On the enigmas of UAP theory (part three)

I am becoming convinced, the more I contemplate the matter, that Vallée’s thesis constitutes, in fact, a very flawed “third way” between the believers and the debunkers. A scholar such as David Halperin merely dreams of what Vallée, whom he all but dismisses, has actually accomplished (albeit, again, in a very flawed way). We are not quite ready, or indeed scarcely even capable of accepting Vallée’s thesis, because to do so would require two things: one from us, the other from Vallée himself. It would require relinquishing both materialism and spiritualism or idealism, and with it the reigning intellectual paradigms that govern science (on the one hand) and religion and spirituality (on the other). Given that science and religion cling to these ideologies—wrongly, we should add—their existing historical forms are challenged existentially by the rejection of these intellectually debilitating standpoints (debilitating does not mean fruitless). But that is what we owe to the spirit of Vallée’s thesis. What that thesis owes to us, who are rightly skeptical (as we shall see) of it, is a more justifiable articulation of, and a more honest methodological clarity for, its core idea, and its guiding principle. If we are able to accomplish this, we will have come far in our ability, if not in the actuality, of our understanding of the UFO phenomenon. Far, but not all the way, for, once we clear the deadwood of old belief, and of persistent metaphysical extravagance, and give ourselves to the patience of a true guiding concept derivable from the heart of the phenomenon itself, tempered with the brilliance of our human creativity (that “free play of the imagination” Einstein knew was the very core of true science), we shall then have our work set before us, and we shall be on our way to an authentic understanding—one hopefully which will, in future times, be confident enough to let these initial attempts die away to more mature conceptions. Let us, then, return to our main subject in this series, which is Vallée’s “unified field theory” of the UFO phenomenon (which, for convenience, we should simply designate “UFT”).

His unified theory is easy enough to state—it is given in the form of an hypothesis: the “Control System” hypothesis. We had already begun to set the stage for it in part two of this series, by establishing the field of the relevant evidence which this hypothesis wants to explain by way of unifying a diverse field of seemingly disparate phenomena. Let us now lay it out more explicitly.

We are given an analogy by chapter 9 of Invisible College (I should point out that I have been reading and referring to the U.K. edition, pictured to the right, sent to me very generously by Bryan Sentes). Everyone is familiar with a thermostat. It is a very curious device. On the one I have (or rather, which was forced on me by the building management), a fancy “Nest”, there are what we can call “threshold settings”:  preset temperatures where, in once instance, when the thermostat detects that a room has exceeded a certain temperature, the cooling system kicks in to keep the apartment from heating up too much; and in the other instance, when it detects that the temperature of the room has fallen below this other preset, the heating system kicks in to warm the place up. This is a control system: it regulates the overall characteristics of something—in this case, the temperature of a room (or a whole house or apartment). What is interesting about it is that a control system sets up a kind of feedback loop: information about the environment is feed into the system, which in turn tries to control the environment itself (albeit in a restricted way—only temperature in this case). For eight chapters of Invisible College what Vallée thinks he has supplied evidence for is not just a unique set of experiences of rather extraordinary or “paranormal” phenomena that have variously been cause for the creation of religions, cults, mystical philosophies and so on. No, rather, the meaning that human beings have made out of these phenomena show, when one takes a global view, that human society and culture itself is being “controlled”—shaped in a way like how a thermostat would regulate the temperature of the room. As human beings (or their societies) cross a certain threshold, the “system” kicks in to reregulate. He points to, for example, the structure of UFO “waves” which show some kind of regularity to them, suggestive, in his mind, of a kind of grand Pavlovian behaviorist experiment in control. He also notes that human history itself is, of course, punctuated by various kinds of collapse and rebuilding cycles. (And we might add—although Vallée does not think to mention it—the seemingly sudden rise of many of the world’s religions during what Karl Jaspers called the “Axial Age”.) Rather than purely sociohistorical/material forces and chance occurrences, or nebulous spiritual forces, triggering these events, perhaps instead there is a deeper layer of meaning here; perhaps human affairs, through some mechanism (neither material nor spiritual) linking the human to the Control System (whatever it is—and he feigns no hypothesis here, if we may be permitted a gesture towards a certain scientist of English fame), are constitutive of these cycles in a way that evades our conventional explanatory categories. “I am led to this hypothesis,” he writes,

