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You might want to be more specific there because I'm quite familiar with the arguments against the ETH and none of them are robust enough to "smash" the ETH, though considering it "smashed" might also be a subjective viewpoint for the sake of expression, in which case it may be valid from a certain personal subjective point of view that I don't share.
really, you mean all over again? how many times do we have to revisit Vallee's arguments against the ETH?
and yes, I like expressions - can't help it - can't help but wonder why we haven't recognized that not changing the record is just causing the same song to play over and over again. the constant call in ufology, since I first started listening to the Paracast years ago has been, what are we going to do about how stagnant ufology is? we've learned nothing in all these years. how do we move forward? and yet we're still singing the ETH blues and not even recognizing that we have no idea what ufo's are, where they come from, or what they want.

But many are still good with aliens from outer space? We have conjecture. We have speculation. We have tried our every which way possible to put the cart before the horse to make sense of aliens from outer space coming to collect five million soil samples, kazillions of sperm and millions of embryos and eggs, coming to tell us to be nice to the planet, coming to raise hell and terrify us, coming from impossible distances with such frequencies and in all manner of different skins & shapes and even flying in orbs, crafts with rivets and portholes, in crafts made of angel hair & spiderwebs, crafts that morph and change shape and dissolve like ghosts, coming all this way to be coy with us and act all shy like, but then insist on being seen by a scant few on the edge of town, in the forest, deep in the woods etc...so none of these patterns don't raise the eyebrows?

Forget the sheer illogic of journeying all this way over and over again to risk life and limb when you can send nano probes to get all the same intel...the ETH asks us to consider either we are being dominated by a species that has been constantly monitoring us for at least the last 100 years if not more, or that there are many many species of aliens who have all agreed together to do much of the same thing - all playing nice nice with the same rules. yes, it's my own subjectivities I suppose, but I take solace in knowing i'm not alone with thinking like this. I also routinely propose that the safe bet is the ETH and that this may be a distraction stopping us from being more open to examining not just other possibilities but by putting a little more concentration in finding new methodologies that may apply to discovering some tidbits and crumbs that may be of actual value instead of surmising aliens that are off planet.

I know, ufology, that you feel that even a Crypto social control society counts as alien as well but I do want to distinguish between the notion of aliens from outer space and aliens among us as those are two different situations altogether.
 
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i like how you upped the ante there and made things even more spookymulder like by introducing a whole other layer to the conundrum


The man I have worked for over two decades...and a dear friend...points out quite rightly I have a tendency to "Rube Goldberg" things up. For whatever reason I can't leave things well enough alone and i have to consider a different angle or answer to things even if they are a slam dunk. Quite frankly I sometimes annoy myself with this quality. Actually one of the best think differently statements I've come across in here was made by @ufology (or at the very least promoted by him) when he suggested that which we call synchronicity could be imposed on us by off planet visitors. In the end I personally think this explanation is probably one of my least favored (and would probably hold as much water as my AI construct thought above) but it sure did make me stop and think.
 
Well I suppose If one feels that the various accounts of alien contact, which include accounts of "hospitality"is something other than a psychological aberration like schizophrenia or something similar then I would say it is about us.

During the post world war two era we seemed to be on the edge of obliterating ourselves the various accounts of alien contact inevitably preached of better earth stewardship. If again there was a foreign (to us) agent that was involved and these accounts were not simply a lucid dream or byproduct of some kind of drug use why wouldn't it be about us?

If one feels that legends of fae folk are something other than made up campfire tales how could it not be about us? otherwise why would this phenomena keep imposing itself on us and interact with us in our reality regardless of who or what "it" is, or what form it may take.

Even if your a proponent of the ETH and feel that this is a totally different phenomena than other forms of paranormal phenomena us seems to play a very big part in both their realms.
 
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It's always been about us as it chases us, or plays cat & mouse on highways with law enforcement, hangs above our houses, shines lights on our vehicles, shines lights through the ground into our missile installations and puts on all manner of displays for our benefit. And the abductions, attempted abductions and humanoid encounters...well don't get me started. We appear to be a necessary audience in all of it, especially as it theatrically echoes & surpasses various aspects of our own technology across the ages with great aplomb & its signature high drama. Sometimes we even get to play a starring role in it all.

