Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (30 page)

Vallee would continue to develop and change his typologies, but his efforts would eventually be superseded by the classification model Hynek developed for the Center for UFO Studies (CUFO), which he then published in his
The UFO Experience
(1972). This system would be made world famous through Spielberg's adoption of it in his movie title
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
(Hynek was a consultant for Spielberg and makes a close-up cameo appearance in the final landing scene). There were three kinds of close encounter (CE) for Hynek: close encounters between human and alien of the first kind (CE1), in which there is visual contact but no interaction is experienced; close encounters of the second kind (CE2), in which there is interaction but of an abstract kind (for example, car ignition failure or radiation burns, as portrayed early in the Spielberg movie); and close encounters of the third kind (CE3), in which aliens or humanoids are clearly seen. Hynek was never comfortable with what would become the category of close encounters of the fourth kind (CE4), as in an abduction or onboard experience, which is how Spielberg's movie really ends, at the base of Devil's Tower in Wyoming—the new mountain of revelation. As for his part, Vallee would not only accept the necessity of this fourth category as a phenomenological descriptor; he would also add a fifth, that is, close encounters of the fifth kind (CE5), in which humans are physically harmed (or, ironically, healed) in some lasting way by the encounter.
²⁵

Space prevents me (forgive the pun) from treating the rest of
Anatomy of a Phenomenon
or its quick sequel,
Challenge to Science
, which picks up on the cultural histories, statistical analyses, and scientific reflections of the first book to advance the thesis of extraterrestrial contact further still and to develop a new typology. It is worth noting here, though, that this second book features a symbolically significant foreword by J. Allen Hynek. In it, Hynek writes of looking for the “signal” in all the “noise” of the UFO accounts and compares this detection work to Madame Curie searching through tons of pitchblende in order to isolate a tiny amount of radium, even a bit of which, of course, changed the world's conception of matter forever. Hynek remains open to whether their own signal in the noise is of a physical or psychological nature, “or even a heretofore unknown phenomenon” (as we have already seen, this
tertium quid
or “thought of the third” occurs throughout the literature of the impossible). But he had concluded
that
there is indeed radium in the pitchblende and that “it is in every respect a challenge to science.”
²⁶
Challenge to Science
picks up on such opening thoughts to, well . . . challenge science. Vallee's general methodology and intellectual orientation, however, remained largely scientific. It was essentially science challenging science, though. This would soon change.

The Vallees moved backed to France in the fall of 1967 and settled in Saint-Germain. There Jacques quickly became disillusioned with his own little bourgeois dreams. He began to feel as if he were running away from his vision and vocation: “In which time, on which scale do I want to live? Back in the United States, Saturn rockets are climbing straight up in the sky. And here I am, wondering if I will ever own a little cottage of my own someday” (FS 1:331). He also realized that there was a real mental and cultural gap between the French and the Americans, and that the future with which he identified was being lived in America, not in France (FS 1:336).

The Vallees would soon move back to the States, first to New Jersey in November of 1968, and then, in December of 1969, to that “secret California where everything is crashing through the old barriers” (FS 1:283). But not before Vallee had had something of a revelation within the occult bookstores of Paris and the old French and Latin documents of the Bibliothéque Nationale. He bought boxes of rare esoteric books and added them to his UFO library. He encountered the books of Charles Fort for the first time. In the summer of 1968, he visited Scotland, the country of the Little People and the Good Neighbors, as he liked to call the land after its local legends. He had begun applying for a passport, not yet back to the States, but to a truly impossible place called Magonia.

Passport
to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers (1969)

It was neither
Anatomy of a Phenomenon
nor
Challenge to Science
that came to represent the deeper worldview of Jacques Vallee. It was
Passport to Magonia
. This third book represented a major shift in Vallee's thinking about UFOs, and it is in many ways the most important in his corpus. It is certainly the most iconic. As the book's subtitle—
From Folklore to Flying Saucers—
suggests, Vallee effectively argues in these pages that the modern flying saucer cannot be understood without taking into account the striking parallels that exist between the bizarre behavior of contemporary UFOs and the earlier appearances of various occult beings in the history of folklore, magic, witchcraft, and religion: angels, demons, elves, fairies, sylphs, Little People, leprechauns, elementals, succubae and incubi—that
sort
of thing. This basic parallelism between traditional folklore and the UFO phenomenon, which he would soon enrich and radicalize further in his next book with what he calls “the psychical component,” is Vallee's grandest comparison and signal contribution to the subject.

Such a folklore approach was not entirely new. As Thomas E. Bullard points out, the attempt to relate ancient mythology and UFOs goes back to the origins of the ufological literature, which was rife with interpretation of things like the Hindu
vimanas
or mythical sky “vehicles” representing ancient spaceships. There are many forms of this “ancient astronaut” thesis, some of them perfectly outrageous, some of them oddly suggestive, if never quite entirely persuasive.

Even an elite figure like Carl Sagan could speculate very seriously about a “central Galactic information repository,” with advanced civilizations employing starships in order to explore the Milky Way and monitor the evolution of life and culture within different solar systems. He calculated how often each technical civilization might be visited by another in such a scenario: about once every thousand years. He imagined “colonies of colonies of colonies,” and he deftly used the mythical memories of contact with European colonizers from North America and sub-Sahara Africa in order to suggest that other “contact myths” may encode ancient encounters with galactic astrononauts, who “would probably be portrayed as having godlike characteristics and possessing supernatural powers.” After teasing his readers with an utterly bizarre ancient fresco from central Sahara depicting, in the words of a French archaeologist, “the great Martian god” (just a human in ritual mask and costume, we are reassured), Sagan zeroes in on a series of Sumerian myths as particularly suggestive of extraterrestrial contact. “Sumerian civilization is depicted by the descendents of the Sumerians themselves to be of non-human origin,” he writes. “A succession of strange creatures appears over the course of several generations. Their only apparent purpose is to instruct mankind. Each knows of the mission and accomplishments of his predecessors. When a great inundation threatens the survival of the newly introduced knowledge among men, steps are taken to insure its preservation.” As for the gods themselves, they are associated with individual stars, the cuneiform symbols for
god
and
star
being identical.

