Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (21 page)

Vallee goes on to cite modern cases that sound equally bizarre: the two little men seen by Lonnie Zamora at Socorro, the ‘goblins’ who besieged the Hopkinsville farm all night, the two midgets in space suits who paralysed the French farmer Maurice Masse—who, in spite of his fright, still felt that his visitors were ‘good’.

It is important to understand that what Vallee is implying is not simply that modern ‘aliens’ seem to have a great deal in common with various ‘supernatural’ creatures of folklore (which is obvious anyway), but that we are wrong to dismiss the fairies, elves, sylphs and angels of folklore as delusions of people who did not know any better.
In 1897, for example, the poet W.
B.
Yeats accompanied his friend Lady Gregory around local cottages in Galway, collecting fairy stories, and, to his surprise, learnt that the peasants not only believed in fairies, but told circumstantial stories of their encounters with them.
Yeats came to accept the factual reality of fairies, and persuaded a young American academic, Walter Evans-Wentz, to spend some time in Ireland collecting accounts.
These appeared in a classic work called
The Fairy Faith in the Celtic Countries,
in which the author concludes that the factual and scientific evidence for the existence of fairies is overwhelming.
In his later years, Evans-Wentz returned to his native America, and studied the beliefs of the local Indians near San Diego, again concluding that there is evidence for the real existence of supernatural beings.

Yeats’s friend George Russell (the poet AE) contributed a section to the book in which he describes his own fairy sightings with the precision of an anthropologist describing primitive tribes: shining beings, opalescent beings, water beings, wood beings, lower elementals.
Russell was a mystic with ‘psychic’ abilities, and in this connection it is worth bearing in mind a comment made by the UFO investigator John Keel; ‘I discovered that the majority of all [UFO] witnesses had latent or active psychic abilities, and .
.
.
other independent investigators around the world confirmed this in their own research’.
[1]

By the end of
Passport
to
Magonia,
the reader is certainly inclined to agree that the most carefully documented UFO sightings sound far more absurd than accounts of fairies, elementals and other beings of folklore.

Not surprisingly,
Passport to Magonia
created dismay among the UFO fraternity.
‘Vallee has gone off the deep end’, said one critic.
People who believed that flying saucers came from Mars, or some distant constellation, felt that Vallee’s parallels with folklore were irrelevant and far-fetched.
UFOs were shining silver discs that took off at a tremendous speed and could do right-angle turns in the air.
But Vallee had noted that not all sightings were of shining discs.
As Mrs.
LottiDainelli, of Arezzo, Italy, passed a torpedo-shaped machine by the roadside, two odd little men in one-piece suits and red hats grabbed the pot of flowers she was carrying to the cemetery, and took it into the spacecraft.
By the time she had returned with a policeman, the machine had taken off, leaving a blue and red trail.
It sounds like a joke, or something out of a children’s cartoon.
It certainly sounds too absurd to interest a scientist—why should two munchkins snatch a pot of flowers?

But Vallee points out that many creatures of folklore—such as fairies—like to steal human products.
And, in doing so, he is putting his finger squarely on one of the major paradoxes of the UFO phenomenon: that it seems to have been devised by someone with a surrealistic sense of humour—like the case presided over by H.
B.
Morton’s Mr.
Justice Cocklecarrot, in which an eccentric lady used to knock on the plaintiff’s door and push seven red dwarfs into his hallway.
Any number of close encounters sound just as hilariously pointless.
Why did little tin men besiege the Sutton farmhouse?
Why did two gas-puffing robots keep Donald Schrum up a tree all night?
What was the motive of the UFO that trailed Colonel Chase’s B-57 bomber over Texas and Mississippi—in one of the few cases that impressed Roy Craig of the Condon Committee?
In fact, why were hundreds of planes in World War Two trailed by UFOs (which were then known as foo fighters)?

Common sense suggests that they were behaving like mischievous schoolboys who knock on a door and run away; but that implies that they had no serious purpose.
If
they had a serious purpose, could it simply be to make themselves known, to make us aware that they are there?
Then why not simply land in the middle of a major city?
Would this, perhaps, be too great a culture shock for the human race?
Vallee speculates in the last chapter: ‘Perhaps it enjoys our puzzlement, or perhaps it is trying to teach us some new concept.
Perhaps it is acting in a purely gratuitous effort, and its creations are as impossible for us to understand as is the Picasso sculpture in Chicago to the birds who perch on it.

But what fascinated him most about UFOs was what he called ‘the psychic component’—the tendency of UFOs (observed by Puharich and Geller) to behave more like ghosts than solid spacecraft.
His next book,
The Invisible College
(1976),
[2]
is devoted largely to this psychic component.
(‘The invisible college’ refers to the small group of a hundred or so UFO investigators all over the world who keep one another informed of their data.)

Vallee was interested in the
effect
of UFOs on people who believed they had seen them, or even that they had been in them.
In 1973, he had met an engineering executive who described how he had been on an archaeological field trip when he had seen a disc-shaped object, and had been taken on board.
He was transported to a place where he was connected up to a ‘teaching machine’, a kind of computer, and had spent three hours having information fed directly into his brain.
After what seemed a few hours, he returned to the spot where he had been abducted—to find that he had been absent for eighteen days, and that his influential father had had the military and the police out searching for him.
He was still wearing the same flower in his buttonhole, his clothes were impeccable, and he did not need a shave.

