Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (31 page)

This book is an attempt to build a bridge—a tenuous and fragile one—between a fancy and a myth. It is not a scientific book. It could be called a philosophical book, if there were a philosophy of nonfacts. It is not a documentary, unless the dreams of children at play and the cries of women burned alive can be documented. Yet many lives have changed (secretly, unnoticeably sometimes), and, indeed, many innocents have been burned alive because of that fancy. This book is a tribute to all the people who dared preserve a dream. (PM vii)

Vallee intends to preserve that dream too. He also intends to extend, interpret, and theorize it, to perfect or realize it.

Central to this theorization that is also a realization is one core theme that he finds in his comparative data: “visitation by an aerial people from one or more remote, legendary countries” (PM viii). There are many names for what Fort had called his “New Lands,” but Vallee rhetorically and mythically privileges one of them: Magonia. Vallee adopts the name from one of his medieval countrymen in France, Archbishop Agobard of Lyons (779–840).
³¹
When he died, Agobard left an account of how he saved four people from being stoned by the locals when they, or so the locals believed, fell from such a place in the sky. Since the myth of Magonia is central to Vallee's literary imagination, the original ninth-century text,
De Grandine et Tonitruis
, is worth citing precisely as Vallee cites it. Archbishop Agobard relates the event in a skeptical, somewhat disgusted mood:

We have, however, seen and heard many men plunged in such great stupidity, sunk in such depths of folly, as to believe that there is a certain region, which they call Magonia, whence ships sail in the clouds, in order to carry back to that region those fruits of the earth which are destroyed by hail and tempests; the sailors paying rewards to the storm wizards and themselves receiving corn and other produce. Out of the number of those whose blind folly was deep enough to allow them to believe these things possible, I saw several exhibiting in a certain concourse of people, four persons in bonds—three men and a woman who
they
said had fallen from these same ships; after keeping them for some days in captivity they had brought them before the assembled multitude, as we have said, in our presence to be stoned. But truth prevailed.
³²

Sort of. Not everyone agreed with the archbishop's assessment of Magonia, including the later alchemists and the hermeticists, men whom Vallee praises as “remarkable for the strength of their independent thinking,” who belonged to “a major current of thought distinct from official religion” (PM 10). One such independent thinker appears in the occult novel and Rosicrucian classic named after this same central character,
Le Comte de Gabalis
(probably written by Abbé Montfaucon de Vilars). The count saw the former events of Magonia quite differently than the archbishop.

In vain the four innocents sought to vindicate themselves by saying that they were their own country-folk, and had been carried away a short time since by miraculous men [
hommes miraculeux
] who had shown them unheard-of marvels, and had desired to give them an account of what they had seen. The frenzied populace paid no heed to their defence, and were on the point of casting them into the fire, when the worthy Agobard, Bishop of Lyons, . . . came running at the noise, and having heard the accusations of the people and the defence of the accused, gravely pronounced that both one and the other were false. That it was not true that these men had fallen from the sky and that what they said they had seen there was impossible. . . . Thus the testimony of these four witnesses was rendered vain.
³³

Basically, what we have here is a ninth-century version of the modern alien abduction account, complete with a subsequent official denial by the major authority of the time, the church, and a later esoteric revisioning that worked to deny the ecclesial denial. Where Agobard saw religious impossibility and folk ignorance, Le Comte de Gabalis saw evidence of a real experience. Putting aside for a moment the historical truth of these events, which will forever elude us, it is easy to see Vallee's comparative point: the basic narrative of an aerial people visiting (or abducting) humanity is a very old and stable one. It is not a twentieth-century invention, although it now speaks our language. We have indeed morphed “from folklore to flying saucers.”

Vallee proceeds to demonstrate this basic comparative point through numerous themes. First and foremost among these are the similarities he noticed with the help of some unpublished notes of Evans-Wentz (an American folklorist specializing in the popular mystical traditions of
Tibet
and Scotland) between the fairy-faith of Celtic lore and contemporary ufology.
³⁴
“The recognition of a parallel between UFO reports and the main themes of fairy-lore is the first indication I have found that a way might exist out of this dilemma [of the UFO phenomenon],” Vallee explains (PM 111).

