Dr. Jacques Vallée on the pattern of UFO sightings: 'Is this a reinforcement schedule?'
For decades, some of the world’s brightest scientific minds have been puzzling over the seemingly inconsistent behaviour of UFOs. Dr Jacques Vallée has proposed a solution.
Anyone who has studied a large number of UFO sightings, whether distant or close encounters, will realise that, whatever intentions one may attribute to the pilots of these advanced craft, there is an intrinsic absurdity in the behaviour exhibited by UFOs. This is evident in the often erroneous or absurd manner in which information is presented during close encounters, the apparent surveillance operations of strategic interest conducted while remaining highly visible, and the willingness to show themselves during displays of force only to evade any attempt at communication. These inconsistencies are a constant feature of the scientific study of UFOs.
Dr Jacques Vallée has offered an explanation for such behaviour in one of his seminal works, The Invisible College, published as early as 1975. Below are some extracts from Chapter 9, in which he presents his hypothesis:
I believe that when we speak of UFO sightings as instances of space visitations we are looking at the phenomenon on the wrong level. We are not dealing with successive waves of visitations from space. We are dealing with a control system.
The thermostats that regulate your house temperature summer and winter constitute a control system…
In summer, a thermostat allows the air to get warmer until a certain limit is reached, and then the cooling system is triggered. But in winter when the outside atmosphere turns cold, and temperature drops below another limit, then a different mechanism, the heater, comes into play and warms the house.
A naive observer might try to explain all this by assuming that warm is “good” and cold is “bad,” and that certain moral laws apply. He would be right half the time. Another naive observer of the opposite school might take a reversed view and decide that warm is “evil.” He would succeed in explaining some of the behavior of the phenomenon (the cooling of the house) but not the whole. To understand the whole phenomenon one needs a grasp of the control concept, and one must be ready to understand that it needs two opposite principles for its function. I propose the hypothesis that there is a control system for human consciousness. I have not determined whether it is natural or spontaneous; whether it is explainable in terms of genetics, of social psychology, or of ordinary phenomena—or if it is artificial in nature, and under the power of some superhuman will. It may be entirely determined by laws that we have not yet discovered.
I am led to this hypothesis 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.
It makes perfect sense that the phenomenon uses absurdity to influence witnesses, thereby controlling their reactions and the impact of UFOs on society as the news spreads. US intelligence has employed the same type of strategy to discredit the subject of UFOs.
However, it remains to be seen what benefit the phenomenon derives from this strategy. By examining sightings statistically, Dr Vallée has noted a recurring pattern of waves of major sightings over time.
The controversial work of psychologist B. F. Skinner has shown under what conditions an organism reacting to an external phenomenon learns a new behavior. We also know under what conditions this learning is irreversible. These are similar to the pattern that the UFO phenomenon seems to be following. Is it trying to teach us something? With every new wave of UFOs, the social impact becomes greater. More young people become fascinated with space, with psychic phenomena, with new frontiers in consciousness. More books and articles appear, changing our culture in the direction of a higher image of man.
Vallée provides the following summary of Skinner and Ferster’s work:
Drastic modification of the behavior of an animal (including man) can be achieved by selectively reinforcing certain actions (for instance by giving food to a pigeon only when he presses a certain lever). However, certain ways of reinforcing behavior lead to better learning than others. If the training is too even and monotonous the subject may stop in its development, or even return to an earlier state; the best schedule of reinforcement is one that combines periodicity with unpredictability. Learning is then slow but continuous. It leads to the highest level of adaptation. And it is irreversible. It is interesting to ask whether the pattern of UFO waves does not have the same effect as a schedule of reinforcement.
If UFO activity operates in a fashion similar to Skinner’s reinforcement, which is the least amenable to extinction (although it is slow and steady), then the learning will take time but it will never be forgotten.
In view of the obvious strategy employed by the UFOs to conceal their physical presence and mask their intentions, he puts forward the following argument:
A phenomenon that denies itself, that annihilates evidence of itself cannot be mastered by engineering brute force. If the logic of the UFO phenomenon is a metalogic, it is not useful to gather in the evenings around a spoon Uri Geller has bent, and to wait in the dark for cosmic messages.
