Encounters, page 15
“I propose that the information and intelligence provided and streamed through Einstein or a silicon chip, is ‘natural’ and closer to our true nature than what we call biological nature. So many humans get very emotional about this biological substrate, but what powers it? At the base of the mitochondrial cell is the electricity firing and sparking all of consciousness and life. If our minds don’t access this place or dimension to flow in the direction of evolution and emergence, then infinite intelligence will find other vessels … silicon substrates are ‘natural’ too. Ninety-nine percent of the mass of the human body is made up of elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus. This substrate is but stardust.
“Natural intelligence is what we are incorrectly defining as artificial,” Simone wrote. “We call alien something that is most likely ourselves, trying to help us with information and gifts to lead us on in our evolution. But if not this biological substrate, fret not dear humans, for another one will emerge to carry superintelligence along its path to the Omega Point.”
* * *
When I began my study of UFOs, my assumptions about UFOs and those who believe they are in contact with extraterrestrial intelligence were shattered. Or, more accurately, my assumptions were confirmed but in ways I never expected. I thought I was studying a myth. My image of the UFO from a distant galaxy was informed by Hollywood movies and spoofs of people who welcomed extraterrestrials as advanced space brothers and sisters who they believed were here to help humanity evolve through advanced technology, much like the Greek myth of Prometheus. This assumption, ludicrous as it appeared, was true for experiencers but in ways I didn’t expect. I was surprised by the caliber of scientists and researchers who believed they were in contact with nonhuman intelligence. This group included people who had won Nobel Prizes and were at the top of their fields, and even defined new scientific fields. I was also shocked by the level of commitment to spirituality and esoteric practices that I found among them. In one of his last interviews, John Mack addressed the sheer enigma of these revelations, “I think that the UFO phenomenon is a window into a universe that is far more complicated, far more interesting, far more challenging, and far more awe-inspiring than anything we had ever imagined.”2
Finally, I certainly didn’t expect to find a group of people, who, like Tyler D., were invisible in ways that are usually only depicted in spy thrillers. As Simone noted, it was this aspect of the UFO research that shocked me most.
8
CHILDREN OF THE INVISIBLES
It’s not about what you want. When you’re in, you’re in.
—IGNACIO “NACHO” VARGA, BETTER CALL SAUL
I was in the lobby of the London West Hollywood Hotel when I saw Jacques Vallée. Although this wasn’t a planned meeting, it wasn’t a coincidence, either. We were both in town to meet a mutual acquaintance who was interested in the topic of UFOs. We did not know we were both staying at the same hotel. I am always happy to see Jacques, but on this occasion, I was especially eager to take the opportunity to ask him about something with which I thought he could help.
Jacques was sitting on a green velvet couch, writing in a journal. He was dressed stylishly in a checked blazer. He looked completely natural sitting amid the old Hollywood decor of the London Hotel.
I walked toward him.
“Jacques!”
He looked up, surprised, and then smiled in recognition.
He said it was wonderful to see me and asked me to sit down. We agreed that we should take the opportunity to talk, as we live on opposite coasts and prefer to speak in person due to the nature of our shared interests.
The year was 2020, approximately one year prior to the release of the Pentagon report, so the UFO topic was still very secretive at the time of this meeting. I sat down and we compared notes. Jacques spoke of his ongoing work on the creation of a database of primary source materials. Three years prior, I had introduced Jacques to Tyler D. Tyler had made it possible for Jacques to gain access to the site in New Mexico.
The Pentagon report was released with much fanfare and publicity on June 25, 2021, by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. There were two parts to the report. One was an unclassified version of a classified report on the data amassed through years of reports of UFOs from military personnel. About a year prior to its release, I was frequently called by members of the press from prominent news agencies. Journalists asked me about “something soon to be released by the government” regarding the topic of UFOs. I didn’t know what was going to be released, although, like these journalists, I had also heard that something was on the horizon. I asked the reporters who contacted me to tell me what they knew. They told me that they were supposed to cover a report and it was being pushed through government channels by senators who wanted to know about government funding of programs related to UFOs and about data found by members of the programs. The senators wanted some transparency from the Department of Defense and the military regarding the topic of UFOs.
By the time the report was released, the communities interested in UFOs, ufologists, were in a frenzy. The public was, ironically, completely disinterested. I found these developments simultaneously comical and curious. Periodicals as far removed from the topic of UFOs as could be, such as the United Kingdom’s fashion periodical Stylist, featured timelines describing UFO sightings from the 1940s until the present moment. It amused me to think of the readership of Stylist viewing a timeline of UFOs side by side with their editor’s handbag recommendations. Even the reporters with whom I had been in contact wondered why they had to cover the topic. This was their job, and I conversed with at least thirty different reporters from around the world who wanted nothing more than to return to their regularly scheduled programming.
