(We here at Mutable first discovered Mr. Vallee as a result of his article, Polanski and Kubrick: two occult tales, in which he makes certain suppositions of a supernatural variety, very different from our own article, but insightful. He is more widely known, however, for his work concerning UFOs and the surrounding mythology. He has described UFO sightings as both ancient and mythic, comparing alien encounters with the Fairies of pre-Christian paganism. Frequently warm and generous, the creatures in these stories are seen as wonderful and magical beings continually involved with perplexing humans with the bizarre and non-sensical. While, at other times, Vallee would have us believe the UFOs represent something hostile and damaging: People get zapped with harmful beams and sometimes die. Below is an interview .)

Your latest book, Confrontations, just came out this spring. Prior to that, you hadn’t been in the limelight much. What was your focus during that time?

Jacques Vallee: People assumed I had gone off to a mountaintop to philosophize. The reason that I dropped out of the UFO scene is that I wanted to do UFO investigations, and I was tired of going to meetings where the same things were continually rehashed. What it came down to was just a lot of talk. I think we’re a long way from understanding this phenomenon, and the only way we’re going to understand it is to stop talking to each other, and go back and talk to the witnesses. That’s what I wanted to do, and I wanted to do it first-hand. I wanted to be able to go to the site, meet the witnesses, and monitor what was happening over a certain period of time. So, I put the highest priority on first-hand cases that had not been reported to the press or to the UFO community because the moment the cases become part of ongoing discussion, they get polarized: the witnesses are bombarded with all kinds of questions; there are biases; the ego gets into it. I wanted to do a quiet kind of long-term research. In ten years, I accumulated over two hundred such cases. The book is really a summary of the more interesting of these cases.

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What were those girls brewing in the woods? What secret longings burn in Abby’s heart? Find out in this second installment of the Crucible as a oneman show, our Bedroom Theater production. The girls are up to something, but what will come of it? And what of John Proctor and his wandering stare?

Download the episode here, or click below to listen.

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The duty to produce alienates the passion for creation. Productive labour is part and parcel of the technology of law and order. The working day grows shorter as the empire of conditioning extends.

In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create. What spark of humanity, of a possible creativity, can remain alive in a being dragged out of sleep at six every morning, jolted about in suburban trains, deafened by the racket of machinery, bleached and steamed by meaningless sounds and gestures, spun dry by statistical controls, and tossed out at the end of the day into the entrance halls of railway stations, those cathedrals of departure for the hell of weekdays and the nugatory paradise of weekends, where the crowd communes in weariness and boredom? From adolescence to retirement each 24-hour cycle repeats the same shattering bombardment, like bullets hitting a window: mechanical repetition, time-which-is-money, submission to bosses, boredom, exhaustion. From the butchering of youth’s energy to the gaping wound of old age, life cracks in every direction under the blows of forced labour. Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live. The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry. Already the front against forced labour is being formed; its gestures of refusal are moulding the consciousness of the future. Every call for productivity in the conditions chosen by capitalist and Soviet economy is a call to slavery.

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