by Daniel Blair Stewart

Excerpt from Green Egg Magazine
The Official Organ of the Church of All Worlds
"A Magazine of Goddess and Nature Religion"
Vol. XXTV, No. 95, Yule 1991
from VirtuallyStrange Website
 

We have all seen the classic Spielberg film that immortalized J. Allen Hynek’s phrase, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It is the story of a little boy, a telephone repairman and a compassionate, wise French scientist who meet at the site of contact with extraterrestrials. How many of us know that the fictional character "Lacombe" is based on a real person, a compassionate and wise French scientist who travels the world in search of the elusive UFO?

Fewer still know that Dr. Jacques Vallee, who is the real-life Lacombe, does not (I repeat, not!) espouse the theory that flying saucers necessarily constitute visitors from other worlds via spacecraft, saucer-shaped or otherwise. Instead, he postulates that they may be visitors from other dimensional worlds that coexist with ours, analogous to the realms of faerie, or may in fact be manifestations of something even stranger.

Jacques Vallee received training as an astrophysicist and a Master’s degree and then worked as an astronomer in France. There he witnessed the destruction of tracking tapes, which he had helped record, showing unidentified aerial phenomena. This sparked his interest in UFOs. He obtained his Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern University in Chicago and moved to California, where he pioneered computer science and proceeded to write what some UFOlogists consider to be the best books on the subject of UFOs.

Anatomy of a Phenomenon (1966) was followed by Challenge to Science (1967) co-written with his wife, Janine Vallee. In his 1970 classic Passport to Magonia, he wrote about the relationship of UFO contact with the patterns of faerie lore and the Little People. Five years later he published The Invisible College, which explored the patterns of influence unexplained phenomena have exerted on humanity historically.

His investigations led him on a grand tour of the sinister side of unexplained phenomena, which he encapsulated in his 1979 book, Messengers of Deception. After a very long period away from writing, while continuing to research UFOs, he published several technical books, notably The Network Revolution in 1982. Vallee returned to the subject of UFOs again in 1988 with Dimensions, which summed up UFOs from a historical perspective.

His book, Confrontations, (1990) is a detailed analysis of 100 of his most recent investigations, from northern California to Brazil.

Most recently, his book Revelations (1991) gives us a glimpse of the world of UFO reporting and investigation -- as well as the paranoid maze of military and intelligence involvement with UFOs. Unafraid of controversy, always ready to examine unpopular issues, he remains one of our most intrepid and highly original thinkers on any subject.

[Note: Green Egg is an "occult" magazine published by a neo-pagan group calling themselves the Church of All Worlds (CAW) and loosely fashioned after the group of the same name in Heinlein’s sci-fi classic "Stranger in a Strange Land." Although in reading this interview some may be pleasantly surprised to discover there is far more to the enigmatic Dr. Vallee than bizarre tales of Pancake-Bearing Martians, what we found of perhaps even greater interest and significance than the refreshingly iconoclastic substance of the interview was the fact that it appeared in this particular publication. Lastly, we offer it here in loving memory of our dear friend and Water Brother; the recently deceased CAW Bard, Adam Walks Between Worlds -- may you never thirst, my Brother. -B:.B:.]

Daniel Blair Stewart: What aspects, data, or questions about UFO phenomena are not being addressed by the community of investigators and researchers?

Jacques Vallee: To begin with, many aspects of UFO sightings have to do with the paranormal; yet psychic phenomena, paranormal phenomena have been consistently pushed under the rug by most UFO investigators. That is due in part to the fact that witnesses tell you such things only after you have gained their trust. But very often they are a challenge to the beliefs or the world view of the investigators. They may not be ready to hear it or they may not publish it because they think it would damage their credibility. And since they are in the business of giving credibility to the subject they don’t want to reveal the paranormal aspects of it.

Just to give you one example, in the Redding case that I investigated in northern California, the witnesses had seen an object three times on their claim near a mine that they worked. The case had been investigated by various UFO groups and the report had been published. I went there and gained the trust of the witnesses.

We went back to the place where the object had been and I asked them "How did the object take off?" They said it took off ... sort of at an angle." I looked at the place and said, "Well, it had to go through the trees, didn’t it?" And they said, "Well, it kind of went through the trees!" I pointed out, "That’s not what you told the other people who investigated and that’s not what’s in the published report." And they said, "Well, this man, he was so nice and obviously he wasn’t going to believe it if we told him it went through the trees."

