In the study of UFOs, two theories of the origin of UFOs stand out - the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) and the paranormal hypothesis (PNH).

While I do not currently find that the data is sufficient to support either theory, I believe that paranormal theories of UFO origin have had a significant effect, and that, in general, that effect has not been beneficial to the advancement of the study of UFOs. I would not claim that paranormal theories of UFOs are invalid, but I would tend to say that they are unprofitable, in the sense that they predict everything, and, thus, nothing.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. Let's imagine that I said to you "UFOs are created by an omnipotent source of energy which can create whatever it wants to. We can't reject any UFO-oriented accounts, because, no matter how absurd or inconsistent they seem, since we're talking about an omnipotent force, it can do anything". This must be ultimately unsatisfactory, because it doesn't help us focus on the problem and weed out the useless chaff. In fact, it is counterproductive, because it makes us weaken the filter to a point where one must draw conclusions from material which would be, and should be, rejected in any other field of science. Such are the consequences of the paranormal theory.

On the other hand, a theory which says "UFOs have specific properties that are measurable and from which information about the underlying phenomenon can be derived" is potentially more profitable. Accounts from witnesses of known reliability are acceptable, while accounts from low reliability witnesses can be rejected. Measurements of UFO behavior, and characteristics can be assumed to represent a pattern which is the surface beneath which the actual and specific nature of the UFO exists, and from which, some aspects of that actual and specific nature can be derived.

Vallee's "Invisible College" and the Control System Hypothesis (CSH)

Both Vallee and Keel write rather breezily about the items which drive them to acceptance of a paranormal hypothesis. But closer examination often reveals how unsatisfactory these are. For instance, Vallee's "Invisible College"[1].

On p 2, Vallee asserts "Modern science developed on the premise that... the physical and the psychological must always be carefully separated. In my view, this distinction, while convenient, has been arbitrary." One must presume that rather than "physical and psychological", Vallee means "objective and subjective" (since both physical and psychological sciences exist and are considered essentially part of the same edifice), which casts quite a different light on his claims. And in this pair of sentences, Vallee blithely tosses away the foundation of science as such.

One would assume that the rest of the book would represent a substantiation of this, but one must watch carefully. For instance, Vallee states on p 6 that his criticism of ETH is based on a computer study of "many of these accounts [which] describe the occupants of the craft; this material is rich enough for us to form a good idea of these beings physiology and behavior, if it in fact corresponded to the conditions of biological evolution we can assume on other planets. What we obtain instead is a picture of a different level of existence, a reality that seems to cut through our own at right angles." This is all very well, but what was the nature of the computer study? What tenets of biological evolution were violated by the observations? What cases were included in the study and how were they filtered? What are the criteria for deciding that such data represents "a picture of a different level of existence" and what does it mean to say "a reality that seems to cut through our own at right angles". Unfortunately, there is no answer anywhere in this book to these essential questions.

On the same page, Vallee goes on to say "no theory of UFOs can be deemed acceptable if it does not account for the reported psychic effects produced by these objects... [by which I mean] space-time distortions experienced by percipients of craft-like devices which appear or fade away on the spot... apparently 'alien' voices or thoughts in connection with sightings... [and] especially... that certain witnesses have been changed in a manner that is not explained by the events they claim to have observed." Many questions are raised by such an assertion: what proportion of reports exhibit such effects? are there possible perceptual or psychological causes for such properties? and is not the change in witness behavior after the sighting more likely a question for psychology or sociology rather than bearing directly on the nature of the UFO itself? The problem is that Vallee does nothing here or elsewhere to answer these questions.

But let's look through the 923 cases in the Magonia landings for the cases of materialization and dematerialization. How many are there?

We won't accept cases of sudden appearance or vanishing, since, as Paul Hill ably pointed out, these may be simply the manifestation of a thrust to weight ratio which is capable of being attained even in rockets. The object will have to "fade" in or out.

Being generous, we have five cases:

47 Jul. , 1929 Five persons among them Einar Rostivold, saw a huge ball of light giving off fiery colors, 25 km from Robsart. It landed slowly, vanished gradually after illuminating the whole countryside for 30 min. Robsart (Canada). (Fate Jan. , 58).

165 Sep. 30, 1954 1630 Georges Gatay and seven construction workers saw a disk at ground level, with a humanoid standing close by. Both vanished in a very strange manner. Physiological effects in all witnesses. Marcilly sur Vienne (France). (25; Magonia).

