From Michael.Corbin@p0.f428.n104.z1.FIDONET.ORG (Michael Corbin) Sun Dec 15 21:05:00 1991 Path: aramis.rutgers.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!qt.cs.utexas.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!caen!hellgate.utah.edu!csn!scicom!paranet!p0.f428.n104.z1.FIDONET.ORG!Michael.Corbin From: Michael.Corbin@p0.f428.n104.z1.FIDONET.ORG (Michael Corbin) Newsgroups: alt.alien.visitors Subject: Jerry Clark/Jacques Vallee/Revelations Message-ID: <95799.294C21A2@paranet.FIDONET.ORG> Date: 16 Dec 91 02:05:00 GMT Sender: ufgate@paranet.FIDONET.ORG (newsout1.26) Organization: FidoNet node 1:104/428.0 - From September/October 1991, Volume 16, Number 5. On September 7 and 8, at a conference in Sydney, Australia, I delivered a two-part lecture which dealt in part with conspiracy theories in historical and current ufology. After the first lecture a woman approached me to say that she would have to listen to the second before deciding whether or not I am a CIA agent. In the middle of that final lecture, as I was making light of Milton William Cooper's leave-your-brains-at-the-door-and- believe yarns about a secret government and its alliance with malevolent extraterrestrials, a man in the audience began shouting and demanding that I shut up. Another lecturer, our old friend Bill Chalker, was asked during the question-and-answer session if it was true that he works for the CIA. I thought this was pretty funny, but Chalker was not amused. He told me later that the charge was being made, indeed had even been published, by Australia's Cooperists; what concerned him was the possibility that witnesses in future UFO cases might hear of it and refuse to speak with him--certainly a legitimate concern. Conspiracy delirium has afflicted Australia, though the illness seems to have been contracted by exposure, I am sorry to say, to my own country. It's not just that the writings of Cooper and John Lear circulate widely within the New Age community, but an expatriate American who claims to be an "escapee from the CIA" (as someone described him to me) feeds the paranoia with his own stories, for which as always no supporting evidence is forthcoming. In our time it is secret documents one has seen, rather than Space Brothers one has met, that comprise the stuff of fantasies and hoaxes. Not, of course, that conspiracy obsessions are ufodom's alone. Not by a long shot. As a news junkie I wake up every morning and switch on cable television's C-Span, which hosts a show on which politicians, officials, pundits, and journalists take calls from viewers. The subject, of course, is never UFOs, but on some days as many as one caller in three seems to subscribe to some variety of conspiracy theory. Now that Communism, happily, is fading from the world scene and so, incidentally, from a leading role in conspiratorial scenarios, the principal suspects have become the CIA (the focus of all evil in the solar system, as we all know), "the media" (believed to be a monolithic entity with, in one caller's words, a "definite agenda"-which is to promote the interests of, depending on who's on the phone, the right or the left end of the political spectrum), and the Israelis (or, as some callers unsubtly express it, thereby tipping us off to their real views, "the Jews"). I happened to remark on the peculiar proliferation of conspiracy beliefs in a conversation with Barry Williams and Tim Mendham, two genial representatives of Australian Skeptics, down under's equivalent of CSICOP. Affecting a darkly conspiratorial expression, Mendham declared, "Somebody must be behind it!" Mendham's wisecrack came back to me as I was reading Jacques Vallee's new Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception (Ballantine Books), the ultimate conspiracy book. Vallee's thesis can be summed up thus: Conspirators are inventing conspiracy theories to mask the real conspiracy. Revelations is a sequel to Vallee's 1979 book Messengers of Deception, which proposed that a shadowy group of intelligence operatives is manipulating UFO beliefs and creating phony UFO encounters in an effort to direct societal consciousness. An early, less elaborate version of this notion was circulated in the 1950s and 1960s by a former government scientist, Leon Davidson. Davidson thought that CIA psychological-warfare specialists posing as space people had fooled George Adamski and other contactees. In Messengers Vallee advances essentially the same idea, though without crediting Davidson; also, unlike Davidson, he believes that a real UFO phenomenon, supernatural, perhaps unknowable, but certainly not extraterrestrial, exists beyond the manipulation. In common with his other works of the last two decades, Revelations is an interesting book even if it is not a good one. Vallee is no profound thinker, but no one would deny that he is a first-rate storyteller. Anyone who enjoys tales from the fringes- and who doesn't?