If a UFO falls in a forest, or a desert, and no one is there to witness it does it make a sound? I highly doubt it.
 
really, you mean all over again? how many times do we have to revisit Vallee's arguments against the ETH?
and yes, I like expressions - can't help it - can't help but wonder why we haven't recognized that not changing the record is just causing the same song to play over and over again. the constant call in ufology, since I first started listening to the Paracast years ago has been, what are we going to do about how stagnant ufology is? we've learned nothing in all these years. how do we move forward? and yet we're still singing the ETH blues and not even recognizing that we have no idea what ufo's are, where they come from, or what they want.

But many are still good with aliens from outer space? We have conjecture. We have speculation. We have tried our every which way possible to put the cart before the horse to make sense of aliens from outer space coming to collect five million soil samples, kazillions of sperm and millions of embryos and eggs, coming to tell us to be nice to the planet, coming to raise hell and terrify us, coming from impossible distances with such frequencies and in all manner of different skins & shapes and even flying in orbs, crafts with rivets and portholes, in crafts made of angel hair & spiderwebs, crafts that morph and change shape and dissolve like ghosts, coming all this way to be coy with us and act all shy like, but then insist on being seen by a scant few on the edge of town, in the forest, deep in the woods etc...so none of these patterns don't raise the eyebrows?

Forget the sheer illogic of journeying all this way over and over again to risk life and limb when you can send nano probes to get all the same intel...the ETH asks us to consider either we are being dominated by a species that has been constantly monitoring us for at least the last 100 years if not more, or that there are many many species of aliens who have all agreed together to do much of the same thing - all playing nice nice with the same rules. yes, it's my own subjectivities I suppose, but I take solace in knowing i'm not alone with thinking like this. I also routinely propose that the safe bet is the ETH and that this may be a distraction stopping us from being more open to examining not just other possibilities but by putting a little more concentration in finding new methodologies that may apply to discovering some tidbits and crumbs that may be of actual value instead of surmising aliens that are off planet.

I know, ufology, that you feel that even a Crypto social control society counts as alien as well but I do want to distinguish between the notion of aliens from outer space and aliens among us as those are two different situations altogether.
Yes we've been through Vallée time and time and again. Among his most notable examples for doubting the ETH has always been the sudden appearance and disappearance of UFOs, but that can be explained not one but two ways, instantaneous acceleration/deceleration directly toward/away from an observer, or by the switching on/off of an active cloaking system. But instead Vallée dreams up a theory about higher dimensions. The list goes on all the way through Vallée's reasons for doubting the ETH, and his credentials, though impressive by the standards of the time, aren't relevant. Condon also had impeccable credentials, as did Menzel, and they mucked things up really good for ufology.

But don't get me wrong. I like Vallée because he gave us food for thought. Maybe we'd never have considered active camouflage if he'd never brought the vanishing act problem to the table; and to be fair, those were the days before active camouflage was a serious idea ( unless we believe the whole Philadelphia Experiment story ). So he can be excused for not thinking of that as a realistic possibility. Plus he had some good stuff to say about contactees and cults and how the phenomenon relates to mythology and belief systems.

So I'm not trying to be overly critical of Vallée. He's a true icon in the field and I've got all his books; some first printing. But there are just some folks who seem to consider any opposition to what he says as heresy, and that video you posted is a perfect example of the kind of cliquish nonsense I was alluding to previously. Set to a backdrop of a first person shooter video game and narrated like a commentator at a comic-con event, the whole thing, while perhaps cool for some, is basically just a fanboy promo. We don't need that nearly as much as people who can look at the big picture from a more objective point of view and apply ( here it comes one more time ) the principles of critical thinking.
 
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Exactly. The theatrical ( the perfect word) element that runs through many encounters very much indicates...imho...an intent and desire to draw the audience in.
 
