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.

Jacques Vallée - Messengers of Deception - hypnotic regression

Jacques Vallée: The Software of Consciousness

Jacques Vallée: The Software of Consciousness

Jacques Vallée talks about Remote Viewing, Ingo Swann, and more.

Interview with Robert Anton Wilson

Interview with Robert Anton Wilson. Copyright Gregory Bishop 1992 (also available in the collection Zen In The Art Of Close Encounters. Edited by David Pursglove)

Q: In the recent book Angels and Aliens, author Keith Thompson cites what he calls "metapatterns", which are repeated patterns in seemingly dipsarate phenomena which connect them.
Do you entertain this concept, and if so, how?

Wilson: Yeah, I see metapatterns between evolution and human history. I see an acceleration of information throughout evolution and you can see a similar acceleration of information throughout human history moving faster than the evolutionary one, and I think cosmic--if you consider the universe as evolving--there's another accumulation of information over time on a bigger scale. That's one of the metapatterns I've found useful.

Q: You don't think that's just because we're noticing it, that the universe is ticking on its merry way?

Wilson: Well that's the deepest question of all! I don't know. John Archibald Wheeler thinks it's because we're noticing it. He thinks that we're fine tuning the big bang every time we measure it, or at least a measurement on a sufficiently small scale, so we're selecting this universe out of all possible universes by the measurements we make, but I don't know whether I believe that or not.

Q: Thompson also compares the UFO phenomenon and people that study it to absurdist theater such as Waiting For Godot where the waiting becomes robotic entertainment...

Wilson: Well, I think it's more like a little film by Idries Shah--The Dermis Probe---it's a dense leathery something and these voices arguing about it. The camera keeps moving back as the voices find more and more details and more and more to argue about, until finally the camera moves back enough so that you can see it's an elephant. It's an adaptation of an old Sufi tale. I think it's more like the, UFO mystery than any of Beckett's plays. Everybody gets ahold of their favorite end and...

Q: ...won't let go...

Wilson: That's what it is! "It's extraterrestrials" "It's angels" "It's demons... hallucinations..."

Q: Fairies and elves...

Wilson: Faries and elves... yeah I like that theory because it's very hard for anybody to take it literally, so it gets one thinking on a different level.

Q: Where did you first hear about that theory?

Wilson: From Jacques Valee in 1976.

Q: Around the time of Passport to Magonia ?

Wilson: Around that time, yeah. I met him and then I ran right out and got the book and read it, and then I read Invisible College, which was the next book he brought out.

Q: Do you see UFOs as an experiment or at least a fly in the ointment of modern (last 50 years or so) consciousness or at least ideas of consensus reality?

Wilson: Oh yes, very definitely. That's what I like about it. I like the metaphor that Brad Steiger used although I don't take it literally: In the reality game, everytime we think we understand it, the player on the other side introduces some new move that in all of infinity has never been done before, so we've got to start thinking again and trying to figure out the rules of the game all over. I like that as a metaphor because the UFO is very much like that--it's a new move that the universe has made. That explains why a lot of people don't want to think about it at all.

Q: It forces people to change their ways of thinking, and that's scary... What is your feeling that many of our major religions are the result of contact with the "alien" the "other", or at least what we now regard as anomalous experience?

Wilson: Well, major religions of all sorts, from shamanic to the most "advanced" (which is what they call themselves--the more successful ones with millions of followers). All religions seem to be based on some sort of encounter with an alien presence, or what seems like an alien presence. According to one theory, it's just the other half of our brain.

Q: Like the miracle of Fatima.

Wilson: At Fatima the number of people seeing odd things increased with each visitation until there were about 100,000 witnesses from all over Portugal who saw parts of the last one which was "a light brighter than a thousand suns and petals falling out of the sky" or something like that. Really it sounds like a cosmic Houdini was putting on a show for them.

Q: What would you think would have happened if this had happened in say, China, Japan, or India?

Wilson: Oh, It would have been dragons fighting dragons in the sky... these things always... on going through the human nervous system they get adapted to the local belief system.

