Ministry of Aeronautics in Rome—Vallee calls him Luciano. He had been studying UFOs since 1947, and had more than six thousand index cards of sightings, eight hundred of them from Italy. Vallee was interested to learn that Italy had also experienced a ‘UFO flap’ in 1954, a year when countries as far apart as France, Brazil and Australia had experienced ‘UFO invasions’.
Some reported sightings amused him: an Englishwoman living in South Africa described seeing an object like a moon which came towards her window, then changed into a kind of golden football.
‘If it was a saucer, if it had a crew and if they saw me at the window, I must say they probably went away with a strange impression of an Earth creature: I am blonde, almost six feet tall; on the night in question I was naked because of the heat and the humidity, and my hair was in metal curlers! It is not surprising that they left and did not return’.
She noted that as the object came close, she smelt an odour ‘like an overheated radio’. Early valve radios smelt of burning Bakelite when they overheated, and it seems just conceivable that this might have been the ‘foul odour’ complained of by the Egyptian scribe.
A friend of Vallee’s publisher told him an interesting story about the ‘Washington flap’ of July 1952, when two lots of UFOs were picked up on radar over the capital, and seen by airline pilots. Two men were sent outside with a camera to try to photograph the objects appearing on the radar screen (no fewer than eight on the first occasion). Their photographs were developed on the spot, and two of them showed clear luminous objects. They were immediately confiscated, and everyone in the room was sworn to silence. Donald Menzel, the professor who had been Hynek’s mentor, explained the sightings away as ‘temperature inversions’.
On 23 March 1966, Vallee heard the radio item that convinced him that ‘nothing would ever be the same again’—about the UFOs seen near Ann Arbor, Michigan, and one that was seen landing in a swamp near Dexter. Girls at a Hillsdale college had also seen them, making more than sixty witnesses in all.
Hynek rang Quintanilla to tell him, but Quintanilla said he was not interested. When Hynek protested that that was not very scientific, Quintanilla replied, ‘I don’t give a damn’. But, half an hour later, Quintanilla rang up and passed on an order to go to Michigan.
Hynek seems to have enjoyed suddenly being in the limelight, with dozens of pressmen and television reporters waiting to hear what he had to say. But, at his press conference three days later, Hynek caused universal hilarity by suggesting that the UFOs had been swamp gas. Vallee was astonished and furious when he heard about it. Hynek rang him to explain that he had been harassed by too many reporters, and that, although there were so many witnesses, their stories were too confused and conflicting to make sense.
Yet the fiasco served a useful purpose. As Hynek became a figure of ridicule, the public began to take a serious interest in UFOs, which crystalised into a consensus that they must be real. And the Republican congressman for Michigan, Gerald Ford (who would succeed Richard Nixon after his downfall), protested that the American public deserved a better explanation than swamp gas. As a result, the Condon Committee came into existence.
By this time, Vallee’s second book, Anatomy of a Phenomenon, had been published, and had aroused a far wider interest than the publisher had expected. This was partly due to the Mariner 4 landing on Mars, partly to a sudden wave of sightings all over the world. With its long opening chapter on the history of sightings of unidentified aerial objects since the days of the Bible, and its chapter on the search for intelligent life in the universe, it was by far the most substantial and scientific assessment of the problem so far.
Challenge to Science had also been published, but only in French. The attitude of these books was new in the world of ufology. To begin with, by presenting such an impressive cross-section of cases from all over the world, Vallee was making it clear that they could not all be dismissed as lies, mistakes or hallucinations. Second, in approaching this as a scientist and mathematician, Vallee was trying to desensationalise the subject, and to persuade science to study it seriously.
Other writers—like Morris Jessup, Donald Keyhoe, and Coral Lorenzen—had been tainted with the ‘invaders from Mars’ mentality, which in turn had led scientists to feel that flying saucers were the product of hysteria. Vallee was arguing that UFOs had been reported so often that there was no possible doubt that they were real; what was important now was to try to decide precisely what they were. He was pleading, in effect, for a new science. After all, psychology and criminology were not regarded as sciences until the late nineteenth century, and there are still many scientists who decline to accept parapsychology as a science. Sooner or later, Vallee was arguing, governments will have to be prepared to finance the scientific study of UFOs.
One academic took him seriously. He was James McDonald, professor of atmospheric physics at the University of Arizona. McDonald asked permission to spend two days at the Wright-Patterson Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio—now virtually the hub of official UFO investigation in the US—studying their reports on ‘ball lightning’. What he saw quickly convinced him that most of their reports of ball lightning were actually UFOs. He insisted on seeing the general, and had a forty-five-minute interview—longer than Hynek had ever had—and ended by talking with him about the humanoid occupants of UFOs. He told Hynek and Vallee that the air force explanations ‘were pure bullshit’, and lost no time in contacting the various civilian organisations that collected sightings, such as APRO and NICAP. Hynek and Vallee had lunch with him, and Vallee was exhilarated. ‘It is clear that an entire era has come to a crashing end’, Vallee wrote. ‘This man has many contacts, many ideas, and he is afraid of nothing’.
