by Colin Wilson
A few days later, French Intelligence announced that some diving gear found on a nearby beach indicated that divers had been using some equipment that explained the radar sighting and the malfunction of the trawler’s navigation system. So the authorities created an atmosphere that suggested that the UFO sighting had now been explained away as something quite natural.
The UFO problem, Vallee feels, is analogous to a conjuror who baffles his audience by some incredible display of magic, then explains it all—the hollow tabletop, the collapsing cane, the rabbit in the coat tail. Back at home you congratulate yourself on knowing how it was done—then realise that the explanation simply does not add up. He was not telling the truth. ‘The phenomenon negates itself’.
Later in the book he has an even better suggestion. He tells an anecdote about the psychiatrist Milton Erickson, who was standing on a corner when a man came round it in a hurry and bumped into him. Erickson glanced elaborately at his watch and said, ‘It’s exactly ten minutes to two’, then walked on, leaving the man staring after him in astonishment.
This encounter gave Erickson the idea for what he called the confusion technique of hypnosis. When a subject was difficult to hypnotise, Erickson would give a number of contradictory suggestions—such as ‘Your left hand is rising, while your right remains immobile’ and ‘Your right hand is rising while your left remains immobile’. The psychiatrist’s apparent confusion would arouse sympathy in the patient and lead to a cooperative attitude which favoured hypnosis. Still further confusion would lead the patient to give up his resistance and retreat from the confusion by accepting all the hypnotist’s suggestions.
This, Vallee suggests, could explain the confusion technique used by UFOs, with all their surrealistic absurdities. Such a notion obviously implies that the UFO entities are trying to make individual contactees drop their rationalistic attitudes in favour of unconscious acceptance. It also suggests, of course, that they might be trying to hypnotise us.
Certainly, these puzzling creatures seem to enjoy creating confusion. Vallee describes how a Midwestern woman named Mrs. Keech woke up with an odd tingling feeling in her hand and arm, and proceeded to take up a pen and do automatic writing. The communicating ‘entity’ seemed kindly and protective, and signed himself ‘Elder Brother’. Mrs. Keech soon became convinced that she was channelling information from a higher level of reality. A small sect formed around her. Then Elder Brother informed them that there would soon be a tremendous disaster, involving earthquake and flood.
A small group of academics from a nearby university infiltrated the group to study the psychology of religious conviction. When the flood failed to occur, the group were not in the least disillusioned; they believed that they had averted it.
The parallels with Puharich and the ‘landing on planet Earth’ are obvious, and, in fact, Vallee goes on to tell the story of Geller, Puharich and the invisible beings from Spectra. And his purpose becomes clearer when he goes on to tell a story about a Mrs. Swan, who had also been writing down messages from space entities. A man named Talman contacted Colonel Friend, head of Project Blue Book, to tell him about this. And, when Mrs. Swan was interviewed by an investigator named Commander Curtis, she suggested that he should try to contact the entities.
Oddly enough, Curtis tried, and got results. The ‘entities’ told him that they were called AFFA, and were from Venus. And as a group of investigators sat in a Washington office, with Curtis writing down answers to questions, someone asked if they could see a flying saucer. They were told, ‘Yes, look out of the window’. There was nothing outside. But at 2:00 that afternoon—6 July 1959—they did see a cigar-shaped object that flew over Washington. They called the radar centre, and were told that, for some reason, the radar beam was blocked in that direction. The official memo stated that ‘there is no question that the object was seen over Washington that day’.
Again, this sounds like firm evidence for the extraterrestrial-intelligence hypothesis. Why does Vallee not accept it? Because he knew enough about automatic writing and psychic phenomena to know that they seem to be based on systematic ambiguity and misdirection. The entities seem to tell lies just as often as they tell the truth. Vallee’s own experiments, with a man of well-tested psychic ability, produced answers that seemed sensible and consistent. Asked what UFOs were trying to do, the answer was, ‘To harmonise this world with the rest of the universe’. (Phyllis Schlemmer’s ‘Tom’ had said much the same thing.)
