Jacques Vallee - UFOs: The Psychic Solution

JACQUES VALLEE holds a masters degree in astrophysics from a French university and a Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern, where he spent four years as an associate of Dr J. Allen Hynek, the US Air Force scientific consultant on UFO reports. A Jules Verne Prize winner for his first science fiction novel in French, Dr Vallee has published over thirty scientific articles in British, French, and American journals and three books in English about UFO phenomena. The author, who is one of the best known experts on the subject of Unidentified Flying Objects and is a member of an international network of UFO scientists (the Invisible College), believes that these phenomena are neither products of mass hypnosis nor little green men from another planet -but something even more dramatic. In UFOs: The Psychic Solution, he presents the first intelligent and comprehensive theory about the nature of the UFO phenomenon.

Jacques Vallee

UFOs:

The Psychic Solution

Panther

Granada Publishing Limited

First published in Great Britain in 1977 by

Panther Books Ltd

Frogmore, St Albans, Herts AL2 2NF A Panther UK Original

First published in the USA by E.P. Dutton & Co Inc

in 1975 under the title of The Invisible College

Copyright Jacques Vallee 1975

Made and printed in Great Britain by

Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd

Aylesbury, Bucks

Set in Monotype Times Roman

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

This book is published at a net price and is supplied subject to the Publishers Association Standard Conditions of Sale registered under the Restrictive Trade Practices Act, 1956.

To

Gerald Askevold

In the last twenty-five years, thousands of people have reported the persistent appearances of UFO phenomena. A careful examination of the patterns of these reports has already shown that they follow definite laws for which no explanation has been found. These statistical facts have been adequately documented elsewhere1 and will not concern us here. Instead we will examine a more exciting subject: the role of this phenomenon and its impact on each of us. The aim of this book is to offer a new point of view on UFOs.

It has become important to pose the UFO problem in a new fashion because our cultural beliefs regarding the existence of forms of consciousness elsewhere in the universe are undergoing major shifts. Perhaps these shifts have been precipitated by the realization that outer space has been opened to man and by the feeling of the smallness and the isolation of our planet brought back by astronauts. Perhaps they are flowing from the hope that other civilizations may already have solved the economic and social problems that concern every country on earth today. The scope and impact of this cultural change have received some attention, but no attempt has yet been made to understand its basic mechanism.

In this book I propose to examine the hypothesis that UFOs may constitute a control system; that they are not necessarily caused by extraterrestrial visitors, nor the result of misidentifications and hoaxes on the part of deluded witnesses. If the hypothesis is true, then what the witnesses have seen were manifestations of a process not unlike that of a thermostat in a house. The thermostat is a mechanism that stabilizes the relationship between our body temperature requirements and the changing weather outside. Similarly, UFOs may serve to stabilize the relationship between mans consciousness needs and the evolving complexities of the world which he must understand. This book will explore this phenomenon.

Among those of my scientific colleagues who have taken an interest in UFOs, there have been two major approaches, which might be termed technological and psychological. Several physicists and engineers have examined UFO reports from a nuts and bolts point of view; on the other hand, the same UFO reports have been interpreted by psychologists as archetypes or as the fulfillment of a psychological need of the percipient. Modern science developed on the premise that these two domains of the physical and the psychological must always be carefully separated. In my view this distinction, although convenient, has been arbitrary. The UFO phenomenon is a direct challenge to this arbitrary dichotomy between physical reality and spiritual reality.

In this book I will not confine myself to the examination of the physical reality, but will frankly step from this to the experiential and even to the mythical. I will approach this inquiry within the framework of descriptive phenomenology, which social scientist Cynthia Nelson has defined as follows: Descriptive phenomenology attempts to communicate the quality and structure of experiences, be they clear and symbolically defined or diffuse and even not symbolized. Its subject matter is any concrete phenomenon in experience.2

2. From a paper, Stress, Religious Experience and Mental Health: A Phenomenological View, presented at the Third International Congress of Social Psychiatry, Zagreb, 1970.

Instead of asking, like the physicist, Does the phenomenon interact with measurable quantities of its environment? or, like the psychologist, What mental impulses or behavioral needs does the report fulfill? we will review what is experienced by the witnesses; we will observe what they do as a result of these experiences; and we will attempt to correlate them within a total framework.

In 1968, during the months following the Six-Day War, many people claimed to have witnessed apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Zeitoun (Egypt). Cynthia Nelson was led to ask the question of the meaning of that reality in a way that is directly applicable to our study of UFOs:

As phenomenologists we suspend judgment as to whether the apparition is really real (a question for scientific naturalism) and attempt rather to understand what people do when confronting stress. If men define situations as real they are real in their consequences.3

In this sense the UFO phenomenon is undoubtedly real. What does it mean, then, to say that it may represent a control system? And what is the quantity that is being controlled? I will try to show that what takes place through close encounters with UFOs is control of human beliefs, control of the relationship between our consciousness and physical reality, that this control has been in force throughout history, and that it is of secondary importance that it should now assume the form of sightings of space visitors.

When the object we call UFO is visible to us in the reality of everyday life, I think that it constitutes both a physical entity with mass, inertia, volume, etc., which we can measure, and a window toward another mode of reality for at least some of the percipients. Is this why witnesses can give us at the same time a consistent narrative (At 1:35 I was driving on highway 58 ) and a description of contact with forms of life that fit no acceptable framework? These forms of life may be similar to projections; they may be real, yet a product of our dreams. Like our dreams, we can .ibid.

look into their hidden meaning, or we can ignore them. But like our dreams, they may also shape what we think of as our lives in ways that we do not yet understand.

I might as well confess at the outset that I have seen phenomena I can only call UFOs. I have not only seen them, but on two occasions in the course of my professional work have tracked them, using small telescopes called theodolites. A few of my astronomer colleagues had made similar observations, and after making inquiries, we became aware of many similar sightings by professional astronomers the world over.