Jacques Vallee - Revelations - Alien Contact and Human

Page 100 of 292

Page 100 of 292
Jacques Vallee - Revelations - Alien Contact and Human

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or most American readers the UFO phenomenon is predominantly a localized concern. Although they are vaguely aware of foreign events that match the same general patterns, most UFO researchers purposes. REVELATIONS explain "flying saucer" incidents of recent years were in fact early experiments of this kind. . . . Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace New York: Dial Press, 1967 in America have shown little interest in sightings that take place in Brazil or in France unless they happen to provide a useful footnote, or a convincing extension, to their own pet theories. The truth, of course, is that the phenomenon has always been global in nature. It did not begin in America. Some of the best-informed and most influential researchers are not in the U.S., and foreign govern- ments have done more concerted research into UFOs than the U.S. has. The United States, as large as it is, only represents a minor percentage of the earth's surface and six percent of its population. Based on land area statistics, more than ninety-five percent of the UFO phenomena should be observed outside the U.S., and little of it would come to the knowledge of American specialists. The investigation of some foreign UFO sightings and the sociologi- cal events that surround them can thus provide an important backdrop for an understanding of the American scene, which we have just re- viewed in Part One. In this section we penetrate an international Hall of Mirrors that will give us new insights into a process that could be called mythological engineering—the deliberate creation of social movements to serve either as opportunities for experiment, as outlets for personal fantasy, or as a vehicle for more down-to-earth political History teaches us that such exercises go on all the time, for a wide variety of purposes. Therefore, I have taken special pains to move step- by-step through a mass of evidence that, in my opinion, points to the