Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (33 page)

Fifth and finally, Vallee sees meaning in the absurdity of the narratives, a meaning he will call the
metalogic
of the encounter stories. Such a
metalogic,
which appears as absurdity from the outside, more or less guarantees that the encounters will be rejected by the elite members of the target society (that is, by professional academics and scientists), even as the symbols conveyed through the encounters are absorbed at avery deep and much more lasting unconscious level. The absurdity of the extraterrestrial explanation, in other words, is a kind of intentional ruse or cloaking technique that allows the phenomenon to accomplish its real work, which is symbolic and mythological.

Everything works, in my opinion, as if the phenomenon were 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. . . . But its impact in shaping man's long-term creativity and unconscious impulses is probably enormous. The fact that we have no methodology to deal with such an impact is only an indication of how little we know about our own psychic world. (IC 30)

“Our own psychic world.” This is the central teaching of
The Invisible College
. By
psychic
, Vallee does not mean “psychological.” He means “the interactions between consciousness and physical reality.”
⁴⁷
Thus if
Passport to Magonia
was about constructing “a picture of a different level of existence, a reality that seems to cut through our own at right angles . . . what I call the reality of Magonia” (IC 6) (recall Couliano's Flatland thought experiment with which we began these reflections), then
The Invisible College
is about exploring “the psychical component” that appears to be a common core result of human exposure to UFOs. This is the book's most important, and most daring, contribution. Vallee notes that it came only gradually to him, as the frequency and richness of the close-encounter cases became both overwhelming and inescapable. The amount of evidential data was just too great.
⁴⁸

It is not simply the psychical component, however. Vallee also intuits profound similarities between UFO abductions and “the initiation rituals of secret societies.”
⁴⁹
Moreover, he suggests a similar phenomenology at work in both UFO encounters and the modern out-of-body experience (OBE), particularly as the latter is mapped by the American businessman turned metaphysical writer Robert Monroe.
⁵⁰
Monroe's books are especially provocative for their elaborate descriptions of out-of-body states, literally thousands of which Monroe experienced throughout his life. Vallee cites three descriptions from Monroe's notes, from the nights of
September
9, 16, and 30 of 1960, in order to gloss the meaning of the UFO encounters. Note both the fantastic nature and the disillusioning honesty of Monroe's descriptions:

I suddenly felt bathed in and transfixed by a very powerful beam. . . . I was completely powerless, with no will of my own, and I felt as if I were in the presence of a very strong force, in personal contact with it. It had intelligence of a form beyond my comprehension and it came directly (down the beam?) into my head, and seemed to be searching every memory in my mind. I was truly frightened because I was powerless to do anything about this intrusion.

The same impersonal probing, the same power, from the same angle. However, this time I received the firm impression that I was inextricably bound by loyalty to this intelligent force, always had been, and that I had a job to perform here on earth. . . .

It is an impersonal, cold intelligence, with none of the emotions of love or compassion which we respect so much, yet this may be the omnipotence we call God. . . . I sat down and cried, great deep sobs as I have never cried before, because then I knew without any qualification or future hope of change that the God of my childhood, of the churches, of religion throughout the world was not as we worshipped him to be—that for the rest of my life, I would “suffer” the loss of this illusion.
⁵¹

As a comparative point, Vallee then offers the story of the twenty-eight-year-old French legionnaire on duty in Algeria, who in March of 1958 saw an immense UFO (one thousand feet in diameter) descend within a few hundred feet of him and “zap” him with a beam of gorgeous, ecstatic, emerald light. He became depressed when it departed. He later recalled how in the presence of the object time seemed to run very slowly, as if he were in another world.

Though a real admirer of an author like C. G. Jung, Vallee seriously questions the usual psychologization of these experiences: “Are we faced here with something more than a projection of Jung's archetypal images, a psychic technology whose applications know few if any limitations in space and in time?” He can see no better way to explain the data and the clear “pattern of manifestations, opening the gates to a spiritual level, pointing a way to a different consciousness, and producing irrational, absurd events in their wake.” This, he suggests, is a technology “capable of both physical
manifestations
and psychic effects, a technology that strikes deep at the collective unconscious, confusing us, molding us—as perhaps it confused and molded human civilizations at the end of antiquity” (IC 140).

He is quite serious about that word:
technology
. And he relates it to another:
physics
. A chapter dedicated largely to the Marian apparitions at Fátima, Lourdes, Knock, and Guadalupe follows in order to study what he calls, rather shockingly, “the physics of the B.V.M.,” that is, the physics of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He arrives again at the same conclusion:

We are faced with a
technology
that transcends the physical and is capable of manipulating our reality, generating a variety of altered states of consciousness and of emotional perceptions. . . . The B.V.M. may dress in golden robes and smile radiantly to children, but the technology which “she” uses is indistinguishable from that of gods and goddesses of other tongues and garb; it is also indistinguishable from the technology surrounding the UFO phenomenon. (IC 153–54)

A psychic technology. The physics of the Blessed Virgin Mary. A technology that transcends the physical and is capable of manipulating our own individual and collective realities. These are jarring phrases that strike at the very roots of the way we separate and divide our experience of the world into subjective appearances and objective realities, into “religion” and “science.” There are three final points to make with respect to such phrases before we graduate from
The Invisible College
.

The first is to suggest a double whammy. What Vallee, after all, is most interested in here in his fourth book on UFOs is building a bridge between the UFO data and the evidence that has been amassed for psychical phenomena over the last two centuries, beginning, as we have seen, with Myers and the S.P.R. This is a truly incredible proposal, as either subject alone is sufficiently outrageous to merit complete exclusion from the boundaries of intellectual respectability. Vallee happily ignores such exclusions and treats the two damned fields
together
, essentially doubling (if not squaring) the provocations of his thought.

