The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (101 page)

Jacques Vallee, one of the most serious and intelligent writers on the subject, finally came to a similar conclusion. In earlier books like
Anatomy of a Phenomenon
and
Challenge to Science: The UFO Enigma
, he studied case reports with unusual thoroughness (and many statistical tables). In
Passport to Magonia
(1970) he pointed out that the picture we can form of the world of the UFO occupants is more like the mediaeval concept of Magonia, a land above the clouds, than some inhabited planet. By 1977 he had come to the strange conclusion that UFOs are basically “psychic” in nature, a view he expressed in a book called
The Invisible College
. The invisible college is a group of scientists who are engaged in the study of UFO phenomena, and who decline to be intimidated by conservative scientific attitudes. Vallee, himself a computer expert, reached the conclusion that UFO phenomena are a “control system” – that is, that they are designed to produce a certain specific effect on the human mind. He explains in
Messengers of Deception
(1979): that after a year researching the similarity between UFO phenomena and psychic phenomena “I could no longer regard the ‘flying saucers’ as simply some sort of spacecraft or machine, no matter how exotic its propulsion”. He went back to his computers, and concluded: “The most clear result was that the phenomenon behaved
like a conditioning process. The logic of conditioning uses absurdity and confusion to achieve its goal while hiding its mechanism. I began to see a similar structure in the UFO stories”.

Absurdity and confusion are certainly one of the most puzzling and irritating aspects of the UFO stories. Vallee devotes a chapter of
The Invisible College
to studying the case of Uri Geller. Geller, the Israeli psychic and “metal-bender”, was “discovered” by the scientist Andrija Puharich. Geller’s powers aroused such worldwide interest that it seemed inevitable that the first full-length book about him would become a bestseller. In fact Puharich’s
Uri: A Journal of the Mystery of Uri Geller
(1974) came close to destroying Puharich’s reputation as a serious investigator. It seems to be full of baffling confusions and preposterous and inexplicable happenings. Yet it also provides some vital clues to the mystery of “space intelligences”. In 1952, long before he met Geller, Puharich was studying with a Hindu psychic named Dr Vinod when Vinod went into a trance and began to speak with an English voice; this trance-entity announced itself as a member of “the Nine”, superhuman intelligences who had been studying the human race for thousands of years, and whose purpose is to aid human evolution. Three years later, travelling in Mexico, Puharich met an American doctor who also passed on lengthy messages from “space intelligences” – the odd thing being that they were a continuation of the messages that had come through Dr Vinod. When Puharich met Geller in 1971 the “Nine” again entered the story; while Geller was in a trance a voice spoke out of the air above his head explaining that Geller had been programmed by “space intelligences” from the age of three – the aim being to prevent the human race from plunging itself into catastrophe. Puharich goes on to describe UFO sightings, and an endless series of baffling events, with objects appearing and disappearing and recorded tapes being mysteriously “wiped”. Puharich assured the present writer (CW) that he had left out some of the more startling items because they would be simply beyond belief.

After Puharich’s break with Geller, the “Nine” continued to manifest themselves through mediums. The story is told in
Prelude to a Landing on Planet Earth
by Stuart Holroyd, and it is even more confusing than Puharich’s book. The “Nine” finally sent Puharich and his companions on a kind of wild-goose chase around the Middle East and other remote places; the main purpose was apparently to pray for peace, and the “intelligences” assured them that they had averted appalling international catastrophes.

In fact, the mention of mediums may provide a key to the mystery.
Modern spiritualism began in the mid-nineteenth century, when “spirits” began to express themselves through the mediumship of two teenage girls named Fox; soon thousands of “mediums” were causing mysterious rapping noises (one knock for yes, two for no), making trumpets and other musical instruments float through the air and apparently play themselves, and producing spirit voices – and even spirit forms – by going into a trance. No one who has studied the phenomena in depth can believe that they were all fraudulent. Moreover, the theory that they were somehow produced by the unconscious minds of the participants must also be reluctantly dismissed, since in many cases “spirits” were able to use different “mediums” in order to reveal fragments of the same message – fragments which interlocked like a jigsaw puzzle.

