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Jacques Vallee

Messengers of deception: UFO contacts and cults (A Bantam book) Paperback – January 1, 1980

by Jacques ValleÌe (Author)

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Acknowledges the big, the not so big, and even the dubious achievements of Jews in nearly every field of human endeavor, featuring hundreds of lists and biographical notes for all entries

Print length

272 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Bantam Books
Publication date

January 1, 1980
ISBN-10

0553139061
ISBN-13

978-0553139068
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Product details

Publisher : Bantam Books; Revised edition (January 1, 1980)
Language : English
Paperback : 272 pages
ISBN-10 : 0553139061
ISBN-13 : 978-0553139068
Item Weight : 5.6 ounces

Best Sellers Rank: #2,993,314 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #93,451 in Suspense Thrillers

Customer Reviews:
118 ratings

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4 star		16%
3 star		4%
2 star		2%
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Top reviews from the United States

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Ace

Be Confronted

Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2014

Verified Purchase

I have been reading J Vallee UAP writings in sequence and must confess that with each new book he becomes even more thought provoking. In this book Valle addresses the incidents and experiences of UFO contactees and the messages conveyed in some of the key contacts. His scientific approach is evident throughout and though he does not consider his views conclusive he offers several hypothesis that builds his theory of UAP as a control system.

Without spoiling the insights articulated in this book I will offer this; The author offers a theory about "time" that I found astounding.

Definitely a book that must be read for those that desire a comprehensive and will rounded view of the UAP.

25 people found this helpful

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J. Taylor

Vallee Makes The Case That UFO Cults Should Not Be Ignored

Reviewed in the United States on August 15, 2014

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As with all his books on Amazon, well written and researched. He was the model for the French scientist in "Close Encounters" so can speak with authority on the subject. He is the chief proponent of the ultraterrestrial thesis though he doesn't go as far as to claim that title. The source of the phenomena has been with us for thousands of years. The book was written in the 70's but is still in print. He details UFO cult activity and its influences on the culture.

17 people found this helpful

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D. A. Kalnoky Jr.

An uniquely original take on an old story

Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2008

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This book is a good summary of Jacques Vallee's unconventional and thought-provoking (often disturbing) theories of the UFO Phenomenon. Namely, that a strong, measurable, and perhaps intended sociological reaction can be observed in response to said phenomena; that the phenomena may behave as an algorithm and are thus difficult to understand in linear terms; that these phenomena have manifested in various ways throughout history and their true nature is still veiled from us.

The chapters appear more as a collection of essays at first glance and the book ends somewhat abruptly. Jacques Vallee is a good writer and has written a novel or two in the past, but this book is not written as a novel nor does it flow as one. You the reader must follow the theories to a deeper, darker place in your mind to get the most from this work. A simple quick read will leave a lot information out.

The ideas presented here are multi-tiered and valuable, with great depth. It is an excellent discussion piece for a philosophical or academic debate. Messengers of Deception is a unique contribution to the literature of not just UFO's, but also of Sociology. The book is somewhat short on eye-witness accounts and 'alien' encounters. If you prefer to read on those, may I recommend Dr. Vallee's fine book 'Confrontations' which is rich with anecdotal evidence...

I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Vallee once and I consider him a treasure to this field of paranormal research. His books are a must have for anyone with a serious inclination towards the UFO subject. Messengers of Deception is a book which stands apart in many ways like the writer himself.

43 people found this helpful

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Nik Cone

It’s Jacques Vallee, no more explanation needed.

Reviewed in the United States on July 30, 2018

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Well, it’s Jacque Vallee

4 people found this helpful

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Lou S

World-view shattering

Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2017

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The most clear thinking researcher ever

7 people found this helpful

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Michael Basha

Messengers of Deception holds water...

Reviewed in the United States on August 12, 2008

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This is an excellent book about the "contactees" and their alleged experience with "aliens". Vallee manages to do what the scientific community and the government fail to - accurately isolate and explain the consistent themes and occurrences surrounding contactees and UFO sightings and develop a theory that actually holds water. To quote the epilogue (without spoiling anything for you of course) Vallee's theory on UFOs "has some advantages (to the traditional views), it does not challenge the reports of thousands of credible witnesses, nor does it contradict our present laws of physics. Moreover, it suggests a plan behind the phenomena and indicates that UFO sightings could have serious social consequences." It's got a conspiracy theory ring to it, but with all the literature available today about the 4th Reich, Illuminati, etc this theory fits right in as a very real possibility.

