The situation concerning control motifs changes radically in the seventies. It appears frequently, is reworked by nearly every major figure, and dominates the theoretical scene as the core concept in several works.
In pure ambition of vision, UFOlogists will find it very hard to ever top the writings of John Keel. Reservations cloud acceptance of the raw material he builds from, but no one need qualify an appreciation of the effort of construction. Drawing on an impressive range of sources, Keel sketches a dark, feathery chiaroscuro of mysterious lights and shadowy patterns of deceptions that plays on primal fears about human powerlessness and naiveté. Keel abandoned the ETH in 1967 when psychic phenomena emerged in his thinking as a full facet of the UFO problem.
Operation Trojan Horse (1970) is his research effort stimulated by this change in perspective. Keel adopts the premise that humans have crude biological crystal sets in their heads that unconsciously receive sophisticated signals of an electromagnetic nature, bearing an omnipotent intelligence that has great flexibility of form. They advance beliefs in various frameworks of thought. Prior ages received Trojan Horses in the shapes of angels, fairies, spirits, phantom armies, mystery inventors and their airships, and ghost rockets. States of mystical illumination and possession accompany receipt of these signals and forward belief in occult happenings. Keel also advances the idea that there are window areas around which UFO sighting congregate—areas typified by a “magnetic fault.” The similarities to Williamson are evident, but so are the differences. The cruder physics errors are gone and an impressive body of research into occult history and learned observations about the implausibilities inherent in the existing body of UFO experiences make this a far meatier meal to chew on. (Keel, 1970)
Our Haunted Planet (1971) is a frivolous interlude that reads like somebody tossed a couple dozen books of Forteana into a blender. Mixing lost civilizations, occult conspiracies, Velikovsky, disappearances, UFO contacts and such, we get a speculative history of ultraterrestrials back to the caveman. It retains the view that ultraterrestrials involve hallucinogenic mind trips guided by a force that manipulates the electric circuits of the brain. (Keel, 1971)
The Mothman Prophecies (1975) is UFOlogy’s most intensely driven narrative. Its ambiance has the mechanistic supernatural evocations of Lovecraft’s finest horror. We learn there is a fearful gamesmanship to the intelligence that scripts the UFO drama. Once a belief of any sort arises, this cosmic mechanism supports and escalates it. The believer is played for the fool when higher expectations for salvation are crushed. The force of events manifests a tangible paranoia. Keel captures this sense of malevolent forces moving the flow of events very convincingly. Psychics and sensitives throughout the centuries parrot monotonously similar phrases like a skipping phonograph needle. Beams of light reprogram people to become belief robots like Saul/Paul at the dawn of Christianity. He adopts the credo of the Enlightenment: “Belief is the enemy.”
The Eighth Tower (1975) is the culmination of Keel’s vision. Religious visions are more fully incorporated into the tapestry of reprogramming games. Love is twisted into a negative force by robotic Jesus freaks and the fanatics of all faiths. Their ruthless, destructive acts reveal the controlling intelligence as emotionally unstrung and stupid. It distorts reality in whimsical, crazy ways such as to suggest “God may be a crackpot.” (Keel, 1975) He expands the control motif around a cosmological construct called the “superspectrum.”