But Vallee’s conclusion is that the answers were ‘an instance of communication with a level of consciousness, possibly (but not necessarily) nonhuman. But (while) its nature may be understandable only in terms of a space—time structure more complex than what current physics places at our disposal . . . it is useful to keep in mind that aspects of it may be systematically misleading’.
The story of a Brazilian named Paul Gaetano is a case in point. On 17 November 1971, he was driving with a friend named Elvio when he told Elvio that a flying saucer was following them. All Elvio could see was a bus. The car engine seemed to lose power, and, as Gaetano pulled into the side of the road, Elvio fell asleep. The saucer then landed, and little men took Gaetano aboard and made him lie on a table while they X-rayed him, then took a blood sample by cutting his elbow. After showing him a town plan and a picture of an atomic explosion, they induced him to fall asleep. He woke up as Elvio helped him back into the car. Elvio saw nothing of the flying saucer. But the wound on Gaetano’s arm seemed to support his story.
It seems that the little men not only had the power to make Elvio fall asleep, but also to make him mistake a UFO for a bus.
In a chapter on miracles, devoted to Fátima, Lourdes and the Guadeloupe Madonna, Vallee points out the same element of confusion. Witnesses at Fátima saw the oldest girl, Lucia (aged ten), addressing the empty air, although one thought he could hear a faint voice responding—or it might have been the buzzing of a bee. Lucia reported that, the day after the vision, she had ‘no strength to do anything’—like the UFO contactees mentioned earlier. Witnesses at Lourdes saw Bernadette dig a hole in the sand with her hands—which immediately filled with water—then try to wash in the water, and, to everyone’s amusement, smeared her face with mud. After this, she began to eat grass. Later, Bernadette explained that the lady had told her to wash and drink in a spring, but that, since there was no spring, she began to dig in the sand, where a spring promptly appeared. The lady had also told her to go and eat grass.
The next day, a clear stream was flowing from the new spring, and, when a blind man washed his eyes in it, he was suddenly able to see. A dying baby was restored to health. When Bernadette was praying in a state of ecstasy, a doctor held a lighted candle under her hand for fifteen minutes, but her flesh was not even blistered. Yet when the candle was held under her hand when she had finished praying, she snatched her hand away saying, ‘You are burning me’.
One witness of the final ‘miracle’ at Fátima describes how the sun seemed to change into a spinning snowball, then come down to Earth in a zigzag motion, causing panic. This was at the scene of the miracle, but, even in a town nine miles away, one cynic who had spent the morning mocking the people who had gone to Fátima ‘to see an ordinary girl’ fell on his knees, crying out to God. A schoolboy who saw it—and who subsequently became a priest as a result—described how everything suddenly shone with rainbow colours.
At the end of the chapter on miracles, Vallee prints a four-page table comparing religious miracles to UFO events, pointing out dozens of parallels.
The final chapter of The Invisible College begins with infectious optimism: ‘I think we are close, very close, to understanding what UFOs are’. He then propounds the theory that UFO phenomena are basically a ‘control system’ for human consciousness—that is to say that an important part of their purpose is to be found in the effect they have on human beings. Their purpose seems to be to change consciousness.
A ‘control system’ is, of course, a system of
thought control. Hitler’s or Stalin’s propaganda machines are crude examples; so are George Orwell’s Thought Police in Nineteen Eighty-Four. But Vallee does not seem to have anything so simplistic in mind. He uses the example of a thermostat, which switches on when a house falls below a certain temperature. A naive observer might think that, for human beings, ‘warm’ is good and ‘cold’ is bad, and would be bewildered when, in summer, the thermostat keeps the house cool. What we need, says Vallee, is not to make moral judgments, but to understand the principle of the thermostat.
He goes on to quote the behavioural psychologist B. F. Skinner, who points out that the best way to reinforce a learning pattern is to combine periodicity with unpredictability—not regular and monotonous, but irregular and unexpected—what might be called a regular pattern of irregularity. Vallee’s graph of bursts of UFO activity from 1947 to 1962 follows precisely this pattern.
