Brother Jacques Vallée

"There is a feeling that I get in the course of my investigations of being in the presence of a form of consciousness that is truly remarkable. That consciousness has a great sense of absurdity, and also a great sense of humor. The bottom line is that I feel that I've learned something out of this whole exercise, and as long as I'm continuing to learn something I'm going to continue to do it."
-Brother Jacques

Excerpts from an Interview with Jacques Vallée

UFOs remain the chief enigma of our time. No matter what we read, no matter what our own experiences with the phenomena, the strangeness and absurdity of the reports keep us wondering just what is really going on. For some, the question is of the utmost importance, for others it is treated as an entertaining oddity.

For those of us who have had some kind of encounter with UFOs, the experience will continue to be a critical question mark behind our taken-for-granted assumptions about the world. We may never find out what they are, but we certainly appreciate any reasonable suggestions as to their ultimate nature

Brother Jacques stateth:

In Brazil there was a whole variety of objects, but the ones that emitted these beams [which injured human observers] were classic in terms of shape. They were boxy, rectangular objects [Interstitial Volvos, no doubt; "They're boxy but they're safe." -B:.B:.] that either didn't make a noise or made nothing more than a hum, like the noise a refrigerator makes. They came over at night, and the beam was a light that not only burned them but pinned them down.

When we asked people in Brazil about the phenomenon, we discovered that they didn't see it as something that comes from another planet, but something that comes from another spiritual plane. That's the way they put it, but they offered no further explanation than that. They seemed to be just as puzzled by it as a scientist would be.

[...]

Usually there is a consensus on the major aspects of the physical parameters of it [the abduction experience], but people can disagree on, for example, when there is interaction with entities. Different people may be perceiving different things.

There is a social, mythological aspect to it also, and that can be very tricky. I think it's important to bring this out so that people can be alerted to it, especially since the publication of "Communion." [Brother Whitley's Tome; his Great Work of the Dark Grey Brotherhood -B:.B:.]

There was a major marketing effort behind Communion which proved to be very successful. True, it's a powerful book, but Communion has also touched people who have never even read it because it also has a powerful cover. That face on the cover has become our society's standard for what aliens are "supposed to look like." This standard has reached the point where any witness that doesn't report something that looks like the cover of Communion is dismissed as a hoaxer. People who see things that don't look like the cover tend not to be believed by UFOlogists. Those sightings are not followed up, and they don't go into the database. So, scientific analysis tends to retrieve more and more patterns that correspond to those patterns that we expect in the first place.

There's a self-fulfilling prophecy involved which is very tricky.

[...]

I studied Greek in school, and of course, the Greeks accepted a mythological universe in which all of that [giants, small people and so forth] was possible. They believed in multiple powers, some of which were called "gods." They also accepted other kinds of spirits. I've spent much time reading the available esoteric literature, especially the medieval literature, where these entities are called "elementals" and thought to be the agents of much of the physical phenomenon. Now, of course, we have physical laws that explain much of the phenomena so the little beings are dismissed out of hand, but there is a body of folklore of people who have actually seen those beings.

I think there is an obvious parallel with people describing UFO entities today.

I think that the basic breakthrough for me is to understand that the UFO phenomenon is not a system. If it was a system, we could probably understand it. We're very good at analyzing systems whether they're social systems, hardware systems, or physical systems. I think we're not getting anywhere because we need to look at a phenomena not as a system but as a meta-system.

In other words, it's a system that generates systems. To offer a simple analogy, let's suppose that we were going to study a civilization that we knew very little about. So, we get there on Saturday night and find these crowds coming out of certain buildings. So, we ask these people, "What did you do there?" And they say, "Oh, it was great. We saw 'Bambi'." Well, we write that down and note that it is consistent because, basically, they all describe the same thing.

Then we go across the street and there's another crowd coming out of another similarly constructed building, and we ask them, "What did you see?" And they say, "Oh, it was great. We saw this character called 'Rambo'." This information is also consistent, but it's completely different from what the people across the street report

So, the next step is to go inside the buildings to check the reports for ourselves. But all we see is a blank wall and rows of chairs facing that blank wall. The obvious theory is a psychological theory -- these people like to get together and their consciousness creates myths out of their own fantasies. Some people like to see Bambi, others like to see Rambo, but we assume there is no physical reality for either. We would be completely wrong in that assumption, but it would be a logical theory to develop.

