Customer Reviews

Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds

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Researcher Jacques Vallee has done an excellent job synthesizing the various reports through the ages of our contact with otherworldly entities. He especially empasizes the fairy lore of the Celtic region, as this is relatively modern and also well-documented.

Vallee points out that many of the chief characteristics of contact with fairies is coincidental of modern accounts of contact with UFOnauts. He surmises that these accounts are cultural-specific descriptions of a phenomenon that has been with us since time immemorial. It is probable that everything from demons, incubi, and jinns are one and the same as the aliens which now captivate our global attention.

Interestingly, the entities have consistantly been described as possessing technology just beyond the means of whichever society is experiencing the contact. Today, the entities appear in antigravity spacecraft, just as in the Bible they steered luminous chariots, and in the great airship sighting wave of 1897, they seemed to be manning turbine-driven zeppelins. The one constant throughout the ages has been the entities proclivity to tinker with the genetics of mankind. Vallee offers no answers to this strange phenomenon, but only wishes to point out that it did not originate in modern times.

I can be harsh in reviews of books I find silly, but this one I found excellent and I'm glad to say so in a review. Yes, it is dated, but that is part of the interest because it lets you see how things have developed over the past 30 or so years. It is also intelligent and discerning and is not in a rush to leap to conclusions or explain everything. It trusts you to be smart and form your own judgements. No book in this subject should be read alone, no one book can begin to cover the many aspects and issues, but this should be one of the books you read.

I have long admired Mr. Vallee, as I have read several of his books and have found him to be rational, thorough in his investigations, and very balanced in his conclusions. Until this book, I never realized the connection between the fairy and other unusual sightings of years ago and the UFO phenomena of today. Mr. Vallee's basic premise is that as man has evolved and become more technologically advanced, so too do the strange phenomena. They seem to parallel our advancements. It is a most interesting theory, and while it does not give answers as to why these things happen in the first place, it makes for an interesting and intelligent read. I am fortunate enough to have a copy of this book, and if you can get your hands on one, do so. You'll be glad you did.

A reprisal (and slight revisal) of an older review of mine from a while back (April 2000). Hopefully books like this will get reprinted if enough attention is brought to them...

I find Jacques Vallee's comparative essays (as I call them, finding each chapter stylized as an essay) are very intriguing. The entire book as a collective goes a long way to explaining that the UFO phenomenon (which, according to popular culture "started" in 1947 with the "Roswell Incident") has been with us a lot longer than most realize.

I agree with Monsieur Vallee that civilizations all over the world have had these experiences/contacts in many different forms throughtout the millennia. As a species, we would prove to be completely ignorant if we absolutely believed that we were superior to all other life forms, to the point of ignoring "specters" that are probably with us everywhere, in everything we see, everyday of our lives. And only those who haven't been totally conditioned away from their childhood insight by society have been able to see the fleeting images of fairies, elves, leprechauns, etc., or at least even feel their presence.

A definite must-read for anyone wishing to find out more about the history of UFO's & mythology, and their connection, or for anyone looking for answers as to why they have had a lifetime of unwanted supernatural experiences.

The credibility of Jacques Vallee as a trained scientist makes it difficult to dismiss the seriousness which he assigns to various strange phenomena which have been reported throughout human history. He gives many examples of episodes of encounters between humans and non-human entities such as fairies, demons, religious apparitions and UFO occupants. These contacts have ranged from seemingly benign to lethal for the humans involved. Within these varied experiences, he sees common elements from which he tries to draw some conclusions.

A significant problem in trying to work with these phenomena within a rational framework is that they contain such a large proportion of absurdity, by human standards, even when reported by credible witnesses. By focusing on the commonalities within these reports and trying to eliminate the influence of emotionalism and wishful thinking, Vallee offers some tentative hypotheses. He stresses that these hypotheses are not at present subject to verification, and may never be.

I think it must be said that non of the possible conclusions he offers are very reassuring to those who adhere to a human-centered and rationalistic view of the universe. It really would not seem out of place to apply the terms 'disturbing' and 'creepy' to the implications of his line of thought. Vallee takes what might almost be thought an overly-optimistic view of this field of study, in that he sees it as an opportunity for humanity to enlarge its knowledge of consciousness and gain more insight into the nature of the cosmos.

This book has the potential to seriously get under the skin of very sensitive people or those who do not wish to have the conventional views of reality challenged. Though I found it fascinating, I have to admit to feeling a bit creeped out after reading it.

Jacques Vallee was the model for the French scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. To those who are convinced of extraterrestrial visitation, he was "in the know" during the 60s-70s. Then he withdrew from any public advocacy of the theory of ET contact and focused on other explanations for the eerily similar experiences of a paranormal nature that people throughout the world have described all through history. Elves, fairies, steps to hidden spaces that didn't exist, magic caves, flying in the night, etc. Basically his view is that "ETs" are the same immaterial demons and angels that have always co-exisited with humans here on earth and perhaps even beneath the earth; but they not likely physical beings from planets or stars light years away.
Personally I don't know why the cases presented in this book should rule out physical ET visitation. Some of the ET contact/abduction/sightings experiences just don't fit any of the classic, ageless encounters and experiences recounted here. So why rule out possibilities when we are only at the frontier of this discovery? We know so little, and don't know what it is we don't know.
Excellent and classic book for understanding the history of human psychology as it processes experiences outside the norm of the physical world. Not so good for an unbiased look at the real possibility of physical ET presence on planet earth.