His vision is hopeful. ‘With every new wave of UFOs, the social impact becomes greater. More young people become fascinated with space, with psychic phenomena, with new frontiers in consciousness. More books and articles appear, changing our culture in the direction of a higher image of man’. He feels that our society is too oriented towards technological progress, and the next step may be a ‘massive change of human attitudes towards paranormal abilities and extraterrestrial life’.
This is fascinating, but it leaves two major questions unanswered: who is it who wishes to change our culture in the direction of a higher image of man and where do flying saucers come from?
Vallee does not try to answer either of these questions—although he seems to feel that the answer might not be far away. But his general conclusion is clear enough. He rejects the simplistic view that UFOs are manifestations of beings from another planet who have recently—or not so recently—come to Earth. He feels that they behave confusingly because they want to confuse us, but that their ultimate purpose is to nudge us in the direction of open-mindedness.
The Invisible College is probably Vallee’s best book. It might well have been entitled Clues, for it reads like a detective story, communicating an enormous sense of excitement. Vallee is fascinated by how many pieces of his complex jigsaw puzzle seem to fit together, and by the way that the distinction between ufology and paranormal research is beginning to blur—supporting the intuition that had led him to write Passport to Magonia.
But his next book, Messengers of Deception (1979), has an altogether darker tone. The optimism about a breakthrough seems to have evaporated. It is clear that he has begun to feel that the answer to the UFO problem is not as close as he thought, and that, as the title implies, the UFOs and the ‘aliens’ may be engaged in a complicated piece of deception. He is even inclined to wonder whether some human group might not be responsible for many of the phenomena. His earlier conclusion that UFOs are ‘psychotronic devices’ whose purpose is to influence human consciousness has now given way to the suspicion that they might be merely ‘terrestrial-based manipulating devices’.
This idea arose, to some extent, from the activities of a mysterious organisation that called itself UMMO, which Vallee had already discussed in The Invisible College. On 1 June 1967, a lens-shaped UFO had been seen over a suburb of Madrid, its bottom inscribed with a symbol like a capital H, with curved uprights and a vertical line the middle of the crossbar. Five rather poor photographs of the UFO were published the next day in a Madrid evening newspaper. Numerous other sightings followed, and local shopkeepers received a circular letter stating that a UFO had landed, and had apparently left behind a number of metallic cylinders. It offered rewards of $300 each for these cylinders.
One cylinder was apparently found. It proved to made of a pure form of nickel, and contained a piece of green plastic with the H symbol on it. This cylinder had been picked up by a twelve-year-old boy, and found itself in the hands of an investigator by way of a man called Antonio Pardo, who, it seemed, was also responsible for the photographs published by the newspaper. The plastic was unusual, but not extraterrestrial—it proved to be the type used in American space rockets.
After this, a writer and government employee named Manzano, who had founded an organisation called the Friends of Space, began to receive an enormous amount of material that claimed to come from aliens who originated on the planet Ummo (spelt in capitals), about three and a half light years from earth; its symbol was the crossed H. These aliens claimed to be responsible for the UFO activity. Some of the Ummo material was scientific, some philosophical.
Manzano also received phone calls from a man with a strong foreign accent, who claimed to be a representative of the Ummans. Apparently they were not responsible for the flying saucers seen by Kenneth Arnold—they had landed on Earth only in 1950. It seemed they did not intend to interfere in the social organisation of the Earth—this was forbidden by a ‘cosmic morality’.
Understandably, Ummo and the Ummans became a subject of excited discussion in UFO circles all over the world. But although the material was often philosophically interesting, it was curiously naive. One letter began by commiserating with human beings on the death of ‘your brother, thinker and mathematician Bertrand Russell’, who, it was suggested, was really an Umman—as, apparently, were Gandhi, Che Guevara, Karl Marx, Martin Luther King, Albert Schweitzer, Tolstoy, and others. It sounds as if the list has been concocted by some typical liberal intellectual of the 1960s.