This is a hypothetical spectrum of energies that purportedly is extradimensional and outside the normal range of the electromagnetic spectrum. It directs unaccountable coincidences into human lives and subtly influences the direction of history. It tried to seduce him in the directions of his own research. Keel even confessed an ability to control other people’s minds on a modest scale. In a whimsical moment he speculates that all these UFO and Bigfoot apparitions are the senile end-products of a dying supercomputer that once ran the world in deep history. Now it idles away the time tormenting people with its madness. (Keel, 1975)
In a feverish finale Keel inverts his theoretical edifice. The reprogramming energies come through a black hole from another time. The superspectral God becomes a switchboard and the only real reality. We are the delusion; it is the everything of reality. While this fast-forward into the cosmic identity phase of paranoia was perhaps obligatory in a psychological sense, it is a letdown from wiser panegyrics against unreflective belief. Perhaps Keel’s own reprogram button had been pushed. (Keel, 1975)
Control motifs also emerge as a central concept of Jacques Vallée’s writings. They have an interesting history with roots in his early science fiction. Subspace (1961, 1975) opens with strange appearances in the sky involving blue spirogires and black crosses, a 21st century UFO phenomenon, which impressed images of catastrophe in the minds of those contacted by it. It transpires that the spirogires hail from the star Spica and involve intelligences who are a part of subspace. This is a region of pure thought inhabited with the creations and monsters of the imagination. Some dark thoughts seek to destroy the linear continuum universe. Thanks to thoughts implanted into the unconscious of a protagonist by Erg-Aonians who inhabit this larger universe, a weapon is brought into subspace. It’s a cricket. The vibrations shatter the matrix in which the dark thoughts dwell. (Seriel, 1975)
The Dark Satellite (1962) opens with the invasion of our galaxy by a nonbeing-something that encircles it and causes all the races within it to become transfixed artists. The story turns to 22nd century Paris that is the home of a great computer that oversees a utopia spanning the solar system. It is free of nation states and war. A little cylinder is found one day in the computer’s imagination and threatens its breakdown. The cylinder causes a strange death of a human and people begin speculating that the cylinder was created by the machine at the prompting of machines from elsewhere with incomprehensible designs upon humanity, or the great machine—an influencing machine within an influencing machine as it were. To ferret out the mystery, technicians enter the computer through another plane of reality. Adjusting its circuits they accidentally set it on fire. Destruction of the computer removes Earth’s protection from an unsuspected mind ray. People are hypnotized into building space ships that form a mass exodus into the sun. An iconoclastic mad-scientist type guy named Xarius Chimero protects one of the technicians from mind control and takes him on a journey to the center of the universe, distributing artistic sculptures as they go. At the center, the two see into the multifaceted somber satellite of the title. It is a reality seeking to destroy our reality. Xarius Chimero presses a button and the dark satellite slides from sight. The button activated the statues and they turn into young girls. Laughing, primitive girls will repopulate the galaxy and a sublime new order transcending the now obliterated scientific utopia has been created. (Seriel, 1962)
As an UFOlogist, Vallée makes no use of the control motif in his first analyses of the UFO phenomenon, Anatomy of a Phenomenon (1965) and Challenge to Science (1966). In Passport to Magonia (1969) he sees disturbing resemblances between the UFO phenomenon and the fairy faith of earlier centuries, implying a shared mythic basis. He entertains the possibility that superior intelligences are projecting creations into our environment as a pure form of art seeking our puzzlement or as a way to teach us some concept. He immediately backs away from the notion with an admission it hasn’t a scientific leg to stand on and offers an apology for showing “how quickly one could be carried into pure fantasy.” (Vallée, 1969)
This “pure fantasy” becomes a major theory in The Invisible College (1975). Vallée compiled a plot of UFO waves through history and their irregular spacing suggested to University of Chicago’s Fred Beckman and Dr. Price-Williams of UCLA a schedule of reinforcement designed to permanently instill a behavior. Vallée developed from this observation the theory that UFOs represent a control system of an undetermined nature. It could simply involve social psychology, but it could also be an imposition of a supernatural will seeking to confus
e us and mold us and our civilization by targeting our collective unconscious with a physical and psychical technology. The book closes on a chilling soliloquy wherein Vallée ponders stepping outside the maze of the control system. Would he find some Lovecraftian horror, some well-meaning social engineers, or “the maddening simplicity of unattended clockwork?” (Vallée, 1975) This theory collapses with the recognition of a deadly oversight. UFO experiences usually involve negative emotions like fear and would yield aversive behavior. (Vallée, 1966; Moravec, 1987) They would not reinforce learning. No value attaches to irregular stimuli in the converse hypothesis of an unlearning curve. (Ruch and Zimbardo, 1971)
Messengers of Deception (1979) accepts as a given that control in the form of a machinery of mass manipulation exists behind the UFO phenomenon. Physical devices are being used to affect human consciousness and distort reality. Images and scenes are fabricated to advance belief in an impending intervention from space. The operators could be either a high-level international military group furthering some political goal or some occult group that stumbled upon a psychotronic technology in their studies of astral travel or spacetime distortions. (Vallée, 1979)
Dimensions (1988) reprints material from the prior books and would not bear mentioning except for a silent concession that Vallée changed his mind about the external teacher idea being pure fantasy. Those lines were excised. (Vallée, 1988)
Confrontations (1990) contains a brief suggestion that UFOs are a window into another reality possessing symbolic meaning. Like dreams, they can be ignored or shape our lives in inscrutable ways. There is enough ambiguity to regard the notion as either a banality or a marginal idea of reference. (Vallée, 1990)
Revelations (1991) argues that some UFO cases are covert experiments in the manipulation of belief systems, but here the processes are conventional ones of rhetoric and lies. The control system theory is reaffirmed in Forbidden Science (1992) with no further elaborations.