Every genuine UFO sighting has some elements that are shocking to the "rational" view, the nuts-and-bolts picture that these are simply spacecraft from outer space.

Another aspect of your question is that for a long time the UFOlogists have been blind to the fact that the phenomenon can be manipulated. In particular it can be manipulated by the government, by various intelligence groups or by different cults with their own agenda. I published over ten years ago in Messengers of Deception my conclusion that many of the UFO organizations had been infiltrated. That book got me in a lot of trouble with my friends in the UFO community who refused to look at that particular problem.

Since then, of course, this observation has been vindicated. One government informant has even come forward to reveal that he, in fact, had been recruited to befriend various UFOlogists and to write psychological profiles of them. Every UFO organization is monitored by government informers.

On the board of the National Investigation Committee on Aerial Phenomena, which was one of the major organizations in this country in the ’50s and ’60s, were three people who were among the founders of psychological warfare. They were people with strong ties to the government and intelligence community. I’m not saying it’s necessarily illegal or wrong, but it should be recognized.

One of the recommendations of the 1953 Robertson Panel, convened by the CIA and the Air Force to review the UFO problem, was that UFO organizations be watched. That report was classified at the time. That recommendation was in fact implemented. The civilian UFO groups were being watched and infiltrated as early as the fifties. They still are.

I think this aspect has many remarkable consequences. To what extent were some well-known UFO sightings actually simulations that were staged for the benefit of someone who wanted to do social engineering research or psychological warfare research? Perhaps to see what kind of stimuli it would take to make people change their belief systems, for example.

DBS: A lot of investigators have pointed out that UFOs behave like holograms. I’ve heard the phrase "a hologram with mass" more than once.

JV: In many cases they behaved like a hologram that had mass. In other words, if a hologram could also interact with the environment, if it could put holes in the ground and burn the vegetation, you’d have a good approximation of what the UFO is. In other words, it is not an object like that car over there is an object. It looks like a car, it feels like a car, but it isn’t a car. It’s something totally different which can look like a car if it wants to.

To a large extent we know how to do that! We have devices that could produce something that would look like that car and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, including shadows reflecting on it as objects go by. This is today’s technology; not 1950s or 1960s technology, but it certainly is 1990s technology. But it still would not have mass. The UFOs do have mass. They leave imprints in the ground, they interact with the environment, so that’s where the analogy stops.

DBS: Tell us your objections to the extraterrestrial hypothesis as the explanation for UFOs.

JV: If we had done this interview 20 years ago I would have told you the best theory we have is that this is extraterrestrial. We do know that UFOs are a physical phenomenon, they offer us an opportunity to do some good science, and they seem to come from the sky. We have the capability to go to the moon and very soon to go to other planets. I do believe that there is life throughout this Universe. So why couldn’t "they" come here?

In the last 20 years we’ve learned a lot of new things about this phenomenon that contradicts the idea that it is extraterrestrial.

We have too many Close Encounters. The extraterrestrial theory on the first level assumes that these are explorers on a mission. They are supposed to have evolved on some other planet and are coming here. But if they have to study us by landing 100,000 times, they have to be very dumb! That’s approximately the volume of data we have on Close Encounters reports today. If you were to take into account that those tend to occur at night when there are fewer observers, if you extrapolate you would actually get into millions of landings.

Now, it wouldn’t take us millions of landings if there was a civilization on Mars we wanted to study. With something the size of a beer keg in orbit we could get most of the things we needed to know about them, especially if they’d been broadcasting "I Love Lucy" into space for so many years! Then we’d want to land to check some things and get actual samples. We’d land maybe a few dozen times, maybe a few hundred times, but we wouldn’t need millions of landings. So that aspect of it is a contradiction with the idea that it’s an extraterrestrial mission.

The second contradiction is the shape of the beings. They are uniformly humanoid in shape, somewhat bizarre and weird. They are described as having big eyes and being short with longer arms and so on, but still they have two legs, two arms. They have a torso and eyes that are adapted to exactly the same part of the spectrum as we are. They don’t walk around with goggles or strange devices on their eyes. They seem to hear what we hear; they seem to be breathing our air. That means they’re human or very close to human beings! It’s very unlikely that beings evolving on radically different planets would end up looking like us, breathing our air, seeing the same part of the spectrum that we see. I think the biological statistics are against it.

So you can say, "Well, they are so smart they are using biogenetic engineering to adapt to this planet and its gravity." But then why don’t they just create complete human beings? If you can go 99% of the way, why not 100%, and then you’d be completely undetectable? So I think that’s a serious obstacle to the ET theory.