Q: Do you think they would have taken it just as seriously as the Catholic church did?

Wilson: Oh sure. Whatever it was, it certainly struck a lot of people very hard, so it would have been a religious event wherever it happened. I was at a conference in Georgia a few months ago called Phenomicon and this was the first time I ever saw this: We had two eyewitnesses in the room in this final panel discussion. Two eyewitnesses to this UFO sighting that was seen by quite a few people in Atlanta. One of them saw a spaceship with portholes and the other one saw a weather balloon. I found that absolutely fascinating. This was the subject of my PHd dissertation - how our perceptions are adjusted to fit our belief systems. This was a fascinating example to watch. Neither one had any doubt - they were both women - which is irrelevant, but I have to say that to explain my grammar. Each one was convined that what she saw was what was "really there" in the external world. Neither of them had any awareness that their brain had taken thousands and maybe millions of energy-events in space-time and correleated them in their brains to put together this picture and project it outward. Leach has said that none of us realize what great artists we are. This is a prime example.

Q: There was a case in Kentucky where two people had been riding along in a car. One saw a craft land and typical aliens get out and abduct them, and the other saw a schoolbus going by. They both swore up and down that that's what they had seen.

Wilson: (Laughter) I think I've seen more UFOs than most people because I have no dogmas about this, and so I'm always noticing weird things that I don't quite know what they are. I've seen UFOs, but I see UNFOs too--"Unidentified Non-Flying Objects". The world is full of things that puzzle me. I'm not quite sure what they are and how to classify them.

Q: Actually, I have some non-UFO questions here... I read your last book (Cosmic Trigger Part 2) and it seemed very pessimistic or even paranoid. I probably shouldn't ask this now because you'll get offended.

Wilson: Well, now I'm curious.

Q: Well, your last book seemed very acidic.
Anyway, if you say we're the artists of our own reality, do you enjoy painting pictures of insane government figures and their plots to ruin our lives?

Wilson: That's a very good question and that book presents various ways of looking at reality. Sometimes the world does look that way to me. Some people see the world that way all the time. What I was trying to do in that book is show that we can see the world that way part of the time, but you don't have to get hung up on seeing it that way all the time.

Q: It was startling because I had never read anything that dark in your books.

Wilson: Well in my novels - you probably read only my non-fiction. People who have read only my novels tend to think I have a tragic and somewhat paranoid view of the world. People who have read only my non-fiction think I'm unrealistically optimistic. I try different reality tunnels in different books.

Q: What made you start doing that, do you think?

Wilson: The Kennedy assasination. I was reading all the controversial literature and I got to see more and more how everybody in that debate, on all sides, how they were adjusting the data to fit their prejudices. So in Illuminatus, my first long novel (in collaboration with Bob Shea) we gave a couple of dozen alternative scenarios and everybody in the book figures it out differently, and the reader has to figure out which version they're going to believe, or are they going to become agnostic.

Later I realized it was not just the Kennedy assasination, I could apply that to the whole world. That attitude is called Model Agnosticism and it's very popular in modern physics, and to some extent it's reaching the other sciences too. It's the idea that the model is useful for a time, but you don't ever believe in it the way people used to believe in religious dogma.

Q: Here's one a bit off the track... What are your two or three favorite films and why?

Wilson: The Trial by Orson Welles, because it's an unsolvable mystery. If it was solveable, I'd lose interest eventually, as it is, I can look at it over and over and always have a new attitude towards it. I always find something new in it.

Q: And...?

Wilson: Another one by Orson Welles, F Is For Fake, which is a documentary about the impossibility of making a documentary. It's a documentary in which everybody is lying, including Welles himself. You never can figure out who's the worst liar and how much you can believe. Some of it is true, but you can never be sure which part. Other documentaries are terribly dishonest, compared to that one, which admits it's lying. A documentary that admits it's lying is honest, a documentary that prentends to be honest is lying... And Stardust Memories, by Woody Allen.

Q: That's one of my favorites.

