Brad Fregger: There are many ways to see the spiritual side of man, and there is something called Psychic Phenomena which I believe to be very closely related to the spiritual side of man, and in my opinion a miracle only because we don’t understand it. I believe that there are laws there that are just as solid as the laws we experience in our material life. But there is one man who has put together religion, science, psychic phenomena and all related areas better than anybody else, and we’re happy to have him with us today. He has also written a new book calledThe Invisible College and maybe some of you noticed some of the leaflets on the table. Dr. Jacques Vallee.

Dr. Jacques Vallee

"UFO’s: THE PSYCHIC COMPONENT"

Several speakers already in this conference have stressed similarities between religion and science. I will be calling your attention to another similarity which goes very, very deep in the history of both, and it deals with the irrational.

In talking about planning and about the future we tend to work very often with extrapolations, extrapolations of past trends, of past behavior. Dr. Lindaman mentioned the importance of images. To a large extent, our society, like past societies, is determined and ruled and defined by myths. We tend to think of myths as something not true, a legend … the myth of Jupiter, or the myth of some ancient tale. A myth isn’t that. A myth is that which is truer than truth, that which holds the images, the formative images for a concept of the world.

Science is based on myth, and if phenomena, if nature, if the outside world changes in ways that make us aware of necessary adaptation of perceiving reality, then science changes. All these changes are not necessarily continuous, are not necessarily linear, and I’ve chosen to take a series of images and present them from a visual viewpoint, rather than simply talking about them.

NOTE: Dr. Vallee’s lecture was in effect a slide presentation that lost much when placed on paper. We have received permission from Psychic Magazine to reprint Jacques Valle’s article “UFO’s: The Psychic Component” from the February 1974 issue. This article explains fully Dr. Vallee’s thesis:

UFO’s: THE PSYCHIC COMPONENT

It is difficult for the public to tolerate a mystery that refuses to die. When encounters with unidentified flying objects were reported all over the United States during the first half of October 1973, and when two men from Pascagoula, Mississippi told their tale of abduction by grotesque robot-like creatures, the public recognized the return of a specter that the doctors had pronounced dead and buried with great pomp just a few years before. The burial had been performed by the University of Colorado at the cost of nearly half-a-million dollars, and the 800 page post-mortem had clearly stated that the study of UFOs “cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby.”

Professor Condon, who led the study, felt so strongly about the uselessness of the whole thing that he destroyed the projfiles. The Air Force subsequently closed down its own public relations office for the monitoring of sighting reports (Project Blue Book) with a similar declaration. And here it was again. How easy for flying saucer enthusiasts everywhere to exclaim “We told you so!” But it was not so easy for the witnesses to understand what they had seen. And it was even harder for them to forget it.

Some never will. A man and wife team who drive a truck in the Midwest almost lost their job when they revealed an object had followed them along a Missouri road one October night, emitting a burst of light that temporarily blinded the husband and caused the plastic frame of his glasses to melt.

Like the Pascagoula story of robot-like creatures, the facts were unbelievable to local scientists who examined them out of context of the overall phenomenon. Professor Condon had had the same problem: all the members of his team had been selected because they had no previous knowledge of the subject. And yet it is only when one analyzes the thousands of similar occurrences in the last twenty-five years and in all countries that some degree of understanding is achieved.

Even during the Colorado study, when investigators were at pains to find sightings in the United State, a large wave of observations was taking place in Spain and Portugal. They never heard about it. In 1972 there was a peak of activity in Puerto Rico and many interesting cases took place in Western Europe. Interest was low among the news media; however, and the fact that the close encounters generally take place in sparsely populated areas tended to make the study of these events a difficult matter.

The aspect of the sightings that makes them interesting to me is the very same aspect that has made scientists from other disciplines turn away in disgust; namely their apparent absurdity. My field of research is the nature of information, its transliteration in the form of documents, and its representation in computers.

If the current wave of reports continues to develop along the patterns I have traced in previous periods, the genuine cases will soon become adulterated with wishful thinking and hoaxes: some hoaxer will confess, or some photograph of a sky object enthusiastically carried on the front page of major newspapers will be recognized as a picture of a weather balloon at sunset. The public will laugh, and the wave of ridicule will sweep into oblivions hundreds of genuine sightings that deserve serious scrutiny.