Brooks Alexander has characterized Vallée as “equal parts of Carl Jung and Report from Iron Mountain.” (Alexander, 1992) This is inadvertently scurrilous since the latter is a confessed hoax by political satirist Leonard Lewin. An equal case could be made for roots in the writings of French or English deists who had analogous notions about how stimulating the emotions of wonderment and advancing religious superstitions could be used to manipulate the masses. Not having behaviorist metaphors available, they spoke of a “psychopathology of enthusiasm” evident in individual fanatics and collective frenzies. Vallée’s affirmations and denials about the reality of UFOs have much the same puzzling flavor as deist affirmations and denials about the reality and nature of god. (Manuel, 1983) The similarity probably reflects shared intellectual predilections and not an exposure of Vallée to deist literature.
Like Keel and Vallée, D. Scott Rogo’s control theories extend through several books. This Haunted Universe (1977) was his first foray across the boundary of psychic research into UFOlogy. His first impulse was to ascribe the psychic components of UFO events to a mysterious force within ourselves, but certain experiences proved to him that evil can exist independently of the mind. The motif suddenly emerges: “UFOs demonstrate that our world plays host to a force that seeks to mystify us.” (Rogo, 1977) The usage here is brief, but significantly arises to imply humans are blameless for evil and mystifications.
He teams up with Jerome Clark for Earth’s Secret Inhabitants (1979). Both were facing the psychological aspects of strange UFO cases, so they concocted a notion they termed “The Phenomenon.” It is a force or intelligence somewhere in the universe that provides the evidence we seek for whatever it is we want to believe in deeply. It does this by beaming projections into our world. They aver it may be an automatic natural mechanism that acts “as routinely as a clock.” (Rogo and Clark, 1979) Clark fell out of sympathy with control systems and collective unconscious as his thinking matured, but Rogo pressed forward with elaborations. (Clark, 1986)
In Tujunga Canyon Contacts (1980), The Phenomenon becomes a supermind that presents people in need with objectified materials drawn from deep in the person’s mind. The process is described as a “psychokinetic effect directly affecting those brain cells regulating memory storage and retrieval.” It does not always materialize the abduction drama into three-dimensional space, but occasionally imprints it directly on the mind of the witness. (Rogo and Druffle, 1980) In UFO Abductions (1980) he adds details like the experience being molded individually to each victim into something like an objectified dream. Typically people in a life crisis receive these messages. (Rogo, 1980)
In Miracles (1982) Rogo leaps ahead into the cosmic identity stage and redefines God. The supermind becomes a spiritualistic realm that translates all religious, shamanistic, and mythic ideologies egalitarianly into literal spiritual reality. The Phenomenon might be the source of the universe’s creative energy and endows those properly attuned to it with great psychic powers. This “God” however would have to satisfy so many contradictory requests and opposing theologies that it would wind up an incoherent mush. (Rogo, 1982)
Looking back on his theory in 1988, Rogo considered it misunderstood and viable. Independent creation of a similar theory by Jenny Randles suggested to him he had probably been on the right track. Alternatively, they both may have read Vallée and a standard text on dreams. One puzzle of the objectified dream idea is that when subjects are regressed under hypnosis, the experiences do not reify into three-dimensional reality despite deeply emotional re-enactment. Saucers or aliens do not materialize for onlookers to experience or instruments to record. It should also not be ignored that if the supermind is directly imprinting experiences into the mind, such experiences are ultimately phantoms and promote false beliefs. One has only to point to various depictions of future catastrophes by abductees and contactees that have repeatedly failed to come to pass to demon strate the misinformation such visions create. Should one really go around calling such a deceiver “God”?