People do exactly the same thing about UFOs. They say, "It's mythology. It rose out of the unconscious of the people at a certain time. At certain times they like to see the Blessed Virgin Mary; at certain times they like to see fairies, and at certain times they like to see spacecraft.

Now, if you go to the movies while the movie is playing, it' suddenly different because now it is a sensory experience -- you see it; you react! It speeds up your heart, and does all kinds of physiological things to you. But does it mean that Bambi exists? Of course not. There is a basic flaw in that level of analysis, and I think that's a pitfall in which the whole of UFOlogy, especially American UFOlogy, has fallen. There is only a first-level reading.

I think that's happening with the abduction research being done right now. When they hypnotize these witnesses, and they regress them to the experience, what they get is what was on the blank screen. I don't think they get the reality.

Instead of looking at the screen, what I want to do is to turn around and look the other way. When we look the other way what we see is a little hole at the top of the wall with some light coming out. That's where I want to go. I want to steal the key to the projectionist's booth, and then, when everybody has gone home, I want to break in. And what you find there is a meta-system.

It's a system of wheels that can generate anything you want -- Bambi, Rambo, "Close Encounters"... That's my next project; I would like to play with the projector. One way to do that would be to interfere with the phenomenon itself. I think if you did that you would force it to react...If it's a control system, then there is a feedback loop somewhere. Once you find the feedback loop then you can screw around with it.

[...]

If you can't have war anymore, then you're faced with the terrible consequences of long-term peace. In other words, our economic system is disorganized; our industrial system is disorganized; the mechanism for technical innovation is thrown out of balance, and you have to replace all that with something else. Now, if there is an enemy coming from outer space, then that would provide new motivations that provide an outside focus. It would be interesting to speculate on that.

There was a report in the fifties in a book called, "The Report From Iron Mountain." It was a hoax, but it was a very interesting literary hoax that people suspect was created by a sociologist or a school of sociologists. [One of our earlier experiments in metaprogramming; designed to impress upon the profane the need for our Most Holy National Security -B:.B:.]

I don't know who it was, but it was somebody who was involved in government long-term planning. It's presented, overtly, as being the summary of a government workshop at Iron Mountain on the impact of long-term peace. One of the main conclusions of it is that we manufacture a hypothetical threat from outer-space to unite the earth in order to keep innovation going and to continue something that serves the same role as war production but in a peaceful world.

[...]

I've been accused of not accepting the fact that the extraterrestrials are coming. The last thing that I published is called "Five Arguments against the Extraterrestrial Origin of UFOs." Of course, one of the conclusions I reach is that they (whatever they are) could be from outer space. But they could be from anywhere and anytime. They could be from inside this coffee pot.

If you can manipulate time and space, then you can be from anywhere you want.

[...]

I feel that I could go before a committee of scientists and convince them that there is overwhelming evidence that the UFO phenomena exists and that it is an unrecognized, unexplained phenomenon for science, but something that I think I could prove. My personal contention is that the phenomenon is the result of an intelligence, that it is a technology directed by an intelligence, and that this intelligence is capable of manipulating space and time in ways that we don't understand. I could convince a committee of my peers that the phenomenon is real, that it is physical, and that we don't understand it. I could not convince them that my speculation is correct; there may be alternative speculations. The essential conclusion I'm tending to is that the origin of the phenomenon of the intelligence is not necessarily extraterrestrial

I think it's an opportunity to learn something very fundamental about the universe because, not only is the phenomenon or technology capable of manipulating space and time in ways that we don't understand, it's manipulating the psychic environment of the witness.

I tried to introduce that idea when I wrote "Invisible College." At that time, the UFO community was not ready for it. The New Age and the parapsychology communities interpreted my conclusion to mean that UFOs are devas from the dream world -- that they are not physical, or that the physical aspect is unimportant. In truth, I think we are dealing with something that is both technological and psychic, and seems to be able to manipulate other dimensions.

This is neither wishful thinking nor personal speculation on my part. It's a conclusion that comes from interviewing critical witnesses, and then listening to what they have to say. And what they have to say is not that they've seen space craft coming down from the sky and then returning to the sky.

More often, what they have reported is that they have seen something appear on the spot, take on a physical shape, sometimes even changing shape, and then disappear, sometimes faster than the eye can trace. On occasion, it will disappear in a closed space by either becoming transparent and then vanishing or by concentrating into a single point. An example that's often given is like turning off a television set; the image goes "zoom!" to a single point.

