Wonders in the Sky

by Jacques Vallee

  We will show that unidentified flying objects have had a major impact not only on popular culture but on our history, on our religion, and on the models the world humanity has formed since it has evolved a culture that includes writing, science, and the preservation of historical records in stone, clay, parchment, paper, or electronic media.

  So why hasn’t science taken notice? Given the robust nature of the phenomenon, and the enormous interest it elicits among the public, you would think that interdisciplinary teams of historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and physical scientists would rush to study it.

  The answer lies in the arrogance of academic knowledge and in the fact that our best and brightest scientists have never bothered to inform themselves about the extent and reliability of the sightings. In a recent interview (for www.ted.com, April 2008) the celebrated astrophysicist Stephen Hawking flatly stated he didn’t believe in flying saucer stories: “I am discounting reports of UFOs. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos?” were his exact words.

  He later asserted that we were the only form of technologically evolved life in a 200 light-year radius, thus out of reach of interplanetary travelers.

  Unfortunate and ill-informed as they are, these statements by one of the brightest scientists of our time reflect the general view of academic researchers. Back in 1969 the U.S. Academy of Sciences put its stamp of approval on a report by a commission headed up by physicist Edward Condon, stating that science had nothing to gain by a study of unidentified flying objects, even though fully one third of all the cases studied by the commission had remained unexplained after investigation! Clearly, we are dealing with a belief system here, not with rational science.

  There are two obvious problems with Stephen Hawking’s statement: first, as we will show, most of our 500 cases come from known witnesses who represent a cross-section of human society, including numerous astronomers, physical scientists, military officers and even emperors– hardly the motley crew of cranks and weirdos rashly hypothesized by Hawking. Second, even if the witnesses were of unknown background, the fact would remain that an unexplained phenomenon has played and continues to play a fantastically important role in shaping our belief systems, the way we view our history and the role of science.

  Consider the following incident, which transports us to the year 438. An earthquake has destroyed Constantinople; famine and pestilence are spreading. The cataclysm has leveled the walls and the fifty-seven towers. Now comes a new tremor, even stronger than all the previous ones. Nicephorus, the historian, reports that in their fright the inhabitants of Byzantium, abandoning their city, gathered in the countryside, “They kept praying to beg that the city be spared total destruction: they were in no lesser danger themselves, because of the movements of the earth that nearly engulfed them, when a miracle quite unexpected and going beyond all credence, filled them with admiration.”

  In the midst of the entire crowd, a child was suddenly taken up by a strong force, so high into the air that they lost sight of him. After this he came down as he had gone up, and told Patriarch Proclus, the Emperor himself, and the assembled multitude that he had just attended a great concert of the Angels hailing the Lord in their sacred canticles.

  Angels or Aliens? Many contemporary reports of abductions involve ordinary humans caught up by a strange force that alters their reality in drastic ways and causes them to report contact with other forms of consciousness, or even with a totally alien world.

  Acacius, bishop of Constantinople, states, “The population of the whole city saw it with their eyes.” And Baronius, commenting upon this report, adds the following words:

  “Such a great event deserved to be transmitted to the most remote posterity and to be forever recorded in human memory through its mention every year in the ecclesiastical annals. For this reason the Greeks, after inscribing it with the greatest respect into their ancient Menologe, read it publicly every year in their churches.”

  Over the centuries many extraordinary events have taken place and chroniclers have transmitted them to “the most remote posterity.”

  We are that posterity.

  It is our responsibility to assess the data they have transmitted to us. Upon their authority and their accuracy rest our concept of history and our vision of the world.

  Four major conclusions

  The authors of the present book have performed such a study. While we make no claim that any of the events we have uncovered “proves” anything about flying objects from alien worlds, or influence by non-human intelligences, we have emerged with four major observations:

  1. Throughout history, unknown phenomena variously described as prodigies or celestial wonders, have made a major impact on the senses and the imagination of the individuals who witnessed them.

  2. Every epoch has interpreted the phenomena in its own terms, often in a specific religious or political context. People have projected their worldview, fears, fantasies, and hopes into what they saw in the sky. They still do so today.

  3. Although many details of these events have been forgotten or pushed under the colorful rug of history, their impact has shaped human civilization in important ways.

  4. The lessons drawn from these ancient cases can be usefully applied to the full range of aerial phenomena that are still reported and remain unexplained by contemporary science.

  Whether we like it or not, history and culture are often determined by exceptional incidents. Stories about strange beings and extraordinary events have always influenced us in an unpredictable fashion. Our vision of the world is a function of the old myths with which we have grown familiar, and of new myths we pick up along the way.

  The importance and antiquity of myths was noted by anthropologist of religion Mircea Eliade in Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities:

  “What strikes us first about the mythology and folk-lore of the “magical flight” are their primitivity and their universal diffusion. The theme is one of the most ancient motifs in folk-lore: it is found everywhere, and in the most archaic of cultural strata…. Even where religious belief is not dominated by the “ouranian” gods [those of the sky], the symbolism of the ascent to heaven still exists, and always expresses the transcendent.”