Reportage of UFO sightings in the media follows a definite pattern of six steps in the following sequence:

• Genuine reports appear, detailed and well documented.
• They are publicized by the news media and people begin to monitor the skies; this precipitates a rash of false sightings of balloons, clouds, atmospheric effect, etc. However, serious cases are still reported.
• Hoaxers and pranksters stage pictures of sightings and contacts, which the press is eager to propagate because the demand for UFO information is high.
• The press and the authorities uncover some of these hoaxes and publicize the fact the public has been duped.
• This finale tends to negate everything previously reported, including the still unexplained, well-documented cases. The public infers that everything was due to confusion, hallucination, or hoax.
• Any additional genuine reports are disregarded by the media. Public interest dissolves because of the lack of newspaper coverage. Then the task of compiling the observations, sorting them out, classifying them, and looking for patterns once more becomes a lonely one.

A few scientists are pursuing this task. Their work to unravel the UFO enigma centers increasingly on the psychic component of the best reports.

In the foothills of the California coastal range, just west of the city of Menlo Park where the Stanford linear accelerator plunges straight under a newly-constructed expressway, there is a spot of unusual beauty. It is situated within a mile or so of a densely-populated area, yet it gives one a feeling of utter loneliness. The linear accelerator stretches deep into this valley, guarded by wire fences, yet the fields around it have kept a sort of bucolic charm; where the accelerator ends there is a funnel-shaped depression which is not visible from the road. It is from the depression that a man saw an unusual object rise in February 1972.

The object made a humming sound that first attracted the man’s attention to it. He stopped his car and got out with his companion. This was in the evening. The hum became more distinct and the object came into view. It was glowing red. It flew in a straight line, up the hill, as if following the roof of the elongated tunnel. Then it flew down again and was lost to sight in the valley. Not for long: it came back very fast as it passed overhead. The two men below saw it clearly: it was somewhat like looking directly at the sun, they said, although contours of the light were sharp; this impression was not that of observing a strong projector attached to a flying object. It was more like looking through a window that “opened on the inside of a star.”

The witness who told me this story mentioned having seen unidentified objects previously. On a certain occasion, in Montana, he had observed two disk-shaped craft crossing his path, and they had come to hover in a field. He walked towards them and approached within seventy-five feet. At that distance he had the intense feeling of being under observation. He used the word “communication.”

“But how could you tell that you were being observed?" I asked him. "You have mentioned no window, no indication that there was life on these objects.”

“Have you ever been close to a whale?” the witness replied.

Accounts such as the one I have just quoted abound in a corner of the psychic house that too few people interested in paranormal phenomena ever take the trouble to visit. In the last twenty-five years, at least five thousand sightings of unidentified flying objects have been filed away unexplained by competent investigators (I am not referring here to the number of cases reported but only to those unsolved, and my figure is a very conservative one), but no bridge has yet been built between this body of data and the evidence that exists for psychic phenomena such as psychokinesis, prophecy, and telepathy. The aim of this article is to promote the building of such a bridge.

The nature of the problem can be illustrated by another example, a report given to me by a lady who lives in Berkeley, California, and who once observed a series of five round objects crossing the sky over the East San Francisco Bay. She immediately thought they must be balloons. Then the first one speeded up and, upon reaching a certain spot, shot straight out of sight at an unbelievable speed. The second object did the same a few moments later while the other three continued. Then the third object dashed ahead and vanished in the sky. And the fourth, and finally the fifth. The sky was empty once again.

But in the mind of the witness there was a strange thought, the strong suggestion that this was all right for her to see. This was accompanied by another thought which almost came as an explicit message: This was nothing that she should report. And indeed she went home without breathing a word of the event to anyone, until she attended a lecture where I raised the question of the possibility of unconscious or repressed “contact.”

If we disregard the last part of the lady’s testimony, she is simply another person among millions of Americans who believe that, at one time or another, they have seen a UFO. But do we have a right to disregard that part of her report? And what happens if we do take it into consideration? What happens if we examine the files of UFO sightings with an open mind regarding the “psychic component?” We find that phenomena of precognition, telepathy, and even healing are not unusual among the reports, especially when they involve close-range observation of an object or direct exposure to its light.

