Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (20 page)

It was a relief to be back in Paris.
He loved strolling along the Seine and looking at the bookstalls.
His interest in UFOs had always run parallel with an interest in mysticism, hermeticism and alchemy.
(Hynek himself was deeply interested in these subjects, and was a Rudolf Steiner enthusiast.) And his study of the history of UFOs since biblical times had made him aware that some knowledge of the past was essential to understanding the phenomenon.
At the end of August 1966, he picked up a copy of Paracelsus, the magician and scientist who lived in the early sixteenth century.
Most scientists would have dismissed Paracelsus as a would-be scientist who was gullible enough to be taken in by the magical superstitions of his time.
But Vallee’s years of studying UFO sightings had made him less dismissive.
He was struck by Paracelsus’s comment on gnomes:

‘They can appear at will small or tall, handsome or ugly .
.
.
Think twice before becoming allied with them.
As soon as you are linked to them, you have to do their bidding.
When they are angry they inflict heavy penalties.
Sometimes they kill.
There are proofs of it’.
Vallee underlined these last (italicised) sentences.

In fact, Vallee was encountering many cases that would have been described in the Middle Ages as encounters with supernatural beings.
The experience of Eugenio Douglas is typical.
In October 1963, he was driving a truck through heavy rain near Islaverda, Argentina, when a blinding light forced him to slow down.
When he stopped the truck, the light vanished.
But farther down the road he encountered a disc-shaped craft, thirty-five metres high, from which three giant figures wearing luminous clothes and strange helmets emerged—Douglas estimated them at twelve feet tall.
A red beam came from either the craft or the entities, and burnt him.
Douglas fired back with a rifle, then fled.
The red beam followed him to the village of Montemaiz, where the street lighting was affected.
Douglas took shelter in a house, whose own lights were flickering; both he and the occupants noted a strong smell.

The next day, Douglas was suffering from radiation burns.
And, back at the site where he had seen the ‘giants’, he found footprints twenty inches long.

Paracelsus had remarked that there were four main orders of supernatural being—nymphs, dwarfs, sylphs, and salamanders—but added that giants should also be included.
The Douglas encounter seemed a case in point.

In November, back in Chicago, Vallee and Hynek went to Boulder, Colorado, to meet the Condon team.
The next day, Hynek addressed them, telling them the whole story of Project Blue Book, and occasionally requesting that the tape recorder should be switched off while he told them things that he would prefer off the record.
Vallee then gave a talk suggesting how the computer might be used in UFO investigations.
All went well, and, when Hynek gave a press conference, there was a general air of congratulation, as if he had finally been vindicated after years of trying to get UFOs taken seriously.
But, when a Denver newspaper reported it next day, it merely stated that Hynek had announced that there had been no ‘hardware’, no tangible evidence of saucer visits.

Vallee’s journal makes it clear that he was becoming increasingly disillusioned with Hynek.
Hynek turned up an hour late for a meeting with Vallee’s publisher, returned some phone calls, made a few distracted remarks, then rushed off, saying he’d be back later.
Vallee commented, ‘How I miss the days when he was not such a celebrity .
.
.
Media men hire Allen as they would hire a guitar player.
He rushes wherever he sees a spotlight, and if the spotlight moves, he moves with it’.

He was also becoming deeply disillusioned with the Condon Committee.
Hearing about Roy Craig’s encounter with the saw-whet owl, he commented, ‘In [Fred Beckman’s] opinion the owl explanation is a joke.
A friend of his, who has done his own enquiry with the local civil defense authorities, has found out that high-quality recordings were made which show artificial signal patterns’.
He was even less happy with Hynek’s dismissal of the Stephen Michalak encounter in Winnipeg on the grounds that it was a one-witness sighting, pointing out reasonably that Michalak’s burns proved he had encountered
something.

In June 1967, Vallee noted with disgust that, while a wave of UFO sightings was taking place in America, the Condon Committee merely argued, dreamt and theorised, while its chief administrator, Robert Low, proposed to use a research grant to go to an astronomical conference in Prague, where he would be joined by Hynek.

One day when Hynek was away on holiday, Vallee went to his house to sort through the air force files, and found a chaos of unfiled material; he took this away, and proceeded to sort it out.
In among this, Vallee found a letter that left no doubt that the air force had been in favour of a cover-up since the initiation of Project Blue Book in 1952.

What had happened was that when the whole country was talking about flying saucers, which had even flown over Washington, the public urgently wanted to know what was going on.
So the CIA decided to convene a panel, under the chairmanship of a physicist, Dr.
H.
P.
Robertson.
Hynek was a very junior adviser.

The Robertson Panel sat for five days, looked at film of UFOs, and discussed the evidence at length.
The panel eventually concluded that most UFO sightings were meteorological phenomena or misidentification of aeroplanes, planets, etc., and that they posed no threat to national security.
Therefore, the panel recommended (in January 1953), future UFO reports should be debunked.
It also recommended that civilian UFO groups, like the Lorenzens’ APRO and Keyhoe’s NICAP, should be ‘monitored’ (i.e., spied upon) because of their influence on public opinion.
Hynek was unhappy about this, but was then too uninfluential to make his views felt.

Now Vallee went on to uncover a letter in the files that left no possible doubt that the air force was engaged in a ‘disinformation’ operation.
This letter, headed ‘Secret’, and dated three days before the panel was due to meet, noted that certain areas in America had an abnormally high number of UFO sightings, and recommended that such areas should have observation posts with radar, cameras, etc.
So far, its advice was unexceptionable.
But it then went on to recommend that ‘many different types of aerial activity should be secretly and purposefully scheduled’ within such areas.

