I’m arguing with exactly what you posted in the OP.
AKA God of the Gaps.
Vallee’s ‘hypothesis’ is a prime example of intellectual laziness. It explains nothing. The coincidences and correspondences throughout history he refers to are all spurious, and can and have been explained much better by experts in mythology and cultural tradition.
Vallee is not an expert in mythology and cultural tradition; after decades of studying his nonsense, it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that he is a fool. What do you make of the Trinity case and the hairdryer burns?
I understand the frustration but this isn’t a court trial, and I’m not arguing that one event proves aliens, extradimensional or otherwise.
What I’m saying is: when multiple events, across time and context, share specific recurring features sensor anomalies, non-ballistic motion, pilot interaction, transmedium behavior that pattern deserves attention even if individual cases remain unresolved.
You’re asking me to “prove” each event in isolation, as if they exist in a vacuum. But phenomena don’t always show up as clean lab experiments. Sometimes the pattern itself is the signal especially when the same high strangeness shows up across decades, systems, and geographies.
I’m not lowering the standard. I’m challenging the assumption that a case must be airtight in isolation to be meaningful in the aggregate.
That’s not evasion. That’s how anomalies work.
Then engage with what I actually said, not the caricature of it.
The OP wasn’t a manifesto. It was an invitation to explore whether Vallée’s framing, flawed or not, points toward something worth examining. You’re free to reject that but twisting it into “supernatural claims with no evidence” isn’t engaging with the argument. It’s dismissing it without wrestling with the core idea.
You cannot demand evidence that disproves the entirety of your premise, while insisting you don’t have to provide sufficient evidence for any one aspect of it. What exactly are you asking of us?
But the core idea is claims, supernatural or not, with no evidence.
You don’t have to respect Vallée but reducing his work to “foolishness” skips the actual work of engaging the broader implications he’s raising.
Not every case he brings up holds water. Some are weak, some are straight-up strange. But dismissing the entire framework because of the Trinity case or hairdryer burns is like tossing out epidemiology because someone once misread a data set.
The value in his work isn’t that he solves the mystery it’s that he keeps pointing to the parts we’ve failed to cleanly explain.
You can call that lazy. I call it uncomfortable curiosity and I’ll take that over comfortable certainty any day.
Unfortunately that is all you will ever get, so long as the Phenomenon remains in the Low Information Zone. As I have indicated, that is where it will always stay. There will never be any positive proof of the extraterrestrial or extradimensional hypotheses for the UFO/UAP phenomenon, because there will never be convincing evidence from sensors at the edge of their sensitivity.
I am still reasonably optimistic that we will in due course find evidence for alien life in the universe, and hopefully even intelligent life. But this evidence will almost certainly have nothing to do with the UFO/UAP phenomenon, which is caused by psychological and social processes. I suspect that when and if we ever make contact with an intelligent alien species, they will have stories of UAPs of various kinds culled from their own sensor data; no matter how sensitive a sensor is, it always has physical limits. And if we ask them about our own UAP/UFOs, they will shrug their alien shoulders and say “not us, mate”.
And if we ask them about Vallee’s extradimensional theories, they will laugh their alien heads off.
Explanations exist, that are ignored is another story.
I’m not asking anyone to disprove anything.
I’m asking: why does the same type of weirdness keep showing up in credible contexts military cases, pilot encounters, sensor anomalies over and over again? If it’s all explainable, great show me how, case by case.
I’ve never said “you must disprove everything.” I’ve said there’s a persistent set of features that haven’t been fully explained. If the best move is to shrug them off, fine but that’s not skepticism.
The difference is that when I am curious I actually try to find out what is what. There is only one reason to stop at being curious, and that reason is that you are actually afraid the answer isn’t to your liking.
And then claims he has an explanation that just happens to need to overturn everything we think we know about reality. He could stop at the parts we’ve failed to cleanly explain still needing an explanation but he doesn’t and his explanation is what makes him a crank.
Because humans are fine tuned to look for patterns, even where patterns don’t exists. The weirdness you are claiming can ALL be attributed to that. You have lots of personal observations which are prone to our brains and senses being fooled, and a few marginal objective observations (sensors, video) that for the most part don’t say what you think they say. There is no phenomenon to explain, beyond humans senses and pattern matching.
Bottom line, your bar for “credible” is way too low, your insistance of complete explainations of marginal stories is way too high.
It really doesn’t; it is always different ‘weirdness’, always due to insufficient or partial data. Every case where we have enough data is explainable.
Give us the cases, and we’ll explain them, or at the very least, show that they are not inexplicable. We have done this repeatedly in this thread and you have ignored it.
Yes. It’s odd to shut down the discussion about things that are “fun to think about” just when the thinking comes up with answers
You might be right. The Phenomenon might always hover in that Low Information Zone never clear, never provable, always just out of reach.
But if that’s true, the intellectually honest position isn’t “it’s just psychology” it’s “we don’t know.” Because uncertainty cuts both ways.
Your view is consistent, but it leans hard on reduction. You say the Phenomenon is noise. I say: maybe it’s signal we haven’t learned to hear properly yet.
And if one day we do meet aliens and they shrug off Vallée’s ideas? That’s fine. But if they nod quietly and say, “Yeah, we’ve seen them too”?
Well. I’d like to be someone who didn’t laugh too soon.
I didn’t say that. You’re responding to something I didn’t claim.
Curiosity doesn’t mean jumping to conclusions, and it doesn’t mean stopping short either. What I’m doing is sitting with the tension in the data, not forcing it into an answer just because I want closure.
There’s more than one reason to stay in the question. Sometimes it’s not fear, it’s just honesty about what we don’t know yet.
More likely, there will be a small minority of credulous aliens who fail to accept that insufficient data doesn’t entitle you to make up imaginary wizards, fairies and ghosts.
The intellectually honest position is not to call it “The Phenomenon”.