Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (35 page)

The
Alien Contact Trilogy and the Mature Multiverse Gnosis

Vallee, however, did not despair. In the late 1980s and early '90s, he published three more books on the subject of UFOs. These became his Alien Contact Trilogy:
Dimensions
came out in 1988,
Confrontations
in 1990, and
Revelations
in 1991. In 1992, he then published his early journals up to 1969,
Forbidden Science
, as well as a study of UFO sightings in the quickly collapsing U.S.S.R.,
UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union
, a subject connected to his earlier remote-viewing activities at SRI. Together these five books represent what we might call Vallee's mature position—a mature position, however, that was strikingly compatible with his earlier writings. In truth, he had not changed his mind in any significant way since
Passport
to
Magonia
and
The Invisible College
. He had, however, become more convinced of the multidimensionality of the cosmos; he had expanded his materials into Latin America and Russia; and he had become much more sanguine about the violent aspects of the phenomenon and the intricate webs of deception that surrounded it, seemingly from almost every side.

Sections of the Alien Contact Trilogy are reworkings of earlier writings. Other parts present new material and new ideas. As a whole, the effect of the trilogy can be summed up by the dedication page to Fred Beckman in the third book: “to Fred Beckman, who urged me to look under the bed.” These indeed are scary, boogeyman books. Vallee gave up writing the last book not once but twice, so repelled was he by the cultish material.

Dimensions
begins with a foreword by Whitley Strieber, the science-fiction author and self-confessed abductee, who offers a fascinating definition of the alien experience as “what the force of evolution looks like when it acts on conscious creatures.”
⁷⁶
All of the classic Vallean themes are present in the pages that follow: the notion of a high technology that is at once physical and psychical, the control system thesis, the present privilege of observing folklore in the making, the metalogic of alien absurdity, the emblem of Fátima, the complexities of censorship and secrecy and their shaping of the phenomenon, the likely temporal or terrestrial origins of the phenomenon, and so on. Indeed, in many ways,
Dimensions
is a summary of all of Vallee's earlier books.

But there are different accents. For example, the control thesis is linked to human evolution in a quite direct way now, hence the relevance of Strieber's opening definition.
⁷⁷
There are also developments around the idea of a multidimensional universe, an idea which was already present, of course, in
Passport to Magonia
. Indeed, this is the real point of
Dimensions
. The universe is not a universe. It is not One. It is a multiverse. It is a Many. Hence Magonia, “made visible and tangential only to selected people,” is now speculatively defined as “a sort of parallel universe, which coexists with our own.”
⁷⁸
As I pointed out with respect to the impossible possibility of time travel, such a theory is well within the parameters of possibility in contemporary physics. Indeed, it is predicted and expected by a number of theorists.
⁷⁹

Vallee continues to interpret the UFO phenomenon within this same expectation. The UFO phenomenon does not thus represent an extraterrestrial visitation. “Instead it appears to be inter-dimensional and to manipulate physical realities outside of our own space-time continuum.”
⁸⁰
He openly acknowledges those before him who came to the same conclusion, particularly Charles Fort, whose famous line he now cites: “We are
property.”
This is no invasion, Vallee observes in agreement. “It is a spiritual system that acts on humans and uses humans.”
⁸¹
How? Through psychic processes we have not even begun to fathom, working on levels of human consciousness we know next to nothing about—hardly a positive assessment. Still, communication does take place. Contact is made. “I believe,” Vallee concludes, “that the UFO phenomenon is one of the ways through which an alien form of intelligence of incredible complexity is communicating with us
symbolically
.”
⁸²
Put in my own terms, Vallee has concluded that the paranormal is a hermeneutical reality.

If
Dimensions
is the most metaphysical of the trilogy,
Confrontations
is the most disturbing. Its subject matter is a collection of cases, mostly from Latin America, that involved the chasing, wounding, even apparent murder of human beings in the presence of UFOs. Fort had declared that “We are fished for.”
Confrontations
suggests something equally discomforting, namely, that sometimes “We are hunted for.” I am not being metaphorical here. Some of the cases Vallee treats in this second book are dramatic examples of hunters being hunted, oddly in ways remarkably similar to their own hunting techniques (more weirdly still, there are other classic encounter cases of fishermen being fished for).

Deer hunters in the Parnarama region of Brazil sit in hammocks in trees at night and use flashlights to hunt for deer in the brush below. In the early 1980s, these deer hunters began reporting incidents of being caught in the bright beams of “chupas” hovering above them. One was chased and “hit” by the beam all night long, after which he developed odd purple marks all over his upper body. Another, named Raimundo Souza, was not so lucky. His hunting partner described how when Raimundo struck a match in their hammock one night, a chupa immediately appeared above them, as if the match had revealed their position. The partner climbed down in terror and hid in the bushes all night long. The next morning he found his partner dead on the ground, with purple marks on his body. Vallee is careful to note that the cause of death in such cases is seldom clear. A fear-filled heart attack and subsequent fall could have easily killed Raimundo. It was the number of these cases, and the absolute sincerity of the witnesses, that impressed Vallee. And why wouldn't they be so open and transparent about what they had experienced? “Nobody has ever ridiculed these people. Their intelligence has never been insulted by the pundits of the
New York Times
or the arbiters of rationalism of
Le Monde
.”
⁸³

And then there was the Brazilian wave of 1977, a wave from July to September during which UFOs appeared every evening around the island of Colares. They arrived from the north or emerged directly out of the
immense
mouth of the Amazon
every single night for three months
. The horror of the events virtually emptied the island. Everyone who could leave did, including the chief of police. Vallee describes the bizarre scene:

The objects were never alone. On numerous photographs taken by journalists they are seen accompanied by smaller probes. They exhibit a variety of shapes that would drive an aeronautical engineer to insanity. They range in size from starlike objects to things as big as two 737s end to end. . . . There was a superior technology at work over Colares, and all the observers could do was to film it and watch in awe.
⁸⁴

Dr. Wellaide Cecim Carvalho de Oliveira chose to stay. She shared with Vallee the odd symptoms she treated over and over. Her patients all had the same story, which was basically a version of that of the deer hunters. A weird immobilizing beam about one inch in diameter would hit them, always on the upper body. Blackened wounds of red or purple would appear immediately. Hair would fall out the next day. Within a week, they were fine, though. The doctor witnessed a UFO too, but her experience was completely different. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. “She hoped it would land and take her.”
⁸⁵

As for the photos the journalists took and the reels of film the Brazilian military recorded (in full view of the population), Vallee states that the latter are now buried in some military drawer and that an unnamed American firm purchased the entire set of photographic negatives from the Brazilian newspapers: “Somebody in the United States owns a collection of records that contains the proof of the reality of the phenomenon”
⁸⁶

If
Dimensions
is the most metaphysical of the trilogy and
Confrontations
the scariest,
Revelations
is the most depressing. Here Vallee takes a hard look at the orchestrated hoaxes, media manipulations, and “hall of mirrors” that define so much of the discussion—including that around the famous cases of Hangar 18, Majestic 12, and Area 51—and effectively make any open public research well nigh impossible. The signal is not only lost in the noise. It is completely drowned out by the noise. This was a return to and amplification of the earlier thesis of
Messengers of Deception
.

In 1992, immediately after his Alien Contact Trilogy was complete, Vallee published two more volumes:
UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union: A Cosmic Samizdat
and his early journals,
Forbidden Science
. The former book treats about forty cases that were being discussed in the Soviet Union after the waves of 1966–67, 1977–79, and 1989. Vallee had already played a rather central role in ufological circles in the Soviet Union in the summer
of
1967, when he published with Russian science-fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev a pro-UFO article in a Russian magazine more or less equivalent to the American
Popular Mechanics
. The piece was picked up by
Trud
, a major labor union newspaper, and republished in its August 24th issue of that same year, which promptly sold over 22 million copies and went on to become something of a collector's item.

By the time Vallee arrived in the Soviet Union in January of 1990, then, he discovered that he was something of an underground legend, and that
Passport to Magonia
had been circulating for years in samizdat form, that is, in a retyped version secretly distributed among trusted friends and close colleagues. He learned that many Soviet intellectuals were comfortable with his control-system thesis, which they had picked up from
The Invisible College
(“invisible colleges are second-nature to us,” one of them noted, no doubt with a smile
⁸⁷
). He also discovered that they were more than familiar with the polymorphous or shape-shifting nature of UFOs (one case featured a UFO that “divided itself into eight parts that reunited into a single block, turned into a torus, then a cylinder”
⁸⁸
); that they were quite comfortable with various parapsychological ideas; and, finally, that they were even guessing that these sightings might express “another form of our existence here.”
⁸⁹
UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union
is very much about this cross-cultural mirroring, about this “intense feeling of a mystery shared.”
⁹⁰

Indeed, Vallee discovered here more or less exactly what the visionaries of the American Esalen Institute had discovered in the 1970s and '80s in their own travels through the Soviet Union, namely, that this was a land especially rich in occult and mystical traditions. Vallee quotes a pair of healers who held a particularly provocative thesis about why. “We're ahead of you in the study of the paranormal,” they told him in complete confidence, “because the Western churches killed all your witches in the name of their dogma. You only have yourselves to blame if you have fewer gifted psychics. You've eliminated their genes from the gene pool.”
⁹¹
Historical (and biological) questions aside, such a comment captures beautifully a certain Russian mystical anthropology that came to impress Vallee deeply.

Confirmations continued to mount in this frozen land as Vallee met with various researchers, scientists, and journalists and visited places like the City of the Stars, the Russian space center where cosmonauts were being trained. He was surprised to learn that some of his Russian colleagues were speculating about the multidimensional nature of the universe and some supercivilization's manipulation of space and time through their own psychotechnology. The Russians were doing more than speculating on psychic technology, though. They were also using their own to
investigate
the encounter scenes. More specifically, they were employing something they called “biolocation,” which was essentially a form of dowsing for fields of energy that they believed were left over from a living organism's previous movement through a particular area (what Myers had called a phantasmogenetic center). Vallee, who was never really convinced of the legitimacy of this technique, was puzzled by how completely even otherwise skeptical intellectuals accepted the realities of such biofields and the legitimacy of such biolocation techniques. He was also amused by how badly the Western press muddled this particular issue. When the
New York Times
picked up on one Russian sighting and subsequent site visit that included the biolocation technique, they printed it as “bilocation,” thus rendering an already puzzling news event virtually meaningless.
⁹²

His early journals, as already noted, appeared under the title
Forbidden Science
in 1992. They came out in a second edition in 1996. The epilogue to the latter edition is a concise summary of his mature gnosis, which was still defined by an impossible double conviction: in the metaphysical reality of Magonia, and in the foolishness of accepting the standard ufological readings. The ufonauts, he wrote now, “continue to behave like the absurd denizens of bad Hollywood movies,” and their “technology is a simulacrum—and a very bad one at that—of obsolete human biological and engineering notions” (FS 1:419). The encounters and abduction stories still struck him as staged. Alien camp.