When the engineer spoke of the encounter, he was soon surrounded by curiosity-seekers, and ended by ‘confessing’ that it had all been a joke, merely to get rid of pests.
But he told Vallee that, for six months after the experience, he had needed an enormous amount of sleep—more than twelve hours a night—and after that his need for sleep then diminished until he needed only an hour or two every night.
His powers of memory and concentration were enormously enhanced.
Now he had become convinced that some immense change was about to take place on Earth.
And since the UFO experience, he had never been ill.

Vallee compares the engineer’s experience to that of the three-year-old Uri Geller in the garden in Tel Aviv; he also adds that he does not believe that mankind is being contacted by benign intelligences from outer space, or that Geller is the new Messiah.

Yet how, asks Vallee, can you say that a man is a sincere witness, and nevertheless reject his beliefs?
This is the question he sets out to answer in
The Invisible College—
and which has preoccupied him ever since.

Yet the case he goes on to cite—of a French doctor who wished to remain anonymous, preferring to be called ‘Doctor X’—seems to contradict his scepticism about benign intelligences.
Doctor X was awakened in the middle of the night by his child, who was pointing at a flashing light in the sky.
He opened the window and observed two disc-shaped UFOs.
Then the two came together and blended into one.
This disc then turned into the vertical position, so its blinding light illuminated the front of the house.
Suddenly there was a loud bang, and it vanished.

The doctor now found that a leg injury had suddenly healed, and so had an old war wound.
Subsequently, he lost weight, and a red triangle formed around his navel.
The same triangle formed on the child.
Vallee notes that, as a consequence of the experience, both the doctor and his wife have developed an almost mystical attitude of acceptance towards life and death.
Strange coincidences occurred, the doctor and his wife became telepathic, and on one occasion he experienced levitation.

Vallee then speaks of a case that occurred at Aveyron, in France, where a farmer and his son saw glowing spheres that floated in the air.
Later, the son saw a disc with a green light inside it, and thought he could see two occupants, before it flew off at an incredible speed.

This witness also began to sleep far more than usual, and also had an occasional sensation of floating out of his body, during which time his body would become paralysed—a phenomenon that often accompanies ‘out-of-the-body experiences’.
He also began trying to persuade young people to study science and astronomy.
When he declared that he had to write a book, and someone pointed out that he was almost illiterate, he replied,
‘They
told me not to worry about that’.

Vallee had first-hand experience of official cover-up when he and Janine heard of a case in Normandy, and went to investigate soon after the event.
A fisherman and his son had come to the beach at daybreak, and saw a bright object hovering over the place where their nets were spread.
It was yellow and emitted a conelike beam towards the ground.
Three months earlier, the son had seen three yellow spheres above the beach.

A radar installation had picked up the second UFO, and watched it move away over the sea.
And a nearby French trawler went off course, its magnetic navigation system having apparently gone awry.

A few days later, French Intelligence announced that some diving gear found on a nearby beach indicated that divers had been using some equipment that explained the radar sighting and the malfunction of the trawler’s navigation system.
So the authorities created an atmosphere that suggested that the UFO sighting had now been explained away as something quite natural.

The UFO problem, Vallee feels, is analogous to a conjuror who baffles his audience by some incredible display of magic, then explains it all—the hollow tabletop, the collapsing cane, the rabbit in the coat tail.
Back at home you congratulate yourself on knowing how it was done—then realise that the explanation simply does not add up.
He was not telling the truth.
‘The phenomenon negates itself’.

Later in the book he has an even better suggestion.
He tells an anecdote about the psychiatrist Milton Erickson, who was standing on a corner when a man came round it in a hurry and bumped into him.
Erickson glanced elaborately at his watch and said, ‘It’s exactly ten minutes to two’, then walked on, leaving the man staring after him in astonishment.

This encounter gave Erickson the idea for what he called the confusion technique of hypnosis.
When a subject was difficult to hypnotise, Erickson would give a number of contradictory suggestions—such as ‘Your left hand is rising, while your right remains immobile’ and ‘Your right hand is rising while your left remains immobile’.
The psychiatrist’s apparent confusion would arouse sympathy in the patient and lead to a cooperative attitude which favoured hypnosis.
Still further confusion would lead the patient to give up his resistance and retreat from the confusion by accepting all the hypnotist’s suggestions.

This, Vallee suggests, could explain the confusion technique used by UFOs, with all their surrealistic absurdities.
Such a notion obviously implies that the UFO entities are trying to make individual contactees drop their rationalistic attitudes in favour of unconscious acceptance.
It also suggests, of course, that they might be trying to hypnotise us.

Certainly, these puzzling creatures seem to enjoy creating confusion.
Vallee describes how a Midwestern woman named Mrs.
Keech woke up with an odd tingling feeling in her hand and arm, and proceeded to take up a pen and do automatic writing.
The communicating ‘entity’ seemed kindly and protective, and signed himself ‘Elder Brother’.
Mrs.
Keech soon became convinced that she was channelling information from a higher level of reality.
A small sect formed around her.
Then Elder Brother informed them that there would soon be a tremendous disaster, involving earthquake and flood.

A small group of academics from a nearby university infiltrated the group to study the psychology of religious conviction.
When the flood failed to occur, the group were not in the least disillusioned; they believed that they had averted it.