Jacques Vallee - Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults

MESSENGERS OF DECEPTION

UFO CONTACTS AND CULTS

Nearly thirty years have elapsed since Messengers of Deception first appeared in the U.S. Since then, the controversial views it expressed have been vindicated and thrown into sharp focus by shocking events that were reported worldwide. In particular, the stark warning I issued in connection with the HIM cult (It only costs your life!) appears as unfortunately prophetic in light of the March 1997 collective suicide of Heaven s Gate, as the group became known. The mass killings of the adepts of the Order of the Solar Temple in Canada, France and Switzerland in 1994 illustrated the dangerous form of mind control and the simulation of extraterrestrial contact I first described here in connection with the Adventures of a Grand Master. The cattle mutilations phenomenon remains unsolved. As for the Ralians, the cult started by Vorilhon whose early lectures in San Francisco are recalled in this book, it has flourished internationally and burst into prominence in recent years with claims of human cloning.

Not only have these issues continued to simmer under the surface while UFO believers basked in their benign expectation of aliens from the stars, but a veritable mass conversion has taken place among the public and the media elite. The belief in extraterrestrial visitation is practically taken for granted among wide sections of the population, and especially among the young. While the hypothesis of alien contact is an exciting one, justified on the basis of continuing observations of unidentified flying objects, it carries the potential for exploitation and manipulation by deceptive groups with their own hidden agenda.

I believe that UFOs are physically real. They represent a fantastic technology controlled by an unknown form of consciousness. But I also believe that it would be dangerous to jump to premature conclusions about their origin and nature, because the phenomenon serves as the vehicle for images that can be manipulated to promote belief systems tending to the long-term transformation of human society. I have tried to identify some of the manipulators and to highlight their activities, which range from apparently harmless hoaxes such as the false professor George Adamskis meetings with Venusian spacemen to bloody expeditions that have littered the American landscape with the carcasses of mutilated animals. I have found disturbing evidence of dangerous sectarian activities linked to totalitarian philosophies. The ease with which journalists and even scientists can be seduced into indiscriminate promotion of such deceptions is staggering. In the context of an academic attitude that rejects any open investigation of paranormal phenomena, such fanatical conversions must be expected. For me, that is only one more reason for an independent thinker to remain vigilant against false ideas and simplistic political notions planted by those I have called the Messengers of Deception.

Notes

Following the 1979 And/Or (Berkeley, California) edition there was a mass paperback by Bantam (NY) in 1980, a French edition called La Grande Manipulation from Editions du Rocher (Paris) in 1983 and an Italian edition entitled Messaggeri di Illusioni from Sperling & Kupfer (Milan) in 1984. The present text is the third American edition.

Give me the superstitions of a nation, and I care not who makes their laws, or who writes their songs!

Mark Twain

Nobody Ever Jumps into the Potomac

Eight thirty. The atmosphere is already warm and humid over Washington. We dont feel it in the aircraft, but the morning haze over the Potomac tells the whole story of whats awaiting us. The huge gray shape of the Pentagon is rising toward us as we turn to land at National Airport.

Nine oclock . The taxi drives by the monuments whose names are those of the countrys past leaders: Jefferson, Lincoln, Washington. The feeling of approaching the worlds power center increases. So do the humidity and the heat.

Nine thirty . Within a block of the White House, I enter the New Executive Office Building, the modern brick structure where senior officials work is protected from the heat by thick glass doors. The architect had the good idea of putting a fountain in the patio. That helps a little. The office of the Presidents Science Adviser is on an upper floor.

Ten oclock . I step out of the elevator and a secretary takes my name, checks with the appointment book. The subject of the discussion: unidentified flying objects.

UFOs: a volatile topic that can be ignited tomorrow by a New York Times story on a frustrating chase by military planes in Iran or by a network documentary on the abduction of some fisherman in the South. A topic nobody in this city wants to touch with a ten-foot pole. A topic that I am beginning to suspect is as much a puzzle to the military, the intelligence community, and the Science Adviser as it is to the public and to the news media. It is amusing to watch how each sector manages to hide its ignorance behind its own professional rhetoric.

The military has a double standard. In public it keeps a stiff upper lip. Whatever they are, say the generals, UFOs cannot possibly pose a threat to the security of the United States! Why is it, then, that amazed witnesses continue to report the mad scrambling of jet fighters every time a light wanders through the sky? None of the regulations that make it a duty for military personnel to report UFOs and a crime to talk about them has been withdrawn, even after the closing of the Air Forces Project Blue Book ten years ago.

The intelligence community likes to give the impression that it knows all about UFOs but, of course, cannot reveal what it knows. Its job is to pretend that it knows everything. Yet I am beginning to suspect that the real secret in Washington, the secret that must be kept at all costs, is that the intelligence community knows nothing, although it certainly has files full of tantalizing details nobody has been able to put together yet.

The scientific community is far behind the times, fighting rear-guard skirmishes in the name of Rationalism. Academic scholars periodically rally behind some luminary who has just discovered the final, rational explanation, and periodically the explanation has to be withdrawn under public ridicule. Flying saucers have been explained scientifically as plasma discharges, swamp gas, status inconsistency, cognitive dissonance, refraction effects, and temporal lobe epilepsy. But they keep right on flying, under the noses of the explainers.

Typical of the thousands of close encounter cases reported in the last thirty years is this sighting in Quarouble, France, which heralded the major wave of sightings in Europe in 1954. The witness, railroad employee Marius DeWilde, saw a craft that had landed and two occupants of it. French police and Air Force Intelligence regard the object as unidentified. (Photo courtesy of United Press International.)

That leaves the UFO buffs, who have been collecting stories for thirty years, concentrating on the kinds of data that fit their theories. And they have been fighting each other in an endless, pointless confrontation, not of ideas and theories, but of personalities in egotistical conflict. Some encouraging words by President Carter electrified these groups when he asked Jody Powell and Science Adviser Frank Press to see what could be done. The new director of NASA was gingerly approached: would the Agency agree to act as a focal point for public inquiries? The Director said he would. What about a project to investigate the current sightings? NASA was going to think about it.