Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (29 page)

Vallee's interest in UFOs began during the European wave of 1954. From France to England to Italy, the headlines and airwaves were filled with stunning and confusing reports. Falling “angel hair” was particularly
common
in Italy, as it had been at Fátima forty years earlier with the perfectly timed, monthly apparitions of a being from the sky (FS 1:128). During the three-month wave of sightings, Vallee gathered newspaper clippings and glued them into a book. It was the next year, though, in May of 1955, that he finally observed a UFO for himself. His mother saw it first. She screamed for her husband and son to come out into the yard. Her husband, who scoffed at such things, would not budge. Her son, though, rushed down into the yard: “What I observed was a gray metallic disk with a clear bubble on top. It was about the apparent size of the moon and it hovered silently in the sky above the church of Saint-Maclou.” The next day his best friend Philippe told him that he saw the same thing from his house half a mile away and even had time to watch it with binoculars.
¹¹

After reading Aimé Michel's
Mystérieux Objets Célestes
in the summer of 1958, Vallee struck up a correspondence with the author. Michel had argued that such beings, if real, must be so superior to us that anything we think about them carries the intellectual weight of an eight-year-old boy staring at the equations of Einstein's blackboard. Yes, a young Vallee answered back, but even the eight-year-old may grow up and outsmart Einstein. Moreover, perhaps their superior evolution carries superior methods of education; perhaps, he implied, they can teach us. Besides, from the reports that were circulating in the newspapers, they appear to be “morphologically human,” and this “implies a similarity of level between us and them” (FS 1:22–23). Whereas Michel had already begun to despair of any effective communication with such alien forms of intelligence, Vallee was hoping for an evolutionary education, for a cultural mutation.

In November of 1962, Vallee and his wife, Janine, traveled to the United States on the
Queen Mary
. Once they had landed and adjusted, they moved first to the University of Texas at Austin, where Jacques worked as an astronomer on a project to develop the first computer-based map of Mars. Here the Vallees also expanded their use of IBM cards to organize their UFO data with a sense of relief. After all, they did not “have to hide anymore” (FS 1:71). They would soon move on to Chicago, where Jacques worked as a computer programmer and, eventually, completed a Ph.D. in computer science at Northwestern University. There he worked as a research assistant for an astronomer named J. Allen Hynek, the director of the Dearborn Observatory at the university. Within two years of meeting him, Vallee would describe Hynek as a “mystical man,” and this despite Hynek's public persona as an arch-skeptic. He would also muse, with some marvel, how Evanston was the home of
Fate
magazine, “that popular standard of occult lore” (FS 1:132).

Indeed,
the lead cover story of the first issue of
Fate
was written by none other than Kenneth Arnold, the American businessman and pilot who, around 3:00 p.m. on June 24, 1947, saw nine silver, crescent-like disks flying in formation near Mount Rainier in Washington State. This is the event that, by all accounts, initiated the public craze around UFOs. Remarkably, Arnold's essay is completely devoid of sensationalism or exaggeration. In it, he simply describes what he saw, and saw very clearly. This was a no-nonsense kind of guy. To prove his credentials, he discloses his pilot's license number (33489), describes his high-performance Callair airplane, and even gives the reader the plane's national certificate number (33355). Not exactly the stuff of high fantasy.

Here are the reported facts. Arnold was helping with a search for a downed marine transport plane. He was cruising at about 9,200 feet on a beautiful, clear day when a “bright flash” or reflection caught his eye. He could not find the source at first but eventually located what he described, in the precise language of a trained pilot, as “a chain of nine peculiar-looking aircraft flying from north to south at approximately 9,500 feet elevation and going, seemingly, in a definite direction of about 170 degrees north to south.” Their high speed or precise formation did not immediately bother him, but the fact that they did not have tails did. “The more I observed these objects,” he explained, “the more upset I became, as I am accustomed and familiar with most all flying objects whether I am close to the ground or at higher altitudes.” He tracked them for two and a half to three minutes and noticed that when they were flying straight and level, “they were just a thin black line.”
¹²

