Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (28 page)

He certainly lived up to these youthful ideals. Vallee has speculated about multidimensional universes and mythological control systems worthy of any science-fiction novel (of which he himself has now written five), but he has also helped map Mars, published on pulsar fundamental frequencies, and written books about business strategies and information technology. His business career and cultural presence similarly reflect this double persona. Vallee was an early entrepreneur in the computer industry of Silicon Valley and the development of the Internet. He was also the inspiration for the character of the French scientist Claude Lacombe, played by Francois Truffaut in Steven Spielberg's sci-fi classic
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
.

In terms of my present reflections, Jacques Vallee dwells exactly where I have suggested the contemporary gnostic intellectual dwells, that is, in a modern form of gnosis or forbidden knowledge well beyond reason and completely beyond belief. These are my terms, not his. But his are
remarkably,
astonishingly close. He too, after all, uses the phrase “beyond reason” to describe his subject matter, and he presents his life as a passionate pursuit of “forbidden science,” the title phrase of his published journals that speaks of a radical rejection of reason's claim to exhaust the possible.
³
He is thus dismissive of “the constipated rationalists who are the new arbiters of French thought” (FS 1:192). He similarly scoffs at the Enlightenment rationalist philosophers, who trapped us all in a boring “bureaucratic cage for two centuries” (FS 1:97). And he is positively disgusted with “the old scientists,” who deny the very reality of the problem of UFOs. Vallee had already had enough of their reasonable, respectable nonsense in 1961, when he wrote this in his journals: “Our research would be emasculated by their lack of creativity and their need to reduce everything to that dull state of uniformity they mistakenly label as rationalism” (FS 1:52).

Not that doctrinal religion fares any better than dogmatic rationalism within Vallee's deeply personal gnosis. He is profoundly suspicious of institutional religion, which he sees primarily as a kind of social control system, certainly not as a deposit of eternal truths. He thus confesses a “lack of faith in the common images of God.” Which is not to say that he does not possess his own spiritual sensibilities. These in fact are profound, as we shall see, but he prefers to label them as expressions of mysticism, not religion. Mysticism, for Vallee, has nothing to do with religion and its doctrinal formulations. Rather, it is “an orientation of consciousness, a direction of thought away from ordinary space-time.”
⁴
We will see that he means this quite literally, even scientifically, in a forbidden sort of way.

Beyond reason and beyond belief, then, Vallee writes as a man who possesses or, better, is possessed by, a form of secret knowledge or gnosis. Such a third way of knowing is closely linked to what he calls “the higher dimensions of mind,” which are traditionally expressed through the imagination, the realm of the fantastic, and, most recently, through science fiction. His intellectual heroes are men like Nikola Tesla, that modern American wizard who combined future electrical, radar, and radio technologies with occult ideas in ways so weird that they were genius; Isaac Newton, who practiced his alchemy and astrology behind all that orthodox science; and the hermetic philosopher and physician Paracelsus, whose texts Vallee has studied with care (FS 1:96). Indeed, with respect to figures like the last and their hermetic science, Vallee feels strongly that “whatever else these old hermeticists were doing, they should be credited as the real founders of modern thought” (FS 1:76). For Vallee, Western thought, truly serious thought beyond the surfaces of rationalism and religion, is fundamentally an esoteric project, the outlines and implications
of
which we have only begun to glimpse. It is still too much for us. So we hide it from ourselves.

It should be stressed that Jacques Vallee's secret knowledge is not simply a function of his mysticism. It is also a function of the U.S. government. Of the air force, to be more precise. Vallee, after all, is a man who worked, in an unofficial capacity, for four years on an independent study of the files of a government project (Project Blue Book) with military professionals and scientists who knew things others did not, should not, and could not know. But Vallee came to realize that such people, with one very important exception, did not really know. How could they? They were naively chasing something “out there,” whose absurd, impossible behavior was also clearly “in here.” They behaved “like a well-organized insect colony whose life is suddenly impacted by an unforeseen event” (FS 1:55). Their idea of research was to form commissions composed of rocket scientists and chase UFOs with jet fighters with the intent of shooting one down. These were not profound puzzles capable of transforming our understanding of the world and ourselves. They were simply “targets.” In
Fastwalker
, one of his later English novels, Vallee puts his own thoughts in the mind of a puzzled fighter pilot. “What is wrong with us,” the pilot muses to himself, “that we automatically call any object in the sky a
target
, as if we had to shoot down anything we don't understand?”
⁵
This kind of military thinking struck Vallee as primitive and silly, if not actually stupid. It was certainly futile.