Another argument is that this is not a recent phenomenon. It is a phenomenon that has existed, as far as we can tell, throughout history in one form or another. Without going back to Ezekiel or to Medieval folklore, we do have excellent UFO report records from 1897. I personally have a number of sightings that living people whom I actually met with and interviewed have told me about that they were witnesses of in the twenties and thirties.

So this certainly invalidates the idea that we’re dealing with a civilization that has just discovered us and is coming here now. UFOs seem to have been a part of our environment for a very long time, perhaps as long as man has existed.

Another problem with the extraterrestrial hypothesis is the behavior of these beings. The mainstream of UFOlogy today claims that these are wise explorers of the galaxy who are coming here to study us and the proof of that is what they do. In abductions, for example, they take away human beings. They seem to carry them inside a craft and they draw blood from them. They take samples from them, such as sperm and ova and these look like biological experiments to people like Budd Hopkins and his followers.

Well, I think it proves entirely the opposite thing, because the descriptions that are given of the medical examinations are crude to the point of being absurd. If you had this technology, disc-shaped vehicles that could fly silently and appear out of nowhere, paralyze people and remain unnoticed; if you wanted to, you could land on the roof of the Mayo Clinic or any large research hospital and you’d have access to the blood bank, the sperm, bank, the frozen embryo banks.

We are close to having the techniques for cloning people. You could potentially restart the human race with what we know today on Earth, yet we have only been doing molecular biology for about fifteen years. It’s a very young science, a new science. Think about it. If we can already do this and these beings are supposedly a million years ahead of us, they should be able to perform experiments that would be way beyond what we do.

Instead what people describe is victims coming back with obvious scars. They come back bleeding, they have things up their nose, they have terrible dreams, intense trauma, and they remember under hypnosis! The whole thing is completely absurd. The mind control people in the military already have drugs that can make people forget what they did for a week or what they did on Tuesday between 2 and 3, and no hypnotist could simply put them into a trance and recover the memory. So if we already have that kind of drug, a civilization millions of years in advance of us should be able to manipulate both the body and the memory much better.

Another thing that has been swept under the rug by UFOlogists, which is yet another argument against the extraterrestrial hypothesis, is that these objects change shape. In other words, they are not always discs or eggs or cigars. They change shape dynamically.

When I went to the Soviet Union, I met a man named Vladimir Azhazha, who is head of the research committee on UFOs in Moscow. He said, "You know, one of the most important aspects of this whole phenomenon is that it’s polymorphic." I wasn’t sure my interpreter was translating accurately, so I had him repeat that. He said, "It’s polymorphic; they change shapes. An object will appear as a disc and as it’s moving through the sky it will change into a cube or into a pyramid or it will vanish on the spot."

I showed him an article where I had said essentially the same thing. He looked at me and he said, "You know, it’s as if you and I had been working together for the last ten years." This shows something rather remarkable about the phenomenon, which is that two people who have been studying it in earnest in completely different parts of the world under completely different conditions will arrive at the same conclusions about it.

If it changes shape, if it can appear out of nowhere and disappear into nowhere, this is not just a bunch of spacecraft. This is a much more interesting technology that manipulates dimensions. It manipulates space-time. And if it can do that, then it can be from anywhere and anytime.

DBS: Where are they coming from, if not from outer space?

JV: Let me try to separate what I think I can prove from personal speculation. I would feel comfortable standing up in front of a scientific committee and I think I could argue convincingly that the UFO phenomenon is a real, unrecognized phenomenon; that it is physical and that it can manipulate space and time in ways that we don’t understand.

Beyond that, my own personal speculation which I could not prove is that the phenomenon represents a form of consciousness that is nonhuman. There’s a big distinction here. A lot of people might agree that there are unrecognized phenomena in nature, but wouldn’t necessarily agree that they are conscious even though they are nonhuman. If UFOs represent a form of consciousness then obviously it could originate in outer space, but not with the first level, nuts-and-bolts extraterrestrial hypothesis. It would have to be a lot more sophisticated than that. There could be a form of consciousness out in space that can manipulate dimensions. But it could just as easily be here on earth. It could be using the Earth as its home port.

