Control system (UAP)

Jacques Vallée's hypothesis that the UFO phenomenon regulates human belief like a thermostat

The control system hypothesis is the proposal of the computer scientist and UFO investigator Jacques Vallée that the UFO phenomenon works as "a control system for human consciousness", a regulating mechanism that, like a thermostat, stabilises the relationship between what people believe and the changing world they must understand, and not a series of visits by extraterrestrial craft. Vallée names human belief as the quantity being controlled, applied through myth and imagination over time frames of about a century, and has left open whether the controller is natural, artificial, human or alien. He offered it to explain why every case he studied in depth held as many absurd elements as rational ones, why genuine direct contact never takes place, and why sightings arrive in waves that combine periodicity with unpredictability. In his account the present form of sightings of space visitors is of secondary importance to the control of belief itself.

The hypothesis sits under Theories of the UFO phenomenon, which arrays the competing accounts of what stands behind the reports. Vallée sets it against the extraterrestrial hypothesis, which he holds looks at the phenomenon "on the wrong level"; it grows from the position he took in Passport to Magonia, which the interdimensional hypothesis also draws on; it relates to the psychosocial UFO hypothesis through the Jungian premise, which Vallée carries farther by externalising the collective unconscious into a cosmic control system, as John Keel's ultraterrestrial hypothesis likewise posits an external controlling force; and it contains a sub-model of its own, the pattern of sighting waves as a schedule of reinforcement. Vallée holds the idea testable, since every control system has a reference level that can be reached; the UFO skeptic Robert Sheaffer objected in 1977 that reasoning of the kind Vallée applies to the phenomenon's absurdity "can, of course, be utilized to justify absolutely any absurdity at all" and yields "hypotheses that can never be proven true or false"; and in a later statement of the hypothesis he gives two variants, in which the controller is either an alien intelligence, possibly Earth-based, training humanity toward new behaviour, or the human collective unconscious projecting the imagery its own survival needs.

Antecedents

Jacques Vallée began as an early scientific proponent of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, and by 1969 his assessment had undergone a significant shift. In Passport to Magonia he set modern UFO reports beside fairy legends and demonological traditions as a single phenomenon existing "at a juncture between the material and mental", in which the intelligence behind the objects was elusive and misleading and the absurdity of the encounters worked "like a schedule of reinforcement to break old conceptual habits and rearrange our mythological structures". The next step came out of the informal network of scientists around J. Allen Hynek, which Hynek called the Invisible College and which gave Vallée's 1975 book its title; two of its members, Fred Beckman at the University of Chicago and Douglass Price-Williams at UCLA, are the people Vallée credits with the suggestion that the research of B. F. Skinner on schedules of reinforcement might bear on human reactions to UFOs. The folklorist Thomas E. Bullard reads the result as the Jungian premise carried farther, with conditioning of consciousness through exposure to strangeness as the purpose behind UFOs, fairy encounters and other anomalous experience and the collective unconscious externalised into a cosmic control system whose goals are unknown.

The thermostat model

Vallée proposes that UFOs "may constitute a control system", that they are "not necessarily caused by extraterrestrial visitors, nor the result of misidentifications and hoaxes", and that the witnesses saw "manifestations of a process not unlike that of a thermostat in a house", a mechanism that "stabilizes the relationship between our body temperature requirements and the changing weather outside"; in the same way UFOs "may serve to stabilize the relationship between man's consciousness needs and the evolving complexities of the world which he must understand". A thermostat needs two opposite principles, a cooler and a heater, and an observer who sees only one of them will decide that warm is good and cold bad and explain half the behaviour; Vallée finds the same with UFOs, where in every case he studied in depth he found as many rational elements as absurd ones, many that read as friendly and many that read as hostile, and could never explain more than half of the facts.

What the system controls, on this model, is human belief: "I suggest that it is human belief that is being controlled and conditioned." Vallée places the regulator at a level of society that political and intellectual action does not reach, where "mythology rules" and time frames "are long, of the order of a century", and holds that life at that level is governed by control systems "although admittedly not of the hardware type", so that any action of UFOs there would be almost impossible to detect by conventional methods. He denies that he means a jailer: "I do not mean that some higher order of beings has locked us inside the constraints of a space-bound jail, closely monitored by psychic entities we might call angels or demons." The model explains, in his account, why there is no genuine contact, since "direct genuine contact would ruin the experiment", and why so many cases are absurd; it supports one idea about the objects themselves, that they are constructed "both as physical craft" and "as psychic devices, whose exact properties remain to be defined"; and it entails that the phenomenon must mislead: "If the phenomenon is forcing us through a learning curve then it MUST mislead us." Reviewing the book in 1977, Sheaffer objected to the premise that UFOs make themselves absurd on purpose to avoid being taken too seriously, holding that reasoning of that kind "can, of course, be utilized to justify absolutely any absurdity at all".