Besides our top three control theorists, there have been a significant number of UFOlogists who offered variants of these themes. Some are well-known folks joining the bandwagon; some are less known but offer a different take. There was a steady stream of these ideas in the late seventies, and to a lesser extent, in the years since. This set will be recounted chronologically rather than by status.
1974: Charles Bowen, editorializing in Flying Saucer Review, asks if some or all UFO images and entities are projected into the mind by controlling powers and/or UFOs. The meaningless gibberish in messages implies more than humans being treated as playthings; it may be an attempt to influence or remotely control humans. He cites C. Maxwell Cade as suggesting ultrahigh frequency radar beams can induce images in the brain. Stanton Friedman suggests UFOnauts could broadcast telepathic signals that would make UFOs appear to disappear. A microwave beam could jumble vision by means of a scotoma.
1975: Allen H. Greenfield’s Alternative Reality Theory accepts the premise that UFOs are “manipulating human history to its own ends.” Timothy Green Beckley cites the cases of Paul Clark, Dr. Morales, and Hans Lauritzen to argue higher powers are systematically guiding human destiny and the course of human civilization, if not by physical force, then by direct manipulation of human minds. Joan Writenour warns extraterrestrials engage in “mental rape” by use of strobe-light-type machines that cause instant hypnosis.
You might notice Operators & Things (1976) spoke of similar technology and was brought to prominence in the 1997 blockbuster movie Men in Black.
1976: Brad Steiger suggests UFOs act as cosmic tutors using space beams. (Steiger, 1976a) They also influence the mind telepathically to project three-dimensional images. The purpose is “too staggeringly complex for our desperately throbbing brains to deal with at this moment in time in time and space.” (Steiger, 1976b)
1977: The Lorenzens accept that thoughts can be taken or absorbed. Abductees may have been programmed with false information to mislead us. James Harder terms
this a multi-level coverup. Abductees are made to look like fools by relaying messages filled with garbage dredged up from their memories and imaginations at the behest of posthypnotic suggestions. (Clark, 1977) Robert Anton Wilson warns higher beings may be playing mind games with humans and using “mindfucking” technology.
Michael Persinger and Gyslaine LaFreniere set forth a variant of the supermind they term “Geopsyche.” A critical mass of believers forms a matrix that is energized by intense geophysical forces of nature. Epidemics of luminous signs, anomalous beasties of the nether realm, unusual kinetic displays, and religious manias forebode earthquakes. A disturbing corollary to this is the irrelevance and expendability of the individual under the sway of activated death instincts and unconscious archetypal forces.
1978: Gordon Creighton fears UFOs influence not only individuals, but governments and whole nations. (Bond, 1978) Art Gatti gravitates to the idea UFOs are mind parasites or occult manipulation thought forms. Brad Steiger suggests aliens may have programmed humans as automatons and Judas goats to lead their fellow humans into servitude.
1979: Leo Sprinkle offers the “Cosmic Consciousness Conditioning” hypothesis that includes the premise that UFO intelligences choose witnesses for illumination. (Haines, 1979) James B. Frazier suggests they implant knowledge in contactees and monitor them by tensor beam communication and repeat abductions.
Raymond Fowler believes Betty Andreasson is primed subconsciously with extraterrestrial knowledge. She feels like a loaded bomb. They may be interstellar missionaries for conditioning in preparation of overt contact. Pierre Guerin speculates the repetitive character of UFOs is meant to create “a pernicious and stupefying wave of religious credulity.” Stefan T. Possony suggests Russia can create semi-stable UFOs via colliding pulsed microwave beams and thus yield UFO crazes and mass anxiety neuroses.
The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters Page 67