It could also be tied to human consciousness. The Collective Unconscious could be doing this to us, projecting images that are important during the current crisis we are going through. It could also come from a form of creature that has always lived on Earth with us and is not an alien consciousness, in the sense that we usually think of aliens. This goes back to the traditions about the faeries and gnomes and Little People: what I have called the Magonia tradition, that in fact there is another Universe right here. Perhaps most of us just don’t see it, but it’s here.

When I started Passport to Magonia, I gathered all the old books about the faeries and the Good People, the Good Neighbors. This is a wonderful body of literature. These beings did approximately what the UFO beings do today. They would fly at night in strange cone-shaped luminous craft, they would abduct human beings, they even had little pins that would paralyze you. This is centuries ago, okay? And it matches reports from people who see UFOs today.

So I think that parallel is very interesting. It’s still one of my favorite theories but there could be others! You could argue that there are natural phenomena that play a role in all this. For instance, Paul Devereux has written several books about "Earth lights" which he has shown to be tied to several megalithic sites. Whether the megaliths have anything to do with UFOs, or whether those sites tended to have strange lights so that over the years people used them for their temple and put a rock there, is open to question. Perhaps it was a natural phenomenon all along. That’s a possibility, but it really does not explain all UFOs.

The other possibility is that there may be forces within the Earth tied to some old traditions. There may be unrecognized telluric currents, forces within the Earth that could manifest in the form of electromagnetic phenomena that could become luminous and float through the air. Usually those things we don’t think of as being intelligent but who knows? Maybe it could be a form of consciousness.

There are other way-out theories that I find entertaining. We could imagine superconductive clouds moving through the galaxy taking any shape they want. Say, if you were a superconductive hydrogen cloud ten times the size of the solar system and you wanted to look like a Volkswagen, who could stop you from looking like a Volkswagen? You could do anything you wanted to! There is a book called The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle, who is one of our greatest living astronomers. It is a science fiction story about a conscious hydrogen cloud. Now, of course if there was such a cloud we’d presumably see it as it came closer to the Earth. But there may be forms of plasma that we don’t know how to detect yet, or maybe we’re simply not looking for them.

Now, I don’t specifically believe all that, but these are fun theories that should be looked at. Paul Devereux’s hypothesis of the Earth Lights is a very important one.

Geologists today are beginning to reassess the descriptions by people who said they saw lights before an earthquake: "I saw this globe of light and it flew down the canyon and ten minutes later there was an earthquake!" Geologists used to say those were ignorant farmers who didn’t know their physics. Now they are beginning to realize that before an earthquake the friction forces within the Earth could well create plasma or electromagnetic discharges that could become visible. In fact, scientists like Dr. John Derr at the US Geological Survey have found a correlation of these lights with fault lines and earthquakes.

DBS: Do you think our awareness of UFOs has been detrimental or beneficial?

JV: In Confrontations we report on a trip Janine and I took to Brazil where there seemed to be evidence of UFO hostility. Objects would literally zap people with beams. In several cases it seemed that it killed them. It certainly injured them. We couldn’t really prove a direct cause-and effect relationship in the cases of death, but there was a cause-and-effect relationship in the cases of injuries. People were, in fact, injured by those beams.

The phenomenon really doesn’t seem to care at all whether it’s perceived as good or bad. It does seem to have an influence on our culture, but we may not be able to detect it because our view of it is so short. Historically, we’re only aware of things for a few months or a few years. We don’t tend to get the big picture of contemporary events. If we did, the science of economics would be in much better shape than it is!

It is very difficult for us to deal both with transient and slow- changing, long-term thing like the UFO phenomenon. It seems to be a control system. If it is a control system, then it affects our culture. We probably would be unable to detect whether it is doing good or bad to us. In fact, it may be beyond the level at which humans would define good and evil.

DBS: How vast might this phenomenon be?

JV: My impression is that it extends to every culture, every race, every religion on Earth. I really have not found a single place that doesn’t have a tradition about this phenomenon. What is fascinating is that most of the anthropologists have completely missed it! You have to look at the footnotes in their books to find any mention of it. It’s never mentioned in the mainstream. It’s a peripheral vision effect, you know? Something that’s just off to the side of your intellectual vision.

DBS: Tell us about your trip to Russia.

JV: In Russia I had a chance to talk to a number of groups who are actually doing UFO research. One of the groups was even interested in New Age pursuits, astrology and a number of other topics. We were amazed because when we went there we had no idea that this sort of work went on.

These people were also interested in natural healing and herbal medicine. They had an entire storehouse of primitive plant remedies that obviously came from a long Russian tradition. So we asked them,

"How come the Russian culture has preserved all this with the kind of regime you’ve had all these years?"

