Vallee's Control Theory: Articulation and Critique

From what I’ve read of his work, Jacques Vallee strikes me as one of the clearest thinkers about UFO phenomenon, but there’s parts to his writing where he’s either not sure what he wants to say, is not expressing himself clearly, or doesn’t want to express himself clearly. Vallee is widely respected within ufology as someone who was willing to do the heavy thinking, and perhaps as a result a lot of people seem to take his efforts as an excuse for not having to think for themselves. As one popular YouTube video puts it:

“What do we know about UFOs? Even Jacques Vallee don’t know.”

For instance, sometimes people cite Vallee’s theory that UFO phenomena are a part of a control system and then go on to either use ‘control system’ to mean their own pet theory or just let the phrase hang in the air like some kind of intellectual miasma conferring legitimacy on whatever they say next. I read a few things by Vallee and found his control system theory quite uncompelling in contrast to how other people viewed it, so I made a note to keep paying attention in the hopes of someday understanding it better.

Turns out there’s a nice summary in a 1978 Fate article where Jerome Clark interviews Vallee and asks him specifically about the control system theory. Obviously the published article condensed the whole interview down into interesting bits and here I’m going to summarize even those – and keep in mind the date, 1978.

Control system theory says that “UFOs and related phenomena are ‘the means through which man's concepts are being rearranged’ . . . [by] continually recurring "absurd" messages and appearances which defy rational analysis but which nonetheless address human beings on the level of myth and imagination.’” This is helpful. It tells me that we’re not talking about the kind of control system that is a thermostat; maybe more of a thermostat with attitude (TWA) and a weird sense of humor, which thermostats by definition shouldn’t have.

The control system doesn’t involve a theistic hierarchy; Vallee explains rather that “mythology rules at a level of our social reality over which normal political and intellectual action has no power…." Which to me suggests that he’s just talking about the realm of the irrational. Call it subconscious, preconscious, unconscious or what you want; it’s the big unknown that is part of us yet also sometimes other than us. Is he talking about Jung’s collective unconscious or archetypes? I don’t think so. He’s mainly trying to distance his notion of control system from the social institutions and religious or totalitarian ideas that that phrase tends to evoke in people.

Control systems use “absurdity as a semantic construction. If you're trying to express something which is beyond the comprehension of a subject, you have to do it through statements that appear contradictory or seem absurd.” If the quote were from Jacques Derrida instead of Jacques Vallee, you might suspect that someone was just playing some postmodern linguistic game here. But of course we can read about the cases that Vallee has reported on, as well as other cases of high strangeness. Some of these resulted in serious trauma and/or in which the absurd signifier can take physical form apparently against the laws of nature. The absurd and the irrational go hand in hand in this regard, not perhaps as mythological absolutes as much as characteristics of the experience of human consciousness.

Here’s where my understanding of Vallee’s control system theory begins to fail:

“The occurrences of similar "absurd" messages in UFO cases brought me to the idea that maybe we're dealing with a sort of control system that is subtly manipulating human consciousness.”

What manipulates human consciousness in the first place? There’s an implicit theory of power in control system theory that Vallee fails to adequately specify. He acknowledges that in UFO experiences people can feel like they lose control of their senses or as if an external force takes over, and that UFO experiences can be traumatic. There’s obviously power in phenomena that can violate the laws of nature. As far as I can tell, a lot of people tend to interpret this control system in teleological and eschatological terms. In other words, something that will ultimately lead us to our salvation (with “us” being loosely defined).

However, we also know that as individual actors we have various kinds of power and lack other kinds of power over our own social, psychological and cultural experiences of reality. Vallee’s control system theory doesn’t take those factors into account, doesn’t differentiate between them and the UFO phenomenon control system. Subtle manipulations of human consciousness could in fact be as mundane as the kind of routine social game-playing humans do with one another during cons, courting or job interviews. Clearly Vallee means something more than that by control systems, though:

“Clark: How could I prove to my satisfaction that there is a control system in operations?

Vallee: If you think you're inside a control system, the first thing you have to look for is what is being controlled and try to change it to see what happens.”

Vallee goes on to give a very interesting illustration of what he’s talking about that still does nothing to persuade me the system he theorizes can be better characterized by control than by communication. Check out the article for the rest of the story with regard to that.

The central conundrum as I see it is how to characterize radical alterity or otherness. Vallee finds the experience, or stories about the experience, of radical alterity thought-provoking and as a result has perhaps built his theory based on certain cultural predispositions about how the world must be understood in terms of functional control systems. However, these predispositions are just passing cultural tropes and don’t necessarily shed intrinsic light on various phenomena. Vallee’s control system theory doesn’t seem to be able to explain or predict much about lived human experience, even the anomalous bits.