Like the “missing mass” that astronomers are trying to locate in the far reaches of our universe, the UFO phenomenon rests on an ocean of dark matter, deep secrets, and forgotten wars fought only in shadows. Not all of it had to do with the kind of objects the American public imagines UFOs to be. Some of the warriors seemed to have understood, early on, that if UFOs existed as a genuine new phenomenon of intelligent origin, this fact did not necessarily mean they were from outer space. And other warriors may have decided that the belief in the reality of UFOs could be twisted, exploited, and bent to obscure political ends. They may have planted false UFO stories to hide real experiments. They may have disguised helicopters as flying saucers, or lied to witnesses at sites where advanced prototypes had crashed, never to be divulged again. No wonder even White House officials get confused when they try, years later, to reassemble the facts.
As we ponder the implications, we are led, inexorably, to a much larger issue. As anyone learns who has become a naturalized United States citizen, the rock upon which American democracy is built is “an informed citizenry.” Without full information, how would you know how to vote? And if you didn’t know how to vote, could you still pretend you lived in a democracy?
In the last fifty years the various branches of the military and intelligence community in the United States have so clouded the reports of the UFO phenomenon that the citizenry has been left not just uninformed but indeed misinformed. This may not have been the intent, but it is indeed the result. Those who truly care about democracy are justified in asking that the government come clean about what it knows and—most importantly perhaps—
All efforts to break open the mystery so far have made the assumption that the “big secret” merely involves extraterrestrial spacecraft put together with metal and rivets. This partial view is supported by the many instances in which UFOs have been seen by pilots, photographed, and tracked on radar. Yet modern physical theory opens up a much wider, richer spectrum of hypotheses for objects that might blink in and out of perception, impact the consciousness of witnesses, accelerate without creating sonic booms, change shape, and merge with one another dynamically. Concepts of higher dimensionality, once on the fringes of physics, have entered the mainstream of science. Given what we know about the universe today, it is irrational to assume it can be described with only three dimensions of space and one dimension of time.
The UFO witnesses are telling us they have experienced objects of vast complexity that challenged their sense of reality. Such observations are anomalous in the narrow sense of the classical physics we learn in school, but they may help build a conceptual framework for the physics of the twenty-first century. It is all the more important then, as Richard Dolan points out, to make a precise assessment of what the most reliable witnesses have observed, and to seriously start looking for the missing parts of this famous puzzle. UFOs have been with us since the beginning of recorded history. Could they be trying to tell us who we are, and what true place we are destined to occupy in the universe ?
—by Jacques F. Vallee, Ph.D.
Preface
When I originally undertook to edit this book for its release by Hampton Roads, I believed it was perhaps too long and intimidating for many readers. Therefore, I decided to tighten the book throughout, eliminate some redundancies of description, and shorten it by about 150 pages.
The result has been both less and more than I expected. As for length, this new edition is only shorter by about fifty pages, but it has several changes from the original that make it substantially different. Every chapter has been edited, although the bulk of the changes are in the first half of the book. The most significant are:
Some paring down of non-UFO-related activities by the American military and intelligence apparatus. This is not complete by any means, and certainly enough remains to place UFO policies and activities within an appropriate context.
Streamlining and clarification of the crash at Roswell; more thorough analysis of the Maury Island and MJ-12 controversies.
More complete analysis of some documents from late 1947, including a correction regarding the Schulgen Memo and a better study of the “Soviet angle.”
Expanded coverage of the Mantell case of 1948, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, astronomer J. Allen Hynek, Thomas Townsend Brown, and anti-gravity research from the 1950s.
Improving the footnoting so as to cite primary documents whenever possible. Not having done this adequately the first time had been a major regret.