By the fact that in every instance of the UFO phenomenon I have been able to study in depth I have found as many rational elements as I have absurd ones, and many that I could interpret as friendly and many that seemed hostile. No matter what approach I take, I can never explain more than half of the facts. … This is what tells me that I am working on the wrong level. And so do all the believers, and this definitely includes the skeptics, because they believe they can explain the facts as strongly as the most enthusiastic convert to Ms. Dixon’s vision of Jupiterian Amazonians! I would argue that they are all wrong, even Puharich [Uri Geller’s psychiatrist] with his disparaging tapes, and Uri [Geller] voicing from Rhombus 4-D (p. 200 of Invisible College).

What is curious here is that Vallée is not dismissing the beliefs of any of these individuals, like the psychic Jean Dixon, or Uri Geller. Rather, because he won’t try to reduce their beliefs to mere psychological curiosity or dysfunction (psychopathology), or attribute it to some other external cause, such things are, rather, only comprehensible as manifestations of the system of control in operation throughout human history. Of course there aren’t Jupiterian Amazonians! we are told—because it’s the belief that there are that is key. The belief evinces manipulative control as part of a larger system in place, regulating human society. Now, for what purpose or end, we simply cannot say, claims Vallée. But, nonetheless, he writes,

There are ways to gain access to the reference level of every control system I know. Even a child, if smart or daring enough, can climb on a chair, change the dial of a thermostat and elicit a response. … It must be possible to gain access to the control of the UFO phenomenon, to forget the spirits and the pranks of Rhombus 4-D, and do some real science. But it will take a very smart approach—or a very daring one. (ibid.)

Vallée’s general strategy, if we were to contextualize in the history of science for a moment, is not new. It is always bold. It is the general strategy of explanation by unification, and we have seen it from time-to-time in the history of science. Both Newton and Maxwell, and even Einstein himself, managed to do this. Newton shows that the mechanics of terrestrial motions and those of the celestial sphere are not fundamentally different; all of this physics can be understood in terms of a core set of physical quantities (energy, mass, etc.), with the force of gravity being a universal feature of the interactions of all things (however vanishingly unimportant it turns out to be in certain mechanical interactions). Maxwell’s theory managed to provided a unification of two seemingly distinct phenomena: electricity and magnetism, and hence his theory is known as a theory of electromagnetism, in which a “field” is posited in order to describe both phenomena, consistently, at once. Einstein, building on the Maxwell theory, demonstrated two unities at once: that the Maxwellian unification of the electric and magnetic fields into the electromagnetic was actually implied by the postulated demand (justified by experiment) that all observers measure the value of the speed of propagation of that field (“c”) to be the same for everyone in every frame of reference, even though such a demand seemed, to the physicists of the day (like the great Dutch physicist Lorentz), to be completely theoretically uncalled for. This meant that the spatial and temporal components of observers’ measurements of that speed must vary together according to their relative states of motion, in order to come to an absolute agreement that “c” had a fixed, invariable quantity—finally giving birth in Einstein’s special relativity theory to the new (but scarcely intuitable) concept of a unified “spacetime” field. Crucially, though, these unifications were disciplined by a great wealth of experimental and observational evidence, data from which one might make a creative leap to the theoretic unity. It is a subtle point. We will have occasion to return specifically to Einstein in a moment, but what I want to consider now is what data, and what about that data, leads Vallée to posit the hypothesis for his unified theory.