 

And they answered, "It’s very simple. In this respect we are ahead because you have had all these so-called ’rationalist’ thinkers in the West. The Russian tradition has always preserved some of the ancient ways, even under Communism."

 

So I said, "Why do you think there is such a difference between these two cultures when it comes to these traditions about nature?"

 

And they answered: "Well, you killed all your witches! So you’ve eliminated the genes from the gene pool. We’ve had an orthodox church here for centuries but they never killed the witches. Neither did the Communists. They did many horrible things, but only the Western church slaughtered the witches."

Oddly enough, parapsychology research went on in the Soviet Union even under Stalin’s regime. They never stopped doing that kind of research and they never stopped natural healing and natural medicine, side by side with the official medicine. Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t approved officially by the Academy of Sciences and all that, but they didn’t kill these people. They didn’t send them to labor camps.

I had never thought of that. The east European countries never eliminated those abilities from their gene pool.

We went there because there were a series of sightings in Voronezh, which is a city a few hundred miles south of Moscow. Some of the UFO sightings were reported in the Western press, but in a very superficial way. We found that there were many more witnesses than had been reported. There were not only Close Encounters but also things seen in the sky by up to 500 witnesses at the same time.

Very active research was being done by several official commissions and by private scientists. I was impressed by the number of people doing research and by the quality of the research.

DBS: Many books depict the UFO phenomenon as benevolent and peaceful. Your descriptions of UFOs in Confrontations make it appear sinister. How would you account for this discrepancy?

JV: I can understand why the expectation has grown that this could be helpful and benevolent. It’s a very complex, unexplained phenomenon and we always tend to project our own human fantasies into every such thing that comes along. It would be nice if somebody came down from the sky and told us how to stop wars and how to cure cancer. Unfortunately the phenomenon itself, when you look at it objectively, doesn’t seem to care about us at all. It seems to be benevolent in some cases and hostile or at least harmful in other cases.

Notice that we could say the same thing about electricity. We couldn’t live without electricity, but if you put your fingers in the socket it could kill you! That doesn’t mean the utility company is hostile to you, it just means that there’s a very powerful force out there and it doesn’t care if it kills you or not. Electricity really doesn’t give a damn one way or the other, and I think that, to some extent, the UFO phenomenon is the same way. It does whatever it has to do according to a pattern we haven’t detected. When people get in the way they get zapped.

In Close Encounter situations there is often a profound long- term psychological behavior change in the witness. Sometimes it’s for the better and sometimes it’s for the worse. You occasionally meet people who seem very enlightened, who have a very positive attitude toward life, who think they have psychic abilities, and when you ask them when they first became aware of this they will trace it to a time when they saw a UFO.

Some witnesses have actually described to us being healed as they were caught in the beam from a UFO. There is a case like that in Confrontations, a doctor in France who had been blown up by a mine in Algeria. He had a form of paralysis that was gone after he was exposed to light from the object.

There are also numerous cases in which the reverse happens. People are confronted with a UFO and their whole life changes for the worse. When they tell their story, the local people don’t believe them. They are ostracized, they get fired from their jobs, their wives leave them, they go through a tailspin, they sometimes end up as bums.

That happened in the ’60s and ’70s to several American cops. The phenomenon tends to happen away from towns, between, say, 1 and 4:00 in the morning. Who is going to be away from a town between 1 and 4:00 in the morning, but the highway patrol! So very often in places like Nebraska, North Dakota, Minnesota, there are cases of Close Encounters at night involving highway patrolmen. In numerous cases their lives were destroyed or broken; they had to leave the force because people wouldn’t respect them anymore. They were suspected of seeing things, maybe of drinking.

DBS: In your book The Invisible College you stated that matter might have three aspects: substantial, energetical, and informational. Could you elaborate on this and show how it applies to UFO phenonmena?

JV: We learn in school that energy and information are two sides of the same coin, okay? That you can translate energy into information and vice versa. And yet, the only physics we learn is the physics of energy! The physics of energy should have a little sister, the physics of information, but nobody talks about it! It’s interesting to ask what might be in that physics.

My speculation is that that physics of information exists and that it is what people through the ages have called magic. The magical tradition asks, how does the mind deal with information structures? And how does it relate to the rest of Nature?

DBS: Tell me what perhaps idealistic changes you might make in our present that would improve our future?