When he landed to refuel, he reported the sighting to the authorities, as he feared the objects might be of Russian origin (this was, after all, Washington State, and military officials had long suspected that any Russian spy plane incursion would come from the northwest over the Bering Strait). In an interview with journalists (they were waiting for him on the ground in Pendleton, Oregon, when he landed again), Arnold compared the flying objects to speedboats in rough water, to flat shiny pie pans reflecting the sun, and to saucers skipping across water. A journalist by the name of Bill Bequette picked up on the last metaphor and coined the expression “flying saucer” (despite the fact that the crescent craft Arnold reported were not saucer-shaped at all). A new English expression was born. So too was an entire mythology, one thankfully not organized around “flying pie pans.”

When Vallee arrived at Northwestern University, Hynek was the government's chief scientific consultant on the air force's Project Blue Book, the successor of two earlier projects, Project Sign and Project Grudge.
Project
Sign had been established in the fall of 1947, after one of the most well-known UFO flurries in U.S. history (including Arnold's original sighting and the infamous Roswell incident in New Mexico, which followed just two weeks after Arnold's sensational news), when Lieutenant General Nathan F. Twining concluded that the saucers were indeed “something real and not visionary or fictitious.”
¹³
The real worry here was best expressed by Major Keyhoe. Keyhoe, noting the tendency for the saucers to be sighted over military and nuclear facilities, put the matter in its scariest terms: “It looks as though they're measuring us for a knockout.”
¹⁴

Project Sign was replaced by Project Grudge the next year, which was then revised again as Project Blue Book in 1952. Like its earlier incarnations, Project Blue Book was about studying UFOs and assessing their potential threat to national security. Most ufologists, however, including Vallee, argue that it was mostly about
not
studying the phenomenon too deeply, downplaying or simply ignoring the most difficult cases, and calming the public. In short, it acted primarily as a public-relations campaign, not as a serious research initiative. By this time, the air force seems to have concluded that, whatever the damned things were, they were not a threat to national security, not an immediate one anyway. They were right about this.

Still, there remained a real question, and a real question that the U.S. government took very seriously for decades. Hynek worked for the government on the UFO problem for twenty-two years, from 1947 to 1969. Because of his carefulness, Hynek was often cast as a complete skeptic by the sensationalizing and frustrated media (the Michigan “swamp gas” case was the most oft-cited incident here
¹⁵
), but in fact Hynek, like Lieutenant General Twining, would become convinced of the reality of UFOs—a reality, however, that he was careful not to define in any naively objectivist fashion. Vallee worked closely, if unofficially, with Hynek on Project Blue Book for four years, between 1963 and 1967, and played a key role in changing Hynek's view of the problem. During this time, they became very close friends. The collaboration between the two men helped produce Vallee's first two books,
Anatomy of a Phenomenon
(1965) and
Challenge to Science
(1966), the latter which he co-wrote with his wife, Janine. Hynek published his own book,
The UFO Experience
, in 1972. This was the book that announced to the public his famous tripartite model of close encounters of the first, second, and third kinds. The two friends also co-wrote a later volume together,
The Edge of Reality
(1975).

Anatomy of a Phenomenon
begins with a historical correction that is in some sense the key to Vallee's entire corpus on these aerial mysteries. When Vallee wrote his first book, it was commonly assumed that the
language
of “flying saucers” (and hence their sightings) began in the spring of 1947, with Arnold's famous story. Many people still assume this. Vallee begins his book in 1965 with a section entitled “As Old as Man Himself” in order to correct this false assumption. Here is the first sentence of his first book: “On January 24, 1878, John Martin, a Texas farmer who lived a few miles south of Denison, saw a dark, flying object in the shape of a disk cruising high in the sky ‘at a wonderful speed,' and used the word ‘saucer' to describe it.”
¹⁶

“The legend of the flying disks has existed throughout history,” Vallee asserts.
¹⁷
A provocative chapter of ancient sightings from around the world follows to underline this point. Ezekiel's bizarre vision of all those fiery “wheels” (or “discs”?) that tradition has mistakenly, and rather bizarrely, called a “chariot,” along with the prophet's subsequent “abduction,” make their standard appearances.
¹⁸
But so do numerous other, lesser-known, unidentified flying objects, including large flying shields, “cloud cigars,” and various sorts of aerial armies and ghost ships. The sightings over Nuremburg (April 14, 1561) and Basel (August 7, 1566) are particularly impressive. They were so obvious and dramatic that popular drawings were made and preserved. Jung reproduced these drawings in his classic study
Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky
(1958), a pioneering analysis that clearly influenced later French authors like Paul Misraki, Aimé Michel, and Vallee himself.

