Last time on this podcast we discussed Jacque Vallée’s ground-breaking and genre-stretching book Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers, which highlights striking parallels between elements found within what’s commonly referred to as the UFO Phenomenon, and distant tales that come to us from so-called faerie lore.

That is to say, once you crack the veneer of more recent 20th and 21st century encounters with what are assumed to be spacecraft being piloted by alien beings who’ve supposedly traveled across the vast distances of the cosmos to get here, and the stories of our ancestor’s encounters with the likes of fawns, faeries and goblins from the annals of human history, the degree of overlap is as startling as it is, at least from Vallée’s perspective, potentially revealing.

Put succinctly, Vallée, and others since he first penned this book in the late 1960s, have wondered if perhaps some kind of intelligence has been interacting with human beings throughout the entire course of our history, and either that we’ve just interpreted them differently because of our changing assumptions about reality, or that the very manner in which they appear to us is partly determined by cultural constructs. Incidentally, this latter possibility may even explain some of the differences noticed, not only across time, but also between cultures existing contemporaneously.

When one peruses the full breadth of the history of these kinds of interactions with beings that appear to be decidedly non-human, one particular element stands out particularly. Here I speak of the degree of absurdity, elsewhere described as “ridiculousness”, that arises in many of these cases. And again, this is often as true of cases of what, at first glance, appear to be standard extraterrestrials flying spacecraft, as it does of faeries abducting human beings and then returning them only after having altered that individual’s relationship with spacetime, in one way or another, at least temporarily.

While we might ignore elements of absurdity apparent in historic cases of faerie lore because, after all, few modern people take those stories seriously to begin with. After all, they’re “fairy tales”: a genre many take to mean “made up” or “not real” or “fantastical. However, what is disconcerting to some who like to cling to a standard extraterrestrial hypothesis to explain modern incidents of the UFO Phenomenon, here too the accounts provided reveal elements of what appears to be pure absurdity: elements of ridiculousness that surely have no place if we’re speaking of sophisticated, technologically superior entities traveling from exo-planets to survey our blue pearl of a planet.

Why the absurdity? And why so often? What are we to make of this? Is this merely attributable to errors in translation or something equally banal? Or is this seeming ridiculousness pointing to something more central; something serving perhaps as a signpost pointing towards the murky origin of these various non-human Others? These are the very matters we’ll seek to explore in this, the 58th episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.

Near the middle part of the 20th century, American society became obsessed with a newfangled fascination. This pastime that took the public’s imagination by storm, prompted serious and excited discussion around interplanetary visitors. The dawning of this new era in pubic life was fueled by a series of sightings of what quickly became known, colloquially, as
“flying saucers”.

More generally, the term adopted was that of UFOs – unidentified flying objects. This term described what was commonly assumed to be, sophisticated technological spacecraft being piloted by alien others – Martians or Venusians or something in that line of thinking; our neighbors from the surrounding planets of our solar system.

Now, while the public’s interest was peaking, the mainstream scientific establishment was much more cautious. All of this hoopla seemed too good to be true; too much like a radio drama depicting an H.G. Wells story, or something along those lines. For that reason, mainstream scientists largely steered clear of this topic. And of course, this bias was helped in large measure by what we understand now to be a dedicated disinformation campaign meant to quell public and academic interest, being perpetuated by the federal government.

However, that said, there were scientists who had not forgotten that their role was to investigate anything mysterious that seemed to be manifesting, without assuming – a priori – that such things simply couldn’t be. These rare pioneers of inquiry are the kinds of people determined to let data – not preexisting bias – lead the way.

One such pioneer was and is a scientist named Jacques Vallee – a living legend who has arguably done more for the field of ufology than any other person in the history of the world. What’s made Vallee so well regarded over time is that, looking back, he was always willing to go – again – wherever the data led him; letting it, rather than the “common sense” thinking of the day lead to the postulating of new hypotheses.

Now, speaking of that, one such data-driven shift that happened for Vallee came when he recognized that, 1.) These supposed encounters with alien beings flying sophisticated spacecraft seemed to regularly include elements of high strangeness more akin to what are commonly referred to as paranormal encounters, and 2.) That, when examined in close detail, these elements overlapped considerably with apparently religious or fairy-tale encounters from distant human history.

This inspired Vallee to do a deep dive, comparing modern-day UFO encounters with events from distant history, leading, eventually, to his controversial, consequential and ground-breaking book Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers. And It is the surprising and evocative revelations uncovered in that seminal book that is the topic of this, the 57th episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.