But what soon becomes equally clear to any student of the subject is that the “spirits” cannot be taken at their own valuation. As often as not, they told lies. Emanuel Swedenborg, the eighteenth-century visionary, warned that there are basically two varieties of spirit, a “higher order” and a “lower order”. A psychiatrist, Wilson Van Dusen, who studied hundreds of cases of hallucinations at the Mendocino State Hospital in California, noted that “the patients felt as if they had contact with another world or order of beings. Most thought these other persons were living. All objected to the term ‘hallucination’”. And he noted that the hallucinations seemed to fall into Swedenborg’s two categories: “helpful” spirits (about one-fifth of all cases), and distinctly unhelpful spirits whose aim seemed to be to cause the patients misery, irritation and anguish.

It is, of course, a major step for any normal, rational person to accept the real existence of disembodied spirits, or “discarnates”. Yet anyone who is willing to study the evidence patiently and open-mindedly will undoubtedly arrive at that conclusion. In fact, anyone who has ever tried automatic writing or the ouija board or “table turning” has probably reached the conclusion that there are “intelligences” that are capable of manifesting through human beings. But the question of the precise nature of these entities is altogether more baffling. It seems clear that some can be taken seriously, others not. Many seem to behave like the traditional demons of the Middle Ages, telling whatever lie happens to enter their heads on the spur of the moment. Some of these “intelligences” – known as poltergeists – can even manifest their presence by causing objects to fly around the room, or causing mysterious bangs and crashes. One interesting characteristic of the poltergeist is that it can cause an object travelling at high speed to change direction
quite abruptly, in defiance of the Newtonian laws of motion. This also seems to be one of the characteristics of the flying saucer.

Jacques Vallee was intrigued by the number of cases in which UFOs behaved in a manner that contradicted the notion that they were simply the artifacts of some superior civilization; some have dissolved into thin air; some have vanished into the earth; some have expanded like balloons, then disappeared. Some “spacemen” seem to have the power of reading thoughts and of predicting events which will occur in the future. Many of them like Puharich’s “Nine” insist that their purpose is to prepare the human race for some astonishing event, like a landing of UFOs on earth; but the landing never seems to occur.

Yet it may be simplistic to believe that UFOs are simply an up-dated version of medieval demons or nineteenth-century “spirit communicators”. Vallee’s belief is that the phenomenon is “heuristic” that is, is designed to teach us something. Modern science and philosophy have accustomed us to materialistic theories of the universe, to the notion that living creatures are a billion-to-one accident, and that the human reality is simply the reality of our bodies and brains. In
Flying Saucers
,
A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies
, Jung suggested that UFOs may be modern man’s response to his craving for religious meanings, and Vallee seems to accept at least the basic implication of this theory. Like Jung, he also seems to believe that coincidences may be more than they seem. In
Messengers of Deception
, he describes his interest in a modern religious cult called the Order of Melchizedek, which believes that its basic doctrines have been received through extra-terrestrial intelligences. Then, as noted in chapter 54, he began collecting all he could find about the biblical prophet Melchizedek. In February 1976 he asked a female taxi-driver in Los Angeles for a receipt; when he looked at the receipt it was signed “M. Melchizedek”. He looked up Melchizedek in the Los Angeles phone directory; there was only one . . .

This leads Vallee to an interesting speculation about the underlying reality of the world. He points out that we are confined to our space-time continuum, and all our concepts of knowledge are based on space and time. So in a library our “information retrieval system” is based on alphabetical order. But modern computer scientists have developed another method; they “sprinkle the records throughout storage as they arrive, and . . . construct an algorithm for retrieval based on some type of keyword . . .” He concluded: “The Melchizedek incident . . . suggested to me that the world may be organized more like a randomized data base than a sequential library”. In a computer “library”, the student enters a request for “microwave” or “headache” and finds
twenty articles that he never even suspected had existed. Vallee had entered a request for Melchizedek, and some psychic computer had asked: “How about this one?”