As Vallée has chosen an historical-phenomenological approach to his subject, and to the data which it its substance, he faces the peril that every theoretically minded historian faces, as Hans Jonas, that underappreciated philosopher and scholar of religions, knew so very well. Indeed, we would do well to take a page from one of his classic studies of (which was really an earnest searching for) Gnosticism. I’m not speaking of his classic, with which many scholars are of course familiar (The Gnostic Religion). I am, rather, speaking of a little brilliant essay (which as it turns out can be read as a guide to and for Vallée): “The Gnostic Syndrome: Typology of Its Thought, Imagination, and Mood”, published lately in Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man. In the opening lines of this essay, he perfectly describes what I believe is the trap into which Vallée, perhaps unwittingly (he’s really more of an amateur historian, one more by avocation), has fallen. I am not sure that it is a trap many of us who want to theorize can avoid, but it is a trap nonetheless. The passage is worth quoting at length.

“Delimiting a phenomenon that exists as a manifold of diverse individuals involves,” Jonas writes,

the well-known circle of using the presumed unity of the many for the designation of a common name, and then using the meaning of that name to define the unity of the manifold—and then to decide over the inclusion or exclusion of individuals. It is the paradox of, first, the evidence prescribing to us—persuasively; and then, our concept prescribing to the evidence—normatively. In our case, this means that we must have some historical delimitation first so as to arrive at a typological one, and again the typological so as to reassess the historical one. I shall not dwell here on the methodological problems of this hermeneutical circle—from felt unity to postulated principle of unity, and back to critically reassigned unity: it is, with all its pitfalls, the necessity and creative risk of historical understanding, confronted as it is with the endless shadings and interpenetrations of historic phenomena. (The situation is different in other logical spheres which either permit the free fiat of definition, or offer such clearcut divisions that questions of delimitations are marginal.) Nor shall I defend here the employment, along the circle, of the “ideal type” construct which the historian, at least for heuristic purposes, cannot do without. Waiving these preliminaries, I will, at this stage of cooperative international scholarship, simply assume a measure of consensus on the existence of such an entity as the gnostic phenomenon, on a spatiotemporal area in which it is located, on the body of evidence by which it is represented, and on the presence of certain pervading features which at least constitute at prime facie case for a unity of essence. On the other hand, we must be prepared to find this essence to consist in a spectrum rather than in one uniform hue, or perhaps in a nucleus surrounded by a less definite halo; and some of these shadings may well have genetic implications. Even so, phenomenology takes pride of place over genealogy, and since the historical locus is provisionally agreed upon, however subject to refinement, I begin with, and shall dwell mainly on, the typological task. (p. 267)

Thus, Jonas brilliantly and decisively establishes his methodology for the discovery of the “gnostic” syndrome (whose “objective content” he delineates in four distinctive themes, which, for sanity’s sake we must pass over, for the moment, in silence). We should take up this idea of Gnosticism, and see how far we can take it to explain, perhaps, the direction into which Vallée as theorist is headed. But for now we ask: How is this passage relevant for our attempt to understand Vallée’s fundamental theory of the UFO phenomenon?

If we are to be honest, we really must put a difficult question to Vallée: what, exactly, do faeries, goblins, gnomes, dwarves and the allegedly ufological visions of ancient and medieval saints, sinners and mystics have to do with modern UFOs? Vallée’s argument—or at least his morphological determination of these historical accounts—is that when one studies all of these phenomena side-by-side, one is able to discern a common structure. But what common structure is it? Here is where things immediately begin to get murky, at least for me. If we allow ourselves for a moment a convenient division of the phenomena under study into the physical character of the perceptions/experiences on the one hand, and their psychological or psychical effects on the other, then the common structure would correspondingly seem to have these two aspects: a common structure of observables (the things and beings seen) and a common structure of mentalistic effects (if you’ll pardon somewhat unfashionable terms). Let’s begin with the latter.