Vallee was not inclined to take the claims of Ummo very seriously, even though he admits that some of the Umman correspondence was ‘profound and even illuminating’. After The Invisible College, he had turned his attention to other groups who claimed UFO connections, and seemed to be confirmed in his view that the UFO entities were far from trustworthy.
For example, he met an attractive girl called Helen by appointment in a Los Angeles coffee shop; she wanted to tell him about her own ‘close encounter of the fifth kind’. She had, it seemed, been part of a pop group, who were travelling back from a gig in the summer of 1968, when all four of them saw a bright light in the sky, which finally hovered silently over their car. Then four funnel-shaped lights came down from the UFO—which was as wide as a freeway—and drew them up into it. They apparently left their bodies in the moving car. Then she suddenly found herself back in her body and in the car.
Suspecting that there was something she could not remember, she submitted to hypnosis, then was able to recall going on board the UFO, being shown its propulsion system by a man dressed in white, who looked like a normal human being, and also being shown a perpetual-motion motor. She was, she told Vallee, trying to build this machine. Vallee felt that it could never run in the way she explained it, and knew, in any case, that perpetual motion was impossible, since it would defy the law of the conservation of energy.
All the same, he went to the trouble of trying to contact other members of the group (who had split up), and succeeded with two of them—he was unable to track down the third. But the two he spoke to confirmed everything Helen said—one of them said the event had been a turning point in his life.
Vallee’s conclusion was that the experience was probably hallucinatory, ‘projected to alter the individual belief systems’. He even suggests that the UFO might have been some ‘form of natural energy’ (ball lightning?) that might have triggered the vision, and adds, ‘Let us not forget that the society in question is badly in need of “space brothers” . . .’. Yet this seems to avoid the question of why they experienced a collective hallucination. Her apparent ‘contact’ may have been ‘a symbolic manifestation or a trap. Her “spacemen” may have been messengers of deception’.
The book is a fascinating and highly amusing study of various Californian cults investigated by Vallee, including a group called Human Individual Metamorphosis, led by a man called Applewhite, which self-destructed dramatically two decades later in a mass suicide—the purpose being to join a spaceship hidden behind the comet Hale-Bopp. (The event had been anticipated in Messages of Deception in a section
eerily entitled ‘It Only Costs Your Life’.)
Then there was Grace Hooper Pettipher, head of the San Francisco Order of Melchizedek, who was always bumping into people who had reincarnated from Atlantis, and had also been in direct contact with the inhabitants of a UFO.
Dr. Pettipher had dissociated herself from another branch of the sect, known as Urantia, who studied a ‘channelled’ book of that title. In pursuit of Urantia, Vallee studied the book, and was impressed. He was even more impressed when he came across a book called The Physiology of Faith and Fear by Dr. William Sadler, a sceptical examination of many religious sects claiming direct revelation, in which Sadler admitted that, in spite of his general disillusionment, he had been deeply impressed by The Book of Urantia—although he admitted that, after eighteen years of study, he was back where he started. Vallee remarks:
We might ask ourselves the same question about UFOs and their alleged agents among us: a phenomenon that leaves physical traces must be taken seriously, but what can we say of the people who claim to be in contact with superior intelligences emanating from these objects? What should we do about their claim that the phenomenon of UFOs is directing the evolution of mankind?
(Messengers of Deception, 1979)
Vallee’s feeling is clearly that they do not deserve serious consideration.
Messengers of Deception introduces the subject of cattle mutilation, which he studied in more detail later—he has still not published his results. But he is inclined to agree with the comments of Frederick W. Smith: ‘Someone has been delivering a message to the American people, to the government, to the intelligence community’. But by this he seems to mean that the cattle mutilations may be engineered to induce terror.
Yet he stresses that he believes that the UFO phenomenon ‘transcends time as it transcends space’. However, he says, ‘we still need to discover the source of this manifestation’. And this aim, which has been the central purpose of all his books, is still unfulfilled at the end of Messengers of Deception.