537 Jun. 26, 1962 evening For about one hour, 20-year-old Roberto Poregozzo, his mother, Maria, and his 25-year-old sister, Luisa, observed a silvery disk, the apparent diameter of the moon, maneuvering in the sky near Santa Anastasia church. They finally went home. About 0300, one of them was awakened by a feeling of intense cold and perceived a greenish light in the room. In the window a sharply defined human shape, delineating a semi-transparent body, was visible. The apparition had a huge bald head. The witnesses screamed, awakening the two others, and they saw the apparition shrink and vanish "like a TV image when one turns off the set. " Verona (Italy). (FSR 63, 2).

582 Oct. 1963 0900 A middle-aged woman, who had seen a strange craft hovering near her house the previous Jul. , observed a gray-colored object, 3. 5 m long, hovering less than 2 m above ground. Through the transparent front part she could see three figures. Suddenly one of the occupants was standing on the grass. He was clothed in "asbestos-textured coveralls" and neither the face, nor the hands, nor the feet was visible. When she asked, "What do you want?" the answer, in English, was: "One of our party knows you; we will return. " The object then decreased in size, tilted, partially sank into the ground, grew to its previous size, and departed to the east, producing steam, a flash, and a noise. Whidbey Island (Washington). (FSR 64, 6).

857 Jul. 18, 1967 0130 A minister was awakened by a strange sound and had the "impulse" to go downstairs and look outside. Between his house and the next one, he saw a silhouette wearing a luminous suit. He thought someone was playing a prank, but the apparition was well-defined and looked real. It turned into a shapeless glow and vanished. Boardman (Ohio). (Keel; Magonia).

Five out of 923, which makes half of one percent[2]. This is not really a significant component of the case lore, and of these, cases 537 and 857 are not UFOs (and in 537, the "shrinking" may have been an effect of increasing distance), while 582 was plausibly accounted for in a recent book[3] as a side effect of a possible propulsion system.

I won't take the time at the moment to go into the strange landscape or strange technology cases, but my sense is that they represent a similar percentage of the case lore - leading to a total of about 1.5% of all cases.

Now I won't contend that these cases are not interesting, but I do not think that the number of them consititutes a crisis for our understanding of UFOs.

At the same time, I realize that Vallee's Hilltop Theory will claim that the number of reports goes down very rapidly with increasing strangeness. However, this remains an intuition on his part and has not, to the best of my knowledge, been statistically verified. Certainly, there are some variations on this with regard to reporting on the Internet, where we definitely see a number of very high-strangeness reports. At any rate, it is well known that perhaps only 10% of all events of moderate strangeness are reported, so if we assume that is true, and that the high strangeness reports are reported only 1% of the time, then we have, let's say 200:1 for reported moderate vs. high strangeness (.5%?), and 2000:100 for total moderate vs. high strangeness events (still about only 5%). We can even take 200:4 (2%), and 2000:400 (20%). Again, this does not seem to justify abandoning objective reality or even the objective reality of the UFO, especially in the absence of those cases, since the hilltop may also represent a decreasing incidence of high strangeness events.

Let's continue a bit with "The Invisible College". Vallee on p 6 begins a fairly extensive comparison of the case of an anonymous engineering executive who claims to have boarded a UFO, been taken to a remote location, and given information injected by a computer directly into his mind, with the claims of Uri Geller, a former stage magician and self-declared psychic who claims to be able to perform physical effects such as bending spoons and keys with his mind (a trick well within the repertoire of many magicians). Vallee draws the likeness between them based on the idea that both have been given "a mission". Yet Geller has been frequently exposed as a hoaxer, and Vallee provides no indication of whether the engineering executive's tale has been checked (and there are a number of checkable points, including claims of searches by the military and police units). Certainly there is a sociological phenomenon here, and it is relevant to UFOs, but it goes nowhere close to proving the validity of paranormal claims.

Vallee continues throughout the book to give examples of apparent acceptance of psychic claims. He states on p9 that some of Geller's abilities include "triggering of a force which affects material objects... some phenomena affecting mass and inertia appear to be reproducible in the laboratory", but he does not tell us which phenomena, which laboratories, does not provide references to reviewed studies... etc. He then later states that he does not believe that Geller has been psychically contacted by ETs. Elsewhere, he discusses his own investigations into automatic writing and channelling and on p 79 states (after an example of a fairly pointless dialog with what claims to be an entity connected with UFOs calling itself 7171): "I regard the above dialog as an instance of communication with a level of consciousness, possibly (but not necessarily) non-human. But its nature may be understandable only in terms of a space-time structure more complex than what current physics places at our disposal." He does not justify this statement, or indicate why we should not consider these as simple demonstrations of poorly-understood aspects of normal human mental functioning. This is especially germane, since he states (p 79) "Its elements may be borrowed entirely from our own brains and reflected upon us... or it may contain genuinely new data." But again, he does not show any such account where verifiable, "genuinely new data" is produced by this process. Further, he goes on to show how SPECTRA (Uri Geller's contact) makes the same error in interpreting light-year as a unit of time as does Geller, which is another indication that we are seeing nothing but the output of Geller's cognition or subconscious.

