"The reason Vallee has irked so many ardent UFO believers for decades is that he doesn't believe UFOs are nuts-and-bolts machines from outer space or spinning silver disks operated by aliens from another universe. Crudely simplified, he was the first scientist to suggest that UFO experiences are in fact interactions with interdimensional beings that have always existed among us -- invisible hands toying with human society from a different level of consciousness. It's not just a physical phenomenon. It's a sociological, spiritual and psychic experience all wrapped up into one."
Jacques Vallee
Note the term "aliens from another universe," which betrays the journalist's ignorance of things cosmological. Ironically, Vallee's position is that UFOs are indeed from other universes; it's the shopworn extraterrestrial hypothesis (which maintains UFOs are craft from neighboring star systems) that Vallee rejects for its inability to account for the phenomenon's strangeness. Vallee has used the term "multiverse" to describe the ufonauts' home-turf; incidentally, "multiverse" is used with increasing frequency among quantum physicists and "parallel universe" theorists.
10 comments:
Have you read his journals "Forbidden Science"? Really amazing and inspiring.
By the way, great introduction to LO!!
"Forbidden Science" was a great behind-the-scenes peek; Vallee has a blog as well -- "The View From California" (see sidebar).
Glad you liked my comments on Fort. It's not so much an introduction as an extended blurb, but it appears on the back cover of the book, so I thought I'd "endorse" it here at PB.
Interesting is the possibility that aliens could not only travel from one galaxy to another, but also from one universe to another.
I read somewhere that if the '11th' dimension exists, then there are actually tiny gaps all around us to get to those other universe. If there are gaps then perhaps its possible to open them up?
Wish I knew.
Couple of points, one minor, one major--
My minor point: I've noticed that non-scientific journalists often confuse the terms "Solar System," "Galaxy," and "Universe." This is pretty much of a piece with the popular notion that cavemen and dinosaurs co-existed. It's like the only concepts they have are a vague "whatever-you-call-it out there" or "way back when." With evangelicals getting in on the science "education" act, this kind of confusion will only get worse.
My major point: Define "interdimensional being." I have not read all of Vallee by any means, but I've read enough to feel very dissatisfied with his "explanations." At the risk of sounding like Michael Shermer, they really strike me as being, in the final analysis, non-explanations. I am, on the other hand, perfectly willing to entertain the possibility of what I prefer to call "discarnate entities" (because this term doesn't posit non-verifiable origins) but why try to "sex up" what strikes me as essentially a form of metaphysics to make it sound like science, which it ISN'T?
Re observed and observer: I guess when Jane Goodall was studying her chimps, the chimps were also studying Jane Goodall.
You're talking String Theory -- in particular, M-Theory -- in which there are 10 space dimensions and 1 time dimension (if memory serves). The problem is that most of the space dimensions are curled up so small we can't directly observe them, let alone visit them.
"At the risk of sounding like Michael Shermer, they really strike me as being, in the final analysis, non-explanations."
Vallee's outlined a profoundly useful working paradigm that drags the UFO debate out of the "ET craft vs. misidentification" arena. No, he hasn't pinpointed where his interdimensional visitors come from, but he's made it a hell of a lot easier for others to ask.
Is Michael Moorcock getting credit for coining the term "multi-verse"? At that, they should be called "multiversal" or multi-dimensional" beings.
My tenuous speculation is better than your tenuous speculation!
Surely, Mac, no matter where "they" originally come from, even from another dimension or universe, in order for us to be able to perceive them, they and their machines have either to emit or to reflect photons that are detected by our retinas. That is, they have to be materially present - as flesh and bone (?) and "nuts-and-bolts" - in our universe or we wouldn't be able to see them or detect or interact physically with them in any other way. Thus, I don't see that Vallee's distinction can be altogether valid unless he is suggesting that the entire phenomenon is somehow being projected directly into our minds (by-passing all normal physical mechanisms). Leaving aside the question of whether telepathy is possible (and also the fact that genuine physical evidence, such as photographs and videos of their craft, could, in this case, never exist), if they have the power to do this, then what is the limit to that power - and why, in fact, should there be any? Surely they could shape our perceived reality to anything that suited their purposes (whatever those might be). If we are such puppets, then we can only ever know what they allow us to know, and who is to say that this is the truth?
It is, of course, an interesting and important question where "they" come from, and Vallee's favoured answer may, indeed, be correct, but I also don't follow his argument that there must be some kind of limit to strangeness in our universe but not in others from which they might come (how much can these proposed alternative universes differ from our own in terms of the laws of physics and of evolution?). If we ever get out to the stars (our own Solar System, even), then I think we are likely to find more than enough comparable strangeness in our own universal back-yard.
Finally, we ought also to bear in mind that Vallee's slightly patronising view of American/British ufology almost certainly stems as much from the perennial French conviction of their intellectual superiority over "les Anglo-Saxons" as anything else. In other words, it is another expression of the only too familiar French refrain of: "You guys just don't understand the subtleties like we do.".
Arcesilaus --
Very good points. Personally, I don't think the "nuts-and-bolts" and "paraphysical" interpretations are mutually exclusive. Like quantum phenomena, I think the UFO intelligence can be both at the same time, inhabiting a liminal realm that's often too slippery for the regular tools of empirical science, but nonetheless physical.
I think the very act of observation (coupled with intellectual bias) plays a significant role in what this otherworldy intelligence ultimately looks like.