As for the psychological effects: this is the classic approach of those wishing to remain more or less neutral about the external reality of the UFO (or of faeries, goblins and all the rest of the mythological content of the past). The strategy is to avoid engaging the being or reality of the perceptions or experiences, but rather focus on their meaning (how it affects the percipients). Surely the effects on someone are undeniably real—and can be considered independently of their causes or reasons for their existence (I am hesitant to use the language of causation here, but we will forestall a critical discussion of these concepts until later). Seen from the point of view of the effects on the percipients of a UFO (how exactly it affects them), these do seem to bear a striking resemblance to effects noted in the mystical, mythological and folk lore literature dealing with visions, apparitions, and other strange encounters with beings and powerful forces (seen and unseen). Being stunned, blinded, struck dumb, or given with the “gift of tongues”, feeling transformed, transfigured, transported, out-of-oneself, and so on … all these would seem to also be classic ufological experiences. Here, at least, in the realm of the mentalistic effects on the percipients of such “strange” and out-of-the-ordinary encounters, we would seem to be justified in coming to the “felt unity” which is, according to Jonas, the first in a dialectical series of stages towards one’s unity conjecture, that will become, thorough another series of transformations, one’s theory of unity. At this stage, though, we are working from the sense of unity to the presumption of it. When we move over to the question of the corresponding physical objects or phenomena associated with these effects—the perceptions of specific things (objects, beings, and the like)—here is where things get even murkier, for I cannot see, at least at first glance, what could possibility lead to even a felt sense of unity among the phenomena.

For example, let’s consider a woman wandering down a road during the Middle Ages, fearful of a goblin—which suddenly appears to her, perhaps inducing some radical change in her (out of existential shock from the encounter). Certainly this goblin is a strange being. UFO encounters of the “third kind” have this character to them: we often have the perception of a being. But, do we need morphological similarity in the specific details of the actual phenomenology, the appearances of these beings—or is it enough to have it be that it was a “strange creature experienced that bears surface similarities to close encounters with ufological beings”? In other words, exactly what about each of the apparitions justifies us in positing a unity among the phenomena? What, exactly, are we unifying? Furthermore, our fearful medieval peasant-woman who finds a goblin on the road: by hypothesis we find no craft or means of transport, yet in many close encounters of the third kind, craft are associated with the creatures. Does the presence or lack thereof count for/against the unity thesis? We are quickly coming to the main problem: when does the unity fail to obtain—or can it not fail in any of the cases? Can we always modify our (felt) thesis of unity to suit any case? Here we come to exactly what Jonas was well aware of: the “creative risk of historical understanding”, and this, I think, brings us to our fundamental criticism—which in turn gives us a key to surpassing the shortcomings of Vallée’s youthful theoretical efflorescence.

We are not, finally, dealing primarily with an “historical” phenomenon, are we? We were initially concerned with understanding the nature of the UFO phenomenon, and this, it would seem, already allows us some measure of demarcation. But the criterion of demarcation should be derived from the specific character of the phenomenon itself, before we seek out its resonances with other historical data. Our justification for this is simple: even by the reckoning of Vallée’s own methodological requirements, we cannot readily accept testimony which we cannot reexamine in as much detail as we can recover with living witnesses. The past does not exist (at least as a practical matter), so this would immediately place all historically remote recorded testimony outside of our evaluative purview. I claim on very practical (if not also on theoretical-epistemological) grounds that, while there may be clear and obvious resonances and similarities between modern UFO encounters and events recorded variously in the past, we must determine the nature of the relation between these present phenomena and the past by means of something specific to these present phenomena.