Vallee makes five statements on p 28 which sum up his "useful propositions":

1. That UFOs are not objects, do not fly, can dematerialize, and violate the laws of motion. He claims photos to substantiate dematerialization exist, but the only one of which I am aware is the Williamette Pass photo which has since been shown to be a very blurred photo of a road sign (Randles, Alien Contact). Paul Hill has ably rebutted the contention that UFOs violate the laws of motion, and certainly no one contends that UFOs use aerodynamics to fly.
2. That UFOs have been seen throughout history and have consistently received (or provided) their own explanation within the framework of each culture. Yet one does expect more primitive peoples to interpret an advanced technology in terms which are as familiar and comforting as possible, so where is the surprise? Contentions that the UFO occupants have represented themselves as being within the framework of the culture seem to me to rest largely on the 19th century airship waves, and unfortunately, it is not known how many of these reports were journalistic hoaxes (Jerome Clark contends that many were, and that the Hamilton cattle abduction was also a hoax, based on his research on reports from the era). However, there are certainly reports in those waves which resemble modern reports. Those, however, do not seem to imply any specific explanation, except to the extent that witnesses claim the objects had fins, wings, or propellors, which may again be an attempt by a witness to force a strange observation into a culturally acceptable mold.
3. That UFO reports may not be caused by ETs. OK... so? He then goes off to speculate without any foundation that "if time and space are not as simple in structure as physicists have assumed until now, then the question 'where do they come from' may be meaningless: they could come from a place in time..." Interesting speculation, but not yet justified by any of the presented data.
4. That the key to understanding the phenomenon lies in the psychic effects it produces (or the psychic awareness it makes possible) in the observers. This is an odd reasoning: Vallee seems to be saying that if there are psychological or social effects from UFOs, they must be intentional, but he provides no special proof of this. He goes on to claim that the witnesses develop unusual talents, yet again, there is a paucity of proof of this within his book.
5. That contact between human percipients and the UFO phenomenon occurs under conditions controlled by the latter. In other words (and this is a thesis he has carried out in more detail in his "too many landings" theory) UFOs intentionally target people and contact them. Vallee's control system theory implies that this is required to implement his "control system".

Point 5 deserves a little more attention, because it can be checked against the catalogs of sightings available. I'd like to set this up with an analogy.

Auto accidents are things which happen essentially at random. For you, the driver, your position relative to a car crash can be: a) You didn't see it because you are nowhere near, b) You heard it but didn't see it, c) You saw it on the other side of the highway after it happened, d) You saw it happen on the other side of the highway, e) You saw it after it happened on your side of the highway, f) You saw it happen on your side of the highway, g) it happened right in front of you, or, last, h) it happened to you.

If UFO sightings are also essentially random, one could expect a similar distribution of proximity, and I think it is clear from the case literature that it exists. We have distant flybys, close flybys, distantly observed landings, witnesses happening upon landed UFOs which immediately depart, witnesses happening upon landed UFOs which interact with them, UFOs which appear to target witnesses, and UFOs which abduct witnesses.

Vallee then goes off toward the religious experience in an attempt to draw parallels between the religious experience and UFOs. I think it is fair to say that we have relatively little understanding of what causes religious experience. However, it is the objectively observable manifestations of religious experience which Vallee claims provide the linkage, along with the common absurdity of statements coming from channels, contactees, and religious miracle percipients (he does not state why such absurdity or stupidity is not a reason for rejecting reports/claims, which would be a normal and justifiable reaction). The similarity of some objective manifestations may exist, but it is tenuous, basically involving very seldom observed "glowing spheres" (seldom observed, that is, in religious manifestations) some light ray cases, and some activities related to miracles which appear to be manuvering UFOs. In addition there are a few (fewer than there are dematerialization cases) healing cases in the UFO literature from which parallels to religious healings can be drawn.

