-Caveat Lector-
"THE ALIENIST" -- Interview with JACQUES VALLEE
<cont'd>
EDITOR'S REVELATION: In Part 1 of our interview with
UFO sleuth/computer conferencing pioneer Jacques Vallee, we
looked at some of the scientific evidence bolstering the
contention that UFOs are a real, measurable phenomenon. In Part
2, below, Vallee continues this theme as he talks about his
samples of "liquid sky" -- the metallic debris occasionally seen
ejected from flying disks.
Then hold on to your propeller beanie as we depart
four-dimensional time space and look at some of Vallee's more
exotic theories about the origin of UFOs. As Vallee puts it, "The
UFO phenomenon exists. It has been with us throughout history. It
is physical in nature and it remains unexplained in terms of
contemporary science. It represents a level of consciousness that
we have not yet recognized, and which is able to manipulate
dimensions beyond time and space as we understand them. It
affects our own consciousness in ways that we do not grasp fully,
and it generally behaves as a control system."
Vallee refers to this complex system of control --which
is shaping human society over the course of thousands of years--
as an "interface of reality with consciousness." I t sounds a lot
like Arthur C. Clarke's science fictional theme in "2001: A Space
Odyssey" -- an alien intelligence subtly directing the course of
human development, toward mysterious ends. Talk about your cosmic
conspiracies!
But Vallee also has controversial ideas about
human-made UFO conspiracies. "I was investigating some cases that
were physically real," he says, "but they were hoaxes -- yet not
hoaxes on the part of the witnesses."
The two most stunning cases of faked UFO events that
Vallee has uncovered occurred rather recently in the history of
saucer sightings. In 1980, a strange object purportedly "crashed"
in England's Rendlesham Forest, a few miles away from an American
Air Force Base. Dozens of military personnel were dispatched into
the forest, without weapons, before the supposed crash of a
luminous object. After the incident conflicting stories leaked to
the press and to civilian investigators, some of the leaks
apparently originating from the front office of the military
base. Vallee's conclusion --controversial among UFO believers who
insist that aliens touched down in Rendlesham Forest-- is that
"the event had all the earmarks of being staged for the benefit
of the witnesses, perhaps so that their psychological reactions
could be studied."
Even more bizarre is the information turned up by
French investigators in the wake of a bizarre 1979 abduction
case. An unemployed young man named Franck Fontaine disappeared
outside of his apartment one morning, reportedly after his
friends saw him enveloped in a luminous fog. After a week of
frenzied press coverage and a fruitless search by the
authorities, Fontaine turned up in a field outside the apartment
-- with no memory of his unusual experience. His friends insisted
he had been abducted by a UFO, and police investigators, though
they doubted that claim, found no other satisfactory explanation.
But as Vallee reports, investigators from GEPAN, the
French government's aerial phenomena study group, were led to an
official in the French Ministry of Defense who willingly
described the so-called UFO abduction as an "Exercise of General
Synthesis." What happened to Fontaine? "We put him to sleep and
he was put under an altered state of high suggestibility,"
replied the official. When asked if the "exercise" was intended
to test the investigative abilities of local law enforcement
agencies, the official said, "That would be a fair way to
describe it." Then he added, ominously, "If this operation had
been completed, the next phase would have been far worse." As
Vallee notes in his best-selling book, "Revelations," "It would
be fair to assume that the [Fontaine] operation could have been a
test, perhaps a prelude to an experiment of wider scope."
Vallee says he knows the name of the French official,
an Air Force officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
So what on earth --to pick an appropriate planet-- is
going on? Vallee has several theories that might explain such
UFO flimflam. The military may be experimenting with
psychological warfare techniques, as the Germans did in World War
I, when they projected images of the Virgin Mary on banks of
smoke in an effort to spook the French into saying their Rosaries
instead of killing Germans. Vallee also thinks that sham UFO
reports might be used as cover for tests of new military stealth
technology.
But the most troubling "deception theory" Vallee poses
is that from time to time, the target of UFO hoaxes might be the
general public, or a segment thereof.
"In some cases," he says, "the community of ufologists
may simply be used in a sociological experiment because they are
a convenient group of people to test, to see how they react to
different rumors."
Sounds a bit improbable, but Vallee's research into the
growth of UFO "contactee" cults is suggests that such
manipulation occurs. In his book, "Messengers of Deception,"
Vallee explored the rise of a new kind of religious movement
throughout the world: the UFO Messiah cults, in which believers
await the coming of bubble-headed saviors in saucers. You can
find these groups in Europe and the Americas, in increasing
numbers. Want a glimpse of this otherworldly subculture? Just
buzz into any of the alt.alien Usenet groups or enter the magic
word "UFO" into any World Wide Web search engine and see how fast
you're channeled into one of the most heavily trodden alternate
dimensions of online obsession since Big Brother went digital.