Taking this stance, we should hasten to note, does not require us to relinquish the theoretical originality or boldness of Vallée’s thesis; but it does require us to temper it with the phenomenological presence of the phenomena treated as a real event in the present that can inform us of what resonances there may be if we then project this phenomenon backwards into our past, now guided by a principle of unity found within the demarcated boundaries of this specific phenomenon. Thus, we may pursue the notion that we ought not seek to reduce the reality (either the physical or the psychical) of the phenomenon to either physical or psychological causes external to the percipients, but restrict this consideration to only the situation in which the physical and the psychical seem to be inextricably linked—linked in fact. Here we would not be forced to treat the appearances as “projections” of any kind; neither are they fantasies or hallucinations. We may treat the perceived objects as real—as a response to a real presence. But it may be that this presence may have a certain power to affect its percipient in ways that are profoundly anomalous, in ways beyond that of the simple ontological shock the appearance of such an object (or of such beings) will almost always induce. In other words, in some UFO cases, we may have an indication of a more intimate relation that is possible between objects and subjects, between percipients and percepts—a mind-mind and a mind-matter relation that may be primary and irreducible. If this is the case, we would then have a datum, which would, in turn, be used to explain certain resonances UFO encounters seem to have with many anomalous experiences recorded in the past. In some of these cases, there may be a ufological cause to them, but in others, there simply may not. But the indication of a primary mind-matter or mind-mind relation derivable from the data of UFO encounters would nonetheless indicate a fact about reality that would, we can reasonably expect, be true independently of historical circumstances—like the force of gravity and so on. The contingencies of culture may add flesh to the underlying skeletal structure of a fundamental (and shocking, when apparent) mind-matter or mind-mind relation that is in any case not readily susceptible to ordinary force of will—or to control by means of more conventional forces. We may posit that accessing and controlling this primary relation has been the desideratum of many religions and spiritual traditions for thousands of years, just as we may posit that this primary relation has been the ground of inspiration for much philosophical speculation (some of which seeks to repudiate the relation, some to grasp it as such).

In any case, we are getting far ahead of ourselves, and we must pull back from the precipice of wild speculations, and return to the safety of the empirical. As we return to this safety, we should pause for a moment and reflect on the dangers that lie ahead of us as we attempt to break free, in a decisive, rather than a fanciful, way from old ways of thinking and naïve hopes of overcoming. We should take as our guide here the very philosopher with whom we began these ufological reflections almost one month ago. We should return for a moment to Kant. “Rational psychology,” writes Kant in his monumental Critique of Pure Reason,

exists not as doctrine, furnishing an addition to our knowledge of the self, but only as discipline. It sets impassable limits to speculative reason in this field, and thus keeps us, on the one hand, from throwing ourselves into the arms of soulless materialism, or, on the other hand, from losing ourselves in a spiritualism which must be quite unfounded so long as we remain in this present life. But though it furnishes no positive doctrine, it reminds us that we should regard this refusal of reason to give satisfying response to our inquisitive probings into what is beyond the limits of this present life as reason’s hint to divert our self-knowledge from fruitless and extravagant speculation to fruitful practical employment. Though in such practical employment it is directed always to objects of experience only, it derives its principles from a higher source, and determines us to regulate our actions as if our destiny reached infinitely far beyond experience, and therefore far beyond this present life. (B421/422, p. 377 of the Kemp-Smith edition)

We must, then, reconsider whether we ought to leap, well beyond what is given by the immediacy of present phenomena which we can check against our empirical method of investigating the truth of the reports of these phenomena, to an historical unity (incapable of real verification) which we then transmute into our “unified theory”, thereby foreclosing all difference in favor of a posited unity. The opposite strategy, which we are suggesting, would be to allow the phenomena to appear in their characteristic differences (and uniqueness), while seeking the unity at the level of our theory of nature (rather than injecting it prematurely by means of our theory of description).

For example, if we return to the facts (even if only the phenomenological ones, if we may so call them) of some key cases, we can immediately see why we would (and in fact do) have a principled reason to be skeptical of the kind of posited unity Vallée wishes to find, which threatens to obscure the actuality of the phenomena in themselves (what was the great phenomenologist of the late 19^th century’s rallying cry? “To the things themselves!” We say: indeed.) Let us call to mind a very intriguing, and yet at the same time rather eerie and vexing, case as reported on by The Debrief just days ago in an article dated 9 May 2022, sent to me by Bryan Sentes of Skunkworks.