The following case is among the most thoroughly investigated accounts of the interaction between human percipients and the phenomenon of UFOs. It took place in France in 1968, and involved a medical doctor who holds an important official position in the southeastern part of the country. What is unusual about this case is the fact that competent investigators were able to gain rapid access to the data and to monitor the development of subsequent events without interference from the press or from military authorities.

The witness wants absolutely no publicity in connection with his experiences; neither his clientele nor his immediate family know of the events, which have only been presented in a British publication specializing in high-quality documentation of UFO phenomena (the FLYING SAUCER REVIEW, edited by Mr. C. Lowen, c/o Compendium Books, 281 Camden High Street, London NWI).

Shortly before 4 a.m. on November 2, 1968, the doctor was awakened by the calls of his 14-month-old baby. He got up—experiencing some pain, because three days earlier he had injured his leg while chopping wood and still had a large hematoma (a swelling containing blood)—and found the baby pointing towards the window with excitement.

Through the shutters, the doctor saw what he first took to be flashes of lightning, but he paid little attention to this, gave a bottle of water to the baby and went on to inspect the house. It was raining very hard but no thunder could be heard. The light flashes continued, coming from the western part of the wide landscape that can be seen from the south part of the house, built on the side of a hill.

Opening a large window that looks onto the terrace, the witness observed for the first time the causes for the light flashes. They were disk-shaped, horizontal, silvery white on top and bright red underneath. There were two of them.

Other details of the objects that the doctor was later able to recall include horizontal “antennae” and a vertical one on top, while a beam of white light, perfectly cylindrical, illuminated the mist under the disks.

The flashes occurred with a periodicity of about one second. They involved a brief increase in luminosity of both disks, followed by a sudden burst of light between them. The objects were moving in unison towards the left, that is to say, towards the center of the doctor’s field of view, and they were coming closer, their apparent size increasing while the object that seemed farthest away came to align itself with the closer one.

While they were still approaching (following the trajectory of the beams on the ground enabled the witness to ascertain that they were indeed coming closer) these two disks went through a remarkable transformation: their “antennae” came into contact, the two beams interpenetrated, the flashing activity stopped and the two craft merged.

There was now a single disk, directly facing the window and still coming nearer, with a single beam of white light underneath. After a time, the disk began slipping from a horizontal to a vertical position, until it was seen as a circle standing on edge. The shaft of light, which had been drawn by this rotation into a sweeping movement towards the house, came to illuminate the entire front and shone straight into the doctor’s face. At that instant a “bang” was heard and the disk dematerialized, leaving behind a whitish glow that slowly was blown away by the wind.

After these events, that I have summarized from Aime’ Mitchel’s excellent report of his investigations published in the FLYING SAUCER REVIEW, the witness wrote a detailed account of his sighting, with sketches. He awoke his wife and told her what had happened. At that point it was she who observed, with considerable amazement that the swelling and pain in his leg had completely disappeared.

In the days that followed, he became aware that all the squelae (after-effects) of a wound he had received during the Algerian war had also disappeared. (He suffered from right hemiparesis [partial paralysis] and a high degree of fatigability on the right side, upright standing position painful; he was unable to keep his balance on the right foot only.)

Mr. Aime’ Michel, a leading figure in the scientific study of paranormal phenomena in France, visited the witness on November 8th and found him tired; he had lost weight since the observation and was very much distressed by what had happened to him. That same day he experienced cramps and pains in the abdomen, and a red pigmentation appeared around the navel forming a triangular shape.

By the 17th of November this “preposterous” phenomenon was well-developed. Examinations by a dermatologist led to negative results, and the specialist was so intrigued by this triangular pigmentation without a cause that he decided to document it as a report to the French Academy of Medicine.

The witness—who had not told the specialist that everything had started with his observation of a UFO—requested that he give the phenomenon no publicity.

During the night of November 13-14, the doctor had a dream in which a triangular pattern was seen connected with a flying disk. The psychosomatic explanation first proposed by Aime’ Michel had to be discarded, when the same triangle appeared on the stomach of the baby a day or so after the witness’ examination.