If the phenomenon is forcing us through a learning curve then it MUST mislead us. When Skinner designs a machine that feeds a rat only when the right lever is depressed, this is extremely misleading for the rat! But if the rat doesn’t do it he becomes extremely hungry. Man is hungry for knowledge and power, and if there is an intelligence behind the UFOs it must have taken this fact into account. We also tend to forget that we have no choice. We must eventually study UFOs. A civilization such as ours, which is entirely oriented toward what it regards as technical progress, cannot afford long to ignore the apparition in the sky of objects that defy the laws of its physics and the performance of its rocket planes.
Within a few years the advanced countries will place on this problem, openly or in secret, their best physicists, their best intelligence specialists, their best computer scientists. But they may be powerless to utilize their expertise, because the phenomenon fits none of these categories. If this is so, then UFOs can never be analyzed or conceived, because they are the means through which man’s concepts are being rearranged.
The question remains as to what behaviour the UFOs are seeking to foster in humanity.
What could a paranormal phenomenon control? I suggest that it is human belief that is being controlled and conditioned.
First it explains why there is no contact. Direct genuine contact would ruin the experiment. (There may be deliberately misleading contact, as in UMMO.) It would preclude genuine learning. It explains some of the statements made by ufonauts (“you should believe in us but not too much”), and the Schirmer case, with its deliberate confusion: “you will not speak wisely about this night.
What I do mean is that mythology rules at a level of our social reality over which normal political and intellectual action has no real power.
Myths define the set of things scholars, politicians, and scientists can think about. They are operated upon by symbols, and the language these symbols form constitutes a complete system.
Scientists may be willing to interview a witness who has seen a landed craft, but he may not wish to talk to them. Or the witness may offer as “proof” of his experience a couple of pancakes given to him by extraterrestrials, a recitation of meaningless messages, or a story of sexual contact with a girl from outer space. In any case, a pursuit of the rational study of the case is impossible. The lurid aspects of many such stories make their serious examination improbable, and this in turn reinforces the role of the UFO rumors as folklore, rich in new images.
There is a spectrum of experience that runs from abduction or contact (conscious or not), to the close-encounter, to the exposure to humanoids, and, finally, to the reports of aliens among us.
What interests me is not the likelihood of such a contact (how could we prove it?) but the fact that a subculture now exists in every country, based on the idea that humanity has a higher destiny. You will find people in remote towns of California who have literally dropped out of city life (where they had held responsible positions and enjoyed good salaries) because they had received messages from space instructing them to do so.
we might also wonder whether they are not the forerunners of a new spiritual movement.
My guess is that the problem will not be seriously studied by many scientists until it has begun to generate a very high degree of public awareness, and then the approach will be an entirely classical one: millions of dollars to consultants and research institutes, thousands of questionnaires, field investigators with glass bottles, sociologists filling correlation matrices, medical personnel adjusting electrodes over the frontal lobes of ranchers.
There is a strange urge in my mind: I would like to stop behaving as a rat pressing levers—even if I have to go hungry for a while. I would like to step outside the conditioning maze and see what makes it tick. I wonder what I would find. Perhaps a terrible superhuman monstrosity the very contemplation of which would make a man insane? Perhaps a solemn gathering of wise men? Or the maddening simplicity of unattended clockwork?
Dr Vallée’s theory might offer another explanation. In Western societies, UFOs appear like Janus, with two faces: on the one hand, craft displaying capabilities that are always ahead of their time, and with an appearance that corresponds to what the culture perceives as futuristic. On the other hand, these craft are not regarded as machines but as means of spiritual transport, particularly in cultures closely tied to a religious worldview.
The fact that they present such a duality—that is, to some as technological objects, and to others as apparitions—could provoke an interesting conflict with the human tendency to believe in a higher being. And if, by presenting themselves in these two guises—in a sense, two golden calves appealing to different cultures—the ultimate effect of this duality were to be the annihilation of belief systems, including belief in these very new golden calves, once the technological capabilities of UFOs have been realised?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke
This strategy may seem strange from an outsider’s perspective. If UFOs are trying to teach us something, why don’t they just tell us directly? However, this educational strategy has been around for thousands of years. In order for students to learn, it is not enough to simply explain things to them; they must be presented with a problem and guided along the path leading to a solution. Otherwise, they will always regard it as their teacher’s solution rather than their own and thus fail to internalise it.
Dr Vallée’s remarkable discovery of recurring patterns in UFO sightings that could be linked to a learning mechanism, made as early as 1975, remains one of the few possible keys to explaining the UFO phenomenon to this day.