Wilson: That's very much like F Is For Fake. You never know what's real and what's part of one of his movies. Sometimes the characters seem to escape from his movies into so-called "reality", except reality itself is a movie that we're watching, right? His hostility escapes from his movie into reality...

Q: And attacks his ex-wife and mother and it's about to get his psychiatrist...

Wilson: (Laughs) It gets one of his fans too. It suddenly reappears when somebody is asking him about the sexuality of artists and "have you ever had intercourse with a horse".

Q: Yeah "with some kind of wild animal" or something like that.

Wilson: And his hostility suddenly appears on screen and drags the guy off! (laughs)

Q: What is "utopia" and do you still see it as a possibility in the next few decades or so? (Relatively anyway).

Wilson: Utopia is a world where there's no nuclear arms race. Where I don't wake up every morning wondering whether the Soviet Union or the government that alleges it's mine are going to start hurling nuclear weapons at each other. So we've already achieved utpoia. That's obviously not going to happen.

Q: It'll be another country that's buying weapons off the Soviet Union.

Wilson: I refuse to worry about that. They scared me most of my life. Now they're claiming there's holes in the ozone and I'm supposed to worry about that. I am too old, I refuse to fall for this crap anymore. The rest of my life I'm going to enjoy myself and I'm not going to let them scare me anymore with these... the Russians turned out to be... they just fell apart. They never had any plan to attack this country. They were afraid of this country all along.

Q: Well, it kept a lot of people going on fear.

Wilson: And I won't worry about the ozone layer. It'll fix itself, or we'll learn how to fix it. I'm not going to ruin the rest of what I've got left of life with worrying about that.

Q: It seems like there's a different finding every week. "No, it's not going as fast as we thought", "Yes, it's going much faster, time to take steps" etc. I don't sense you have as much hope in the future as you once did.
Is this incorrect? And do you agree with Israel Regardie's statement that things will get worse before they get any better?

Wilson: I think I'm as optimistic as I ever was in the long-run evolutionary perspective. This idea that we have to go through some horror before we're cured, if that were true, we'd have been cured long ago. We've been through enough horrors, especially in this century. After Hitler's death camps and Hiroshima and Vietnam, how many horrors do we have to go through before we're ready to be happy? I think we're ready to be happy right now. I'm not going to let Regardie stop me.

Q: Well he can't object now.
Do you think all this is "millenium jitters" or is the shit really going to hit the fan?

Wilson: I regard myself and my friends as the power elite. That way I don't have to worry if someone else is manipulating me. They're trying, but we're outsmarting them every step of the way. Most people want to believe somebody else is in charge. Then they don't have to take responsibility. Then they have the supreme pleasure of perpetually complaining that somebody else is in charge, and it would be better if only they were in charge. As long as I think I'm in charge, I've got nothing to complain about. I've got to take the responsibility for all of it. How can I go on? (laughs) Well, some of us have more balls than others. I'm sixty years old. In any traditional society I would have been hanged long ago.

Thanks The Invisibles

Jacques Vallee: Dimensions Excerpt 2

Continuing the excerpt from yesterday.