Listen to "Seth," the channeled alien being from
beyond; hear the Venusian commander known as Val Thor, who parks
his spaceship on Lake Mead near Las Vegas as if it were an
extraterrestrial houseboat (when he's not advising the Pentagon);
heed the warnings of the well-heeled "Rael," who speaks through a
French contactee and runs a worldwide organization.
According to Vallee, the French press has recently
reported that the notorious Order of the Solar Temple --in the
news last year after 53 members committed suicide in Switzerland
and Canada-- told its followers that the highest levels of
initiation involved meetings with extraterrestrial beings. The
cult used holographic projectors purchased in the United States
to fool its members. "As you may recall," says Vallee, "members
of the cult were educated people and professionals -- not crazy
kids on drugs."
So without further ado, we present Part 2 of the
Jacques Vallee interview: Liquid Sky
60GCAT: Let's talk about some of the other forms of hard evidence
that scientists can look at when studying the UFO problem. For
instance, chunks of molten metal, the so-called "liquid sky"
samples.
Vallee: On their own, these metal samples are not compelling
evidence. But the existence of this material does show that there
is data that scientists can look at. When we received the Bogota,
Columbia, sample [supposedly the remnants of a plume of liquid
slag ejected from a flying disk over the University of Bogota in
the mid-1970s] we sawed off one little corner for analysis. It
turned out to be mostly aluminum. Again, this doesn't prove
anything: you could make a hunk of this stuff in your backyard by
pouring molten metal into a pool of water. Metallurgically, the
Bogota sample is not that unusual -- except that it has gone
through a violent heating, not just up to a boiling point, but
beyond. My point has always been that it is interesting to see
what patterns emerge from analysis of enough of these samples. If
you kept picking up specimens like that, it might move your
research into a particular direction.
60GCAT: One theory is that this liquid metal is part of the UFOs'
propulsion system.
Vallee: There are [man-made] motors that use liquid metal
--usually mercury-- for liquid contact. But the temperatures
necessary for molten aluminum and other metals would have to be
quite extreme.
60GCAT: What about liquid sky samples that are of a slightly more
exotic makeup than the aluminum slag?
Vallee: The only one that's unusual is the one that Prof. Peter
Sturrock (a plasma physicist at Stanford University) has. It
comes from Ubatuba, Brazil. In the early 1930s, an object
exploded over a beach in Ubatuba. [In 1957, an alleged fragment
from the explosion turned up; its precise origin is uncertain.]
Subsequent analysis at the University and Colorado and Stanford
confirmed that the material was magnesium and magnesium oxide,
with a very minute amount of impurities. If the metal really did
originate in the 1930s, it would be very unusual because given
the technology of the day, someone would have had to go to a lot
of trouble to get it that pure.
The Cosmic Database
60GCAT: Let's talk about some of the implications of your
research. If the UFO phenomenon is real, but is not aliens from
outer space, we're talking about new ways of thinking about
reality and cosmology, aren't we?
Vallee: Yes. In that sense, phenomenon is much more important
than visitors from another planet would be. Because it
fundamentally challenges the nature of reality. If UFOs are a
physical reality, they certainly violate everything we think we
know about reality. There are reliable reports of material UFOs
that become immaterial and disappear on the spot.
60GCAT: Your theories about UFOs and other "paranormal" phenomena
involve your metaphor of the "informational universe," where time
and space and whatever other dimensions there might be act as a
kind of cosmic computer database. What do you mean by that?
Vallee: You can get a consistent representation of reality if you
look at the world as a collection of events, or 'instances' (as
the philosophy of Occasionalism did in the eleventh century),
rather than as a collection of material objects moving in
3-dimensional space as time flows. In virtual reality, of course,
you can't tell the difference. In the real world information and
energy are actually the same physical quantity. In a universe
viewed as 'informational events' you should expect coincidences,
telepathy, time travel, multiple realities -- all those things
that seem impossible in the 4-D energy universe. To me that's why
puzzles like UFOs are interesting. I don't have a personal theory
to "explain" them, but I see them as an opportunity to pose new
questions. If it's true that information resides in the questions
we ask, coming up with novel problems may be more important than
having answers, at this stage of our very limited understanding
of the universe.
60GCAT: 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.
Vallee: 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.
60GCAT: Of course, now we're talking about the intersection of
science and mysticism. Do you consider yourself a mystical
person?
Vallee: I have never been comfortable with an arbitrary
separation of the world into the physical universe (which is
presumably what science studies) and the psychological, social
and psychic side of life. To me that arbitrary separation is the
major weakness of our intellectual system.
Most scientists who decide to study astronomy at an early
age, as I did, are probably motivated by something akin to a
mystical desire to understand the night sky and to embrace the
larger issues. As time goes on, of course, that desire gets
eroded and trivialized. In my case I managed to keep that
curiosity fresh because although I haven't had a "mystical"
experience in a religious sense, I have always suspected that
there was another level of consciousness and that it was
accessible to the human mind. I have found similar feelings among
many Net programmers, who were drawn to networking by the
impression of operating outside the normal constraints of time
and space, something akin to what mystics describe, although of
course much more mundane.
<cont'd>
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