-will have great fun with the chapters on UMMO and on Franck Fontaine's bogus abduction. Vallee's deadpan account of his dinner with Bill Cooper is hilarious. And he shows admirable good sense when he takes after paranoid ufologists' traditional anxieties about tapped phones and CIA assassinations of those who know too much about flying saucers. What he himself believes, alas, is hardly less crazy. Much of his problem is that he has a hard time entirely disbelieving anybody. To Vallee even those whom others have had no trouble identifying as crude charlatans are "sincere." To those who do not see a conspiracy everywhere, it is quite easy to accept that somebody might peddle tales of man-eating aliens--or of Space Brothers or of ETs in our midst-simply to fatten the bank account, to gratify the ego, to fool the gullible, or to feed any other unworthy but recognizable human impulse. There is no reason, logically or evidentially, to suspect these hoaxers are some other hoaxer's victims. But if one wishes, with Vallee, to indulge in conspiratorial musings, then the contactees and the Cooperists really had an experience (with actors in alien outfits) or really saw a secret document (contrived for disinformation purposes), even if to get there one has to ignore clear and specific evidence that the claimants are lying through their teeth. <> -- Michael Corbin - via FidoNet node 1:104/422 UUCP: !scicom!paranet!User_Name INTERNET: Michael.Corbin@p0.f428.n104.z1.FIDONET.ORG From Michael.Corbin@p0.f428.n104.z1.FIDONET.ORG (Michael Corbin) Sun Dec 15 21:05:00 1991 Path: aramis.rutgers.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!qt.cs.utexas.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!caen!hellgate.utah.edu!csn!scicom!paranet!p0.f428.n104.z1.FIDONET.ORG!Michael.Corbin From: Michael.Corbin@p0.f428.n104.z1.FIDONET.ORG (Michael Corbin) Newsgroups: alt.alien.visitors Subject: Clark/Vallee/Revelations - Part 2 Message-ID: <95800.294C21A6@paranet.FIDONET.ORG> Date: 16 Dec 91 02:05:00 GMT Sender: ufgate@paranet.FIDONET.ORG (newsout1.26) Organization: FidoNet node 1:104/428.0 - > Vallee drags the Cergy-Pontoise tale--a confessed hoax yet- into the conspiracy. In this instance, he writes, the agents were "beings of flesh and blood within the French military and technological establishment." How does Vallee know this? He has it from a nameless source who claims to have spoken with an anonymous bureaucrat in the French Ministry of Defense. This, by the way, is the same Vallee who complains (on page 76) of Len Stringfield's habit of citing anonymous sources. Yet anonymous sources, making claims in some ways as incredible as those who tell Stringfield of crashed saucers and extraterrestrial autopsies, abound in Revelation's pages. Some instances: (l) "[A]ntiterrorist exercises in which the attackers disguised their craft as a flying saucer have actually been run more than once," which explains cases cited by "amateur groups" as "proof that extraterrestrials are surveying our strategic assets." Source: "men who were trained in the penetration of nuclear plants and missile bases," none named. (2) There is evidence that the "UMMO group" is linked with the "LaRouche extremist movement in France." Source: "French investigators," none named. (3) During Desert One, the failed April 1980 attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran, a "disk resembling a UFO" was seen. "It was said to be a platform for nonlethal weapons, intended to paralyze or otherwise disable the Iranian guards." The "code word for that part of the operation, of which Richard Secord and Oliver North had been among the planners, was none other than Snowbird," a name that appears in recent UFO- conspiracy lore. Source: "some witnesses," none named. Even as he complains of "eager believers [who] have fabricated fanciful explanations out of whole cloth," he breathlessly spins theories out of what appears to be the same material. He enlists UMMO in the conspiracy, even as he mentions in passing the more prosaic findings of two Spanish investigators (actually named) who have uncovered evidence suggesting the supposedly extraterrestrial writings were forged by individuals (also named) associated with a Spanish contactee group. Poor Carl Meredith Allen (aka Carlos Miguel Allende) is