I just finished reading The Invisible College by Jacques Vallée, and I found his approach to the subject to be really unique and valuable.

At the end of the book, he presents his “control system” hypothesis of the phenomenon. I’ll try to summarize that quickly, before building on it with some of my own thoughts and questions.

The “Control system” hypothesis

Vallee spent decades studying UFO encounters in depth, meeting and interviewing the experiencers. This not only included sightings, but also abduction experiences, those who claim to channel ET intelligences, other scientists who study the phenomenon and intelligence personell. His goal is to identify patterns within all these experiences to try to gain a better understanding of their cause, nature, and possible intents.

He observes that there is a clear connection between UFO encounters and psychic phenomena: telepathic communication, matter manipulation, altered states of consciousness, lesson ‘downloads’, etc.

However, the ‘content’ of these experiences and messages often contain an amount of absurdity, and often particular biases and misunderstandings of the individual experiencer. (For instance, Uri Gellar channels an ET that misuses the term ‘light-year’ as a measurement of time, instead of distance. A mistake that Uri himself makes in his speech patterns)

The phenomenon also appears to resist attempts to study it directly, with many experiments ending with compelling but ambiguous results. Yet in other cases, such as the apparition of Our Lady of Fatima (1917), the apparent intent is for it to be perceived by many people but only on its own terms.

This phenomenon has been going on for many human generations, dating back thousands of years.

Psychological Conditioning – B.F. Skinner

Vallée likens this to positive reinforcement training developed by the psychologist B.F. Skinner. The basic idea is that when the subject (perhaps a rat in a cage) performs a desired behavior, it’s given a reward (such as a tasty treat).

However, Skinner learned that the MOST effective reward schedule for learning is not to give the rat a treat every single time it performs the desired action, but instead to only reward it sometimes; variable reward. This keeps the rat engaged and guessing, trying to figure out some sort of deeper pattern or reason WHY it is sometimes rewarded for the behavior and sometimes not.

If the reward is given too consistently, then there it doesn’t engage the rat’s curiosity and it might lose interest. Trainings with a variable reward schedule have the most long-lasting impact on the rat’s behavior.

Perhaps by operating in a partially unpredictable way, and mostly at the periphery of human culture the phenomenon is engaging in a subtle control system, or guidance program to slowly and gradually shape human society in certain ways.

Levers of Social Control & Influence

We often imagine the levers of power in society are things like laws, and economic forces. While those are very powerful tools of control, there is a much deeper, often subconscious realm of social influence. That’s the realm of myths, legends, and worldviews.

Unlike laws that tell us what behavior is permissible, our myths speak to deeper matters of identity that underpin all our thoughts, behaviors, and decisions;

Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we heading? Why are we here? What role do we play in the unfolding cosmos? What is possible, and what is impossible? What laws govern the universe and reality itself?

The phenomenon appears to be engaging at this level of control. It appears unpredictably and enacts miraculous events (such as spontaneous healings or revelations of knowledge) to individuals or small groups. Those individuals lives and worldviews might be radically transformed by their experiences, but these transformations are often hard to translate to others. So their stories become like local legends.

Sowing Seeds of Transformation

These experiencers begin to find one another, and begin building an alternative shared worldview in which such anomalous events are possible and meaningful. These sub-cultures of true believers are like seeds that germinate a new understanding into the wider culture, gradually. This allows the wider society to begin to grasp and eventually integrate some of these new ideas without causing major disruptions or overt control.

Mainstream Western culture has still not accepted most psychic phenomena into the realm of legitimate scientific study. Perhaps the phenomenon is trying to slowly open up our societies imagination to such possibilities.

Our current mythology has all but banished magical thinking to the fringes, yet we have all experienced the ‘miracles’ made possible by rapidly advancing technology during our lifetimes. Perhaps this is why the phenomenon manifests itself as a technology and alien species from other planets; because such possibilities are much more comprehensible to our current mainstream culture than notions of spirit realms and gods. (Much like the experimenter might dress up their control apparatus as everyday objects in the subjects environment; a rock, bush, or other animal)

If this hypothesis is correct, it still leaves us with many questions;

Who is behind these guiding/controlling forces? Where does it originate from? How does it operate?

Is it some higher intelligence that yet remains hidden? A different species from a different physical world here to exploit us? Or our space daddy, lovingly guiding us into adulthood within the cosmos? Or the creators and managers of the simulated reality we’re all trapped within? Or perhaps some unconscious emergent part of ourselves that beckons us toward our greater latent potential?

Vallée ends with an insightful impulse to look past the theatrical displays and messages of the phenomenon. He implores the reader to attempt to peer behind the curtain, at the mechanisms of the control system itself; the thermostat that’s regulating human cultural development. This is the level of analysis that might give us the real answers we seek. Or at least, it’s one important avenue of investigation.