In
The Flying Saucer Vision
(1967), the English writer John Michell also takes his starting-point from Jung. Michell accepts Jung’s view that the UFO phenomenon is somehow connected with the “religious vacuum” in the soul of modern man. He associates UFOs with ancient legends about gods who descend in airships, and his conclusions are not dissimilar to those of von Däniken, although rather more convincingly argued. But Michell also has an original contribution to make to “ufology”. In his researches he had stumbled upon Alfred Watkins’s book
The Old Straight Track
(1925), in which Watkins argues that the countryside is intersected with ancient straight trackways which were prehistoric trade routes, and that these tracks connect “sacred sites” such as churches, stone circles, barrows and tumuli. Watkins called these “ley lines”. Michell argues that the ley lines are identical with lines that the Chinese call “dragon paths” or
lung mei
. The Chinese science of
feng shui
, or geomancy, is basically a religious system concerned with the harmony between man and nature; it regards the earth as a living body.
Lung mei
are lines of force on the earth’s surface, and one of the aims of
feng shui
is to preserve and concentrate this force, and prevent it from leaking away. Michell was mistaken to state that
lung mei
are straight lines, like Watkins’ leys – in fact, the Chinese regard straight lines with suspicion; the essential quality of
lung meis
is that they are crooked. But Michell takes an important step beyond Watkins in regarding ley lines as lines of some earth force; he believes that ancient man selected spots in which there was a high concentration of this force as their sacred sites. Points where two or more ley lines cross have a special significance. Michell also points out that many sightings of flying saucers occur on ley lines, and particularly on their points of intersection – for example, Warminster, in Wiltshire, where a truly extraordinary number of sightings have been made. In a book called
The Undiscovered Country
, Stephen Jenkins, another serious investigator of such matters, points out how often crossing-points of ley lines are associated with all kinds of “supernatural” occurrences, from ghosts and poltergeists to strange visions of phantom armies. Once again we seem to have an interesting link between UFOs and the “supernatural”.

Two more investigators deserve a mention in this context: T.C. Lethbridge and F.W. Holiday. Lethbridge was a retired Cambridge don who became fascinated by dowsing, and the power of the pendulum to detect various substances under the earth. (I have spoken of him at
length in my book
Mysteries
.) Towards the end of his life (he died in 1971), Lethbridge became interested in flying saucers, and in a book called
Legend of the Sons of God
(1972) suggested that UFOs may be associated with ancient standing stones – in fact, that such stones may have been set up in the remote past as “beacons” for ancient space craft. Lethbridge knew nothing of ley lines, but his own investigations led him to conclusions that are remarkably similar to Michell’s.

F.W. Holiday was a naturalist and a fishing journalist who became fascinated by the mystery of the Loch Ness monster (
qv
) and wrote a book suggesting that it was a giant slug, or “worm” (using this word in its medieval sense of “dragon”). But after years of study of the phenomenon he found the Loch Ness monster and other lake monsters as elusive as ufologists have found flying saucers. He became increasingly convinced that both flying saucers and lake monsters belong to what he called “the phantom menagerie” (see chapter 19 on The Grey Man of Ben MacDhui). This view was expressed in his book
The Dragon and the Disc
, and in his posthumous work
The Goblin Universe
. Like Vallee, Holiday finally became convinced that the answer to the UFO enigma lies in “the psychic solution”. It must be acknowledged that there is a great deal of evidence that points in this direction. On the other hand, it would be premature to discount the possibility that they may be spacecraft from another planet or galaxy; this is a matter on which it would be foolish not to keep an open mind.