In deciding to examine this idea, one must also note that in most cases of interest, UFO witnesses report objects which, though sometimes luminous, have a very specific appearance of solidity. UFO witnesses never report a UFO landing on the road which stops their car, and from which emerges the Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit, after which, the Trinity having reentered their vehicle, the witness receives radiation burns, the road is marked with a scorched imprint, and the car restarts itself. If, indeed, UFOs and Christian religious experience (the only kind Vallee uses in his parallels) exist, why does this not occur? Clearly the overlap is not great, and the patterns are very different. Therefore, I contend that while UFO phenomena might be mistaken for religious phenomena by superstitious individuals, and that some religious phenomena may be misinterpretations of UFO activity, we are far short of the evidence needed to assume a direct, much less intentional, connection.

John Keel, "The Mothman Prophecies", and the Paranormal Hypothesis (PNH)

Keel's books provide what might appear to be a wealth of raw data, and so to that extent they deserve more consideration than Vallee's, since one can at least have more to work with in checking whether the data will back up the theory.

Keel's theory is that there is one or more superintelligent beings capable of creating matter from nothing (or nearly nothing) are responsible for the UFO phenomenon and various connected phenomena (again, psychism, religion, contactees, etc.). For the purpose of this analysis, I will focus on "The Mothman Prophecies" which represents a localized set of cases which Keel personally investigated in 1967. These cases centered around reports of a winged flying humanoid with glowing red eyes (dubbed "Mothman"). There was also significant UFO activity in the area, and a publicized contactee case.

Keel's style is to use a few solid and detailed cases as anchors, and to stitch them together with a combination of weaker cases, assertions, and speculation.

There is no question of the association of flying humanoids with UFOs. A borderline case would be the Kelly-Hopkinsville case, where the occupants were seen to float down from the trees. There are various cases where occupants are reported to float above the ground and manuver in the air (these cases are not cited by Keel). However, in these cases, a UFO is present, if peripherally. This is not the case for Mothman - Keel presents no case in which Mothman is present in proximity to a UFO. Mothman is at least a couple of steps away from the previously mentioned occupant cases - first, the presence of wings and glowing red eyes (not frequently reported elsewhere); second, the lack of a UFO. But Keel attempts to show that Mothman has a solid foundation in observation, and does a fairly good job of it. The observations are multiple witness (though often single family) and the descriptions are consistent. Medical effects are found to have occurred, and those are similar to such effects reported in UFO incidents. Having shown that Mothman seems to exist, he then brings in a variety of reports of "flying men", like Mothman, but more distant in their proximity. Again, there are multiple witnesses in these cases, but most of these are from newspaper reports, not first hand investigation. He also presents reports of "giant" birds, but here is on shakier ground, since there is no demonstrated basis for size or distance measurements in many of these cases, while others could, at a stretch, be attributed to an escaped emu or other similar bird. In any event, none of these "cryptozoological" incidents are shown to have a specific UFO connection. As Keel mentions, the Mothman events happened during a national UFO wave, and after the Mothman incidents, UFOs were seen in the area. But proximity is neither correlation nor causation.

This is typical of Keel's style, and he reuses it working outward from the Derenberger contactee case. Here he is on somewhat less solid terrain. The corroboration for Derenberger's case comes in the form of a case which was reported after the Derenberger case had been reported in the news, and which supposedly happened the same night. The witnesses are anonymous. Derenberger claimed further contacts, and also claimed to have been interrogated by NASA. A psychologist who examined Derenberger claims that he had later heard voices in his head claiming to be from a spacecraft hovering above. But none of this is properly documented, nor is it demontstrated that there are multiple witnesses, though Keel seems to imply that some persons may have seen Derenberger's "visitor" Indrid Cold, who came to Derenberger's farm for a visit, using a normal automobile.

Keel next examines the "silent contactee" phenomenon - those who claim direct or psychic contact with UFO occupants. Here we move into a realm of much less reliable accounts from single witnesses, who claim a special relationship with the phenomenon. Keel, on the basis of their apparent confusion, asserts that they are being manipulated in some way by a cosmic source. Their information is absurd, their prophecies are claimed to come true in minor incidents and to fail on major predictions, and the silent contactees seem to meet their Gypsy-like contactors in a variety of otherwise normal situations.