JV: By idealistic, what do you mean? If I could change human beings, I would make them more loving, more open, but I don’t know how to do that. So I’m going to take your question on a different level: if I had the power to make changes in the way things are in the world, what would I change without changing human nature? I have to assume human nature is a given.

DBS: We’ll have to assume that. But now we’re going to give you temporary control of the world.

JV: Good! (Laughter, a long pause.) The reason I am silent is that it’s so easy to come up with idealistic things. Jesus Christ did it, every prophet has done it, and usually they ended up with the exact opposite of what they wanted. The prophets say: "Let there be love!" and people say, "Yeah, let there be love, but of course it has to be my way and not this other guys’s way!" and they end up fighting.

I do wish that the impulse to search, to question reality, to search beyond the obvious face of reality, became more widespread. I wish that people had more of an interest in the mysteries around them.

I also wish that there was a simple, medical way for all of us to experience what goes on in the moment of death without dying. I think that if people had that simple experience once, the rest of their lives would be very, very different. I have a few friends who have had a near-death experience, usually under very traumatic circumstances like a head-on collision. They changed radically the way they thought about their careers, their relationships, their life, their view of death. In some cases it eliminated their fear of death completely. When you don’t fear death anymore your life is going to change radically. So if there was one thing...

You cannot wish for people to have head-on collisions! I’m just wishing there was a way for people to have the experience of dying, to take it with them into the mainstream of their life without going through the trauma of an accident. Of course, that’s what initiation does, in part, with a lot of work. A head-on collision gives you that instant initiation, assuming you survive it. To some extent the UFO Close Encounter has the characteristics of a near death experience.

DBS: In quantum physics and biology scientists are considering models that no longer resemble the mechanistic models of the 19^th Century. In particular, quantum physicists speculate that the observer influences the phenomenon observed. In biology microbiologists are examining relationships to determine if Earth qualifies as a literally living thing. How do you respond to these models? Will breakthroughs in these fields apply to UFO phenomena?

JV: In both of those cases you have an example of the relationship of information with energy.

What we seem to be discovering in genetics is that what’s important is information storage. DNA is essentially a machine to store a lot of information. When you alter the information you alter the whole being. Essentially you are dealing here with software, not hardware. There may be other ways of representing it, other than DNA. It just seems to be an extraordinarily efficient way of storing information perfectly and duplicating it perfectly.

I’m not a physicist, but I do talk to a lot of physicists who are very puzzled these days. When you draw information out of an experiment, theoretically you’re drawing energy, because energy and information are related; in fact, they are identical. So if I observe a certain phenomenon at the quantum level, the answer is translatable in terms of energy. That energy had to come from somewhere! So I’ve actually had an impact on the experiment. It might not have happened the same way if I had not been observing it.

That’s another mechanism in which you see information and energy being related and unless we take that equation into account we don’t have a real picture of the Universe. That leads to the question of what is the role of consciousness in the Universe. This also relates to magic, because in magic you are manipulating information structures that have a relationship to the material world around you. So I think that both of those examples are very relevant to the question of information versus energy. Increasingly we may find that information is the more important of the two.

I think UFOs are a special case that forces us to question what we call reality. In Close Encounter cases there is a point at which the witness seems to enter a different reality. There is an English researcher named Jenny Randles who calls this "the Oz factor." There is a point where all of a sudden reality has split and the reality of the observer has been replaced by another reality. If we could measure that, if we could instrument the witness, we might be able to learn about what we call physical reality. But that also raises the question: how do we know that this reality is the real one? How would we prove that it’s the real one? This reality is merely a human consensus.

There are interesting experiments that have been done where a newborn cat is given goggles that have vertical slits, and the cat can’t take the goggles off. It’s known that visual reality is created in the first two weeks in the life of a cat. So after two weeks they remove those goggles and the cat has a vertical reality! The cat could not think of horizontal structures. The cat would never jump on this bench, for example. She would negotiate her way around a vertical structure, but she has no concept of horizontal things. If the goggles had horizontal slits, then that cat would have a horizontal reality.

The point is that we all have goggles over our minds and that’s where the UFO phenomenon comes in. It challenges these goggles! Our goggles are called culture, education, tradition and so on, and these are the things through which we see the world! We’re incapable of seeing the world through a different set of goggles. One of the opportunities that the UFO phenomenon is giving us is to look at reality in a much larger context.

Whatever UFOs turn out to be, the opportunity is here. Simply by stretching our minds and forcing us to look at the Universe in other ways.