Sometime between December 2003 and May 2004, aboard the USS Ronald Regan, several witnesses (some of whom wished to remain anonymous) encountered what they variously described as an orange/reddish luminous ovoid “object” that seemed to be swirling like a gaseous plasma of energy as they looked into the center. It had hazy borders, as if is was a kind of sun, but seemed to give off no light that made it to the deck of the ship, even though witnesses consistently described it as hovering but one to two hundred feet abovedeck (although such observations would seem to be inconclusive, though a curious detail). As it hovered, witnesses were mesmerized but not overly so; and they experienced no strange effects (at least none they felt they had to mention as they—a total of five witnesses—came forward in The Debrief article). What was interesting, however, was that at least one witness felt as if the ovoid orb was watching their activities, keeping pace as it was with a ship moving into the wind at over twenty knots. At one point, the object did “half-circle” movements (this according to one of the witness observers, specifically trained to watch for various airborne and seafaring vessels, and to distinguish such from biologicals), and then, in a flash, rapidly ascended directly upwards, vanishing away into the night sky. In another incident with what appeared to be the same object, another officer came out onto the deck to see what all the chatter about “UFOs” was on the comm systems, only to discover that, in fact, there was this luminous orb which her deck officers were actually seeing. This officer, who wished to remain anonymous, described it in some more interesting detail: as having a translucence to it, as she remembers being able to see through it, even though there was clearly visible some kind of a swirling gaseous substance contained within the orb itself. In another sighting, a watch officer got sight of it through the on-deck mounted “Big Eyes” binoculars; he described it as looking like the surface of the sun (as seen in those dazzling pictures that we are probably by now all familiar with). The object would hover, dance momentarily, then, in the blink of an eye, be gone. To readers familiar with the history of UFO sightings, and the details of the many reports that exist (a daunting number), this is an all-too-familiar encounter. Indeed, as The Debrief itself excellently contextualizes, this encounter bears striking resemblance to the infamous Malmstrom Incident, where swirling orange luminous orbs were sighted hovering above the nuclear missile silos at Malmstrom AFB in Montana in 1967. In that encounter, famously, as the orbs hovered overhead, each of the independent ICBMs suddenly and inexplicably went offline. (A failure of one or two might be unusual but not out of the question; a failure of all of them simultaneously would be unthinkable.) The incident, now widely known, is still unexplained.

Let us also return for a moment to the eyewitness testimony of our most important cases: the USS Nimitz encounters (with Cmdr. David Fravor being one key witness there among several) that occurred off the coast of San Diego (near Catalina and San Clemente islands); and the USS Roosevelt encounters that occurred between summer of 2014 and  March of 2015 (as reported on in the NYT in a May 26 2019 article), off the Virginia coast (with Lt. Ryan Graves being the key witness here). Although a much more thorough investigation of all eyewitness testimony, including follow-up questions, would be necessary to more definitively establish my case here, it is a fair initial assessment of what testimony and interviews do exist (like this hours-long interview with Cmdr. Fravor) to assert that, aside from the strangeness of the observations themselves, nothing particularly strange occurred to the witnesses. Now, we must grant that they may simply not be forthcoming about this—especially not in public, as they are already coming forward with rather bizarre claims (which are, to repeat, not so bizarre if one knows anything about the existing UFO literature, a cause, sometimes, for some to wax deeply skeptical of any accounts that are too consistent with existing narratives … an issue we can examine in detail later). But listening to and reading their testimony, and that of the other radar operators and technical specialists who were present during the encounters and who recall different aspects of them, there seems to be conspicuous absence of reports of “high strangeness”. And, of course, no reports of “beings” of any kind, nor any spiritual illuminations (except the curious case of Nimitz radar officer Kevin Day, who does report a transformative effect the encounter had on him personally).