The man I have worked for over two decades...and a dear friend...points out quite rightly I have a tendency to "Rube Goldberg" things up. For whatever reason I can't leave things well enough alone and i have to consider a different angle or answer to things even if they are a slam dunk. Quite frankly I sometimes annoy myself with this quality. Actually one of the best think differently statements I've come across in here was made by @ufology (or at the very least promoted by him) when he suggested that which we call synchronicity could be imposed on us by off planet visitors. In the end I personally think this explanation is probably one of my least favored (and would probably hold as much water as my AI construct thought above) but it sure did make me stop and think.
I don't actually recall making that statement, but if I did, it was probably to point out that if we can setup situations that make them seem like instances of synchronicity, then how easy would it be for some high tech alien agents lurking in the shadows to do the same thing? The average person would have very little hope of avoiding it.

The Adjustment Bureau

 
Yes we've been through Vallée time and time and again. Among his most notable examples for doubting the ETH has always been the sudden appearance and disappearance of UFOs, but that can be explained not one but two ways, instantaneous acceleration/deceleration directly toward/away from an observer, or by the switching on/off of an active cloaking system. But instead Vallée dreams up a theory about higher dimensions. The list goes on all the way through Vallée's reasons for doubting the ETH, and his credentials, though impressive by the standards of the time, aren't relevant. Condon also had impeccable credentials, as did Menzel, and they mucked things up really good for ufology.

But don't get me wrong. I like Vallée because he gave us food for thought. Maybe we'd never have considered active camouflage if he'd never brought the vanishing act problem to the table; and to be fair, those were the days before active camouflage was a serious idea ( unless we believe the whole Philadelphia Experiment story ). So he can be excused for not thinking of that as a realistic possibility. Plus he had some good stuff to say about contactees and cults and how the phenomenon relates to mythology and belief systems.

So I'm not trying to be overly critical of Vallée. He's a true icon in the field and I've got all his books; some first printing. But there are just some folks who seem to consider any opposition to what he says as heresy, and that video you posted is a perfect example of the kind of cliquish nonsense I was alluding to previously. Set to a backdrop of a first person shooter video game and narrated like a commentator at a comic-con event, the whole thing, while perhaps cool for some, is basically just a fanboy promo. We don't need that nearly as much as people who can look at the big picture from a more objective point of view and apply ( here it comes one more time ) the principles of critical thinking.
That seemed a more easily digestible format as it summarizes this: http://www.jacquesvallee.net/bookdocs/arguments.pdf
You haven't really addressed any of his key arguments at all.
 
That Seth is some scientist. How did he obtain the data on which he based his conclusions and launched into his theories on the state of this potentially significant phenomenon? He “trawled the web for listings of ‘the best UFO cases’”. Sounds like shoddy science to me.

If in 1990 someone had conducted a poll that had mimicked Seth’s web trawling, I doubt that a single person would have had Rendlesham in their “best cases” list. Yet the events of that case had occurred 10 years earlier. Something similar can be said of the lag to prominence of other noteworthy cases.

Basing conclusions on browsing the web for “best of” lists? Sounds like pseudoscience to me.
 
You haven't really addressed any of his key arguments at all.
So you're saying that the UFO disappearing act isn't one of Vallée's key points? You can hear him reference it in the video you yourself posted ( at about 3:35 ), and there are other videos I've run across too. Do I really need to dig those up too? Or find the quotes in his book? Hmm let's see: In his book Dimensions ( in which he poses the IH ) Chapter 9 - The Case Against Extraterrestrials, in the section titled in bold letters, The Super Physics of UFOs, he cites a few cases where to quote: "The craft vanished silently and instantly", "like a TV image when the set is turned off", "departed with a flash", vanished in sort of an explosion". He uses these as supporting evidence for his case against the ETH when they barely qualify as evidence of an actual sighting, let alone evidence of another dimension or universe ( two different concepts Vallée mistakenly seems to use interchangeably ).
That seemed a more easily digestible format as it summarizes this: http://www.jacquesvallee.net/bookdocs/arguments.pdf
Thanks for the link there, but do we really want to go through all that? Sigh ... OK, but it's getting late here. I'll get on it sometime in the morning. Later Burnt :).
 