21 people found this helpful

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Ace

Be Confronted

Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2014

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11 people found this helpful

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Daniel Chirinos

Informative

Reviewed in the United States on October 1, 2019

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Exactly what I expected! Very informative and an eye opener

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Top reviews from other countries

Anglian Traveller

Vallee's journey into the saucer cults plunges him into deep waters

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 24, 2011

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Jacques Vallee's sixth book on the UFO/contactee phenomena was first published in 1979, and an updated paperback edition (including a new introduction by the author) appeared in 2008. Like most of Vallee's published work, `Messengers of Deception' is densely written, contains almost no padding and is backed up by extensive field research and casework by the author, very much worth reading but at the same time problematic with plausible conclusions thin on the ground.

Some of the themes initially explored in the author's 1975 book `The Invisible College' are re-engaged in MoD: the idea that the UFO phenomenon is possibly a super-cosmic algorithm acting as a barometric control system on human consciousness, may not be ET in origin, and that its predominant features are not only physical (he stresses the phenomenon has unmistakable hard, physical aspects) but psychic and social.

MoD reads more like a collection of loosely connected essays than a continuous narrative building a cohesive argument. In the first chapter `The Case Against the Spacecraft' the author outlines his doubts about the so-called extraterrestrial hypothesis. Vallee's objections are confined to the simplistic idea of UFOs being ET spacecraft engaged in `investigative surveillance' originally put forward in the 1950s by writers such as Donald Keyhoe, subsequently adopted by science fiction creations such as `The Day the Earth Stood Still' (1951) and Spielberg's CE3 & ET. Despite what some people mistakenly believe of him, Vallee does not reject the ETH per se: rather, he points out that any hypothesis to explain these phenomena needs to encompass all the data; i.e. why the enormous number of reported contacts? - a question many others have asked and some, researching the abduction issue, had by the late 1990s plausibly answered. Other data include objects reported to appear/disappear and that seem to manipulate space-time, and the destabilising effects on percipients of absurdity and psycho-social elements as principle components; so a sophisticated ETH allowing for very advanced technology and long involvement with the human race might indeed prove correct in the long run. However, Vallee sticks to his control system idea as the back-stop of his interpretation of the phenomenon and this is the major factor in MoD's less-than-convincing conclusions, as he tries to force-fit the data to a seemingly flawed model.

Vallee does not believe that the governments of the world, or the military or intelligence agencies employed by them, necessarily understand the UFO phenomenon or its origins and refuse to disclose to the public what they know. Supported by `information' from an anonymous intelligence-agency contact referred to as `Major Murphy', he postulates instead that ignorance and puzzlement may be the pre-eminent governing factors at play, but that which is understood about the phenomenon is sometimes used deliberately to control and deceive - what he terms `the manipulation hypothesis.' Though the idea is mildly interesting the ends of the string don't quite meet; his case is over-intellectualised and the sum turns out to be less than its multiple, varied and thoroughly researched parts. (Major Murphy, BTW, sounds like Col John Alexander.)

Most of the chapters are filled with detailed investigations into secret societies and flying saucer contactee-cults who in general espouse the idea that benign brothers from space plan to rescue mankind from its errant ways and claim to be, each and every one, the sole repository of divine truth. Vallee's analysis of these cults and their common themes - Melchizedek and its various offshoots, the Urantia-channelling group, the Raelians and others - is insightful:

"Below the attention of academic science, below the dignity of official history, there are groups, cults and sects that serve as leading indicators of mass movements."

The rise of such cults and sects Vallee postulates to be a direct consequence of the action of his `control system' on the percipients, who consequently begin to replace rationality and science with revelatory and messianic belief systems. These cults were in 1979 found not only in the USA but all over the western world. The internet age has forced some into decline whilst others have morphed into looser entities promoting broadly similar conspiratorial ideologies across the web. Vallee saw the trend in 1979 as anti-intellectual and anti-scientific, messianic and authoritarian - for example belief that enlightened ETs plan to guide/civilize the human race towards forward evolution with their superior knowledge, implicitly renders redundant current human political and social structures like democracy. Like virtually all conspiracy theories and messianic cult-thinking, these ideologies infantilise people by creating simplistic alternate narratives with good guys and villains, free from the nuanced complexity of geopolitical realities, sophisticated economic structures and the burdens of investigative science.