In 2020, however, the topic of UFOs was still something secretive, officially, and talking specifically about UFOs was not what I had in mind when I saw Jacques in the lobby of the London. After I published the research that involved my work with Tyler and Garry Nolan, a few things happened in fast succession. While my manuscript was in press, Garry and I were targeted by harassing emails. Our university email accounts were barraged. We were in communication about what to do, and we both decided to report the matter to our university police and cybersecurity departments. I also received phone calls from journalists from major media who asked me to reveal the names of Tyler and James, the pseudonyms I had used to conceal the real names of the scientists who accompanied me to New Mexico. James revealed himself publicly as Garry a few years after the publication of the research. I never revealed their names to the journalists or to anyone else.
In the lobby of the London Hotel, I needed Jacques’s help. I wanted his input on a new colleague who had come into my sphere. I’d known Jacques for ten years at that point. He had mentioned, on many occasions, the use of discernment as a tool, the most important tool, to wade through research related to UFOs. I learned to identify his process of discernment as a key element of his research. In Christian and specifically Catholic traditions, discernment is a method or a “sense” by which one develops the ability to judge a situation or a person or to ascertain the costs or benefits of a particular course of action. In this tradition it has spiritual connotations, as people are not thought to have adequate innate skills of discernment but are encouraged to develop them. The logic behind this is that Christians live in a world that is hostile to their values, and they must develop the spiritual insight to identify their enemies so they may persevere in a world of which they are “in, but not of.” Research into UFOs involved unknown events and aerial objects, military personnel, and people—experiencers—who had been or were being traumatized or completely transformed by their experiences of anomalous aerial phenomena. The research landscape was confusing and often outright hostile, just as Christians described their own experience of the world. A method of engagement is necessary, and discernment is a strategy of primary importance.
When Jacques talked about discernment, I wasn’t sure if he had secularized this process and divorced it from its Christian roots, or whether he utilized it in some innovative way. It didn’t matter, really, as just by observing his process I learned to develop my own. It would prove to be badly applied in my case on several occasions. Yet a learning curve includes mistakes.
I didn’t have a lot of time on the day I saw Jacques, as I was scheduled for meetings with our acquaintance, and I needed to ask him the question that was at the top of my mind. I had not yet finished vetting the colleague who had recently appeared within my sphere. He was intelligent and knew very specific information. He was a pilot and knew, in detail, the history of aviation. He also knew the backstories and life histories of the members of the Invisible College. His own life story was interesting, and his youth seemed at odds with his knowledge of aerial phenomena, which was at a level that was as high as that of Tyler’s. He appeared to be able to download.
Because the research of UFOs brought me into contact with people whose agendas are hidden or are not entirely transparent, I had begun to doubt my ability to discern. I categorized people as “pre-UFO life” and “post-UFO life,” and I rarely allowed new people into my life. But I did like and admire this new friend. I just didn’t know what to think of him. He was with me at the London to attend the meeting, and when I saw Jacques I saw the opportunity to get Jacques’s read on him. While I sat with Jacques on the couch, I asked him if he would meet my friend. I gestured toward him. Jacques glanced his way. My friend, like Jacques, looked natural amid the surrounding luxury. He leaned on a marble column while he checked his phone, stylishly dressed with shoulder-length shiny black hair.
Jacques looked back at me. His answer was no. He wouldn’t meet him. He gave me a brief explanation. He told me that people in intelligence communities are generally very charming. They meet you. Then they meet your friends. Then they meet your family and they become friendly with your children. Jacques said no more than that. As usual, I trusted Jacques, and this was precisely the information I needed. My friendship with this man, while brief, was nonetheless exceptional. I learned many things, but mostly meeting him put many things into context. It put into context the nature of knowledge about UFOs, and it put into context the types of lives some people live. These are not ordinary lives, and this is not ordinary knowledge.
* * *
In the beginning of my research into UFOs I started with official histories of aviation, although I knew that much of the information would be classified. As an American citizen I’m not interested in jeopardizing national security, and I respect the process of classification. I have family members in law enforcement and who had served in the military, and I know that if something is classified, it is classified for a reason. Classified sources are impossible to read or learn about unless one has a clearance with a “need to know,” yet there are people who have read them. Additionally, there are meetings among those who hold clearances that are never written down. Therefore, there is an oral tradition of UFO history that can never be known or can only be known by those in the right place at the right time. The oral tradition of UFOs is more important than what is written about them.
