Jacques Vallée's Messengers of Deception - Humans posing as Aliens?

This book is amazing, it's like it was written last week. Unbelievable that this was written in 1979, that we still know as little as back then, and that the bullshit cults and belief systems keep springing up. (Here's looking at you Steven Greer & co.)

update: check this post and see this through another reality tunnel, see this phenomenon as ourselves out of time peering through to us in time here and just confusing the hell out of us.

Read it here

Excerpt: Foreword to the 2008 Edition: 

Nearly 30 years have elapsed since Messengers of Deception first appeared in the US. Since then, the controversial views it expressed have been vindicated and thrown into sharp focus by shocking events that were reported worldwide. In particular, the stark warning I issued in connection with the HIM cult ("It only costs your life!") appears as unfortunately prophetic in light of the March 97 collective suicide of Heaven's Gate, as the group became known. The mass killings of the adepts of the order of the Solar Temple in Canada, France and Switzerland in 94 illustrated the dangerous form of mind control and the simulation of extraterrestrial contact I first described here in connection with the "Adventures of a Grand Master." The cattle mutilations phenomenon remains unsolved. As for the Raélians, the cult started by Vorilhon whose early lectures in San Francisco are recalled in this book, it has flourished internationally and burst into prominence in recent years with claims of human cloning.

Not only have these issues continued to simmer under the surface while UFO believers basked in their benign expectation of aliens from the stars, but a veritable mass conversion has taken place among the public and the media elite. The belief in extraterrestrial visitation is practically taken for granted among wide section of the population, and especially among the young. While the hypothesis of alien contact is an exciting one, justified on the basis of continuing observerations of unidentified flying objects, it carries the potential for exploitation and manipulation by deceptive groups with their own hidden agenda.

I believe that UFOs are physically real. They represent a fantastic technology controlled by an unknown form of consciousness. But I also believe that it would be dangerous to jump to premature conclusions about their origin and nature, because the phenomenon serves as the vehicle for images that can be manipulated to promote belief systems tending to the long-term transformation of human society.

"Give me the superstitions of a nation, and I care not who makes their laws, or writes their songs!" Mark Twain

From later in the book:
 

If we are not dealing with space visitors at all, but with powerful imagery projected in order to alter individual belief systems, then the dream-like, hallucinatory nature of the experience begins to make more sense. We could even imagine that the object is a form of natural energy; that close exposure to it triggered the vision; and that the most important question to ask is, what effect do such visions have on the society around the witnesses? Let us not forget that the society in question is badly in need of "space brothers," and has lost much of its faith in the scientific genius of mankind.

Such is the social matrix within we must consider an experience like Helen's abduction. Certain factors combine to suggest we should believe that she was interviewed by space creatures, but all the facts taken together suggest a different, more subtle interpretation: what she thought was a "contact" may have been a symbolic manifestation or a trap. Her "spacemen" may have been messengers of deception.

Witnesses to close encounters with UFOs give reports similar to this one in case after case. The phenomenon involves more than a simple craft using an advanced form of propulsion; it involves a technology that can distort the observer's sense of reality.

Psychic Technologies

We already have human technologies that are both physical and "psychic" (in the sense of influencing the consciousness of an observer). An example of such a technology is given, very simply, by your television set. There is no question that it is physical. You can talk about its size, volume, weight and temperature. But if you turn it on, it will begin to control your awareness in peculiar ways. You will observe scenes that, as far as you can tell, could be either "real" or faked. You may be a witness to an actual crime committed right now, or to something that happened years ago. You may also believe a scene to be absolutely real, when in fact it is actually staged in a studio in Hollywood. Based on what you can observe, you have no way to know the truth, even if you have a nobel prize in physics. Besides, your television set influences you in other ways. It determines what toothpaste you use, how you shave, who you go to bed with, and how you will vote in the next election.

In some respects I think UFOs are similar to television sets. They are physical objects, the products of a technology, bu tthey are also something else: the tools of a major cultural change. I think UFOs are perpetrating a deception by presenting their so-called "occupants" as being messengers from outer space, and I suspect there are groups of people on Earth exploiting this deception. I have written this book because I am concerned with the changes which would be triggered by the belief in an outer-space invasion, real or simulated. In the words of a Brookings Institute report on the cultural impact of extraterrestrial life:

The consequences of such a discovery are presently unpredictable because of our limited knowledge of behavior under even an approximation of such dramatic circumstances. The fundamentalist (and anti-science) sects are growing apace... For them, the discovery of other life would be electrifying.

update: Check out CaM's excellent remarks in the comments section.