The Case of the Tranquilizing Light

A case that took place in March 1958, and which was later reported in the pages of The Flying Saucer Review by French investigator Joel Mesnard, provides an opportunity to verify again the strange properties of the lights associated with the UFO phenomenon in modern as in ancient times.The witness here is a twenty-eight-year-old French legionnaire who was on sentry duty at the Algerian camp of Bouahmama, in the desert south of Constantine. Shortly after 12:30 A.M., this man heard a whistling noise that seemed to be coming from the sky, and as he looked up he saw a very large object, about one thousand feet in diameter, coming down some 150 feet away from him.
The most remarkable thing about this object, however, was not its enormous size but the intense conical beam of emerald-green light that came down from its underside. The recollections of the legionnaire beyond this point are vague and, by his own admission, may not correspond to reality. Instead of either firing his gun to alert others or picking up the field telephone to call his superiors, he remained staring at the object for over three-quarters of an hour. According to this man, as interviewed by Joel Mesnard: "The pale green and emerald colors were the most beautiful, relaxing, and fascinating colors he had ever seen."
The object departed in the most classical way: first the whistling noise, then the rising to an altitude of about three hundred feet, and finally the climb at "tremendous speed" toward the northwest. As the object left and the man returned to full awareness, the happy, ecstatic feeling he had experienced was replaced by sadness. He picked up the telephone and reported what he had seen to his superiors. They initially thought that the experience was a hallucination due to stress, but it is to the credit of the French military that a thorough investigation was pursued. Instead of sweeping the case under the rug (and the French Legion in Algeria had more pressing problems at that time than investigating UFO landings!), the officers went to the site, examined it carefully, found no physical evidence, resumed their questioning of the witness, and, as he kept insisting on the veracity of the
event and they had no reason to doubt his truthfulness, they sent him to Paris for a more detailed examination. In Paris he was kept under observation for one week at the Val-de-Grace Military Hospital. An electroencephalogram revealed nothing unusual. The medical staff concluded that he was in a state of good mental and physical health and was not suffering from the strain of war in any unusual way.
Mr. Mesnard met the witness in May 1970. The legionnaire had returned to civilian life and impressed the investigator with his practical, down-to-earth sense. He had been looking for no publicity whatsoever and was even reluctant to discuss his experience. When he did so, he answered questions in a straight, matter-of-fact way. He has had no illness of any kind since the day of the sighting, no new experience of an unusual type, and he recalls the extremely peaceful state induced by the presence of the object. "It was like time running very slowly... it was like being in another world."
Is the mechanism of UFO apparitions, then, an invariant in all cultures? Are we faced here with another reality that transcends our limited notions of space and time? I see no better hypothesis at this point of our knowledge of UFO phenomena. Certainly the space visitors hypothesis fails to explain adequately the ancient symbolism. We do not have a simple series of incidents that could be explained as an encounter with space travelers who might have spotted the earth and explored it casually on their way to another cosmic destination. Instead, we have a pattern of manifestations, opening the gates to a spiritual level, pointing a way to a different consciousness, and producing irrational, absurd events in their wake.
The Phoenician amulets, the close encounters with "occupants" in our time, the ancient beam from heaven, and the focused light from UFOs seem to imply a technology capable of both physical manifestation and psychic effects, a technology that strikes deep at the collective consciousness, confusing us, molding us – as perhaps it confused and molded human civilizations in antiquity.

Jacques Vallée: Dimensions

An excerpt from the fascinating book Dimensions by Jacques Vallée, the first I'm reading of him, talking about science and history, entity contact and the heavenly beam of light. The images in the article are not what Vallée is exactly talking about but what related images I could find on google. You can download the book here.

A Universal Fact

The problem before us now is this: if the reality behind the UFO phenomenon is both physical and psychic in nature, and if it manipulates space and time in ways our scientific concepts are inadequate to describe, is there any reason for its effects to be limited to our culture or to our generation? We have already established that no country has had the special privilege of these manifestations. Yet we must carry the argument further: if the UFO phenomenon is not tied to social conditions specific to our time, or to specific technological achievements, then it may represent a universal fact. It may have been with us, in one form or another, as long as the human race has existed on this planet.
Something happened in classical times that is inadequately explained by historical theories. The suggestion that the same thing might be happening again should make us extremely interested in bringing every possible light to bear on this problem. Beginning in the second century B.C. and continuing until the fall of the Roman Empire, the intellectual elites of the Mediterranean world, raised in a spirit of scientific rationalism, were confronted and eventually defeated by irrational element similar to that contained in modern apparitions of unexplained phenomena, an element that is amplified by their summary rejection by our own science. It accompanied the collapse of ancient civilizations. Commenting on this parallel, French science writer Aime Michel proposes the following scene.
Consider one of the Alexandrian thinkers, a man like Ptolemaeus, the second-century astronomer thoroughly schooled in the rational methods of Archimedes, Euclid, and Aristotle. And imagine him reading the Apocalypse, various writings about Armageddon. How would he react to such an experience? He would merely shrug, says Aime Michel: "It would never occur to him to place the slightest credence in such a compendium of what must regard as insanities. Such a scene must have taken place thousands of times at the end of classical antiquity. And we know that every time there was the same rejection, the same shrugging, because we have no record of any critical examination of the doctrines, ideas, and claims of the counterculture that expressed itself through the Apocalypse. This counterculture was too absurd to retain the attention of a reader of Plato. A short time – a very short time – elapsed, the counterculture triumphed, and Plato was forgotten for a thousand years. Could it happen again?"
Only a thorough examination of the ancient records can save us from the effects of such cultural myopia. Among other interesting objects, some of the artifacts that have come to us from Phoenicia provide insight into the idea of contact in antiquity.