Another, and perhaps more paranoid thread, are the mystery visitors. Keel's friend, Gray Barker, was associated with the official beginning of the mystery visitor thread, as documented in his "They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers", which outlines the Bender case. But "mystery visitors" made their first appearance in the Maury Island incident, widely regarded as a hoax, and their subsequent appearances were under conditions where they may have been used as an excuse by hoaxcrs to, as in the Maury Island case, justify the absence of key pieces of claimed evidence. Keel entertains us with a number of these cases, and some of them are "multiple witness", but the problem lies in determining whether what they are witness to is actually as anomalous as it seems from the accounts as provided by Keel. In any event, even taking them at face value, only one case is alluded to in the book which even has the appearance of directly connecting the mystery visitors to UFOs. This case, attested to by an anonymous family of seven, involves a sighting where occupants from a landed UFO are seen to exit their object and get into a black Cadillac. The only other connection lies in what Keel claims is a common appearance for UFO occupants and mystery visitors (which is not supported by cases from other investigators).

These accounts are stitched together with a number of odd coincidences, telephone problems, and other events of indeterminate import. Unfortunately none of these accounts seems to force the conclusion that UFOs are generated by Keel's ultra-terrestrial intelligence, or that the variety of odd phenomena and coincidences are reliably related to UFOs.

Like Vallee, Keel tries to construe the weakness, internal contradiction, and inconsistency of these accounts as actually indicative of a deeper meaning, but neither of these authors offer compelling reasons for this interpretation rather than the simpler one of unreliability. By contaminating consistent UFO data with ghost stories, religion, psychic lore, and paranoia, these authors have lent credibility to a theory which has helped to destabilize and discredit the study of UFOs among professional scientists.

A Critique of The Conclusions of Vallee's Appendix 1 to Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception[4]

The conclusions of Vallee's Invisible College, critiqued above, were carried further in his appendix to Revelations, also published as a paper in the Journal of Scientific Exploration. This section of the document critiques the conclusions of that paper, using the abstract of the paper as the basis for its structure.

In this section, Vallee's assertions are in italics.

Five specific arguments articulated here contradict the ETH:

(1) unexplained close encounters are far more numerous than required for any physical survey of the earth

Assuming one wishes to defend ETH (and I am no ETH partisan), it is obligatory to point out that ETH does not predict a specific number or limit on visits to the earth, and does not specify a mission ("physical survey of the earth"). Thus, Vallee's contention cannot be used to falsify ETH.

For instance, if the ETs are tourists, or anthropologists, there might be radically different numbers of visits resulting, and "required" might be irrelevant. For instance, do we never send an expedition back to look at a primitive tribe once it has been studied? Do we never go on vacation to somewhere we've visited before?

Vallee limits the nature of an ET interest in earth (mapping, physical chemistry) to one which suits his hypothesis. He also assumes a uniformity of purpose on the part of ET races which cannot be found in our own.

Surely one should generalize from the data, not to the data.

Furthermore, Vallee's estimate of the number of landings rests on a number of unproven assumptions. One is that landings occur without reference to the presence of witnesses. We do not know if this is true. Another is that the frequency of landings does not follow the number of available witnesses, and that there is a significant reservoir of unreported cases post midnight. Again, this is unproven.

Statement (1) represents an a priori judgement about the nature of ET life on Vallee's part which cannot be supported with the current state of our knowledge. Remember, to falsify ETH, you have to prove that UFOs do not come from space. Thus you must explain things like the consistent approach from high altitude and departure to high altitude, neither of which are predicted by (for instance) either the Control System Hypothesis (CSH) or the Paranormal Hypothesis (PNH), but which are consistent with ETH.

(2) the humanoid body structure of the alleged "aliens" is not likely to have originated on another planet and is not biologically adapted to space travel

Part one of this statement is not justified by the evidence. From the various debates I have seen among qualified evolutionary theorists, opinion is split about 50/50 as to whether humanoid forms are a potentially common evolutionary product. Since we have just one sample of intelligent life certainly available (us), it would seem to be premature to be reasoning from a sample of one. Again, we have an a priori assumption not justified by available data.

Part two of this statement seems irrelevant. We humans aren't adapted to space travel either, but we do it. In addition, I will point out that the apparent levitation and assisted or even stiff bodied movement of UFO occupants can very well represent gravitational or other artificial compensations for long-duration exposure to low G environments. Also, in a significant proportion of cases, occupants are isolated from the earth environment by suits and helmets of various kinds. One could also argue that in those cases which do not exhibit this isolation, that a more advanced isolation technology is used, perhaps involving force fields, hidden masks or air feeds, etc.