When the investigator (who kept under close observation the witness and his environment) published the results of his two-year follow-up of the case, it was noted that no recurrence of either the was squelae or the wound on the leg had appeared. The peculiar triangle, however, continued to come and go on both the father and the son. It would stay visible for two or three days at a time, even when the child was away and staying with his grandmother, who still knows nothing of the sighting and is very much alarmed when she sees the triangular pigmentation.

Like the grandmother, friends of the family still know nothing, but they have noted a change in the mental attitudes of the doctor and his wife; they seem to have acquired an almost “mystical” acceptance of the events of life and death, which is puzzling to those who have known them in previous years.

Finally, there is the matter of the paranormal phenomena that now takes place around them. Coincidences of a telepathic nature are frequently reported, and the doctor has even, on at least one occasion, experienced levitation without being able to control it. Clocks and electrical circuits have been affected apparently without cause.

Such phenomena are not unprecedented. UFOs have produced many reports of uncontrolled levitation or gravity effects. In one case that took place in 1954 in the French countryside, a man who was coming back from the fields with his horse had to let go of the bridle as the animal was lifted several feet into the air at the time a dark, circular object was flying fast over the trail they followed.

Neither is the change in life patterns an uncommon fact among witnesses of close encounters with such objects. An awareness of the paranormal has been inspired by such sightings in men like Uri Geller and Edgar Cayce. Geller’s experiences are well-known to readers of PSYCHIC, but they may not be familiar with Cayce’s encounter as a child with a woman who appeared out of a sphere of radiant light, and told him that he would be able to heal the sick when he grew up. Edgar Cayce’s sighting is reminiscent of several cases that fall into the category of religious experiences, although the initial observation is often linked to an unusual flying object, as in many “miracles.”

* * * * *

Near the Portuguese town of Fatima a series of sightings were made in 1917 driving public opinion to passion and culminating in a remarkable collective observation witnessed by seventy thousand people. These sightings centered on a “globe of light” that was seen close to the ground, and on a shining entity described as a lady. In the last of these sightings the crowd saw the sun taking the appearance of a silvery disk that seemed to spin wildly and fall towards the earth.

An examination of other events that are classically interpreted as religious miracles (such as the apparitions of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexico, or Joseph Smith’s vision of angel Moroni that prefaced the development of the Mormon church in this country) yields similar patterns.

It is noteworthy that such “miracles” are often accompanied by healing and prophecy. In the case of Uri Geller who, like the French doctor, traces his paranormal abilities to his exposure to a peculiar beam of light that came from the sky, we have an example of psychokinetic phenomena where the sensitive believes his power comes from an extraterrestrial intelligence. Such statements place the problems of “contact” in a totally new framework.

What do we know of the nature of the communication that is reported to occur between human witnesses and the phenomenon of UFOs? I have mentioned earlier my own conclusion that a fundamental feature of such communication was its apparent absurdity. The word “absurd” however, is misleading and I prefer the expression “metalogical.” When a witness meets a UFO occupant who asks “What time is it?” and replies “It’s 4:30” only to be bluntly told “You lie—it is 2 o’clock.” (this actually happened in France in 1954), the story is not simply absurd. It has symbolic meaning beyond the apparent contradiction of the dialogue.

In 1961, similarly, Barney Hill (as reported in The Interrupted Journey, by John Fuller) found himself trying to explain to the humanoid who examined him that Time was an important concept for us on Earth. The humanoid appeared not to understand what he meant. In an even more remarkable case in South America, a man who found himself inside a UFO could see the “pilots” consulting a device contained in a box. He managed to look into this box and saw a clock-like device, but the clock had no hands!

Situations such as these often have the deep poetic quality of Eastern religious tales (“What is the sound of one hand?”) and the mystical expressions of the Qabalah, such as references to a “dark flame.” If you strive to convey a truth that lies beyond the semantic level made possible by your audience’s language, you must construct apparent contradictions in terms of ordinary speaking.

In the contact case in France, just mentioned, the next question was about space, and again was absurd, “Am I in Italy or Germany?” asked the UFO occupant. (He reported the “man” later abruptly went to a UFO in a nearby field, boarded, and the craft flew off.)