Phoenician Amulets

History books tell us that the Phoenician civilization was established long before the Hebrew migrations, when several Semitic tribes founded a series of cities on the Mediterranean littoral. The main ones were known as Tyre, Sidon, Tripoli, and Byblos, and each was governed by an oligarchy or by a king. At the height of its development, Phoenicia itself extended through that part of Syria that goes from Nahr-al-Kabir (Eleutherus) on the north to Mount Carmel on the south.
Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, one of this century's most distinguished scholars of Egypt and Mesopotamia, states that the Phoenicians were not a literary people. Unlike most Semitic peoples, they loved the sea. They used their abundant forests to supply timber for their ships. Their work was exceptionally refined and their products were sold by their merchants throughout the ancient world, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and India. They had learned from Babylon the art of dyeing, from Egypt the craft of glassblowing, and they used accurate systems of weights. Little is known of their religious beliefs, although it is often pointed out, on linguistic grounds, that the names of their gods showed direct Babylonian, Egyptian, and Greek influences.
Of their ritual practices we are told that they sacrificed their firstborn children in times of trouble; that they killed their prisoners of war on the altars of their gods; and that their women surrendered their virginity in the sanctuaries of Astarte. For their personal magical protection the Phoenicians appear to have adopted the type of amulets used in Babylonia and Assyria, and a collection of cylinder seals has been preserved in the British Museum. Some of these artifacts, which are shown in Wallis Budge's book Amulets and Superstitions, may date from a few centuries B.C., probably from about 400 to 300 B.C. Five of these cylinder seals depict a Winged Disk, often with appendages. Figures that are referred to in the literature as "divine beings" are seen emerging from these disks in four cases. And in every one of them human figures in ceremonial dress appear to be involved in rituals that contain. Assyrian features.
The first cylinder seal shows a hero holding in each hands the foreleg of a winged beast. One of these two beasts has horns on its head and a tail. Above the human being is the winged disk, from which a god is emerging. ("Ahuramazda or some Assyrian god," writes Sir Wallis Budge.) The interpretation of the second amulet involves scorpion-men and sexual symbols. It is apparent that two strange creatures, obviously male, are supporting a winged disk above a sacred tree. To the right is a worshipper, while another person is bringing some sort of animal as a sacrifice. Here, again, two divine figures are to be seen, emerging from the disk.
In the third amulet two large winged figures – classically interpreted as "priests wearing winged garments" – frame a large disk with extended legs. Directly beneath the disk is a symbol of lightning or a thunderbolt, before which a man appears to be standing in adoration. There is something on top of the disk.
Another artifact: a sphinx and a goat stand on either side of a sacred tree above which is a winged disk. Two men are performing a ritual in connection with the scene.
In the last amulet two of the strange dwarfish figures, which authorities call scorpion-men (despite their large breasts on this particular seal), are supporting a "winged disk from which project the heads of three divine beings." Two men are in adoration before the disk, beneath which a sort of vaulted door can be seen. To the left is a very strange figure interpreted as "a god holding a gazelle or goat under each arm."
The interpretation of this collection of artifacts raises several questions, because the classical statement that the flying disk is simply a primitive representation of the sun or the soul leaves much to be desired. Is it common for the winged disk (a frequent symbol in antiquity) to show several beings emerging from its upper part? In what context are such representations encountered? If the disk is interpreted as some mythological symbol connected with the cosmos (as is indicated by the abundance of astronomical designs in the seals: stars, crescent moons), should we speculate that the representation of a disk with extended claws may in fact seek to preserve the memory of a vision, or observation, of a flying craft capable of landing?
This speculation does not answer all our questions but it provides a stimulating avenue of research into ancient symbolism. It is certainly fascinating to read the best accepted interpretation for the zig-zag symbol in some of the amulets is lightning or a thunderbolt. Why should a thunderbolt be associated with a winged disk, and why should three people in elaborate magical garments stand in adoration before it? The scene suggests plan and purpose rather than a chance occurrence of some purely natural phenomenon. It suggests overt contact with a flying craft.
Equally fascinating to the student of close-encounter cases are the scenes in which animals are carried to the hovering disk. In one case, a god is seen holding a horned animal under each arm – a scene certainly reminiscent of many a claim of animal kidnapping by UFO occupants. Three of the cylinder seals show approximately the same thing: a disk above some elaborate ground structure, a human in adoration, and someone bringing a horned animal toward the center of the scene.
The beings themselves fall into the following categories:

1. Human beings that Assyriologists call worshippers, priests, kings, etc. Sometimes they are wearing winged garments.
2. The gods. They are shown either emerging from the disk and wearing, in some cases, elaborate headdresses or walking outside the disk, as in one amulet where an entity seems to be wearing its hair in three long tresses on either side of the head.
3. The scorpion-men, who have large phallic attributes in one figure but in another case would more properly be called scorpion-women. They are only seen supporting the disk. It would be interesting to find out where the word scorpion comes from in connection with these figures. The scorpion-men are consistently about two-thirds the size of men, who in turn are smaller than the gods. (Professor Douglas Price-Williams of UCLA points out that in the Gilgamesh epic the scorpion creatures were the guardians of the mountain of the sun. The scorpion-man in the Babylonian Enuma Elish was a monster created by chaos at the beginning of the world. Price-Williams adds: "These creatures would thus be tellurian beings, 'chthonic' as Jung would have said.")
4. Various monsters, such as a horned creature or a sphinx.

Why should the observation of a flying disk be represented in the context of an obviously magical ceremony that does not appear to have any traditional characteristic of Phoenician religion? We are told, for instance, that the Phoenicians held the same view as the Hebrews concerning the survival of the soul, that they buried their dead with great care, and that their sacrificial ceremonies involved killing human beings and sacred prostitution. Why then is it that, if the seals are associated with spiritual or religious values, they depict nothing of this, but do instead show winged disks that appear to come from a star, contain strange beings who carry off earth animals, and emit lightning bolts? And why are the human assistants wearing special vestments with wings on them?
Representation of flying disks in religion does not stop with the Phoenicians. The symbol is a basic one in the early Christian church, and it is consistently associated with the angels. Christian theology does not have much to say about the angels, just as official Muslim theology remains discreet about the jinn. Some rare documents, however, give details concerning the nature of these beings. According to Japanese researcher Y. Matsumura, the religious Sophia, a written document commenting on the dogma of the Greek Orthodox Church preserved in the Leningrad National Library, describes the process of communication between God and the angels:

How does the Lord guide His Angel, if the Angel cannot see the face of His Lord? An Angel has a projection on the upper part of his eyes, where a sacred cloud rests. He has also a thing to recieve sounds on his head. This thing makes noises as an Angel recieves an order where to go from his Lord. Then he quickly looks at the mirror in his hand, and he gets in the mirror something on which an instruction from God is given.