Vallee in his appendix to Revelations also complains about the presence of recognizable emotions in the aliens. Yet as with his assumption of non-human form as the norm, it is unknown as to whether the conditions of life in general and intelligent life in specific might not lead to similar emotional structures. Some cognitive theorists believe that emotions are used to rapidly register state of mind, so as to free cognition for other tasks. Since the nature of the universe and biology requires the ability to respond to similar conditions (threat, avoidance, pleasure, pain, hunger, etc.) it would not be surprising for an alien race to have evolved at least some emotions with human counterparts.

Vallee also wants it both ways. He expects alien compassion to cause them to treat abductees the way we treat human patients, but complains that since they don't they mustn't be advanced aliens (see below).

(3) the reported behavior in thousands of abduction reports contradicts the hypothesis of genetic or scientific experimentation on humans by an advanced race

Abduction research is a still controversial part of UFOlogy. However, there are numerous possible ways to account for the apparent "crudity" or "insensitivity" of some of the reported medical procedures, including:

1. indifference
2. cruelty
3. inadequate knowledge of human physiology
4. "veterinary" level procedures because humans are not at "their" level
5. less progress among aliens in medical knowledge compared to physics and engineering

For all we know, these are "high school students" on a field trip, or sadists getting entertainment from the primitives, or they are using some psywar technique on us to confuse us. Also, a still unknown percentage of abduction events are valid vs. invalid, so on which part of the data should one base acceptance of Vallee's conclusion?

(4) the extension of the phenomenon throughout recorded human history demonstrates that UFOs are not a contemporary phenomenon

Does ETH require UFOs to be a contemporary phenomenon? No.

Vallee also reasons in what I regard to be a reversed fashion that since witnesses in earlier times interpreted UFO events in the context of their culture (including, in some cases, accompanying journalistic hoaxes which have yet to be completely eradicated from the data) this must have been intended by the phenomenon itself, which carefully tailored its apparitions to what people would accept.

However, as the earlier section pointed out, this is not a justified assumption. One can just as easily expect earlier peoples to distort the observations in such a way as to make them more acceptable to their worldview.

Such a cause might more easily explain

• the prevalence of contemporary (i.e. 19th century) looking objects and occupants in the 19th century reports (on the verge of flight, little is known of possible vs impossible, so observations (and misinterpretations thereof) and hoaxes are skewed more heavily in favor of the known);
• the relatively uninterpreted phenomena of early history, where witnesses' context is certainly not up to dealing with flying machines as a possible part of their society, thus offering little in the way of explanation, except, perhaps, the religious, and
• the more objective reports of modern times, where UFO appearance and behavior is clearly inexplicable in terms of our existing technology, thus not immediately suggesting an explanation (witness the confusion in 1947 and the years immediately following, when the secret weapon hypothesis attains its peak).

(5) the apparent ability of UFOs to manipulate space and time suggests radically different and richer alternatives

And this comes back to whether the case lore supports such conclusions, and, as I showed in the earlier section, it is a real stretch to come to the conclusion that UFOs manipulate space or time in anything but ordinary ways based on existing catalogs and reliable reports.

The closest that Vallee comes in the Revelations appendix to justifying this is to say that there are "objects and beings that appear and disappear suddenly, to change their shapes in continuous fashion and to merge with other physical objects". This is the same assertion presented in Invisible College, and there is insufficient evidence in Vallee's recent books or other publications to generate any substantial change in the objections I made earlier.

Conclusion

The appendix to Revelations is no more convincing than the arguments in Invisible College. Vallee uses the "argument from personal increduility" to argue against ETH. This is not a scientific form of argumentation.

One should also ask whether the PNH and CSH are not vulnerable in a number of "plausibility" areas which Vallee seems to think are fair game with regard to ETH. For instance - why UFOs? Why a fairly consistent presentation of apparent vehicles and occupants? What evidence exists that so-called "schedules of reinforcement" can work on free individuals, much less entire free societies? There are many others.

But, ultimately, without support from basic research, none of these hypotheses are the answer. I remain willing only to go so far as:

"An objective physical phenomenon exists which manifests itself as UFOs. Study of the properties of UFOs as observed by witnesses and other instruments will help us determine the actual properties of that phenomenon." I also think that this can be pursued most profitably by examining UFOs as machines, which is what they appear to be (Occam's razor).

Footnotes

1. ISBN 0-525-47450-1

2. Jan Aldrich informs me that he has been unable to find any mention of (47) in Canadian newspaper archives.

3. UFOs and Anti-Gravity, Cramp, ISBN 0-932813-43-7

4. ISBN 0-345-37566-1