What Jacques Vallee came to know, in other words, could not be explained as something strictly objective
or
subjective. It was both. And it was neither. When Vallee writes of the paranormal—and this is what
really
drew me to his impossible writings—he is not thinking of purely internal states or subjective conditions, however interesting and profound. He is thinking of fundamentally anomalous events that routinely appear on radar screens. He is thinking of a potentially hostile force that deeply concerned nation-states and their militaries for decades, of an advanced future technology that has easily escaped our best fighter jets, and of a puzzling presence of truly mythological proportions that has secretly shaped our folklore, our religious beliefs, and our cultures for millennia. He is thinking of something that is mythical and physical, spiritual and material
at the same time
.

If the reader is now confused, then so much the better. Rational certainty and religious belief are the enemies here; confusion, our delivering angel; absurdity and suspicion, our flapping wings. Hence the fundamental weirdness of the situation at hand deserves restating.

And then underlining.

And then highlighting.

What,
after all, we are approaching here is a particular moment in Western cultural history when the mystical and magical qualities of human consciousness became the object of tax-funded secret research programs, where the paranormal became a matter of national security, and where governments tracked occult forces on radar systems and chased them with supersonic planes.
⁶
We are also approaching the idea of a future technology of folklore through which we might imagine parallel universes and holographic visions projected back through time in order to reprogram our own cultural software, with or without our present permission. In such a fantastic world, a UFO may remain a physical “object,” while at the same time functioning more like a symbol or metaphysical “window” into another plane or dimension, a portal in space-time through which we imaginally encounter not an alien race from another planet but our own evolved species from another time.

Forbidden
Science (1957–69)

I visited Jacques Vallee in his San Francisco condominium. The flat looks out high above the local buildings toward the city skyline and the iconic pyramid of the Trans-America tower. I had asked to meet him and to see his library. The latter request was very much related to the former, as I had spent time in other writers' libraries and found this an especially direct pathway into their authorial souls. These are symbolic spaces whose details are all significant: which books are there (or not there); how they are organized; what sort of art sits alongside which books; and so on. The Vallee Collection, which spills out into rooms and hallways, did not disappoint. The present chapter is a very partial record of what and whom I encountered on two separate visits in those rooms and hallways high above the city.

Jacques Vallee was a war baby. He was born among exploding bombs, on September 24, 1939, in Pontoise, France. The doctor was unable to come over the bridge during the attack, so a local nurse delivered him amidst the sound of the first German air strike. The Nazi Panzers would soon arrive, and the Vallee family would flee for Normandy (FS 1:35). Vallee's free associations with the cultural timing of his birth are interesting. He notes that this was the year that the film
The Wizard of Oz
and the superhero Batman appeared. These are hardly random associations, as Oz-like magical balls of light would float through his own later texts, Kansas and all, and a paranormal Batman would even make an anachronistic
appearance,
eerily, in the London of 1837, almost exactly a century before Bob Kane dreamed him up again, this time as a quasi-criminal superhero.
⁷
Vallee also notes that this was the year President Roosevelt received a letter from Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard suggesting that atomic energy could be used to make a bomb, and that, at the time of his birth, Sigmund Freud lay dying in London, in exile—from the same Nazis that were bombing Pontoise, I would add (FS 1:446). As a young boy, little Jacques witnessed the war's atrocities: the Germans “would fire pitilessly at the bodies of helpless Allied pilots swinging down from the bright blue sky at the end of their white parachutes.” But he also remembers affectionately how the war ended: “Soon came the mighty rumble of Patton's tanks, behind which marched tall, laughing Americans with chewing gum in their mouths and nets over their helmets” (FS 1:37).