  Yet the lessons from the past are often forgotten. An examination of contemporary cults centered on the belief in extraterrestrial visitations shows that the modern public is still willing to jump to conclusions every time a UFO incident is reported, anxious as people are to follow instructions that appear to come from above. Even in these early years of the 21st century, we observe a continuing process through which the myths of humankind become implemented as social and political realities. We are the witnesses and the victims of that process.

  Alien contact: mankind’s oldest story

  Most “experts” in the study of UFOs in the context of popular culture, state that visitations by “flying saucers” started after World War II. It is traditional for UFO books and television documentaries to begin with the statement that the Flying Saucer Era began on June 24, 1947, when an American businessman and pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported a series of unidentified flying objects over Mount Rainier, in the State of Washington. Even some well informed researchers have posed as an axiom (without citing any evidence) that the UFO phenomenon is a recent historical occurrence—“apparently no more than two centuries old” in the words of one American writer. This late date is consistent with the idea that UFOs are extraterrestrial spacecraft bent on studying or inspecting the Earth, perhaps as a result of the atomic explosions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  In contrast, if the phenomenon has existed in fairly constant form for a very long time, it becomes harder to hold to a simplistic “ET visitation” scenario to explain it.

  Indeed, many documents point to the very ancient nature of the observations. In a recent book on abductions a Canadian researcher, Dr. Persinger, has observed that “for thousands of years and w
ithin every known human culture, normal individuals have reported brief and often repeated ‘visitations’ by humanoid phenomena whose presence produced permanent changes within the psychological organization of the experient. When these phenomena were labeled as deities the “messages” were employed to initiate religious movements that changed the social fabric of society.”

  Historical scholarship reinforces the latter view. In a book entitled Out of this World: Otherworldly Journeys from Gilgamesh to Albert Einstein (Boston: Shambhala, 1991) Professor Couliano, editor in chief of the journal Incognita and professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, has made it clear that the observation of UFOs and abductions by beings from beyond the Earth is mankind’s oldest story. Couliano asserts on the basis of ethnosemiotics that “human beings had beliefs concerning other worlds long before they could write” and that “the most ancient documents of humankind and the study of its most ‘primitive’ cultures…both show that visits to other worlds were top priorities.” He defines the basic question in terms similar to those used by modern abductionists: “Where did those people who pretended to travel to another world actually go?”

  It is impossible to catalogue the information accumulated by Couliano, who cautions us that he barely scratched the surface: “To collect all historical documents referring to otherworldly journeys is a gigantic task, a task that has never been undertaken before.” Clear examples of this material cover every culture, from eastern Melanesia (where living people had access to a netherworld called Panoi, either in body or in spirit) to Mesopotamia, the source of abundant material about otherworldly journeys. In a typical example Etana, king of Kish, makes an ascent to the sky in order to bring down a plant that cures childlessness—that reference to the theme of reproduction again. “Along with Etana we move from heaven to heaven and see the land underneath becoming smaller and smaller, and the wide sea like a tub,” a classic abductee statement.

  Otherworldly beings, celestial vehicles

  While some individuals in antiquity have allegedly left the Earth by non-physical means, many were said to be taken away by beings that actually used flying vehicles, variously described in the language of their time and culture. Taoists often describe such vehicles involved with “dragons.” Thus K’u Yuan, about 300 BC, wrote a poem about the experience of flying over the Kun-lun Mountains of China in a chariot drawn by dragons and preceded by Wang-Shu, the charioteer of the moon. Modern ufologists might characterize this description as a “screen memory,” where the mind of the percipient is assumed to replace the awesome vision of a space being with a more familiar human or animal. Under their interpretation, such a story resembles a classic abduction, in which a human is captured by space beings who take their victim away in an interplanetary craft. But the Taoist literature goes further, describing a ritual in which otherworldly entities are actually invited and come down to Earth in order to meet the celebrant.

  At the end of the ritual “they mount the cloud chariot, and the team of cranes takes off.” The cloud chariots are reminiscent of the “cloudships” seen over southern France in the ninth century, to which Archbishop Agobard of Lyon devoted part of one of his books. Saint Agobard had to preach to the crowd to dissuade the citizens of Lyon from killing four individuals, “three men and one woman” who had alighted from one of these cloudships, alleged to have come from Magonia, a magical land in the sky.

  The Middle East is one of the most fertile sources for such early stories. Ezekiel was transported by the “wheels within wheels” of his vision to a far away mountain in a state of stupor. The testament of Abraham tells us he was given a heavenly tour by Archangel Michael in his chariot. In Jewish mysticism such descriptions sound like actual physical observations, witness the experience of Rabbi Nehuma ben Hakana: “When I caught sight of the vision of the Chariot I saw a proud majesty, chambers of chambers, majesties of awe, transparencies of fear, burning and flaming, their fires fire and their shaking shakes.”