So the question we ask here, probing of course not the details of these cases but rather probing them with the intention of analyzing the requirement of the Vallée theory (or rather, concept) of unity, is simple: in cases where there are no phenomena of “high strangeness” corresponding to the sighting or the encounter, where multiple persons involved in the encounter report nothing unusual in themselves, others or in the surrounding environment—how is it that we can confidently group such contemporary encounters with other, more distant historical phenomena that seem to bear some similarities (which we cannot in any case specify very precisely)? Furthermore, for every disturbing and highly strange encounter, how many are not particularly “strange”? In other words, can we, by examining in morphological-phenomenological detail the many cases that we have on record, establish a solid and significant statistical correlation between UFO sightings or encounters, and attending phenomena of “high strangeness” (for example, “paranormal” events, strange beings, other “psi” effects, and so on)? (My understanding is that no one has thought to do this rigorous study of all existing data to find out the answer to this question, which is, granted, a rather daunting task, but one, nevertheless, necessary in my view.)

Even if we could, I have argued that, since we have absolutely no access, for the crucial set of historical cases, to the original witnesses, nor to the exact circumstances of the apparitions or encounters, we are unable to attempt what Vallée has spent his life attempting: to establish both the credibility or reliability of the witnesses, and to seek corroborating evidence. Without this, Vallée’s theory cannot become anything more than a curious historical theory in need of a more fundamental account of the posited unity of the phenomena. Without a more substantial body of verifiable historical data all we have are surface-level phenomenological descriptions passed down by sources of unknown reliability. Furthermore, it remains unclear as to how exact the phenomenology needs to be across historical and contemporary cases, and again, without access to witnesses whom we might question at length to get a more exacting description of their experience, it is hard to assess even the phenomenological accuracy of their reports.

Finally, do we want a science of the phenomena to remain confined to phenomenology alone? Surely this move was made only out of desperation (and even so, it remains something that actually cannot be subject to the rigorous philosophical techniques of, for example, the Husserlian phenomenologist—for we would need to study the appearances in real time for ourselves, and do so guided by an independent principle of phenomenological analysis). It was made in desperation since, until even today we have no known way to consistently and predictably interact with the phenomenon aside from its completely unexpected appearance. (Although, as UAPx has recently reported, they were in fact able to record a significant amount of data, containing an as-yet unknown volume of anomalies—some of which were also visually sighted—at a location where UAP are reliably encountered, something which argues for there being at least one location that can be used as a source of consistent UAP sightings, much like the well-known Hessdalen Lights site in Norway. No members of UAPx report any associated phenomena of “high strangeness” it should be noted; they did see an object at one point drop down and enter the ocean, then shoot back up into the sky.)

In part four of this series on the enigmas of UAP theory, we will attempt to decisively overcome the failings of the Vallée theory, and establish a new program of theoretical possibilities, perhaps following the “phenomenological” moves of Einstein’s famous 1905 paper, the one that established what was to be called the special theory of relativity. What we will discover here is that what characterized Einstein’s revolutionary step forward was a bold postulate not necessarily implied by the available evidence, but one which brought an entirely new light to the problems in physics of the day—effectively redefining the terms of physics itself, and therefore the kinds of questions it could ask. Old problems no longer mattered, because we had an entirely new way of looking at mechanical and electromagnetic (and eventually gravitational) phenomena, which posed new and different problems. But beyond changing the questions of physics in light of a new paradigm of understanding them, Einstein’s specific strategy was in itself illuminating—something he was to describe in a now-famous letter to the London Times as a “theory of principle”. We would like to explore just how far one might go by finishing Vallée’s theory in new terms, as a perhaps a theory of principle which draws on certain phenomenological insights, and accepts key results no longer as anomalous, to be explained in terms of some old or existing theory, but as key postulates in an entirely new one.