Vallee thus grew up in postwar France in the 1940s and '50s, fully aware that there were forces beyond his little neighborhood and country that could have a tremendous impact on his life and world. As a teenager, he followed with fascination the amazing wave of UFO sightings in France, indeed all across Europe, in 1954. Three years later, he watched the first
Sputnik
satellite fly overhead, on Sunday, 24 November 1957, at 5:54 p.m., he is careful to note in his journals. The French Astronomical Society published his account of it (FS 1:11). As a young man, he studied physics and astronomy, completing an M.A. in astrophysics. In June of 1961, he began working as a government employee on the artificial-satellite service of the Paris Observatory, where he saw tape recordings of visual readings of UFOs intentionally and systematically destroyed (FS 1:48). “There were films, too” (IC 46).

It was at this time that his boss, a man named Paul Muller, received a letter from Aimé Michel, a well-known interpreter of the UFO phenomenon whom Vallee had read and much admired. Michel wrote Muller, offering to donate his rich files on UFO sightings to the observatory (Michel, Vallee explained to me, believed that he was dying of a brain tumor at this point in time and wanted these materials preserved in an appropriate institution). “You see,” scoffed Muller, not knowing that Vallee had corresponded with Michel, “that's another letter for the crackpot file. Although properly speaking, Aimé Michel is not really a crackpot, he is a crook.” The cruel comment stung Vallee so badly that he insists on including it in the original French:
Ce n'est pas un fou, c'est un escroc
(FS 1:49). He would never forget those words. He wrote Aimé Michel that same night and asked to meet him. The next January he resigned from the observatory. Later, Muller would deny in a French television interview that
astronomers
ever see anything but satellites, shooting stars, and planes. “A bundle of lies,” Vallee comments in his journals, “but the French public swallows it” (FS 2:349).

And this was only the beginning of the cruelty and the censorship. Years later, Vallee would learn of how the Condon Committee papers—a study commissioned by the air force in the fall of 1966 at the insistence of Michigan Representative Gerald R. Ford to study the UFO problem at the University of Colorado
⁸
—were locked up by the university and then transferred to a private home, where, it was rumored, they were subsequently burned (FS 1:51). He would also learn about what happened in the radar room in July of 1952, when seven UFOs, on two consecutive weekends, no less, were buzzing around Washington, D.C., and F-94 fighter jets were scrambling in the sky. This is how Michael D. Swords, the biographer of Major Donald E. Keyhoe, one of the early founding fathers of ufology, described the scene: “The case was huge. It made banner front-page headlines. Radar at Washington's National Airport had tracked a cluster of objects over restricted airspace near the Capitol building. Visual confirmation came from commercial flights and jets scrambled by the Air Force. The government was agog from the Pentagon to the President.”
⁹
According to Vallee, an officer in the radar room ordered two men to go outside and take pictures. They did. The photos were developed on the spot. They clearly showed what everyone else was seeing outside, that is, luminous objects darting about in the sky. The photographs were immediately confiscated and the men in the room ordered to say nothing (FS 1:151). Later, some of Allen Hynek's files at Northwestern were stolen by a group of individuals. No one ever found out who they were (FS 2:402). There is no end to such stories of cover-ups, confiscations, even suspicious deaths.
¹⁰

It was because of stories and scenes like these that Vallee finally decided to publish his private journals. A crucial historical event had occurred, he believed: whole “new classes of phenomena that highlighted the reality of the paranormal” had appeared in the historical record. The government and the military, moreover, had deliberately denied and consciously distorted the data with the result that scientists, much less the public, never had “fair and complete access to the most important files.” In short, “the public record was shamelessly manipulated” (FS 1:4). Vallee points out that this had been widely assumed and often alleged, but never effectively proven. His published journals, he feels, prove it (FS 1:3).