What scientist would take such a story seriously? What public official would risk his reputation by reacting in earnest? Even a priest might avoid it, to bypass the intelligentsia and the Church, remain undetectable to the military stratum and leave undisturbed the political and administrative levels of society, and at the same time implant deep within that society far-reaching doubts concerning its basic philosophical tenets, this is exactly the kind of semantic note they would have to strike.

At the same time, of course, such a process would have to provide its own explanation to make ultimate detection impossible. In other words, it would try to project a plausible image or reason just beyond the belief structure of the target society. I think the current belief among most “flying saucer enthusiasts” that the unidentified flying objects are craft used by visitors from another planet fits precisely into this structure, thereby masking the real, infinitely more complex nature of the intelligence and technology that gives rise to the sightings.

Observations similar to the landing at Pascagoula have been made every week in the United States since 1947. A computer catalogue of close encounter cases that I have compiled for purposes of content analysis holds the details of nearly two thousand cases of that type, from all countries, indicating that a formidable impact is being made on our collective psyche.
Yet what trace has this produced on scientific patterns? A very small one indeed.

A few courageous astronomers are beginning to revise the probability estimates for other civilizations in space, much is made of the possibility of detecting radio signals from other solar systems, and a few physicists are beginning to voice their doubts concerning Dr. Condon’s conclusions.

Over such a background I hesitate to state my own speculations because they may contradict both the ideas of the believers and the assumptions of the skeptics. I would not feel justified in offering them here if I had not had the opportunity to discuss them in private conversations with professional scientists forming the “invisible college” of UFO research. All have encouraged me to share these speculations with the readers of PSYCHIC in the hope that some piece of the puzzle, as yet undisclosed, may come to light.

Here, then, is a brief statement of my conclusions:

•  The things we call “Unidentified Flying Objects” are neither objects nor flying. The can dematerialize, as some recent photographs show, and they violate the laws of motion as we know them.
• UFOs have been seen throughout history and have consistently provided their own explanation within the framework of each culture. In antiquity they were regarded as gods; in medieval times, as magicians; in the nineteenth century, as scientific geniuses. And finally, in our own time, as interplanetary travelers. Statements made by occupants of the 1897 airship included such declarations as the fact that “We are from Kansas” and even “We are from anywhere … but we’ll be in Cuba tomorrow.” More recent stories have shifted to an extraterrestrial content: We come from Venus … .”
• The current tendency to accept UFO reports as “evidence” of visits from space travelers is a non-sequitur. The phenomenon could be a manifestation of an advanced technology in a much more complex sense, involving, for example interpenetrating universes. If time and space are not as simple in structure as physics has assumed until now, then the questions “Where do they come from?” may even have no meaning.
• The key to an understanding of the UFO phenomenon may lie in the psychic effects it produces (or the awareness it makes possible) in some observers, whose lives are deeply changed and who develop unusual talents with which they may find it difficult to cope. The proportion of witnesses who do come forward and publish accounts of these experiences seems to be quite low compared to the number of cases reported in confidence.
• Contact between human percipients and the UFO phenomenon occurs under conditions controlled by the latter. Its characteristic feature is an invariant of absurdity that leads to rejection of the story by the upper layers of the target society and absorption at a deep unconscious level of the symbols conveyed by the encounter. The mechanism of this “resonance” between the UFO symbol and the archetypes of the human unconscious has been abundantly demonstrated by Carl Jung, whose book, Flying Saucers, makes significance of the “signs in the sky.”

It should be apparent that I am not regarding the phenomenon of UFOs as the unknowable, uncontrollable game of a higher order of beings. Neither is it likely, in my view, that an encounter with it would add to the human being anything it did not already possess—possibly at an unconscious level. Everything works, in my opinion, as if the phenomenon was the product of a technology that followed well-defined rules and patterns, though fantastic by ordinary human standards. The phenomenon has so far posed no apparent threat to national defense and seems to be indifferent to the welfare of individual witnesses, leading many to assume that we may be dealing with a still-undiscovered phenomenon of nature, a hypothesis that certainly deserves very serious attention.