Passport to Magonia - Jacques Vallee ( Folklore to Flying Saucers )

Passport to Magonia - From Folklore to Flying Saucers ( 3 Separate PDF's )

"To a certain extent, this is a shocking book, and it should be."

--from the Preface

Vallée borrowed the term "MAGONIA" from a magical land described in French folktales. Magonia is also the name of the cloud realm whence felonious aerial sailors were said to have come in the treatise on weather magic composed by Carolingian bishop Agobard of Lyons in 815. The Magonians were said to travel the skies in "cloud ships" (storm clouds) and worked with Frankish tempestarii, "tempest-raisers" or weather-magi, to steal grain from the fields during magically raised storms.

One of the classics in the field of UFOlogy to be sure. For those of you who are not familiar with this I pulled a decent review from the web:

"So you think you understand about UFO's huh? Everyone seems to nowadays, and they're all saying the same things: extra terrestrials, come to warn us about the ozone layer, global warming and AIDs (about 30 years too late I think). No evidence, but that's because there has been a cover up. No evidence for a cover up, which just proves what an effective cover up it was. QED. Or maybe you think it's all just marsh gas, the planet venus and the lights from Japanese squid boats? or New Age avatars here to lead mankind into the next stage of our spiritual evolution? Seeing as everyone is so certain about UFOlogy, why do they call it a mystery? This book won't answer these questions, it won't explain everything (or anything) but it will leave you extremely confused. So confused that you may start laughing hysterically. You will learn how all the explanations exclude the most interesting data. You may figure it all out. I didn't. I have read it several times and I'm more confused than ever, and cheerfully agnostic. You may cease to believe in extraterrestrials, and believe in fairies instead (more rational, and better evidence) Caution: contains stories which even UFOlogists may find "a bit silly". One of the most intelligent and funny books on the unexplained ever, right up there with Charles Fort."
French ufologist Jacques Vallee's 1969 book did shock a lot of people.

UFO believers were already familiar with Vallee. As one of the few scientists who had written detailed and careful analyses of UFO sightings that indicated that the witnesses were neither mistaken nor lying, he was seen as a valuable asset for their position. They looked forward to more of the same in his latest book.

What they got was something quite different. As Vallee himself said in the preface, Passport to Magonia was not a scientific book. In reading older books, Vallee had noticed a curious correspondence between stories that were hundreds of years old and those he was investigating in the late 1960s.

If we decide to avoid extreme speculation, but to make certain
basic observations from the existing data, five principal facts stand
out rather clearly:

Fact 1. There has been among the public, in all countries,
since the middle of 1946, an extremely active generation of colorful
rumors. They center on a considerable number of observations of unknown
machines close to the ground in rural areas, the physical traces left by
these machines, and their various effects on humans and animals.

Fact 2. When the underlying archetypes are extracted from these
rumors, the saucer myth is seen to coincide to a remarkable degree with
the fairy-faith of Celtic countries, the observations of the scholars of
past ages, and the widespread belief among all peoples concerning
entities whose physical and psychological descriptions place them in the
same category as the present-day ufonauts.

Fact 3. The entities human witnesses report to have seen,
heard, and touched fall into various biological types. Among them are
beings of giant stature, men indistinguishable from us, winged
creatures, and various types of monsters. Most of the so-called pilots,
however, are dwarfs and form two main groups: (1) dark, hairy beings -
identical to the gnomes of medieval theory - with small, bright eyes and
deep, rugged, 'old' voices; and (2) beings - who answer the description
of the sylphs of the Middle Ages or the elves of the fairy-faith - with
human complexions, oversized heads, and silvery voices. All the beings
have been described with and without breathing apparatus. Beings of
various categories have been reported together.

Fact 4. The entities reported behavior is as consistently
absurd as the appearance of their craft is ludicrous. In numerous
instances of verbal communication with them, their assertions have been
systematically misleading. This is true for all cases on record, from
encounters with the Gentry in the British Isles to conversations with
airship engineers during the 1897 Midwest flap and discussions with the
alleged Martians in Europe, North and South America, and elsewhere. This
absurd behavior has had the effect of keeping professional scientists
away from the area where that activity is taking place. It has also
served to give the saucer myth its religious and mystical overtones.

Fact 5. The mechanism of the apparitions, in legendary,
historical, and modern times, is standard and follows the model of
religious miracles. Several cases, which bear the official stamp of the
Catholic Church (Fatima, Guadalupe, etc.), are in fact - if one applies
the definitions strictly - nothing more than UFO phenomena where the
entity has delivered a message having to do with religious beliefs
rather than with fertilizers or engineering.

Given the above facts I believe the following three propositions
to be true:

Proposition 1. The behavior of nonhuman visitors to our planet,
or the behavior 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 nonhuman intelligence.

Observation and deduction agree, in fact, that the organized
action of a superior race must appear absurd to the inferior one. That
this does not preclude contact and even cohabitation is an obvious fact
of daily life on our planet, where humans, animals, and insects have
interwoven activities in spite of their different levels of nervous
system organization.

Proposition 2. If we recognize that the structure and nature of
time is as much of a puzzle to modern physicists as it was to Reverend
Kirk, then it follows that any theory of the universe that does not take
our ignorance in this respect into account is bound to remain an
academic exercise. In particular, such a theory could never be invoked
seriously in a discussion of the constraints placed on possible visitors
to our planet.

Proposition 3. The entire mystery we are discussing contains
all the elements of a myth that could be utilized to serve political or
sociological purposes, a fact illustrated by the curious link between
the contents of the reports themselves and the progress of human
technology, from aerial ships to dirigibles to ghost rockets to flying
saucers - a link that has never received a satisfactory interpretation
in a sociological framework.