That Seth is some scientist. How did he obtain the data on which he based his conclusions and launched into his theories on the state of this potentially significant phenomenon? He “trawled the web for listings of ‘the best UFO cases’”. Sounds like shoddy science to me.

If in 1990 someone had conducted a poll that had mimicked Seth’s web trawling, I doubt that a single person would have had Rendlesham in their “best cases” list. Yet the events of that case had occurred 10 years earlier. Something similar can be said of the lag to prominence of other noteworthy cases.

Basing conclusions on browsing the web for “best of” lists? Sounds like pseudoscience to me.
What else might we expect out of a pseudoskeptic ... LOL. The article is basically a slam against ufology that exploits the reader's base emotional desire for something sensationalist. So maybe his hope is that if he can make UFOs seem unfashionable and boring, people will just lose interest and the subject will fade away leaving all the skeptics happy that they won by default. I dunno. Or maybe he's actually frustrated that we don't have the sensationalist evidence that at heart he secretly wishes would materialize? Hard to say for sure. A closet ufologist disguised as a skeptic? Whatever the case, somewhat ironically, by bashing ufology he gets to go on record with his views about one of the most fascinating aspects of human history.
 
I liked your post but at the same time I don't agree that, "the ETH is just as good a hypothesis as any". Though it may be as good as any you've seen, because I'm not familiar with what you consider to be "good" or which ones you seen. So for example, If you've run across the Transports From Hell hypothesis, which states that UFO are demonic craft from the realm of Hell ruled by the Antichrist, I'd have to agree that's "a really good one" in the sense that's it's so ridiculous that it doesn't deserve to be taken seriously, and I would have a really hard time thinking that was just as "good" ( sensible ) as the ETH, and we can apply similar lines of evaluation to virtually every other example we might run across.

Good point. I meant that it's at least as good a hypothesis as any of the other main hypotheses (i.e. interdimensional, cryptoterrestrial, trickster). As far as some of the other ones, like the one you brought up, it's way better than those.

I read Vallee's points and while they're interesting, he was basically putting holes into an almost straw man, very narrow view of ET visitation with all sorts of human assumptions built in to it. Seeing that we don't know their motivations, there may be many explanations to each of his points.

For example, just because there is an element of theatricality (digging up holes of soil for everyone to see) or their technology always looks slightly more advanced than ours doesn't mean ETs are immune from being theatrical or using deception. ETs may use the trickster archetype for whatever their purposes are. I don't think deception is limited to djinns, tricksters, ultraterrestrials or cryptoterrestrials. Every time I hear a reason that they're not ET because of some deception or non-sequitur, this simply assumes ET won't use deception or illusion, which I think is a false assumption, considering human beings use it all the time. So why not ET?
 
Good point. I meant that it's at least as good a hypothesis as any of the other main hypotheses (i.e. interdimensional, cryptoterrestrial, trickster). As far as some of the other ones, like the one you brought up, it's way better than those.

I read Vallee's points and while they're interesting, he was basically putting holes into an almost straw man, very narrow view of ET visitation with all sorts of human assumptions built in to it. Seeing that we don't know their motivations, there may be many explanations to each of his points.

For example, just because there is an element of theatricality (digging up holes of soil for everyone to see) or their technology always looks slightly more advanced than ours doesn't mean ETs are immune from being theatrical or using deception. ETs may use the trickster archetype for whatever their purposes are. I don't think deception is limited to djinns, tricksters, ultraterrestrials or cryptoterrestrials. Every time I hear a reason that they're not ET because of some deception or non-sequitur, this simply assumes ET won't use deception or illusion, which I think is a false assumption, considering human beings use it all the time. So why not ET?
Very good points. This discussion has inspired me to do a more detailed written analysis of Vallée's argument against the ETH, but I think I'll save it for my book project. What I would like add though, returning to your original point, is that all hypotheses, at least serious hypotheses, should be considered without bias, which means that before any specifics are mentioned, they're all as good as any other in terms of candidates for consideration. So we shouldn't get so wrapped up in one or another that if something new does come along, that we simply ignore it.
 