Vallee's method here is quite interesting. He begins with the hypothesis that
the absurd is meaningful
, that the dilemma signals new thought, that we should be looking for the cracks or glitches in the stories in order to begin divining their latent messages. Much like dreams, UFO accounts do not mean what they seem to mean. They point to something else, or to somewhere and somewhen else. They often have the quality of dreams, but they are also physical events. They look a lot like physical dreams. In my own terms, they are hermeneutical events, meaning events that share in both the mythical and the physical.

Hence Vallee hones in on some of the most bizarre features of contemporary UFO reports—like Joe Simonton being fed crispy pancakes on board a spaceship, with the pancakes as souvenirs to prove it no less—in order to highlight the inadequacy of a purely technological interpretation. Fairies too, after all, fed their guests (PM 25). They also abducted human beings for reproductive reasons, much as aliens are said to abduct human beings today for genetic ones (PM 105). Similarly, the manner in which UFOs are said to create circular landing patterns or “UFO nests,” as they are called, reminds Vallee of the fairy-rings and magic circles of Celtic lore (PM 32–38). Precognitive dreams announcing an alien encounter also function in both mythologies in very similar ways.
³⁵
Vallee concludes: “It would be nice to hold on to the common belief that the UFO's are craft from a superior space-civilization, because this is a hypothesis that science fiction has made widely acceptable” (PM 56). But this cannot be a complete answer. Why? Because the theory looks too much like a belief. It looks too much like the Celtic faith in fairies, or the medieval belief in lutins, or the Christian belief in demons, satyrs, and fauns. Or whatever. Put simply, Vallee locates the UFO phenomenon squarely in the history of religions, where the human witness “is the only tangible vehicle of the story” (PM 44).

Which is not to say that Vallee interprets the modern encounters strictly in traditional religious terms. Such an alien hermeneutic, after all, works
both
ways. That is, the traditional religious accounts can be read in “alien” ways just as easily as the modern alien accounts can be read in traditionally “religious” ways. The point is not to reduce one “false” register to the other “true” one. It is to confuse and destabilize
both
registers. Put more radically, the point is not to adopt this or that symbolic system as somehow literally
true.
The point is to be simultaneously sympathetic to and suspicious of
all
symbolic systems, and then finally to entertain the impossible possibility that the controlling intelligence communicating with us through all these systems is a human one, that is, a form of human consciousness far beyond our present, hopelessly materialistic and restrictive notions. We are not who we seem to be. We are alien to ourselves (PM 57). We are, quite literally,
fantastic
.

Vallee also wishes to make a historian's point, namely, that we have a very unique opportunity before us, an opportunity to observe and study folklore in the making. Note again Vallee's extraordinary synthesis of material and mythical realities:

When the phone rings in Wright-Paterson Air Force Base, and a local intelligence officer transmits the observation of a motorist who has just been “buzzed” by what he describes as a flying saucer, we are really witnessing the unique conjunction of the modern world—with its technology—and ancient terrors—with all the power of their sudden, fugitive, irrational nature. We are in a very privileged position. . . . We feel . . . that we can almost reach out into the night and grab those lurking entities. We are hot on their trail; the air is still vibrating with excitement, the smell of sulphur is still there when the story is recorded. (PM 78)

Sulphur indeed. We read, for example, of a “parallel universe” called Elfland where time operates in an Einsteinian fashion
way
before Einstein. And we meet a sylph who teaches a Renaissance scholar named Facius Cardan truths about the material nature of existence (as continuously created in every moment) that would fit nicely into a modern textbook on quantum physics, but “which antedates quantum theory by four centuries” (PM 101–2, 105–6, 163). Some of these are glitches, more damned facts, as Fort would say. Some of them, if true, seem more like huge rips in the fabric of our reality. This is how Vallee writes anyway. Impossibly.

