Jacques Vallee - Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times

by David J. Hufford, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Psychiatry
Penn State College of Medicine
Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Author, The Terror That Comes in the Night

In 1969 I was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, pursuing a Ph.D. in the field of Folklore. My primary interest was in what was called folk belief. This term was, and still is, generally reserved for beliefs that are at odds in some way with the official modern worldview. I was taught that such beliefs were both non-empirical and non-rational, that they were cultural fictions that reflected local concerns and functioned to support community values and psychological needs. The experiences on which they claimed to be based were, to use the term popularized by Thomas Kuhns landmark work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), anomalies.

From seeing a ghost to the alleged cures of folk medicine, the events described in folklore seemed to contradict the paradigm of science, the gold standard of modern rationality. For this reason they were, as Charles Fort had said, damned (1919), forbidden entry to the corpus of valid knowledge. However, I was pursuing the heretical idea that folk belief traditions might actually incorporate accurate observations, and that if they did they might point to important new knowledge.

I was already frustrated by the way that widely held folk beliefs, beliefs common to many distinct cultures, were dismissed without investigation or argument. I had, in fact, already seen that investigation of the possible validity of folk belief claims was subject to an intimidating array of sanctions. I was thrilled, therefore, to find Jacques Vallees book, Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers (1969).

I considered UFOs to be a part of contemporary folk belief and, given my questions about valid anomalous observations, I had been reading the UFO literature. I had read Vallees Anatomy of a Phenomenon (1965) and knew him to be both scientific and open-minded. More than most of the popular UFO literature, Vallees Anatomy provided a convincing case for the objective reality of anomalous aerial phenomena. In Passport to Magonia he continued to strengthen the case for there being real phenomena behind UFO reports, but linked these reports to older reports of fairies, ghosts, angels, demons, and so forth in a compelling and fascinating way. He recognized the difference between the core phenomenology of reports and the local language and interpretations that clothed that core in traditional accounts.

This is a sophisticated distinction that I had rarely found among scholars of folk belief, and in Magonia Vallee laid out the conceptual basis for using this distinction in the cross-cultural analysis of reports of strange aerial phenomena and the events often associated with them. Criticizing conventional UFO investigators for confusing appearance and reality he said that The phenomenon has stable, invariant features, some of which we have tried to identify and label clearly. But we have also had to note carefully the chameleonlike character of the secondary attributes of the sightings: the shapes of the objects, the appearances of their occupants, their reported statements, vary as a function of the cultural environment (1969: 149).

In 1971 I traveled to Newfoundland, Canada, where I spent four years teaching and doing fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation on folk belief. Vallees ideas went with me and were repeatedly confirmed by the folklore that I studied there. Ghost ships, Jackie-the-Lanterns, and weather lights comprised a very old set of folk traditions and were constantly reported around the island, often in very UFO-like terms. In one small village a series of strange aerial sightings was described and interpreted in old fashioned terms by older residents, while the young people in the community simply called the lights UFOs. In Newfoundland I also found the tradition that they call the Old Hag, a terrifying nocturnal paralysis accompanied by a frightening entity that Newfoundlanders associated with witches or ghosts.

Using Vallees approach I was able to immediately recognize in the Old Hag the bedroom invader experience that I had encountered in popular UFO literature (Keel 1970). This phenomenon, known to sleep researchers as sleep paralysis, has stable, invariant features that in reports are surrounded by culturally shaped language and interpretations. Among the stable core features of sleep paralysis is the anomalous presence of a frightening entity. This experience, like the experience of strange lights and aerial objects, has wandered through a great variety of traditions around the world: witchcraft, ghosts, vampires, and UFOs. In the 1992 booklet Unusual Personal Experiences (Hopkins et al.) UFO abduction investigators Hopkins, Mack and Jacobs report a large national survey intended to determine how many humans have been abducted by alienstheir number one index question asks whether the respondent recalls Waking up paralyzed with a sense of a strangepresencein the room (p. 26): sleep paralysis.