The Basel Broadsheet of 1566 clearly shows dozens of black and white round objects in the sky. The white objects seem to be flying directly out of the sun, not unlike what happened at Fátima in 1917. The Nuremberg Broadsheet of 1561 shows a number of classic UFO shapes, including the spear, the cross, the circle, a kind of crescent-wing, and a weird tube form from which circular objects are popping out in great numbers, as if from some toy ping-pong gun. Some of the circular objects appear to be attacking a town in the lower right corner. Smoke arises ominously from this corner scene. Much later in the book, Vallee will treat the classic and most dramatic example of a flying saucer before the flying saucer: the case of Fátima again (FS 1:160–64).

Vallee points out that space travel has only very recently become a technological possibility, hence the earlier accounts were not interpreted, and could
not
have been interpreted, as ships from outer space.
¹⁹
What I have called the alien hermeneutic, then, is a very new interpretive possibility, dependent on the imaginative universe of modern science fiction, modern cosmology, and the advanced technology of our space programs. Through the latter, we now have a way of “reading back,” which can all too easily
become
a kind of “believing back” or “projecting back.” Vallee, as we shall see, is very astute here, striking a balance that acknowledges the privileged position from which we can now see the past, even as he cautions us against naive backward projections from a literalizing and historically naive sci-fi imagination.

At this point in his career, Vallee was clearly open to the widely held belief that UFOs were evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations attempting contact or, more darkly, reconnaissance. This, of course, was exactly what Charles Fort had argued in his own language of galactic super-constructions. This was also the U.S. government's initial concern (after they had ruled out Soviet technology) when they initiated their own secret studies in the late 1940s. Vallee treats the major available theories of contact, including Paul Misraki's theory of extraterrestrial intervention in the history of religions, in chapter 7.

It is, however, the modern scientific version of potential alien-human contact that captures his real attention here.
²⁰
Vallee attributes the first truly scientific expression of the theory to Dr. J. E. Lipp, who had written a classified report in 1949 on the subject for the air force's Project Sign.
²¹
Chapter 2
reflects Dr. Lipp's government-classified theory, bearing a title that could have come straight out of a
Fantastic Four
comic book or
Star Trek
episode: “Probability of Contact with Superior Galactic Communities.” Basically, Lipp had concluded that visits from Mars, the usual science-fiction scenario, was unlikely at best, since civilization there would probably be no more significantly advanced than it is here. We, after all, share the same star. Visits from other solar systems within our galaxy were more likely, he thought. The vast interstellar distances traveled in such a scenario would remain a constant problem, however, as would the second-rate nature of our galactic neighborhood: “A super-race (unless they occur frequently) would not be likely to stumble over Planet III of Sol, a fifth-magnitude star in the rarefied outskirts of the Galaxy,” Lipp cleverly wrote.
²²
Vallee picks up on that parenthetical “unless” and does the math. He comes up with eight billion inhabitable planetary systems in our galaxy alone.

Vallee also develops a classification scheme for organizing UFO sightings in this first of his books. We learn from his journals that Vallee began developing this typology back in France as a kind of secret telephone code, so that he and his colleagues could speak openly with each other on the phone about UFO landings, free from worry that their rationalist colleagues would overhear and report them (FS 1:64). There were five types of UFOs in the published system of 1965: (1) those perceived on the ground or near the ground; (2) those that appear as large cylinders surrounded
by
cloud formations, often oriented vertically (the classic “cloud cigar”
²³
); (3) aerial forms hovering in the sky or flying in an interrupted path, usually associated with some ground target or site; (4) aerial forms flying straight through the sky with no such flight patterns; and (5) those that appear as distant lights.
²⁴