And then there is the subject of the sexual. Thankfully, Vallee is a self-described “passionate man” who does not feel the usual American puritanical squeamishness about the subject (FS 1:101). Quite the contrary. “Thought and sex are the only human activities which are not totally ridiculous,” he wrote in the spring of 1959 (FS 1:31). He continued to write openly, gently, humorously about such intellectual-sexual connections. And to collect books. His library includes an entire section dedicated to the history of erotic mysticism and sexual magic, with everything from Aleister Crowley and Tantra to Wonder Woman. When I asked him about
this
particular collection, he explained to me that he understands the history of sexual magic through the esoteric categories of alchemy, that is, he understands the energies of the body to be mutable and, when alchemically transformed through technique or accident, as capable of granting access to different levels of consciousness.

It is also worth noting in this context that Vallee's beloved wife, Janine, appears in his journals, always beautifully and graciously. “Since September,” he writes on 22 February 1961, “I have been working on a new science-fiction novel entitled
Dark Satellite
. I am writing very fast, swept along by passion and Janine's kisses” (FS 1:41). Janine's presence would grow more and more central to his writing. She read all of his manuscripts—every line, every word. She was his constant critic and “guardian angel,” the skeptic he could always trust. It was Janine who prevented Jacques from ever getting too involved in ufology, “from ever slipping into a belief system,” as he put it to me.

Such personal details are also emblematic to the extent that they demonstrate a real appreciation for the demonstrable erotics of human life in all its multiple dimensions. It comes as no surprise, then, when Vallee insists that the sexual component is central to the alien narratives, and that it points again to the history of folklore and religion, this time to the folklore of witchcraft and sexual magic. Succubae enticing medieval mystics, fairy-women seducing men into a kind of parallel universe, and the witch's magical intercourse with the Devil or demons—these are all encountered again in the dramatic sexual episodes of the modern UFO encounters (PM 116–25). Vallee features what is probably the most famous case of such alien sexual encounters: the Brazilian episode of Antonio Villas-Boas, first reported in English in 1965 in three separate issues of
Flying Saucer Review
.
³⁶

On October 5, 1957, twenty-three-year-old Antonio Villas-Boas witnessed a powerful searchlight sweep the family corral in São Francisco de Salles, Minas Gerais. Ten nights later at about 1:00 a.m., as Antonio worked his night shift, what looked like a red star descended, floated above his International tractor, and landed. Four short, suited, and helmeted humanoids seized Antonio and took him aboard a ship, where, now joined by a fifth, they stripped him, washed his body with some sort of strange liquid gel (perhaps an antiseptic or an aphrodisiac), drew some blood from his chin, and left him in a room to wait . . . for a short, gorgeous woman, it turns out. She walked in stark naked, with large oblong blue eyes (“like the slit eyes of those girls who make themselves up fancifully to look like Arabian princesses”
³⁷
) and blondish-white hair, thin lips, a pointed chin, and a grunting sexual aggressiveness.

After
Antonio became aroused and the woman had had her way with him (“That was what they wanted of me—a good stallion to improve their stock”
³⁸
), another male humanoid came in. The woman gestured to her stomach, then to Antonio, smiled, pointed to the heavens, and left with the man. A series of events then followed, including a failed attempt on Antonio's part to steal a dial of some sort, after which Antonio was ushered out before the machine zipped off, like a bullet, toward the south. It was 5:30 a.m. He had spent four hours and fifteen minutes on board. Antonio later drew the ship in some detail, including an abstract script above the door. He also developed symptoms that suggested radiation poisoning.

The case of Barney and Betty Hill, a mixed-race couple from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is equally bizarre and equally important, as theirs is the first fully documented abduction account in the literature. John G. Fuller's
The Interrupted Journey
, which recounts the case in careful detail based on the hypnosis treatment of Dr. Benjamin Simon, is an undisputed classic in UFO studies.
³⁹
The event was not as sexualized as the Villas-Boas case, but it did involve classical (and absurdly primitive) surgical procedures that appear to carry reproductive connotations.