Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds Paperback – 16 May 1993

this is a groundbreaking book,even today.vallee shows that the "ufo and alien" phenomenon has been around for hundreds,possibly thousands of years..he demonstrates that sightings of unusual objects in the sky and encounters with strange beings are perceived in the prevailing age and culture..thus we have encounters with fairy's,trolls and other denizens of some fantastical realm,this is not a book about "folklore" but delves deep into the problem..he argue's convincingly that the entitie's being seen in modern time's are the same that were seen in earlier time's.
do these things have a seperate existence, are we being subjected to some type of control mechanism?
i would recommend "confrontations" and every other book by this author as essential reading.

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 consistent and numerous, so maybe, as Vallee tells us, they are connected - but how, exactly? The same phenomenon at source, something in the human psyche which interprets them as such, or is this just `argument from spurious similarity' and of little value?

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 Vallee may have been barking up the wrong tree. Others have pointed out that ET/inter-dimensional 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 something of 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. Unlike `Messengers of Deception' and the `Dimensions' trilogy, PTM has received no modern reprint, and if you can find a good original hardcover copy from the 1970s it will likely command a high price. Consider reading Vallee's 1988 book `Dimensions' instead: great chunks of PTM are copied and pasted verbatim into the text of `Dimensions' and the essential argument of the original 1969 book is updated.