“Such a picture is not altogether different from what we might expect if a network of confederated civilizations interlaced the Galaxy,” Sagan concludes, noting, of course, the hypothetical nature of his thought experiment. Then he immediately speculates about a possible interstellar base on the far side of the moon and suggests one possible reason for intervening
in
another planet's evolution: “to head off a nuclear annihilation.” These, of course, are all standard tropes in the ufological literature, not to mention science fiction, which Sagan also approvingly cites, this time in the person of Arthur C. Clarke.
²⁷

But Bullard recognizes that Vallee is doing something different here: in his terms now, Vallee's “message was actually subversive of this standard view and the beginning of a new perspective on UFOs, one that diminished them from the answer for all mysteries to just one offshoot of a large mystery encompassing religion, mythology, folklore, and paranormal experience.”
²⁸
This is exactly right. Vallee has shared with me that when he wrote
Passport
, he thought of himself as following in the footsteps of Charles Fort. “Let's face it, he was right.” Vallee, though, was especially interested in what Fort missed, how his method could be developed and advanced further.

He was also deeply influenced here by his training in advanced mathematics and his awareness that mathematical theorists commonly think about the impossible. Mathematical theory, Vallee explained to me, often has to confront the fact that two contradictory theories can explain the same data. A solution is inevitably found not by choosing one of the contradictory theories, but by going to the next, third level. Similarly, he remains convinced that the UFO phenomenon will never be solved by the believers or the rationalists. More or less exactly like Fort, he thinks that we have to reject the dogmatisms of both religion and science and confront the phenomenon
on its own terms
(in the study of religion, we would say that the phenomenon is
sui generis
, that is, “of its own genus” or “its own thing”). We cannot begin by assuming what UFOs are. We cannot begin by assuming that they can be reduced to normal physics or normal psychology. Obviously, they cannot be. They are their own thing.

Much like Myers and Fort before him, Vallee's is also a strong comparative method. He works with both hard and soft data—metal and chemical physical traces, photographs, spatial and temporal coordinates, medical reports, police investigations, and richly complex first-person narratives of sightings and abductions. He insists that the enigma of the UFO cannot be understood by restricting the data to, say, American cases, or European cases, or, for that matter—and this constitutes his real originality—to the second half of the twentieth century. Only a wide sweep through space and time can provide the broad comparative perspective necessary to decipher the mystery.

He thus sees his task as one of collection, classification, comparison, and, finally, theorization. The latter, moreover, must always remain open
and
tentative and, in the end, perhaps even literally impossible, for, as his friend and colleague Aimé Michel used to insist, a full theory may well be completely beyond the reach of the human brain with its present cognitive and sensory capacities. The reader might recall that Vallee had once debated with the older master on this very point in his first youthful letter. He appears to be coming around to his old friend's position now. He thus ended his most recent essay, in 2007, with the following lines from William Irwin Thompson:

We are like flies crawling across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: We cannot see what angels and gods lie underneath the threshold of our perceptions. We do not live in reality; we live in our paradigms, our habituated perceptions, our illusions; the illusions we share through culture we call reality, but the true historical reality of our condition is invisible to us.
²⁹

There is a double edge to such a line of thinking. One edge suggests that, as flies, we can never really know the meaning of the visions across which we crawl so ignorantly. The other suggests that, if we could fly back a bit and obtain a true historical consciousness, this might constitute a true gnosis, that is, an effective deliverance from culture and consciousness as they presently co-create (and co-constrict) themselves. We could see how consciousness and culture interact to create our experience of reality, which is never complete or entirely trustworthy. A truly radical historicism, that is, a knowledge of “the true historical reality of our condition,” would thus become
an awakening
.

Vallee suggests that flying saucers and folklore have something very important to teach us here. The lesson is not an easy one, however. For although UFOs are still quite real for Vallee in
Passport to Magonia
, they are no longer probably extraterrestrial, and they are almost certainly not literally true. They are not what they appear to be. Often, in fact, the stories, which really happened, are really absurd. Deception and absurdity, Vallee insists now with a growing conviction, are part of what the phenomenon is communicating, what it intends to teach us about the nature of our world. They are
designed
or even
staged
to confuse us, to baffle us, to shock us into another level of consciousness and culture, rather like the mystical paradoxes of Zen Buddhism and Jewish Kabbalah, Vallee suggests in an especially insightful aside (IC 27). Hence those humorous, nonsensical, but vaguely profound statements made by the occupants of the American “airship” wave of 1897, widely reported in the newspapers across the country. Here is one: “We are from Kansas.” Here is another: “We are from
ANYWHERE,
but we'll be in Cuba tomorrow” (IC 29). A technological koan in the sky. A metaphysical joke.

This is a different man writing in 1969, or perhaps it is the same man allowing himself to write now in a very different way. The statistics, databases, and scientific methodology of the two first books now float into the background, and a distinct and quite beautiful lyricism enters the text.
³⁰
This is how Jacques Vallee became an author of the impossible. This is how he opens and so offers to us a
Passport to Magonia
: