Jacques F. Vallée - The Invisible College: What a Group of Scientists Has Discovered About UFO Influence on the Human Race

Also by Jacques Vallee, Published by Anomalist Books

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Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact

Confrontations: A Scientists Search for Alien Contact

Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception

THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE

What a Group of Scientists Has Discovered
About UFO Influence on the Human Race

Jacques Vallee

ANOMALIST BOOKS

San Antonio * Charlottesville

THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE

Copyright 1975 by Jacques Vallee

Foreword copyright 2014 by Jacques Vallee

ISBN: 978-1938398308

Originally published by E.F. Dutton & Co. in 1975.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

Cover image by Rui Vale de Sousa/iStock

The author can be contacted at the following address:

P.O. Box 641650

San Francisco, CA 94109

For information, go to AnomalistBooks.com, or write to:

Anomalist Books, 5150 Broadway #108, San Antonio, TX 78209

To
Gerald Askevold

Contents

Foreword to the 2014 Edition

When it was first published in New York 40 years ago, this book raised a number of new questions, never seriously considered before in paranormal research. It attempted to build a bridge between two fields that were growing in ignorance of each other, namely the investigation of psychic functioning and the study of unidentified aerial phenomena.

At the time, most advocates of the reality of UFOs were convinced that the objects were spacecraft from other planets and that public opinion would soon force governments to recognize this fact. Many proponents of ufology still feel the same way today.

For the small group of scientists who were actively investigating cases, interviewing witnesses, and exchanging data through a small, informal network of international contacts, the phenomenon did not seem to fall so simply into comfortable patterns.

At Northwestern University, the team around Professor J. Allen Hynek, of which I was a part, had access to the files of the U. S. Air Force Project BlueBook. They were augmented by the collections of sighting data I had brought from Europe when I emigrated from France in 1962. These files did support the notion that UFOs were physical objects with all the characteristics of an advanced technology, but they also posed some intriguing challenges of a different kind: witnesses described an alteration of consciousness in the presence of the phenomenon, and even some unexplained physiological effects.

Soon a small cadre of dedicated researchersmen like Fred Beckman at the University of Chicago, William T. Powers at Northwestern, Douglass Price-Williams at UCLA, Ted Phillips in Missouri, and half a dozen othersbegan exchanging data and analyses on a regular basis. They were joined by distinguished French researchers in philosopher Aim Michels circle, like planetary astronomer Pierre Gurin, Sorbonne biologist and parapsychologist Rmy Chauvin, and relativist Olivier Costa de Beauregard, along with aerospace expert Dr. Claude Poher at CNES.

With his keen sense of scientific history and his usual humor Dr. Hynek called this informal network the Invisible College in reference to the secretive group of natural philosophers who fought against the established dogmas of the church in the mid-seventeenth century to acquire knowledge through experimental investigation. Inspired by early Rosicrucian ideas, they became the nucleus for the Royal Society, the first modern scientific body.

Some of the members of the Invisible College around Dr. J. Allen Hynek photographed in Boulder, Colorado in 1974. From left: Douglass Price-Williams, David Saunders, Leo Sprinkle, Dick Henry, Jacques Valle, J. Allen Hynek, Claude Poher, and Fred Beckman (photo taken by Ted Phillips).

In later years the movement started by this group became integrated in a larger, multi-nation volunteer research effort joined by many individuals. Many new facts have accumulated beyond those cited in this book, but the questions we had raised have remained current: What is the nature of unidentified aerial phenomena?

If they are not simply visitors from the cosmos, what are the implications for our view of reality and for the search for extraterrestrial civilizations? What basic scientific issues do the observations call into question? Most urgently, what are the changes that will be necessary in the structure of modern science in order to allow progress in the rational study of such observations? And is there an undiscovered bridge between human consciousness and higher physical dimensions?

Because these questions are as open today as they were in 1975 we have decided to reprint this book and to place these burning issues before a new generation of interested readers.

Jacques F. Valle,

San Francisco, July 2014

Introduction

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 elsewhere 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.