It was nice to read the original work, after reading Mr. Vallee's theories put forth in books by Whitley Strieber, Richard L. Thompson and others. Mr. Vallee's theories about connections between the modern UFO phenomena and the European fairy lore have become fairly well known over the last 30 years. Readers familiar with more recent UFO material, may find some of the material to be quite dated and unreliable. I think that the author's preface to this 1993 edition is very helpful in this regard.

That having been said, this book does not strive for answers. This is a book that states a question and gives you a lot of data to mull over and make up your own mind. If you are willing to read this book with an open mind in the spirit it was meant, I think that you'll have an enjoyable read.

The appendix of "A Century of UFO Landings" is also woefully out of date. It is also not in the easiest format to read. It took quite a lot of work to put this together, and according to Mr. Vallee, no one has improved upon it since the original publication.

If you're looking for a book that deals with the early years of the UFO era, this is certainly one of the more original.

In PTM, published six months following Apollo 11's historic Moon landing, French astronomer and computer scientist Jacques Vallee moved away from his earlier writings ("Anatomy of a Phenomenon" and "Challenge to Science") where he had attempted to apply the scientific method to categorising and understanding patterns in UFO encounters and sightings, to musing on modern UFO-occupant encounter reports and their historic parallels with folklore.

In his introduction, the author tells us:

"This is not a scientific book. It could be called a philosophical book, if there were a philosophy of non-facts...it aims only at the documentation of a recurrent myth; namely...contact between mankind and an intelligent race endowed with apparently supernatural powers...it's an effort to provide systematic documentation and literary illustration of modern folklore in the perspective of ancient myths..."

By cherry-picking a bunch of the more odd-ball (predominantly sole witness) UFO-occupant cases pre-1970 and drawing parallels with mythical encounters between humans and the fairy-folk, mostly from the Celtic mythology of the British Isles, Vallee broadly succeeds in his objective. He also works in stories of Christian-religious "visitations" such as the Knock apparition in August 1879; the missing-time elements common to so many fairy-world interactions in folklore and their similarity to modern missing-time abduction reports; and numerous accounts over the centuries of the sexual harassment of both men and women by fairy folk of the opposite sex (succubi and incubi in Christian/demonology parlance - he's in Colin Wilson territory here), in an attempt to link them with more recently reported breeding-focussed interactions with UFO occupants (he spends a number of pages on the 1957 Villas Boas case). Human interbreeding with non-human entities is a recurrent theme in most folk mythology from around the world: it is intriguing to speculate if all these legends of sexual encounters with angels, sky-gods and goddesses, of "marriages" between humans and fairies, and of "changeling" children are in fact one and the same phenomenon as the reported interest demonstrated by some UFO occupants in the interbreeding of species which has emerged in thousands of UFO abduction reports in the past 50+ years of sperm-extraction, mysterious pregnancies and "hybrid" children. These parallels are certainly strong, consistent and numerous, so maybe, as Vallee tells us, they are connected - but how, exactly? The same phenomenon at source, or something in the human psyche which interprets them as such?

Vallee makes some poignant observations such as:

"The behaviour of non-human visitors to our planet, or of a superior race coexisting with us on this planet, would not necessarily appear purposeful to a human observer. Scientists who brush aside UFO reports because `Obviously intelligent visitors would not behave like that' simply have not given serious thought to the problem of non-human intelligence."

Ultimately, does Vallee offer any answers, or bring more clarity to this most intriguing set of phenomena? Not really. Perhaps given the weirdness of his selected data, firm conclusions are not warranted. This reviewer suggests that although PTM was an interesting essay, in the end the author may have been barking up the wrong tree. Indeed, Vallee admits today "I made a lot of mistakes in `Passport to Magonia' " - no kidding, Jacques, but you deserve respect for owning up to mistakes, which many writers/researchers never do.

In subsequent years Vallee did re-embrace the idea of extraterrestrials as the probable purposeful agency behind the UFO/occupant phenomenon, and it now seems likely that ET visitation might be at the core of most mythological encounters with non-human entities, interpreted by witnesses in each case through their relevant contemporary cultural paradigms.

PTM remains an interesting historical essay. Though 40 years after publication the direction of its thesis seems in retrospect like a blind alley offering no answers, it was seen at the time as opening up new thinking and is for this reason worth reading.

As usual with Vallee's writings, his fine prose shines through. He's a good writer, if a little formal in style. A good hardcover copy of PTM will command a high price, if you can find one.

Vallee's book is seminal.

It was one of those few UFO books that will always be classic and "now" because it probes the unknown with an enlightened and interesting perspective. Having read a lot of books on the subject prior to 2000, there are few that add anything to the dialog, but this one is central to study of the paranormal. His history of similar events recorded through history shows concisely how repetitive and ancient these odd phenomena are. A must read for anyone.

Personally, I think Vallee closed a LOT of minds in his time by presenting something unthinkable. Decades later he is opening minds to possibilities as people communicate more information about the phenomena. This book should be endlessly reprinted as a POD book; it is a true pity this book isn't accessible anymore.

Are they kidding? Not even collectible! ROTFL! Great book - read it once, but $60?! It's not even that old!