It's always been about us as it chases us, or plays cat & mouse on highways with law enforcement, hangs above our houses, shines lights on our vehicles, shines lights through the ground into our missile installations and puts on all manner of displays for our benefit. And the abductions, attempted abductions and humanoid encounters...well don't get me started. We appear to be a necessary audience in all of it, especially as it theatrically echoes & surpasses various aspects of our own technology across the ages with great aplomb & its signature high drama. Sometimes we even get to play a starring role in it all.

"It's always been about us."

On the other hand, don't we humans tend to think that everything is about us? Not too long ago our species considered itself, its position, to be at the center of the universe. And despite our species' realization in our time of the immense extent of the visible universe and the little we understand about it, our characteristic psychological propensity is to think in narrow egoic terms about existence itself. We primarily think about and are concerned with our own individual existence (what we need, what we want in our short biological lifetimes) rather than recognize that we are each a part, a cell, in a human ecology within a natural ecology within a universe/multiverse/cosmos about which we know virtually nothing. I was especially interested in this paragraph in the Vallee paper you linked:

“In the mid-70s I proposed to approach the UFO phenomenon as a control system, reserving judgment whether the control would turn out to be human, alien, or simply natural. Such control systems, governing physical or social events, are all around us. They can be found in the terrestrial, ecological, and economic balancing mechanisms that rule nature, some of which are well understood by science. This theory admits two interesting variants: (1) An alien intelligence, possibly earth-based, could be training us towards a new type of behavior. It could be the “Visitor Phenomenon” of Strieber (1987) or some form of “super-nature,” possibly something along the lines of the “Gaia” Hypothesis. (2) Alternately, in a Jungian interpretation of the same scheme, the human collective unconscious could be projecting ahead of itself the imagery which is necessary for our own long-term survival beyond the unprecedented crises of the 20th century.” (pg. 116)

You could say that we are in general blind to our situation in 'what-is'. I still think that the ETH is the best available hypothesis to account for the physically measurable manifestations of many 'ufos', and that we received dramatic attention from nonterrestrial species in the 1940s because we were on the brink of destroying the viability of life on this planet and possibly for some distance beyond it. But it's true that the abduction phenomenon calls for a different hypothesis to begin to account for it. It does seem to be an extension of the hair-raising close encounters that became most individually intrusive in the 60s, often on the highways of the US and elsewhere. My guess is that at this point the 'visitors' were frustrated by the lack of rational official response to their intrusions over military bases and nuclear weapons sites. They might not have been able to understand our species' apparent lack of a collective understanding of the significance of their earlier manifestations. So they got 'in the faces' of numerous individuals, hovering over and levitating their vehicles, for example, as Richard Hall reported at length. It was a kind of campaign of terror perhaps intended to shake us up, shake us out of our apparent unawareness or indifference to their presence and the purpose of it. Perhaps this is why 'their' behavior escalated to abductions of numerous individuals -- to examine us up close and figure out what prevented our species from responding to so many specific provocations. The intent of abductions would involve, I think, both psychological and physical investigations of what makes us 'tick', or rather prevents our collective awakening to the changes in reality that their presence should have made obvious.

I find it most significant that, by most all accounts of close encounters, including abductions, the 'others' have communicated with one another and with us telepathically. This indicates that those others extensively share clear channels of unified consciousness and common understanding of the nature of consciousness and mind (and the fragility of life), in their case an understanding much more evolved than ours and much less compartmentalized than ours. For the most part, our species has declined [over the millenia of our successive 'civilizations'] in sensitivity to what we probably know subconsciously, especially in the collective unconscious. Our human forebears were much more open to, aware of, their connections to the natural physical environment/ecology from which all life on earth has emerged and on which it depends. We've nearly lost that capacity, including most pertinently our capacity to protect, or even simply to sustain, the ecology on which we rely. It could be that genetic experiments have been made on many individuals to understand why we have become so blind and insensitive {so stupid} and to correct these deficiences. It could be that what looks like hybridization is not for 'their' benefit but for ours. It could also be that the long-range intent is to replace our species with an improved species that can live constructively rather than destructively on this planet.