I don't have a good explanation for the question of why the technology seems to appear in a form that uses images from our own unconscious. I'd be kidding if I said that I understand that. There are cases of repeated observations where the phenomenon begins by being amorphous and then starts matching the expectations of the witnesses.

There are two ways to deal intellectually with that: One is to say it's a phenomenon of the brain which is very good at reading recognizable images in amorphous things like clouds and ink blots. So, perhaps the witnesses are getting used to this phenomenon and are starting to read things into it. But that's not the only explanation.

It may be that the phenomenon itself is using our reactions to it in order to turn into something that we expect or understand. We may be carrying a matrix of imagery that it somehow picks up. A good example of that is Fatima. The apparitions witnessed at Fatima did not start in 1917. They started two years before. Some of the same kids were involved, and there were also other witnesses. What they saw was a globe of light.

Then they saw a globe of light with some type of being inside. Then they started calling the being an angel, and then the angel stated communicating with them and gave them a prayer. It developed in stages, and culminated in 1917, but even then the virgin Mary wasn't seen by everyone who was present

[...]

There are certainly occult groups that claim they can invoke or evoke beings that do some of the things that UFO entities do. I've looked. I've contacted a number of those groups. [Indeed, we at the Lodge have compiled a sizable array of dossiers on neo-Enochian practitioners who have enjoyed a great degree of success invoking such "space alien extraterrestrials." -B:.B:.]

[...]

We know more today than we did five years ago about the manifestations of the phenomenon. You could say that, if it's a superior type of consciousness we're dealing with, that consciousness is engaging us in certain games.

They can throw whatever phenomena they want at us, and we will not be the wiser. So, it's like being in school and having somebody give you tests all day long; you try to do the best you can. That's all I can do. And I have to believe there is a way to graduate from this. How? That depends on the kind of control system we are operating within.

There are two kinds of control systems. There are control systems that are open, like a university, where you take tests for what seems to be a long time, but eventually you graduate, and go out into the real world a little bit better equipped to deal with it.

Then there are closed systems like jails. If I was going to build a control system, it would be an open control system because I don't think I would derive much pleasure out of running a jail. If I assume the UFO phenomena represents some kind of consciousness out there, then I would also assume it would be dealing in terms of an open system. That assumption may be wrong. Maybe this a jail, and there is no hope. But I'm going with the assumption that if we respond to these tests, we will learn something. There is a feeling that I get in the course of my investigations of being in the presence of a form of consciousness that is truly remarkable.

That consciousness has a great sense of absurdity, and also a great sense of humor. The bottom line is that I feel that I've learned something out of this whole exercise, and as long as I'm continuing to learn something I'm going to continue to do it.
 

Brother Jacques at Crowleymas

As told by Frater Robert Anton Wilson; Holy Discordian, OTO Initiate and CAW Water Brother in his Outstanding Masterpiece of Speculative Illumination "Cosmic Trigger." Recalling Crowleymas (October 12) 1974, Brother Wilson stated:
...And then Jacques Vallee arrived.

I had wanted to talk to Doctor Vallee for several months now and I immediately kidnapped him into a room which the other partygoers were not informed about. On the way, we spotted Hymenaeus Alpha (Grady McMurty), Caliph of the Ordo Templi Orientis, and his wife, Phylis.

The Skeptic had heard Jacques Vallee talk at a conference on Science and Spirit, sponsored by the Theosophical Society, earlier in the year. He had taken a new approach to the UFO mystery and was systematically feeding all the reports of extraterrestrial contacts into a giant computer. The computer was programmed to look for various possible repeated patterns. Jacques said that the evidence emerging suggested to him that the UFOs weren't extraterrestrial at all, but that they seemed to be intelligent systems intent on convincing us they were extraterrestrial.

[Indeed, even as our Dear Brother Terence McKenna hath said, "We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extraterrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us." -B:.B:.]

Now the Skeptic started pumping Jacques about his evidence that they weren't extraterrestrial. He started to explain that, analyzing the reports chronologically, it appeared that They (whoever or whatever they are) always strive to give the impression that they are something the society they are visiting can understand. In medieval sightings, he said, they called themselves angels; in the great 1902 flap in several states, one of the craft spoke to a West Virginia farmer and said they were an airship invented and flown from Kansas; in 1940s-1950s sightings, they often said they were from Venus; since Venus has been examined and seems incapable of supporting life, they now say they are from another star-system in this galaxy.

"Where do you think they come from?" I asked.

Doctor Vallee gave the Gallic form of the classic scientific Not-Speculating-Beyond-The-Data head-shake.