The second point to make is that the psychic technology Vallee imagines depends on the manipulation of
time
as well as space.
⁵²
What I read him reading in the history of folklore is a
future
technology projected, somehow, back into our present. Such a hypothesis—which is a common trope in science fiction, not to mention well within the imagination, if not the present technology, of contemporary physics—implies that these
need
not be space aliens from another planet. They may well be human beings from another time, from the future. They may be
us
. The future technology of folklore that Vallee is imagining here, in other words, is a technology that we may be using on ourselves to manipulate our own past, to control, as it were, our belief systems and mythologies that lie well below the present political system or cultural fad of the day.

It is precisely these religious systems that control our history for Vallee, hence his privileging of Jung in the concluding third part of
Fastwalker
: “It is not starvation, not microbes, not cancer,” Jung writes and Vallee quotes now, “but man himself who is mankind's greatest danger; because he has no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating in their effect than the greatest natural catastrophes.”
⁵³
Hence, to employ an overused metaphor that is nevertheless quite apt here, mythologies and beliefs can be seen as the “operating systems” of that cognitive and behavioral software we call culture. What Vallee is imagining, then, is a kind of “re-writing of the computer code” from the future, before the viruses that determine us now can take over and crash the system for good.
⁵⁴

Third and finally, it is worth underlining the basic disillusionment, which is also an awakening, that appears with such poignancy in
The Invisible College
. Monroe had confessed his own disillusionment with respect to religion. Vallee now expresses his own with respect to science. Vallee once thought that science was enough, that it would eventually recognize the reality of paranormal phenomena and so generously and definitively expand our conception of what it means to be human. Essentially, he believed that science could and would rewrite our code.
The Invisible College
closes with the confession that he no longer possesses such a faith. Science cannot supply the key to our psychic crisis. How could it? Its strict commitment to a method that only recognizes objects prevents it from even admitting the presence of psychical phenomena, which are objects and subjects at the same time. How can a method that denies the very reality of the subject study the magical and mystical qualities of that subject? The answer: it cannot.

Nor, though, will we find our answer “in some secret file in Washington.”
⁵⁵
The solution to our psychic crisis, he suggests in the very last lines of the book, “lies where it has always been:
within ourselves
. We can reach it any time we want” (IC 209). Which is to say, once again, that the solution lies well outside the present parameters of the scientific method. It lies rather in the fundamental mystery of human consciousness, in the subject doing the science. It lies in us.

The
Present Technology of Folklore: Computer Technology and Remote Viewing in the Psychic Underground

Vallee had very good reasons to end his book on a note suggestive of both government intelligence and the primacy of human consciousness, as the lived context in which he wrote
The Invisible College
was deeply informed by a small group of elite government-sponsored scientists interested in artificial intelligence, information theory, quantum biology, the mind-matter interface, and the physics of consciousness. Vallee interacted with these scientists at SRI, an independent research institute in Menlo Park that contracted with the U.S. military for various secret research programs. Vallee in fact worked for one SRI program, which was not secret at all, and became indirectly involved in another, which definitely was.

The first program was something called the Augmentation of the Human Intellect, for which Vallee worked for a little over one year, from February of 1972 to April of 1973. This project was erratically managed and frustrated him, but in its more interesting moments it also involved him in cutting-edge technology and government conferences that were a part of the early development of a global communication network sponsored by the Pentagon called the Arpanet.
⁵⁶
The Arpanet would eventually morph into the Internet in the early 1990s, effectively changing the world of communications, and just about everything else, in the process.

The same project also put him in touch with individuals who worked for the intelligence community, including the NSA (National Security Agency), whose initials were jokingly said to stand for “Never Say Anything” or “No Such Agency” (FS 2:160). Vallee quickly grew disillusioned with such people once he realized how little they actually knew about paranormal subjects and how impossible it was to ever really know who was telling the truth. It all struck him as a very silly and childish game. Hence the negative conclusion of
The Invisible College
concerning those “secret files in Washington.” He had had quite enough of all that.

The second SRI program, housed one floor down from the first in the Electronics and Bioengineering Laboratory, was a research project that was initially conceived as a series of quantum biology experiments designed to answer the question of whether the human mind can affect very small-scale quantum processes. If such a thing were possible, a kind of mind-matter interface could in turn be imagined that might allow for the mental control of quantum machines and supersmall circuits. Through a series of truly remarkable events, this initial research project quickly morphed into a very different sort of animal, this one dedicated to exploring the
intelligence
potentials of using gifted psychics to accomplish what came to be known as “remote viewing.”

Historically speaking, this program was originally set up by Stanford alumn Harold Puthoff in the spring of 1972. Puthoff is a laser physicist who had written a textbook on quantum physics and had worked as a naval officer for the Defense Department laboratory before he arrived at SRI. After hearing Puthoff lecture at Stanford, Russell Targ, another accomplished laser physicist at that point working for Sylvania, approached Puthoff and asked to join his research group.
⁵⁷
This was no sudden interest on Targ's part, though. In 1965, he had founded the Palo Alto Parapsychology Research Group (the PRG), a small collective of scientists, intellectuals, and interested individuals (including Vallee in the early '70s) who met regularly—for a time, according to Vallee, in an A-frame house built exactly on the top of the San Andreas fault—to discuss issues surrounding the subject of parapsychology. It was in this way that Puthoff and Targ became the early leaders of the SRI group.