Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience Read online

  He was also becoming deeply disillusioned with the Condon Committee. Hearing about Roy Craig’s encounter with the saw-whet owl, he commented, ‘In [Fred Beckman’s] opinion the owl explanation is a joke. A friend of his, who has done his own enquiry with the local civil defense authorities, has found out that high-quality recordings were made which show artificial signal patterns’. He was even less happy with Hynek’s dismissal of the Stephen Michalak encounter in Winnipeg on the grounds that it was a one-witness sighting, pointing out reasonably that Michalak’s burns proved he had encountered something.

  In June 1967, Vallee noted with disgust that, while a wave of UFO sightings was taking place in America, the Condon Committee merely argued, dreamt and theorised, while its chief administrator, Robert Low, proposed to use a research grant to go to an astronomical conference in Prague, where he would be joined by Hynek.

  One day when Hynek was away on holiday, Vallee went to his house to sort through the air force files, and found a chaos of unfiled material; he took this away, and proceeded to sort it out. In among this, Vallee found a letter that left no doubt that the air force had been in favour of a cover-up since the initiation of Project Blue Book in 1952.

  What had happened was that when the whole country was talking about flying saucers, which had even flown over Washington, the public urgently wanted to know what was going on. So the CIA decided to convene a panel, under the chairmanship of a physicist, Dr. H. P. Robertson. Hynek was a very junior adviser.

  The Robertson Panel sat for five days, looked at film of UFOs, and discussed the evidence at length. The panel eventually concluded that most UFO sightings were meteorological phenomena or misidentification of aeroplanes, planets, etc., and that they posed no threat to national security. Therefore, the panel recommended (in January 1953), future UFO reports should be debunked. It also recommended that civilian UFO groups, like the Lorenzens’ APRO and Keyhoe’s NICAP, should be ‘monitored’ (i.e., spied upon) because of their influence on public opinion. Hynek was unhappy about this, but was then too uninfluential to make his views felt.

  Now Vallee went on to uncover a letter in the files that left no possible doubt that the air force was engaged in a ‘disinformation’ operation. This letter, headed ‘Secret’, and dated three days before the panel was due to meet, noted that certain areas in America had an abnormally high number of UFO sightings, and recommended that such areas should have observation posts with radar, cameras, etc. So far, its advice was unexceptionable. But it then went on to recommend that ‘many different types of aerial activity should be secretly and purposefully scheduled’ within such areas.

  The careful monitoring of every possible unknown flying object would enable the air force to learn precisely which objects were flying saucers. But it would also enable the air force to debunk the thousands of public sightings that would inevitably occur, explaining that the air force was operating in that area. Moreover, said the letter, ‘reports for the last five years could be re-evaluated’—in other words, past UFO sightings could also be debunked. In this way, the great American public could be reassured—and, of course, deceived.

  When Vallee later met two members of the Condon Committee, he asked what had happened about the Stephen Michalak case, and was told that the investigator had ‘brought back some data’. Vallee was not told that Roy Craig had decided not to wait around for Michalak’s identification of the UFO landing site because he had decided that Michalak was a fraud.

  One of the committee members, Mary-Lou Armstrong, told Vallee frankly that they were not interested in field investigations. They were at present pursuing a theory propounded by one of their members, a psychologist name Wertheimer, that motorists only thought their headlights failed when they saw a UFO, because they were blinded by the ball lightning, and failed to realise that their headlights were on . . .

  In fact, Mary-Lou Armstrong would resign from the committee in disgust. The other committee member who was present that day with Vallee was Norman Levine, who was sacked for showing McDonald the famous cover-up letter from Low.

  Fred Beckman, one of Vallee’s closest associates, summarised the problem of the Condon Committee when he said, ‘The public is expecting serious answers from a committee of experts. Yet the truth is, these people won’t even take the trouble to become superficially familiar with the problem’.