Unfortunately, McDonald proved to be a mixed blessing. He was assertive, abrasive and rude, and made no secret of his belief that Hynek had sold out, and become a tool for the air force cover-up. He even tried to recruit Vallee to join the anti-Hynek, anti-bullshit camp. ‘If it wasn’t for your influence, and all the research you brought over from France, Hynek would still be arguing that ninety-three percent of those reports are due to Venus or marsh gas’. But Vallee quickly sensed that he would never be able to work with McDonald as he worked with Hynek—he felt that behind McDonald’s determination to drag UFOs into the light of public debate was a will to power, a need for ego-assertion. In 1971, after five years of beating his head against a brick wall, and being jeered at by the scientific community, McDonald committed suicide.
Hynek himself was increasingly prepared to stick his neck out. When Challenge to Science was published in America in 1966, Hynek wrote a foreword. In this he used the analogy of isolating radium from pitchblende, and admitted that he now felt there was radium to be found in the vast pile of UFO sightings, and that ‘Perhaps I should have spoken earlier; eighteen years is a long time’.
Meanwhile, Vallee was studying the air force files, and was excited to discover that a wave of UFO sightings had occurred in 1951, ‘landings and cigar-shaped objects, just as in Aimé Michel’s classic work’. He admitted, ‘I am beginning to think like McDonald: how could Hynek have missed it?’
The air force was anxious to get rid of the responsibility for UFOs, and wanted to pass it on to some respectable university. Hynek and Vallee hoped that the job of computerising their reports would go to their department at Northwestern. They were angry and frustrated when the Dean got cold feet and turned down the proposal; he was afraid that Northwestern might be associated with ‘crank theories’. Hynek was so furious that he considered resigning.
Vallee was glad to escape back to Europe at the end of the summer semester. He was beginning to feel disillusioned with America, and was learning that democracy had two faces. On the one hand, he was able to publish books about UFOs while not endangering his position at Northwestern; on the other, ambitious career scientists like Carl Sagan could sneer about UFOs, and declare that no government funds should be channelled into research, and effectively prevent the subject being taken seriously. Vallee noted: ‘If the saucers turn out to be significant, Sagan will take the credit for having theorized about cosmic visitors. If they are discredited, he will claim he always saw clearly through their mythical character’.
It was a relief to be back in Paris. He loved strolling along the Seine and looking at the bookstalls. His interest in UFOs had always run parallel with an interest in mysticism, hermeticism and alchemy. (Hynek himself was deeply interested in these subjects, and was a Rudolf Steiner enthusiast.) And his study of the history of UFOs since biblical times had made him aware that some knowledge of the past was essential to understanding the phenomenon. At the end of August 1966, he picked up a copy of Paracelsus, the magician and scientist who lived in the early sixteenth century. Most scientists would have dismissed Paracelsus as a would-be scientist who was gullible enough to be taken in by the magical superstitions of his time. But Vallee’s years of studying UFO sightings had made him less dismissive. He was struck by Paracelsus’s comment on gnomes:
‘They can appear at will small or tall, handsome or ugly . . . Think twice before becoming allied with them. As soon as you are linked to them, you have to do their bidding. When they are angry they inflict heavy penalties. Sometimes they kill. There are proofs of it’. Vallee underlined these last (italicised) sentences.
In fact, Vallee was encountering many cases that would have been described in the Middle Ages as encounters with supernatural beings. The experience of Eugenio Douglas is typical. In October 1963, he was driving a truck through heavy rain near Islaverda, Argentina, when a blinding light forced him to slow down. When he stopped the truck, the light vanished. But farther down the road he encountered a disc-shaped craft, thirty-five metres high, from which three giant figures wearing luminous clothes and strange helmets emerged—Douglas estimated them at twelve feet tall. A red beam came from either the craft or the entities, and burnt him. Douglas fired back with a rifle, then fled. The red beam followed him to the village of Montemaiz, where the str
eet lighting was affected. Douglas took shelter in a house, whose own lights were flickering; both he and the occupants noted a strong smell.
The next day, Douglas was suffering from radiation burns. And, back at the site where he had seen the ‘giants’, he found footprints twenty inches long.
Paracelsus had remarked that there were four main orders of supernatural being—nymphs, dwarfs, sylphs, and salamanders—but added that giants should also be included. The Douglas encounter seemed a case in point.
In November, back in Chicago, Vallee and Hynek went to Boulder, Colorado, to meet the Condon team. The next day, Hynek addressed them, telling them the whole story of Project Blue Book, and occasionally requesting that the tape recorder should be switched off while he told them things that he would prefer off the record. Vallee then gave a talk suggesting how the computer might be used in UFO investigations. All went well, and, when Hynek gave a press conference, there was a general air of congratulation, as if he had finally been vindicated after years of trying to get UFOs taken seriously. But, when a Denver newspaper reported it next day, it merely stated that Hynek had announced that there had been no ‘hardware’, no tangible evidence of saucer visits.
Vallee’s journal makes it clear that he was becoming increasingly disillusioned with Hynek. Hynek turned up an hour late for a meeting with Vallee’s publisher, returned some phone calls, made a few distracted remarks, then rushed off, saying he’d be back later. Vallee commented, ‘How I miss the days when he was not such a celebrity . . . Media men hire Allen as they would hire a guitar player. He rushes wherever he sees a spotlight, and if the spotlight moves, he moves with it’.