I have not been able to verify directly the existence of this document and the accuracy of the translation, but it is consistent with a number of paintings, icons, and murals that depict contact between "God" and His messengers and contact between the messengers and men. Communication for a long time took place through pictorial representation rather than words, and it is not surprising to find few descriptions of such contact in written language.
I am inclined to a literal, rather than purely symbolic, interpretation of the scenes depicted on the Phoenician amulets, and I am also tempted to accept as a working hypothesis that in times remote contact occurred between human consciousness and another consciousness, variously described as demonic, angelic, or simply alien. This would explain much of the symbolic power retained in our own time by the concept of "signs in the sky." It would account for the fact that modern-day UFOs seem to present archaic as well as futuristic designs (as in the representation of the Arabic astrological sign for Venus on the object seen at Socorro, New Mexico, by patrolman Lonnie Zamora), and it would also explain the fascination that people of all countries and races have always had for the strange entities from "above."
How constant these observations and visions have remained will be seen by comparing the Phoenician seal story with the following letter from a woman who saw a scorpion-man... in our time!

A letter from a British woman begins:

At the lecture by Jacques Vallee at the London A.A. [Architects Association] on the 12 of December I was surprised by one of the slides of a Phoenician seal showing a winged sphere held up by two creatures which he described as "Scorpion men." Perhaps I have seen such a man myself....

It was the summer of 1968, about 4:00 P.M. She was driving from London to a place near Stratford to visit friends for the weekend. She had a companion in the car with her. Just outside Oxford they both saw a shining disk in the sky. They slowed and then stopped to watch it as it darted and dodged. Another car stopped to watch it, too. Eventually it sank behind the trees. They resumed their trip, but the really striking events took place after the disk had disappeared:

During the drive between Burford and Stratford I had some startling, and to me, novel insights into what I can only describe as the Nature of Reality. They were connected in some way to this shining disk, and have had a profound effect on me, causing what is commonly known as a personality change. I won't try to explain what those insights were since almost all the religions of the world have tried to do this and have failed. (In that afternoon I changed from an agnostic to a gnostic, if that means anything at all.) However, these insights hit me like bolts from the blue, as though from outside, one after the other. I've never had a similar experience since.

The letter continues with a description of what the woman saw that evening after supper, a
description that seems to come straight out of a John Fowles novel: the guests were in the sitting room, which had open French windows leading out onto the lawn, and the woman went over to the window to get a breath of fresh air. The weather, she wrote, was "very hot and close."

The light from the room shone in an arc of about ten feet around the window. In that area I saw, as soon as I came to the window, a strange figure. My perception of it was heightened by the state of frozen panic it produced in me. It was for me without any doubt, a demon, or devil because of my Western oriented interpretation (I imagine) of the vision or creature or animal or man, or whatever it was I saw. Like the "Scorpion man," as well as Pan, it had dog or goat-like legs. It was covered in silky, downy fur, dark, and glinting in the light. It was unmistakably humanoid, and to my mind malevolent. It crouched, and stared, unblinkingly, at me with light, grape-green eyes that slanted upwards and had no pupils. The eyes shone and were by far the most frightening thing about it. It was, I think retrospectively, trying to communicate with me, but my panic interfered with any message I might have received. If it had stood to its full height it would have been about four to five feet tall. It had pointed ears and a long muzzle. It gave the impression of emaciation; its hands and fingers were as thin as sticks.
Eventually, convinced that I was hallucinating, I went and sat down for a while, until the panic had subsided. Then I went to see if it was still there. It was, except that it had moved further into the shadows on the edge of the arc of light. I made sure I kept away from that door for the rest of the evening, and left the next day. I told no one. That it may have been connected with the shining disk I only realized when I saw that slide.

I have other reports in my files of such forgotten observations that the witnesses only recollected when their memory was triggered by a slide, a book cover, or a lecture.

The Beam of Light

A major feature in all religious traditions involves a mysterious beam of light emanating from a point in the sky or from a cloud of peculiar shape and focused on a human being. This beam usually is interpreted as a sign of blessing which conveys information from a divine source.
I am intrigued by this concept because it is a recurrent one in modern contact cases. Psychic experimenter Robert Monroe has described a similar phenomenon in his own investigations of out-of-body consciousness. On the night of September 9, 1960, as he was lying on his bed, Monroe says (in his book Out of the Body):

I suddenly felt bathed in and transfixed by a very powerful beam that seemed to come from the North, about 30º above the horizon. I was completely powerless, with no will of my own, and I felt as if I were in the presence of a very strong force, in personal contact with it. It had intelligence of a form beyond my comprehension, and it came directly (down the beam?) into my head, and seemed to be searching every memory in my mind. I was truly frightened because I was powerless to do anything about this intrusion.