If we had become enlightened enough by now to have produced an open society in which knowledge is broadly shared, in which the conditions of our lives are actually understood, the reality and significance of the nonterrestrial presence here might have led to a conscious choice on the part of humanity to learn from species more advanced than we are. As it is, though, these visitors might well be expected to have given up on us by now.

So I think it's been 'about us' to the extent that we are a problem to be solved and that we refuse to understand why.

 
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... I find it most significant that, by most all accounts of close encounters, including abductions, the 'others' have communicated with one another and with us telepathically. This indicates that those others extensively share clear channels of unified consciousness and common understanding of the nature of consciousness and mind (and the fragility of life), in their case an understanding much more evolved than ours and much less compartmentalized than ours ...
The whole telepathy thing makes me nervous. As you are well aware, I try to be as grounded in my thinking as possible, and reports of telepathic communication are a challenge to that. So what other mechanism might be at work there? We have technology ourselves that can project sound in a manner that makes it seem like it's coming from inside one's head rather than from a distance. So the mechanism at work might be something like the "universal translator" we see at work in Star Trek rather than "true telepathy" ( so to speak ). Too far out one might say? Imagine for example a device like the Amazon Echo, able to listen and respond in any language combined with direct to skull transmitting capability. Suddenly it's not so far out. This gets a bit somewhat troublesome in the case of two-way communication, but it seems reasonable to propose that some kind of brain scanner might be able to accomplish the task. So I'm not so sure it's safe to assume that what has been perceived as telepathic communication, is exactly the same kind of mind-to-mind thing a "unified consciousness" would imply.

Nevertheless, I still like the insights you draw by making that assumption. What if it is "true telepathy"? I think you should explore the ramifications of that more deeply, and perhaps include a comparison of that idea with that of a universal translator and our own emerging technology. Even now we're seeing a less "compartmentalized" understanding of our world just by breaking down language and information barriers with tools like the Internet and Google Translate. The Echo device is taking that to the next level. But it also has a dark side: Technology - Geeks Gadgets & Gizmos
 
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So you're saying that the UFO disappearing act isn't one of Vallée's key points? You can hear him reference it in the video you yourself posted ( at about 3:35 ), and there are other videos I've run across too. Do I really need to dig those up too? Or find the quotes in his book? Hmm let's see: In his book Dimensions ( in which he poses the IH ) Chapter 9 - The Case Against Extraterrestrials, in the section titled in bold letters, The Super Physics of UFOs, he cites a few cases where to quote: "The craft vanished silently and instantly", "like a TV image when the set is turned off", "departed with a flash", vanished in sort of an explosion". He uses these as supporting evidence for his case against the ETH when they barely qualify as evidence of an actual sighting, let alone evidence of another dimension or universe ( two different concepts Vallée mistakenly seems to use interchangeably ).

Thanks for the link there, but do we really want to go through all that? Sigh ... OK, but it's getting late here. I'll get on it sometime in the morning. Later Burnt :).
I guess you are addressing argument five, the physical considerations. The examples you give are ones that repeat frequently enough: dissolving objects, objects that merge and separate, objects that behave like ghosts, objects that morph, objects that defy our own notions of space and time, and in whose abrupt motions and actions, again appearing to do so for ur benefit, are all entirely absurdist in nature. If these were the actions of a visiting space craft why all the elaborate hocus pocus theatrics? Why not just blast in and out of the atmosphere on a direct route instead of all this high drama. In the world of "critical thinking" these actions make no sense unless the goal is to provide us with absurdist sky koans to ponder. This leads back again to either a psycho social discussion or, as he mentions in his paper, that these actions are Jungian in nature, or that their total symbology is getting us to think differently about our place in time and space, or even act and behave differently in our own pursuits of time and space, or flight.

At the same time there are a great number of cases that also present as straight up aliens from another planet just stopping by for a fine slice of that Socorro desert sand for the sample container and then it's straight back to alpha centauri. Again, how many soil samples are needed and how often is that show put on for the human witness? And before you say ET doesn't have to make sense because it's ET then let's also toss critical thinking out the door as well and just talk more about those transports from hell.
 
"It's always been about us."