  In the words of Couliano, “All Jewish apocalypses (a word that means revelation, uncovering) share a framework in which the individual is accompanied by an angelic guide, the revelation is obtained in dialogue form, multiple levels of heaven are visited…”

  Enoch ascends through the sky in a chariot of fire. The Slavonic Book of Enoch gives additional details about his abduction: Enoch was asleep on his couch when two angels looking like oversized men came and took him on a heavenly trip. Similarly, Elijah goes to heaven without dying. Couliano adds that “a third one might have been abducted to heaven as well, for ‘no one knows the place of his burial to this day’, that one is Moses.” Also in the Mediterranean region, Muslim stories of the Mi’Raj recount the ascent of Prophet Muhammad to heaven, while the Greeks have preserved the records of the travels in space of Phormion of Croton and Leonymus of Athens. Heraclides himself (circa 350 BC) was fascinated by air travel, otherworldly journeys and knowledge of previous incarnations.

  Similar imagery can be found (under the guise of a “journey of the soul”) in the Mithraic Paris codex, where we are told that the great God Helios Mithra “ordered that it be revealed by his archangel, that I alone may ascend into heaven as an inquirer and behold the universe…It is impossible for me, born mortal, to rise with the golden brightnesses of the immortal brilliance. Draw in breath from the rays, drawing up three times as much as you can, and you will see yourself being lifted and ascending to the height, so that you seem to be in mid-air.”

  The text goes on: “The visible gods will appear through the disk of gold…and in similar fashion the so-called ‘pipe,’ the origin of the ministering wind. For you will see it hanging from the sun-disk like a pipe…and when the disk is open you will see the fireless circle, and the fiery doors shut tight. Then open your eyes and you will see the doors open and the world of gods which is within the doors.”

  An invocation follows: “Hail, o Guardians of the pivot, o sacred and brave youths, who turn at one command the revolving axis of the vault of heaven, who send out thunder and lightning, and jolts of earthquakes and thunderbolts…” Similar beliefs appear throughout American Indian cultures. Thus Lowell John Bean reports (in the book California Indian Shamanism, Menlo Park: Ballena Press 1992) that “souls and ghosts transcended the space between worlds,” while “some humans, through ecstatic experience, were able to transport themselves to the other worlds or to bring from them supernatural power.”

  Physical interpretations

  Couliano spends more time speculating about possible physical interpretations of the material he studies than ufologists preoccupied with modern abduction claims. In a chapter entitled “A Historian’s Kit for the Fourth Dimension,” he cites Charles Howard Hinton, Robert Monroe, Charles Tart, Ouspensky, and Einstein, and observes that “Physics and mathematics are to be held responsible to a large extent for the return of interest in mystical ways of knowledge.”

  If the soul is a “space shuttle,” as religious tradition and folklore seem to suggest, does it follow special laws of physics yet to be discovered? And what conclusion can we draw from the multiplicity of current representations of other worlds? Simply that we live in a state of advanced other-world pluralism, where the “coarse hypothesis of a separable soul” is becoming obsolete. New models of mind, “inspired by cybernetics and artificial intelligence, are replacing the old ones.”

  Later in his analysis Couliano remarks that “science itself has opened amazing perspectives in the exploration of other worlds, and sometimes in other dimensions in space. Accordingly, our otherworldly journeys may lead to parallel universes or to all sorts of possible or even impossible worlds.”

  It is to such a journey that we invite the reader.

  Return to Magonia

  Forty years ago a book entitled Passport to Magonia (subtitled “From Folklore to Flying Saucers”) documented the parallels between contemporary sightings of “Aliens” and the behavior of beings mentioned in ancient times, often interpreted as gods, ang
els, or devils. They were the “Daimons” of Greek antiquity, the “Little People” of the Celtic fairy-faith, the elves and gnomes of Paracelsian tradition, the familiars of the witchcraft era. They flew through the air in various devices such as spheres of light. They abducted humans, had sexual intercourse with them, showed them visions of parallel worlds, and gave them messages that changed history.

  Passport to Magonia shocked many UFO believers, because it questioned the simplistic “extraterrestrial” origin of the phenomenon, calling for a more complex interpretation where symbolic and cultural factors added another layer to the mythical dimension of the observations. Yet the book was based on preliminary data and scanty documentary evidence. Its claims were subject to interpretation and criticism from many angles.

  In the last 40 years much has happened to strengthen this research. Several teams of historians, anthropologists, folklore specialists and philologists have entered the field. Their work has deepened and broadened the investigation of these ancient themes. The advent of powerful Internet search engines, followed by a worldwide movement to make historical archives available online, has amplified the ability of interested amateurs and professionals alike to make important contributions to the work. The result of this massive cooperative effort is astounding.

  Anyone who doubts that descriptions of unusual aerial phenomena and the entities associated with them have made a major impact on human history and culture only has to browse through this book – purposely restricted to 500 prominent cases between Antiquity and the Age of Flight – to realize what wonderful events they’ve been missing.