resurrected from the Saucerian boneyard, and we are to believe that Morris K. Jessup's suicide was in some way-here as elsewhere in the text Vallee is vague on details connected with the conspiracy. In fact, from every available indication Jessup's suicide, like James McDonald's, had nothing to do with his UFO interests and everything to do with his personal problems. As for Allen, if Vallee had read Robert A. Goerman's article in the October 1980 issue of Fate--evidently he has never heard of it-we would have been spared this further exploitation of this sad character. Vallee is brought to Norton Air Force Base to learn UFO "secrets" from two men whom even he recognizes as no more than naive saucer buffs. Yet when one tells of a desert meeting with a landed UFO some years earlier, Vallee cannot resist speculating that the occupants were American agents of the conspiracy- He does not think to ask why the U.S. government would go to the considerable trouble and expense of building an advanced aircraft and training pilots to act like space people simply to dazzle one obscure individual who would never publicize the experience. I suppose that something like this would happen, but if we are to believe it did, Vallee will have to produce the relevant evidence. But evidence is the one element most conspicuously missing here--as, one might add, in all UFO-conspiracy literature. In the end, though he is sincerer and saner than most other current conspiracy theorists, he gives us no more reason to believe him than they do. Vallee has little to offer beyond unnamed informants and a ufological revisionism which offers us speculation and imagination in place of reason and substance. There is nothing remotely like the documentation a true investigative journalist would have nailed down before he wrote a book as loaded with bizarre and implausible allegations as Vallee's. According to Vallee, UFO beliefs are so spiritually charged that they are actually changing society, and that is why the conspirators use them to manipulate us to some end or other about which Vallee is characteristically obscure. In fact, UFOs were trivialized and marginalized long ago, and outside ufology, which Vallee apparently has mistaken for the real world, they are visible, and even there not consistently so, mostly in popular culture, along with rap music, soap operas, supermarket tabloids, miniskirts, and other ephemera. As a vehicle for social transformation UFOs are just about the last thing any sane conspirator would choose. A more interesting question is why and how a phenomenon potentially so significant has come to appear to most people to be of no consequence whatever. Maybe that's where we'll uncover the conspiratorial machinations, if we are determined to find them. Other, less sinister explanations come to mind, however, and some can be found in less exciting but more intellectually fulfilling books and papers by sociologists of science. Of course, if we were to follow the logic of Vallee's argument, why confine the conspiracy to the UFO era? If we don't let a dearth of evidence for a conspiracy stop us, there is no stopping us. What is to keep us from concluding, for example, that Richard Shaver was not a nut, as generally assumed, but the victim of a mind-control experiment which led him to believe he met alien creatures underneath the earth in the 1930s and 1940s? And what about 19th-Century Spiritualist mediums? Were they, too, victims of the conspiracy? After all, Spiritualism had a far more marked effect on Victorian culture than flying saucers have had on our own. A medium is even said to have encouraged President Lincoln to emancipate the slaves. But if one has no compelling desire to drop into a black hole of unreason, one can but reflect that hoaxes, delusions, visions, and strange occurrences have always been a part of human experience, and since the UFO era has been lived by human beings, why should we expect it to be different? Why should not weird tales circulate in our time? In the absence of evidence, conspiracy theories of the sort Vallee proposes simply are unnecessary. And yet, from time to time, Vallee touches on real issues. The Holloman Air Force Base affair, which concerns an apparently real film of what is supposed to be a meeting between government scientists and aliens, is a puzzle. So are the Bennewitz episode, the MJ-12 briefing document, and related matters. Vallee is surely correct, though he is hardly the first so to argue, that these amount to evidence both of a strange psychological warfare experiment and (at least where Bennewitz is