Historians of the United States Space and Missile Systems Center are refreshingly transparent about their work and the obstacles presented by classified data. In their historical overviews, they admit to only telling a fraction of the real story of the history of aviation, space flight, and what pilots and aviators of all stripes have seen but have been discouraged to speak about. UFOs are primarily aerial phenomena, so it is natural to research documents and histories written by the historians of the United States Air Force. Overviews are generally written to acknowledge an oral and classified tradition, such as the following:
“For several reasons, this overview does not discuss or even mention some significant space and missile programs managed by SMC (Space and Missile Systems Center) and its predecessors during the last fifty years. For one thing, there are too many to cover in a narrative as brief as this one. Many fascinating but less prominent efforts must be left to more detailed histories. Furthermore, although we have tried to mention the most prominent space programs that have been declassified during the last ten years, many important efforts are still classified in whole or in part and must be left to the historians who will follow us.”1
Many historians tend to focus on written documents as sources for history. Scholars of religious studies and anthropologists widen the sphere of sources to include oral traditions, as imprecise as they may be. Sometimes oral tradition is the only source one has for a historical event or development. These oral traditions run in and are passed down in families and extended families.
When Tyler taught others about his research, he often presented his taxonomy of beings, which was his cosmological worldview. In this hierarchy of beings, God was placed at the top. After that were angels, then off-planet beings. “Off-planet” is the term Tyler used for extraterrestrials. Below that were “certain factions within intelligence communities.” Below this were ordinary people, and then animals. He also had a phrase he used very often, which was “connect the dots.” When I asked him about the factions of people within intelligence communities to whom he referred, who in his estimation were higher on the cosmological hierarchy than regular human beings, he told me to “connect the dots.”
As I have previously written, there are people who have either chosen or who were born into a life that is constrained within certain types of limits. I made the comparison between the Vatican postulators and Tyler. Postulators—the Roman Catholic men who live at the Vatican and have taken vows of obedience to the church, do not engage in worldly life. They live behind the walls of the Vatican and seldom venture out. They do not watch the news. At least this is the life of the postulator whom I met and spoke with. Some people choose a life of constraints to keep themselves free from influence. They do this because they believe it secures their ability to receive information and to create. Tyler did both: he chose a lifestyle in which he was able to cultivate his ability to download, and his job required him to refrain from watching the news and being influenced by worldly events and disinformation. Within the traditional religions there are renunciates, sannyasis, nuns, yogis—people who are generally called monastics and who choose a way of life that they believe preserves their highest nature. In many ways, those who choose a life of monasticism are like the factions to whom Tyler referred. And then there are their children.
When I first published my research on UFO communities, people used to ask me how I got access to these sources. I wasn’t sure what they meant. I was doing my job. I think they meant, Why did I have access to information and people that was not available to them? People at Harvard University asked me this question. Student workers in my department office asked me this question. I don’t have a satisfactory answer to this question, but I think it is important to notice the people around you, and perhaps that has something to do with it.
One of the people I noticed was my colleague, Patricia Turrisi. She is a scholar of one of the most innovative and impenetrable of Western philosophers, Charles S. Peirce. My Jesuit professors were very interested in his philosophy of semiotics—the study of language and signs—so when I met Patty, I was curious about her work. At the time, she was not a practicing Catholic, and she was being recruited by the National Security Agency (NSA). She was a senior professor, and she seemed to intimidate some of the professors in my department. I think she may have intimidated them because her work was so difficult to understand. And academics are usually not actively recruited by national security organizations, so she was also an anomaly. She had won several teaching awards and had been promoted to positions of prestige outside of our department, so that also set her apart from most professors. In a department of men, Patty and I became friends.
This was my pre-UFO life. Patty and I used to take our children on outings together. Once we were picking strawberries in one of the local strawberry fields. As we filled up our baskets with fragrant red berries, I took some photos of our kids and sent them to her phone. She mentioned that she wished that her mother had taken photos of her when she was our children’s age. I was confused and I think my face indicated that. She said, “My parents couldn’t take photos. I have none, zero, nada. From my childhood.”
This wasn’t the only time she mentioned her childhood. On many occasions she mentioned that her father worked for the “secret space program.” I had never heard of that before but took note. It was only years later, when a television production company reached out to me, post-UFO life, about the secret space program, that I “connected the dots,” as Tyler would say. But what Patty told me about her childhood and the space program was nothing like the mythology that is propagated by social and entertainment media. Instead, it corresponded to the lived realities of the people I had come to know—those involved with the most innovative technology, and the space industry, and those whom Tyler had named “factions within the intelligence communities.”
Patty was welcomed into the small conferences that included Kary Mullis and other scientists. After my research had been published and she had retired, I felt comfortable enough to ask her about her childhood. What follows is an interview I conducted with Patty in January 2022.
DIANA: When were you first aware that your father was part of the space program, and when were you aware that it was secret?