"I can theorize, and theorize, endlessly," he said, "but is it not better to just study the data more deeply and look for clues?"

"You must have some personal hunch," I insisted.

He gave in gracefully. "They relate to space-time in ways for which we have, at present, no concepts," he said. "They cannot explain to us because we are not ready to understand."

I asked Grady McMurty if Aleister Crowley had ever said anything to him implying the extraterrestrial theory which Kenneth Grant, Outer Head of another Ordo Templi Orientis, implies in his accounts of Crowley's contacts with Higher Intelligences.

"Some of the things Aleister said to me," Grady replied carefully, "could be interpreted as hints pointing that way."

He went on to quote Crowley's aphorisms about various of the standard entities contacted by Magick. The Abramelin spirits, for instance, need to be watched carefully. "They bite," Aleister explained in his best deadpan am-I-kidding-or-not? style. The Enochian "angels," on the other hand, don't always have to be summoned. "When you're ready, they come for you," Aleister said flatly.

(The Enochian entities were first contacted by Dr. John Dee in the early 17th Century. Dr. Dee, court astrologer to Queen Elizabeth and also an important mathematician, has been controversial from his own time to ours, some writers regarding him as a genius of the first rank and others as a clever lunatic

According to two interesting books, "The World Stage" and "The Rosicrucian Enlightenment," both by a most scrupulous historian, Dr. Francis Yates, Dee was almost certainly a prime mover in the "Illuminati" and "Rosicrucian Brotherhoods" of that time, which played a central role in the birth of modern science. The alleged UFOnaut from Uranus which communicated with the two Naval Intelligence officers gave a name, AFFA, which is a word in the "angelic" language used by the entities Dee contacted. It means Nothing. George Hunt Williamson also got some words in "angelic" from his Space Brothers, remember.

"The outstanding quality of UFO contactees," Jacques Vallee said at this point, "was incoherence. I now have grave reservations about all physical details they supply," he said.

"They are like people after an auto accident. All they know is that something very serious has happened to them." Only the fact that so many cases involve other witnesses, who see something in the sky before the "contactee" has his/her strange experience, justifies the assumption that what happens is more than "subjective."

"Largely," Doctor Vallee summarized, "they come out of it with a new perspective on humanity. A religious perspective, in general terms. But all the details are contradictory and confusing." He regarded green men, purple giant men, physical craft with windows in them, etc., as falling into the category psychologists call "substitute memory," always provided by the ingenious brain when the actual experience is too shocking to be classified.

I asked how many in the room had experienced the contact of what appeared to be Higher Intelligence. Grady and Phylis McMurty put up their hands, as did two young magicians from the Los Angeles area, and myself. Jacques Vallee, curiously, looked as if he might raise his hand, but then evidently changed his mind and did not. I said I inclined to believe the Higher Intelligences were extraterrestrial, and asked what the others thought.

Grady McMurty-Caliph of the Ordo Templi Orientis said, in effect that the theory of higher dimensions made more sense to him than the extraterrestrial theory in terms of actual space ships entering our biosphere.

The two Los Angeles magicians agreed.

Tom, who had been a witch for five years and hadn't raised his hand when asked for contactee testimony, said that the Higher Intelligences are imbedded in our language and numbers, as the Cabalists think, and have no other kind of existence. He added that every time he tried to explain this he saw that people thought he was going schizophrenic and he began to fear that they might be right, so he preferred not to talk about it at all. Tom-who is a computer programmer by profession, a witch only by religion-later added a bit to this, saying that all that exists is information and coding; we only imagine we have bodies and live in space-time dimensions.

Doctor Vallee listened to all this with a bland smile, and did not seem to regard any of us as mad.

(A few days later, in discussion with the former Vacaville prison psychologist, Dr. Wesley Hiler, I asked him what he really thought of Dr. Leary's extraterrestrial contacts. Specifically, since he didn't regard Leary as crazy or hallucinating, what was happening when Leary thought he was receiving extraterrestrial communications?

"Every man and woman who reaches the higher levels of spiritual and intellectual development," Dr. Hiler said calmly, "feels the presence of a Higher Intelligence. Our theories are all unproven. Socrates called it his daemon. Others call it gods or angels. Leary calls it extraterrestrial. Maybe it's just another part of our brain, a part we usually don't use. Who knows?")

Since everybody in the room at this point had either had the required experience, or was willing to speculate about it and study it objectively rather than merely banishing it with the label "hallucination," I went into my rap about the parallels between Leary and Wilhelm Reich.