  What he meant, quite simply, was that the basic weakness in the approach of the Condon Committee lay in the assumption that all that was needed was a group of intelligent and honest men. This is rather like setting up a panel to investigate whether the Big Bang theory deserves to be taken seriously, and choosing professors of English rather than physicists. The assessment of UFO phenomena requires, at the very least, an extensive knowledge of UFO reports. The members of the Condon Committee simply did not possess this knowledge—or try to acquire it. Vallee and Hynek had studied thousands of cases; the Condon Committee studied a case only when it was drawn to their attention.

  In the autumn of 1967, disillusioned with America, and the direction UFO research was taking, Vallee returned again to France, and took a job in Paris. He disliked de Gaulle’s France almost as much as Lyndon Johnson’s America, yet found that Paris moved him in a way Chicago never could. He was in Paris for the students’ uprising of May 1968. And on the day the strikes ended, 15 June 1968, he returned home with a pile of second-hand books, and recorded in his journal the idea for a book drawing a parallel between UFO phenomena and the medieval tradition about fairies, elves and elementals. The writing of Passport to Magonia went fast—even though he was writing in English—and, by 12 September 1968, it was completed—together with a list of reports of over 900 saucer landings. Vallee felt that this was a book that he could never have written in America; the subject had somehow needed the deeper intellectual roots of Europe. Yet as soon as he had finished it, he returned to America—this time, for good. Comparing America to France in his journal, Vallee wrote:

  On the one side is the great creative wind of freedom, the immense potential of America. When I look for something to put in the balance on the French side, what comes to mind is not science or art . . . but the humble street scenes—that old woman I passed in the rue de la Verrerie, for instance, whose hand was shaking so much she could hardly hold her grocery bag . . .

  (from Forbidden Science, 1996)

  So America won. He went back taking Papus’s Practise of Magic, Flammarion’s Invisible World and Margaret Murray’s God of the Witches.

  So Passport to Magonia is, on one level, a kind of nostalgic homage to Europe. The title is taken from a passage in the writings of the nineteenth-century Archbishop Agobard of Lyons, who speaks harshly of people who believe that there is a country in the sky called Magonia ‘from which ships sail in the clouds’. Agobard tells how three men and a woman were dragged before him by a crowd who claimed the strangers had descended from one of these airships, and demanded that they be stoned to death. Agobard states briefly, ‘But truth prevailed’—meaning, evidently, that he told them not to be stupid, that people did not descend out of airships. Presumably the four men and women were the first recorded ‘abductees’.

  Vallee then quotes St. Anthony’s circumstantial account of his encounter with a friendly ‘elemental’, and philosophers like Paracelsus, who believed that there is a whole class of beings between the gods and humanity. Vallee goes on to speak of the scholar Jerome Cardan, whose father recorded how, on 13 August 1491, seven men ‘appeared to him’, dressed in garments like silken togas, who claimed to be ‘men composed of air’, and told him their age was three hundred years. Cardan’s father recorded that they stayed with him for three hours, and engaged in lengthy theological discussion. One of them explained that God created the world from moment to moment, and that, if he desisted even for a second, the universe would disappear.

  The account sounds preposterous—but not more preposterous than hundreds of modern tales of encounters with ‘extraterrestrials’, many of
whom sound very much like traditional angels.

  And what should we make of a story of the poet Goethe, who describes in his autobiography how, on the road from Leipzig to Frankfurt, he passed a sort of amphitheatre by the road in which there were hundreds of lights, some of which moved around, while others were stationary? Goethe was unable to stop and investigate—he was walking uphill behind the coach—but wondered whether they were will-o’-the-wisps or ‘a company of luminous creatures’. But ‘will-o’-the-wisp’ (or jack-o’-lantern) is another name for methane—Hynek’s swamp gas—which can ignite spontaneously, and it is obviously impossible that a whole amphitheatre could have been full of exploding methane.

  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 tha
t 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.