concerned) of egregious official misconduct. But to extrapolate a massive conspiracy from these small elements is simply to excuse oneself from the ranks of those who have a serious claim on our attention. Throughout the text Vallee vents his spleen, as he did in his previous book Confrontations, on those ufologists who perversely insist on thinking for themselves even in the face of his repeated offers to do it for them. His books could as well be subtitled "Me Jacques; You Dumb." As always he displays minimal understanding of ufologists and their concerns. Sooner or later the alert reader will notice that hardly any of those unnamed "believers" and "amateurs" ever actually get quoted. Vallee prefers to set up and knock down straw arguments, always easier to do than to address the concerns of ufology's serious (as opposed to naive or cracked) researchers and theorists. From all indications he still has not read Thomas E. Bullard on the patterns in abduction reports or Michael D. Swords on the scientific soundness of the extraterrestrial hypothesis. No one familiar with UFO Crash at Roswell or The Roswell Report will feel Vallee has contributed anything to rational discourse on that subject. Vallee continues to ignore the many nontrivial criticisms of his approach I outlined in "The Thickets of Magonia" (IUR, January/February 1990). He has simply cranked up the volume as he declaims yet again what is less a scientific reading of the phenomenon than an occult one. Let us not forget that Magonia, the word Vallee made famous, translates as "Magicland." Errors large and small litter the pages of Revelations, evincing Vallee's ignorance of any ufology but his own. Donald Keyhoe did not write The UFO Conspiracy, nor is Timothy Good the author of something called Beyond Top Secret. Benton Jamison is not "Benton Majison," and Detlev Bronk's first name was not "Detley." (For that matter, Leo Tolstoy's was not "Leon.") And whatever else page 216 would have you believe, CUFOS left Evanston, Illinois, years ago. Vallee's coverage of the crashed disc question is a disaster. He has the Ubatuba incident occurring in 1933 or 1934 when it is supposed to have taken place in 1951. He places the Spitzbergen event in May 1941-contemporary published accounts put it in the early 1950s, though it is almost certainly a hoax-and Dorothy Kilgallen is incorrectly identified as the source of the rumor. The celebrated Texas/Mexico incident is set in a year and location different from those its proponents have assigned it. One assumes, however, that no error lies behind Vallee's pretense that the Journal of Scientific Exploration is the "only refereed publication in the field" of ufology. First, JSE is not a ufological periodical, though it publishes occasional papers on the subject, and second, as Vallee is well aware as a former JUFOS board member, CUFOS' Journal of UFO Studies is ufology's only "refereed publication." This is Vallee's way of responding to his critics. There is more to be said, but enough is enough. Let us close with Vallee's own words: "Mysteries that linger without solution for such a long time are a powerful irritant to the mind; they tend to trigger wild speculation. When the very existence of the enigma is flatly denied by arrogant scientists who have not even taken the time to look at the data, when the government destroys or covers up the fact that its own employees have actually witnessed some of the best documented sightings, it is natural for speculations to turn into paranoia, and for research to become derailed by fantastic delusions. "It is at this point that the very people who could help us in our investigations, namely the UFO researchers themselves, become caught up in their own need to believe in the most bizarre theories, for which not a shred of real proof exists." Sadly, Vallee has no idea that he has just described himself.- Jerome Clark PARANET FILE NAME: VALLEE.REB -- Michael Corbin - via FidoNet node 1:104/422 UUCP: !scicom!paranet!User_Name INTERNET: Michael.Corbin@p0.f428.n104.z1.FIDONET.ORG From Michael.Corbin@p0.f428.n104.z1.FIDONET.ORG (Michael Corbin) Sun Dec 15 21:06:00 1991 Path: aramis.rutgers.edu!rutgers!att!emory!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!caen!hellgate.utah.edu!csn!scicom!paranet!p0.f428.n104.z1.FIDONET.ORG!Michael.Corbin From: Michael.Corbin@p0.f428.n104.z1.FIDONET.ORG (Michael Corbin) Newsgroups: alt.alien.visitors Subject: Vallee Responds Message-ID: <95801.294C21AA@paranet.FIDONET.ORG> Date: 16 Dec 91 02:06:00 GMT Sender: ufgate@paranet.FIDONET.ORG (newsout1.26) Organization: FidoNet node 1:104/428.0 -