2005 Preface

THE HUMANOIDS, edited by Charles Bowen, is the classic volume of scientific data about landed UFOs and their occupants. The beautiful thing about such cases is that we can always rule out the usual suspects: secret military aircraft, swamp gas, Venus, and so forth. From the data set as a whole, we can rule out fraud.  

Jacques Vallee presents a good argument that UFOs are not the result of some mass psychosis. Other than that, the contributors come to no consensus about the data. As the title indicates, all the occupants seen were humanoids, a word coined by Ufologists.  

These early Ufologists did not have sufficient confidence in their understanding of scientific method to boldly proclaim to the world their discovery of star traveling humanoids. Perhaps they could not believe it themselves. The proof is in this book, for those with a sufficiently broad background in the sciences.  

Jacques Vallée presents 200 cases, all from 1954, mostly from France. Gordon Creighton describes 65 cases in detail, all from South America, ranging in time from 1947 to 1965. Coral Lorenzen has 28 cases, mostly from the 1960s and the United States. Antonio Villas Boas, Professor Johannis, Villares del Saz and the Socorro incident each get a chapter to themselves.  

Our visitors remind me of anthropologists, careful to avoid making changes to a primitive culture. That is why they tell stories to contactees, avoid inhabited areas, and make no official contact. They put on a show of sound, light and electro-magnetic effects to convince us that they travel by high technology, even though physicists know that is impossible. They are nothing like the ETs imagined by science-fiction writers or expected by the scientists who work on the SETI project. The invasions and space wars of science-fiction are entirely misleading and false.  

The UFO’s silent mode of flight reminds me of levitation. Their habit of abruptly appearing or disappearing reminds me of teleportation. These are powers of the mind, not of technology.  

Anthropologists differ from missionaries, colonists, traders and conquistadors in being more highly evolved. The aliens are humanoids like us, but in their behavior they are not like us. They are not here to conquer us, save us or convert us. They are merely curious. I find that very comforting. It means we have no need to fear them. Not even the hairy dwarfs, who enjoy hand-to-hand combat.  

The way to the stars is through advanced evolution, not advanced technology. If mankind wants to go to the stars, we must reverse course, away from reduction, towards psionics, metaphysics and utopian analysis.

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