The schedule of reinforcement

Vallée's argument for the regulating action rests on the pattern of the waves. He plots the development of the UFO waves between 1947 and 1962 and asks whether the curve is a schedule of reinforcement; he did not extend it to the present because "there is too much work here for one man". From the experiments of Ferster and Skinner he draws that the best schedule of reinforcement "combines periodicity with unpredictability", that learning under it is slow but continuous and irreversible, and that the pattern of UFO waves may have the same effect. He holds that the idea can be tested, since anyone smart or daring enough can reach the reference level of a control system and elicit a response, and it "must be possible to gain access to the control of the UFO phenomenon... and do some real science". In 1991 he added that a test of the hypothesis could send a signal to the form of consciousness that may be governing the phenomenon, a capability that "the intelligence community does not control", so that "challenging the UFO control system is a game anyone can play".

Vallée has restated the pattern since. He describes the phenomenon as "not constant", going "through waves" of two or three months over a country such as France or Japan, and reports testing whether the waves correlate with the approaches of Mars, a correlation that "didn't quite work"; he explains the schedule of reinforcement with the experiments of Skinner, in which a behaviour that is not rewarded every time persists, "You have to have some randomness", and says of the pattern of UFO cases around the world, "The pattern is a worldwide reinforcement of behavior." Bullard records that Vallée kept theorising about a control system through the late 1980s while re-emphasising the physical aspects of the phenomenon.

The controller

The hypothesis does not fix who or what the controller is. In 1975 Vallée leaves open whether it is "natural or spontaneous", explainable "in terms of genetics, of social psychology, or of ordinary phenomena", or "artificial in nature, and under the power of some superhuman will", and adds that it "may be entirely determined by laws that we have not yet discovered". In a 1978 interview with Jerome Clark he divides the flying saucer phenomenon into three components handled differently: a physical object, the perception of the witnesses, and a social phenomenon that arises when the reports reach society. His attention then turns to human agencies that exploit the subject: he tried to blow the whistle on the infiltration of research groups in Messengers of Deception (1979), and in Revelations (1991) he writes that "some UFO sightings are covert experiments in the manipulation of the belief systems of the public", and Bullard summarises his view of the UFO experience as a process of "subliminal seduction" with an unwelcome purpose, since the rising UFO counterculture promoted public distrust of science, irrational faith in extraterrestrial intervention and a preference for a totalitarian social order. Vallée keeps that finding apart from the control system itself, whose governing form of consciousness he says "the intelligence community does not control".

In a paper presented in 1989 and reprinted in Revelations Vallée wrote that "in the mid-Seventies I proposed to approach the UFO phenomenon as a control system, reserving judgment as to whether the control would turn out to be human, alien, or simply natural", and listed two variants: an alien intelligence, possibly Earth-based, training humanity toward a new type of behaviour, which could be the Visitor Phenomenon of Whitley Strieber or some form of "super-nature" along the lines of a Gaia hypothesis; or, in a Jungian reading, the human collective unconscious projecting ahead of itself the imagery necessary for long-term survival. He proposed that future research explore "natural or artificial control systems" as alternatives to the extraterrestrial hypothesis.

In his 2020 conversation with James Fox and Joe Rogan Vallée describes "some form of consciousness out there that's teaching us something", and Fox relates Vallée's formulation of an omnipresent intelligence that manifests itself in many ways, "nuts and bolts, but it's also psychic"; Vallée adds that the phenomenon "works on the culture at a very deep level". The religious-studies scholar Diana Pasulka describes Vallée as having observed the phenomenon's effects on culture and people and as having identified a pattern of input and response, which he described as a control system and read with a schedule of reinforcement. The author Peter Levenda asks, of apparent foreknowledge of the assassination of John F. Kennedy in a play written decades earlier, whether the force pulling the strings is "a mechanism of some kind, as Vallée called it, a control mechanism".

Open questions

References

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