Historic parallels are drawn with the decline of the science-based culture of classical Greece and its gradual replacement with superstition and religious mysticism where `revelation' and belief-ideology displaced inquiry, observation and experiment as the governing cultural paradigms, leading to the so-called `dark ages' where the ideology of the Christian Church became the ruling orthodoxy and scientific advances were for a time arrested.

Vallee has a habit of attempting to condense his ideas into lists; five reasons for this, seven types of that, four categories of something else, and in MoD he summarises six potential social consequences of this trend, some of which overlap:

1. Belief in UFOs widens the gap between the public and scientific institutions
2. Contactee propaganda undermines the image of human beings as masters of their own destiny
3. Increased attention given to UFO activity promotes the concept of political unification of the planet
4. Contactee organizations may become the basis of a new "high demand" religion
5. Irrational motivations based on faith are spreading hand in hand with the belief in ET intervention
6. Contactee philosophies often include belief in higher races and in totalitarian systems that would eliminate democracy

MoD also contains a chapter (intriguingly titled `A Cow for NORAD') on the cattle mutilations, fresh in the news in the 1970s following the investigative work of Linda Howe. Vallee does not integrate this disturbing phenomenon into his argument very well, except to suggest his theoretical UFO-contact manipulators may be behind the activity in order to instil fear and panic. He also touches on how improbable synchronicities might reveal the universe to be a kind of information-based matrix - an idea previously investigated in `The Invisible College' and later explored both in Michael Talbot's excellent book `The Holographic Universe' and in Ray Fowler's less well known `Synchrofile' (Vallee has a fine example of synchronicity: taking a taxi in LA driven by the only person in the city who happened to have the name Melchizedek - the name of the cult he was currently researching). These observations bolt on to the end of the book and support the central essay only on the periphery.

It needs to be emphasised that like most (not all) of Vallee's work on the UFO issue, MoD is definitely worth reading. The complex, odd and sometimes over-intellectualised ideas he puts forth deserve attention if only because they are unusual. He is an excellent writer, thorough researcher and a real field investigator who listens to actual witnesses without discrimination; he is not an armchair theorist, and is in some small ways an original thinker.

Maybe Vallee does sometimes exhibit `out-of-the-box' thinking; ultimately though, the thinking is just as constrained inside a different box. Be advised that at the end of MoD although you might emerge with a marginally deeper understanding - especially about the beliefs of contactee cults in the 1970s and the trend away from rationality - you may also, like Jacques, feel even more confused and none the wiser about the true nature, origins and purposes of these bizarre but pervasive phenomena.

27 people found this helpful

DiemensionX

-zzzzzzzzz

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 2, 2019

Verified Purchase

Started off ok but a bit long winded for me, was hoping for some great stories about the crazy contacties and their cults, didnt come away with anything memorable realy, like some of his other works, read allot of john keel so anything after ready 8th tower will be a little disappointing I guess. Cant really remmeber anything from this book already so a little disappointed.

Dodwell

Another winner from M. Vallee.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 29, 2018

Verified Purchase

As with all M. Vallees works, this is a well researched tome that continues his argument that all UFOs are not necessarily extraterrestrial.
A good companion work to read alongside this would be, I suggest, the authors "Passport to Magonia" Well worth the effort.

One person found this helpful

George Gigauri

Deep research into the phenomenon.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 2, 2016

Verified Purchase

UFOs, from another planet or ultimate technology for mind control to bring about the great deception?!
Interesting research by Jacques Valee.
Very good read.

One person found this helpful

Rien

Hidden agendas

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 27, 2012

Verified Purchase

Jacques Vallee has written an interesting account of the various ufo cults and the mysterious 'messengers' behind them. It is quite apparent that the ufo phenomenon is not just about alien races visiting us, as whatever this intelliegence is, it has been with humans for millenia and is apparently native to Earth. Vallee gives an eerie account of a 'coincidence' he experienced while reseaching this book. It appears that we are all being watched, but by whom?

5 people found this helpful