On the other hand, don't we humans tend to think that everything is about us? Not too long ago our species considered itself, its position, to be at the center of the universe. And despite our species' realization in our time of the immense extent of the visible universe and the little we understand about it, our characteristic psychological propensity is to think in narrow egoic terms about existence itself. We primarily think about and are concerned with our own individual existence (what we need, what we want in our short biological lifetimes) rather than recognize that we are each a part, a cell, in a human ecology within a natural ecology within a universe/multiverse/cosmos about which we know virtually nothing. I was especially interested in this paragraph in the Vallee paper you linked:

“In the mid-70s I proposed to approach the UFO phenomenon as a control system, reserving judgment whether the control would turn out to be human, alien, or simply natural. Such control systems, governing physical or social events, are all around us. They can be found in the terrestrial, ecological, and economic balancing mechanisms that rule nature, some of which are well understood by science. This theory admits two interesting variants: (1) An alien intelligence, possibly earth-based, could be training us towards a new type of behavior. It could be the “Visitor Phenomenon” of Strieber (1987) or some form of “super-nature,” possibly something along the lines of the “Gaia” Hypothesis. (2) Alternately, in a Jungian interpretation of the same scheme, the human collective unconscious could be projecting ahead of itself the imagery which is necessary for our own long-term survival beyond the unprecedented crises of the 20th century.” (pg. 116)

You could say that we are in general blind to our situation in 'what-is'. I still think that the ETH is the best available hypothesis to account for the physically measurable manifestations of many 'ufos', and that we received dramatic attention from nonterrestrial species in the 1940s because we were on the brink of destroying the viability of life on this planet and possibly for some distance beyond it. But it's true that the abduction phenomenon calls for a different hypothesis to begin to account for it. It does seem to be an extension of the hair-raising close encounters that became most individually intrusive in the 60s, often on the highways of the US and elsewhere. My guess is that at this point the 'visitors' were frustrated by the lack of rational official response to their intrusions over military bases and nuclear weapons sites. They might not have been able to understand our species' apparent lack of a collective understanding of the significance of their earlier manifestations. So they got 'in the faces' of numerous individuals, hovering over and levitating their vehicles, for example, as Richard Hall reported at length. It was a kind of campaign of terror perhaps intended to shake us up, shake us out of our apparent unawareness or indifference to their presence and the purpose of it. Perhaps this is why 'their' behavior escalated to abductions of numerous individuals -- to examine us up close and figure out what prevented our species from responding to so many specific provocations. The intent of abductions would involve, I think, both psychological and physical investigations of what makes us 'tick', or rather prevents our collective awakening to the changes in reality that their presence should have made obvious.

I find it most significant that, by most all accounts of close encounters, including abductions, the 'others' have communicated with one another and with us telepathically. This indicates that those others extensively share clear channels of unified consciousness and common understanding of the nature of consciousness and mind (and the fragility of life), in their case an understanding much more evolved than ours and much less compartmentalized than ours. For the most part, our species has declined [over the millenia of our successive 'civilizations'] in sensitivity to what we probably know subconsciously, especially in the collective unconscious. Our human forebears were much more open to, aware of, their connections to the natural physical environment/ecology from which all life on earth has emerged and on which it depends. We've nearly lost that capacity, including most pertinently our capacity to protect, or even simply to sustain, the ecology on which we rely. It could be that genetic experiments have been made on many individuals to understand why we have become so blind and insensitive {so stupid} and to correct these deficiences. It could be that what looks like hybridization is not for 'their' benefit but for ours. It could also be that the long-range intent is to replace our species with an improved species that can live constructively rather than destructively on this planet.

If we had become enlightened enough by now to have produced an open society in which knowledge is broadly shared, in which the conditions of our lives are actually understood, the reality and significance of the nonterrestrial presence here might have led to a conscious choice on the part of humanity to learn from species more advanced than we are. As it is, though, these visitors might well be expected to have given up on us by now.

