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Jacques Vallee
This nOde last updated January 2nd, 2003 and is permanently morphing...
(3 Cauac (Storm Cloud) / 12 K'ank'in - 159/260 - 12.19.9.15.19)

"I'm speaking specifically of the post-World War II spinning silver disc in the sky, and the accompanying myth of the pointed-eared, cat-eyed aliens.  This myth has numerous variations, but it's clearly an idea complex emerging in the collective psyche.  The question is, what is it?  Is it prophecy?  Is it a vision of the human future?  What is it?  The postmodern phase of UFO speculation recognizes that the UFO is no mere light seen in the sky, but that it is somehow mixed up with human psychology.  Researchers have determined that people who have seen UFOs were in many cases thinking about something very odd and unusual immediately prior to the sighting.  The UFO seemed to act as a kind of ideological catalyst for some purpose.  Jacques Vallee was the first person to suggest what I would call the "cultural thermostat theory" of UFOs, in a book called _The Invisible College_.  He proposed that the flying saucer is an object from the collective unconscious of the human race that appears in order to break the control of any set of ideas that are gaining dominance in their explanatory power at the expense of ethics.  It is a confounding that enters history again and again whenever history builds to a certain kind of boil. "

        - Terence Mckenna - _Archaic Revival_

In his classic study _Passport to Magonia_, Jacques Vallee traces many motifs of UFO lore to the legends, religious texts, and historical accounts of premodern times.  In the ninth century the Archbishop of Lyons mentions the widespread popular belief in manned floating ships; a twelfth-century Japanese record describes a strange "earthenware vessel" flying around Mount Fukuhara; a medieval Irish account claims that a cloudship got its anchor stuck on a church door.  Vallee draws particularly striking connetions between alien abductions and the fairy lore compiled in ethnographies like Robert Kirk's seventeenth-century _Secret Commonwealth_ and Evans-Wentz's massive _The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries_.  In a more than trivial sense, E.T. is only the latest in a procession of fauns, satyrs, leprechauns, incubi, and other spectral critters who have peered through the windows of the human soul, especially when that soul finds itself in a twilight zone where the borders between phantasm and fact not so tightly policed.
- Erik Davis - _Techgnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism In The Age Of Information_p. 228

FIVE REASONS WHY UFOs ARE NOT EXTRATERRESTRIAL MACHINES

Regardless of what mainstream science thinks of them, UFO observations continue to pile up---by the tens of thousands. In fact, like the Crop Circles  events, UFO reports are increasing in number and strangeness. It doesn't matter that the UFOs and their alleged occupants may not be physically real. There are tens of thousands of people who think that they have observed something strange --- even after all hoaxes and misinterpretations of natural phenomena have been culled out. Most of those who are willing to accept UFOs as valid phenomenon think they are real hardware piloted by extraterrestrials.

J. Vallee, a computer scientist and prolific writer on the subject, demurs, and he gives five reasons why:

"(1) Unexplained close encounters are far more numerous than required for any physical survey of the earth; (2) The humanoid body structure of the alleged 'aliens' is not likely to have originated on another planet and is not biologically adapted to space travel; (3) The reported behavior in thousands of abduction reports contradicts the hypothesis of genetic or scientific experimentation on humans by an advanced race; (4) The extension of the phenomenon throughout recorded history demonstrates that UFOs are not a contemporary phenomenon; and (5) The apparent ability of UFOs to manipulate space and time suggests radically different and richer alternatives."

If not extraterrestrial hardware, what are the UFOs? Vallee has three suggestions: (1) they are "earth lights" a la P. Devereux; that is, an unappreciated terrestrial phenomenon that impresses mental images on the minds of observers; (2) They are artifacts of a "control system" operated by a nonhuman intelligence or, perhaps, a Gaia like manifestation of supernature (of which we are a tiny part) that is trying to modify our behavior; and (3) They are apparitions caused by entities manipulating space and time; viz,. time travellers from our own past and/or future. (Vallee, Jacques F.; "Five Arguments against the Extraterrestrial Origin of Unidentified Flying Objects," Journal of Scientific Exploration, 4:105, 1990.)

• Anomalog:
  • Jacques Vallee on Crop Circles
  • UFO Researcher & Internet Catalyst Jacques Vallee Says Weblogs Will Save The Net

Dr. Jacques Vallee, a cyberneticist, asserts that, in addition to tens of thousands of laypersons who claim contact with extraterrestrials, there are more than 100 trained scientists in the US alone who have had that experience.  Dr. Jack Sarfatti, who is one of the 100 and who has come out of the closet about it, says that the entities may be extraterrestrials or time travelers or something for which science has yet no label.
  - Robert Anton Wilson - _The Illuminati Papers_ 

So reality is like a computer database in that the right search word or "incantation" might cause a piece of information--a UFO or ghost or other anomaly--to materialize.  If you think of [reality] as the software for the universe, all it would take is for someone to change a comma in the program and the chair you are sitting in wouldn't be a chair at all. The major benefit from this model is that it handles anomalies very well.  Coincidences would be a normal expectation. If you address a database with a request for anything with the word "pool" you will get ads for sunscreen, lotions, billiard balls and an investment prospectus or two. In parapsychology, gifted subjects may be forcing similar coincidences between separate locations or separate minds. One way of testing the theory, by the way, is to create massive informational anomalies and see what happens when they collapse. You could enhance remote viewing experiments, for instance, by loading the site with large quantities of data about highly unlikely events or situations, then quickly erase that data to collapse the singularity.- Jacques Vallee

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