"The attempt to destroy both Dr. Reich and Dr. Leary reached its most intense peak right after they reported their extraterrestrial contacts," I said. "I keep having very weird theories about what that means..."

Grady McMurty nodded vigorously.

"That's the $64,000 question," he said emphatically. "For years I've been asking Phylis and everybody else I know: why does the gnosis always get busted? Every single time the energy is raised and large-scale group illuminations are occurring, the local branch of the Inquisition kills it dead. Why, why, why?"

Nobody had any very conclusive ideas.

"I'll tell you what I think," Grady said. "There's war in Heaven. The Higher Intelligences, whoever they are, aren't all playing on the same team. Some of them are trying to encourage our evolution to higher levels, and some of them want to keep us stuck just where we are."

According to Grady, some occult lodges are working with those nonhuman intelligences who want to accelerate human evolution, but some of the others are working with the intelligences who wish to keep us near an animal level of awareness.

This is a standard idea in occult circles and it can safely be stated, without exaggeration, that every "school" or "lodge of adepts" that exists is regarded, by some of the others, as belonging to the Black Brotherhood of the evil path. Grady's own Ordo Templi Orientis, indeed, has been accused of this more often than have most other occult lodges. I have personally maintained my good cheer and staved off paranoia, while moving among various occult groups as student or participant, by always adhering rigidly to the standard Anglo-Saxon legal maxim that every accused person must be regarded as innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. This obviously spares me a lot of worry, but the more guarded approach is very well argued by Isaac Bonewitz, the author of Real Magick. "Paranoid magicians outlive the others," Isaac says

Somehow the conversation drifted away from Grady's concept of "war in Heaven." Several times, Grady tried to steer us back there, but each time we wandered on to a different subject. Tom said later that he felt a presence in the room deliberately pushing us away from that topic...

Dr. H. -- the psychiatrist whose bad acid-trip had started the Crowleymas party off so jumpily for me -- dropped by the next day, to thank me for "talking him down" from his anxiety attack.

He also, it soon appeared, wanted to tell me about his accelerating experiences with magick. It had started over two years earlier, after an intensive seminar at Esalen. Dr. H. suddenly found that he could see "auras." (The aura of the human body, known to shamans and witches since time immemorial, has been repeatedly rediscovered by scientists, most of whom were thereupon denounced as "cranks." Franz Anton Mesmer called it "animal magnetism," in the 16th century. In the 19th, Baron Reichenbach called it "OD." In the 1920s, Gurvich named it "the mytogenic ray."

Wilhelm Reich rediscovered it in the 1930s, called it "orgone energy," and was destroyed by AMA bigots who charged that he was hallucinating it. Kirlian photography has now demonstrated beyond all doubt that this aura exists.) Dr. H. soon found, further, that he could use the aura as a diagnostic tool in analyzing new patients. This experience, Leary's books, and a lecture by me on Crowley's magick, led him to further experiments.

On a beach in Sonoma County, after taking LSD the day before and programming an opening of the self to higher beings or energies, Dr. H. (no longer under the direct influence of the drug) had an experience with Something from the sky. "It wasn't exactly a Higher Intelligence," he said carefully, "or, at least, I didn't receive that aspect of it, if it was Higher Intelligence. To me it was just energy. Terrible energy. My chest was sore for hours afterward. I thought it would kill me, but I was absolutely ecstatic and egoless at the peak of it. If the chest-pain weren't so intense, it would have been a totally positive experience."

MacGregor Mathers, Outer Head of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the first occult teacher of such worthies as Aleister Crowley, poet William Butler Yeats and novelist Arthur Machen, once recorded a meeting with the Secret Chiefs. These ambiguous entities, known in several schools of occult training, are variously believed to be discarnate spirits of the great Magi of the past, living Magi who can teleport themselves about as easily as you or I telephone a friend, "angels" in the traditional sense, or merely "beings we cannot understand."

In any case, Mathers noted that the meeting, although pleasant, left him feeling as if he'd been "struck by lightning" and he also suffered chest pains and extreme difficulty in breathing. Dr. Israel Regardie has also noted that Alan Bennett, who was Crowley's chief teacher for many years, developed asthma, a chest disease. Crowley developed asthma himself as his contacts with the Secret Chiefs occurred more often; and Regardie finally "caught" asthma for several years after studying with Crowley, a condition which was only cured when he went through the bioenergetic therapy of Wilhelm Reich.