The careful monitoring of every possible unknown flying object would enable the air force to learn precisely which objects
were
flying saucers.
But it would also enable the air force to debunk the thousands of public sightings that would inevitably occur, explaining that the air force was operating in that area.
Moreover, said the letter, ‘reports for the last five years could be re-evaluated’—in other words, past UFO sightings could also be debunked.
In this way, the great American public could be reassured—and, of course, deceived.

When Vallee later met two members of the Condon Committee, he asked what had happened about the Stephen Michalak case, and was told that the investigator had ‘brought back some data’.
Vallee was not told that Roy Craig had decided not to wait around for Michalak’s identification of the UFO landing site because he had decided that Michalak was a fraud.

One of the committee members, Mary-Lou Armstrong, told Vallee frankly that they were not interested in field investigations.
They were at present pursuing a theory propounded by one of their members, a psychologist name Wertheimer, that motorists only
thought
their headlights failed when they saw a UFO, because they were blinded by the ball lightning, and failed to realise that their headlights were on .
.
.

In fact, Mary-Lou Armstrong would resign from the committee in disgust.
The other committee member who was present that day with Vallee was Norman Levine, who was sacked for showing McDonald the famous cover-up letter from Low.

Fred Beckman, one of Vallee’s closest associates, summarised the problem of the Condon Committee when he said, ‘The public is expecting serious answers from a committee of experts.
Yet the truth is, these people won’t even take the trouble to become superficially familiar with the problem’.

What he meant, quite simply, was that the basic weakness in the approach of the Condon Committee lay in the assumption that all that was needed was a group of intelligent and honest men.
This is rather like setting up a panel to investigate whether the Big Bang theory deserves to be taken seriously, and choosing professors of English rather than physicists.
The assessment of UFO phenomena requires, at the very least, an extensive knowledge of UFO reports.
The members of the Condon Committee simply did not possess this knowledge—or try to acquire it.
Vallee and Hynek had studied thousands of cases; the Condon Committee studied a case only when it was drawn to their attention.

In the autumn of 1967, disillusioned with America, and the direction UFO research was taking, Vallee returned again to France, and took a job in Paris.
He disliked de Gaulle’s France almost as much as Lyndon Johnson’s America, yet found that Paris moved him in a way Chicago never could.
He was in Paris for the students’ uprising of May 1968.
And on the day the strikes ended, 15 June 1968, he returned home with a pile of second-hand books, and recorded in his journal the idea for a book drawing a parallel between UFO phenomena and the medieval tradition about fairies, elves and elementals.
The writing of
Passport to Magonia
went fast—even though he was writing in English—and, by 12 September 1968, it was completed—together with a list of reports of over 900 saucer landings.
Vallee felt that this was a book that he could never have written in America; the subject had somehow needed the deeper intellectual roots of Europe.
Yet as soon as he had finished it, he returned to America—this time, for good.
Comparing America to France in his journal, Vallee wrote:

On the one side is the great creative wind of freedom, the immense potential of America.
When I look for something to put in the balance on the French side, what comes to mind is not science or art .
.
.
but the humble street scenes—that old woman I passed in the rue de la Verrerie, for instance, whose hand was shaking so much she could hardly hold her grocery bag .
.
.

(from Forbidden Science, 1996)

So America won.
He went back taking Papus’s
Practise of Magic,
Flammarion’s
Invisible World
and Margaret Murray’s
God of the Witches.

So
Passport to Magonia
is, on one level, a kind of nostalgic homage to Europe.
The title is taken from a passage in the writings of the nineteenth-century Archbishop Agobard of Lyons, who speaks harshly of people who believe that there is a country in the sky called Magonia ‘from which ships sail in the clouds’.
Agobard tells how three men and a woman were dragged before him by a crowd who claimed the strangers had descended from one of these airships, and demanded that they be stoned to death.
Agobard states briefly, ‘But truth prevailed’—meaning, evidently, that he told them not to be stupid, that people did not descend out of airships.
Presumably the four men and women were the first recorded ‘abductees’.

Vallee then quotes St.
Anthony’s circumstantial account of his encounter with a friendly ‘elemental’, and philosophers like Paracelsus, who believed that there is a whole class of beings between the gods and humanity.
Vallee goes on to speak of the scholar Jerome Cardan, whose father recorded how, on 13 August 1491, seven men ‘appeared to him’, dressed in garments like silken togas, who claimed to be ‘men composed of air’, and told him their age was three hundred years.
Cardan’s father recorded that they stayed with him for three hours, and engaged in lengthy theological discussion.
One of them explained that God created the world from moment to moment, and that, if he desisted even for a second, the universe would disappear.

The account sounds preposterous—but not more preposterous than hundreds of modern tales of encounters with ‘extraterrestrials’, many of whom sound very much like traditional angels.

And what should we make of a story of the poet Goethe, who describes in his autobiography how, on the road from Leipzig to Frankfurt, he passed a sort of amphitheatre by the road in which there were hundreds of lights, some of which moved around, while others were stationary?
Goethe was unable to stop and investigate—he was walking uphill behind the coach—but wondered whether they were will-o’-the-wisps or ‘a company of luminous creatures’.
But ‘will-o’-the-wisp’ (or jack-o’-lantern) is another name for methane—Hynek’s swamp gas—which can ignite spontaneously, and it is obviously impossible that a whole amphitheatre could have been full of exploding methane.