On September 16, at night, again from the verbatim notes of Robert Monroe:

The same impersonal probing, the same power, from the same angle. However, this time I received the firm impression that I was inextricably bound by loyalty to this intelligent force, always had been, and that I had a job to perform here on earth....
I got the impression of huge pipes, so ancient they were covered with undergrowth and rust. Something like oil was passing through them, but it was much higher in energy than oil, and vitally needed and valuable elsewhere (assumption: not on this material planet).

On September 30, the same pattern:

They seemed to soar up into the sky, while I called after them, pleading. Then I was sure that their mentality and intelligence were far beyond my understanding. It is an impersonal, cold intelligence, with none of the emotions of love or compassion which we respect so much, yet this may be the omnipotence we call God. Visits such as these in mankind's past could well have been the basis for all of our religious beliefs, and our knowledge today could provide no better answer than we could a thousand years past.
By this time, it was getting light, and I sat down and cried, great deep sobs such as I have never cried before, because then I knew without any qualification of future hope of change that the God of my childhood, of the churches, of religion throughout the world was not as we worshipped him to be – that for the rest of my life, I would "suffer" the loss of this illusion.

Jacques Vallée

Dr. Jacques Vallée about important findings in UFO phenomena


Dr. Jacques Vallée discusses the wordwide distribution of unidentified aerial sightings

"Skeptics, who flatly deny the existence of any unexplained phenomenon in the name of 'rationalism,' are among the primary contributors to the rejection of science by the public. People are not stupid and they know very well when they have seen something out of the ordinary. When a so-called expert tells them the object must have been the moon or a mirage, he is really teaching the public that science is impotent or unwilling to pursue the study of the unknown." Confrontations

"The 'medical examination' to which abductees are said to be subjected, often accompanied by sadistic sexual manipulation, is reminiscient of the medieval tales of encounters with demons. It makes no sense in a sophisticated or technical framework: any intelligent being equipped with the scientific marvels that UFOs possess would be in a position to achieve any of these alleged scientific objectives in a shorter time and with fewer risks." Confrontations, p. 13

"The symbolic display seen by the abductees is identical to the type of initiation ritual or astral voyage that is imbedded in the [occult] traditions of every culture...the structure of abduction stories is identical to that of occult initiation rituals...the UFO beings of today belong to the same class of manifestation as the [occult] entities that were described in centuries past."

Also check out this Brainsturbator article on Jacques Vallée

Spielberg launching social network for UFO and paranormal buffs?

From Boingboing.net

TechCrunch reports a rumor that Steven Spielberg is readying a new social network for people who are interested in unusual and/or paranormal phenomena like UFOs and ghosts. According to the TechCrunch post, "the new social network may also have original video content investigating alleged ghosts and UFO stories." This has the potential to be very interesting as Spielberg has had a lifelong interest in this topic. Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind is one of my all-time favorite films and in later years, I realized how in touch he was with UFO research at the time. This was brought home for me when I learned that esteemed UFO researcher Jacques Vallee, a past president of Institute for the Future where I work, was the inspiration for Claude Lacombe, the French scientist in the film played by François Truffaut. Apparently, Spielberg's interest in strange phenomena wasn't just tied to Close Encounters either. From TechCrunch:

"Spielberg has apparently had at least one paranormal experience himself. There are stories of him staying in a hotel called Excelsior House and being so frightened by ghosts that he fled the room and moved 20 miles away. We’ve also heard anecdotes about Spielberg seeing the ghost of a dead relative repeatedly as a child. Whether based in reality or the product of an exceptional imagination, these experiences may have had an impact on his life’s work and this upcoming social network."

That TechCrunch article seems to be down though, I'd love to check out more of Jacques Vallee's work as Terence McKenna often mentions him as interesting. And I guess after that I'll check out Close Encounters again ;p