DIMENSIONS: A Casebook of Alien Contact

In this provocative new work, the dean of UFO theorists vigorously cultivates the theory he seeded in Passport to Magonia and The Invisible College: that UFOs aren't spacecraft, but consciousness-controlling mechanisms from ""other dimensions beyond spacetime."" Vallee--model for the French scientist played by Francois Truffaut in Close Encounters of the Third Kind--roots his argument in similarities he finds between UFO reports and reports throughout history of other luminous phenomena: elves, fairies, angels, the Virgin Mary at Fatima, etc. Analyzing oral and written records for a wide array of such sightings, Vallee posits that UFOs are only a modern variation of them, purposefully contoured in scientific trapping for our high-tech society. He underscores this notion by sifting through numerous descriptions of encounters with UFOs and their occupants, emphasizing the frequent conjoining of alleged physical effects (from actinic burns to saucerian ground-impressions), nonlawful physics (UFOs dematerializing, or accelerating at right angles), and, most importantly, psychic, effects (which range from blackouts to prophetic messages and spiritual conversions). Tossing out the extraterrestial thesis as simplistic, Vallee concludes that UFOs, whether in their ancient, elfin form or in today's spacecraft guise, are nothing less than a kind of intelligent thermostat applied by God knows what--his speculation stops short here--to regulate the temperature of humanity's collective psyche: "". . .they are the means through which man's concepts are being rearranged."" Although lacking the sensationalism (i.e., focus on UFO-abductions) that catapulted Whitley Strieber's Communion and Budd Hopkins' Intruders onto last year's best-seller lists, Vallee's intensively researched, thoughtful book begins to make at least a smidgen of sense out of a major mystery. Watch the skies--and read this book.