So I think it's been 'about us' to the extent that we are a problem to be solved and that we refuse to understand why.
While the telepathic angle is exciting it is entirely unprovable. It is all literally happening in our heads and any acts of telepathy presupposed by witnesses could just as easily be an internal dialogue with no other agent present or it is a dialogue sustained by witnesses in the face of an unknown stimulus. I am never convinced by any reports of telepathy for these reasons. They also could just as easily point to literal voices in the head, the controllers again, or schizoidal episodes.
 
I guess you are addressing argument five, the physical considerations. The examples you give are ones that repeat frequently enough: dissolving objects, objects that merge and separate, objects that behave like ghosts, objects that morph, objects that defy our own notions of space and time, and in whose abrupt motions and actions, again appearing to do so for ur benefit, are all entirely absurdist in nature. If these were the actions of a visiting space craft why all the elaborate hocus pocus theatrics? Why not just blast in and out of the atmosphere on a direct route instead of all this high drama. In the world of "critical thinking" these actions make no sense unless the goal is to provide us with absurdist sky koans to ponder.
You mention critical thinking. So let's follow the basic model:
  • Establish Purpose: The purpose is to determine the most likely theory for the observed behavior of objects known as UFOs:
  • Define The Problem: Problem 1 - The sudden appearance or disappearance of UFOs from the observer's field of view.
  • Evidence or Information: From multiple UFO reports.
  • Infer that: UFOs are able to somehow appear or disappear from the observer's field of view.
  • The theories that might explain this behavior are:
  1. An illusion caused by the rapid movement of an object directly toward or away from an observer
  2. An illusion caused by the rapid movement of an object from behind something that had previously been blocking the observers view of it.
  3. Camouflage that makes it difficult for an observer to visually detect the object.
  4. Popping in and out of an alternate dimension or universe.
  • We can assume that all options above could hypothetically account for the observed behavior.
  • Given what we know, we can safely assume that options 1 through 3 above are all well established concepts with real-world examples that support them, at least to some extent.
  • Given what we know, option 4 is highly speculative and that little or no substantial real-world evidence exists to support it.
  • The implications of the above are that although option 4 might be possible, the consequences of making it preferential requires a leap of faith in an unproven and more complex theory that requires a host of additional assumptions beyond what is already known that are also entirely hypothetical, and therefore heuristics such as Ockham's razor would suggest it is the least likely of the available theories to be true.
  • The point of view this leads to is that options 1 through 3 are all more likely to be the case than option 4.
Now we can repeat and refine, but IMO it is already clear how that will go. There are all kinds of examples one can dig up where movement that is rapid accompanied by a momentary distraction can make things seem to vanish or appear. Magicians have been doing it for centuries. Couple that with examples of camouflage, many proven in nature, plus the development of standard and active camouflage, and those theories are as proven possible as you can get, unlike alternate universes, and especially alternate dimensions. But even if we accept that such exists, there's still the added problem of "extra accounting for" required. So I'm sorry to say, but without something better, this aspect of UFO behavior barely lends any weight to the idea that an alternative universe exists, let alone that aliens are coming here from there.

Now all that being said. I believe I've already mentioned someplace that an alternate universe ( not dimension ), is my favorite theory, even if I don't think it's the most likely.
 
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No, you are just treating only one aspect of his discussion, the disappearance part, and missing out on the rest of those physical considerations, for which I gave you quite a list. Also, keep in mind that Vallée is not arguing for any other theory, just proposing five arguments against the ETH, by examining some very specific, collected aspects of the phenomenon.

The physical considerations are concerned in some ways with the absurdist nature of the phenomenon, its theatrics & its ability to defy what we know about time and space. It is not trying to prove the interdimensional, but to expose the holes in the ETH. Sure it may seem the likely answer, but it is also the culturally programmed answer. Ironically the phenomenon appears to have gone out of its way to both provide the appearance of ET in our skies as well as the inexplicable & ridiculous plenitude of types of craft, types of alien, and types of physical maneuvers that also range from your regular flying saucer to flying hotels and tanks.

So sure, the ETH is a good model, but it's just the start of the discussion, as it does not answer the problems that still exist. If the model of the atom could evolve multiple times over then certainly the model of what the UFO is can too. If it doesn't then it will remain stagnant.
 
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