Algorhythms: Robert Anton Wilson vs. UMMO

"The kind of UFO cases that interest me usually fall into Jacques Vallee's sixth or seventh degree of strangeness, e.g. the Travis Walton case. I don't literally believe in aliens who molested Walton, but a lot of details leave me with the feeling that nobody consciously lied. All the witnesses and Walton tried to tell the truth about something for which they had no neurolinguistic grids (`mental categories') except those of bad sci-fi movies. In other words, my hunch about this and some similar cases comes down to the two ideas that (1) Weird Shit Happens, and that (2) when it happens, nobody at this stage of evolution knows how to talk about it.

"The other kind of case that still interests me falls into the UMMO type..."

--Robert Anton Wilson



UMMO: "For 30 years we have studied your science, your culture, history and civilizations All this information we have carried from your Earth to Ummo in our titanium crystals codified with data. We HAVE DEMONSTRATED to you our culture and our technology in purely descriptive form - so you cannot convert them or realize them practically. We have done this because we note with sadness that you employ your sciences primarily for war and the destruction of your own selves, your principal objective."



UMMO: "You are like children playing with terrible and dangerous toys which will destroy you. WE CAN DO NOTHING! A cosmic law says that each world must take its own path, to survive or to perish. You have chosen the second. You are destroying your planet - annihilating your species, and contaminating your atmosphere and your seas until now this is irreversible. With sadness we contemplate your insanity, and understand that the remedy is only in yourselves."



UMMO: "We can not look forward a great distance into your future because your psyche are completely unpredictable and capricious, bordering on paranoia. As your elder brothers in this cosmos, we urgently desire with all our hearts your salvation.Do not destroy your beautiful blue planet, a rare atmospheric world that floats so majestically in space, so full of life. IT IS YOUR CHOICE."



You've said that UFOs represent a form of alien intelligence that is actively manipulating human society. How and toward what end?

Jacques Vallee: A new computer analysis of historical trends, compiled in the 1970s, led me to plot a striking graph of "waves" of UFO activity that was anything but periodic. Fred Beckman and Dr. Price Williams of UCLA pointed out that it resembled a schedule of reinforcement typical of a learning or training process: the phenomenon was more akin to a control system than to an exploratory task force of alien travelers. There are many control systems around us, and some are a part of nature: ecology, climate, etc. Some are man-made: the process of education, the thermostat in your home. If the UFO phenomenon represents a control system, can we test it to determine if it is natural or artificial, open or closed? This is one of the interesting questions about the phenomenon that has never been answered.



What about the French theory that UMMO was a psychological experiment?

Jacques Vallee: Yeah, they thought that the cult had been used or was manipulated by the KGB. Because for one thing, some of their ideas--some of the data that was supposedly channeled from the UMMO organization in the sky was very advanced cosmology. Very advanced cosmology about twin universes involving some data that was not stupid--it came straight out of the notes of Andre Sakarav, including some of the unpublished notes of Sakarav, some things that Sakarav was known to have worked on, but had not published. And so some people--and I don't know who's right--felt that somebody had to have access to those notes, to inspire those messages, perhaps the KGB. It wasn't just ordinary science fiction; it was somebody who knew what some of the more advanced cosmologists were thinking.

Why would the KGB or any intelligence agency perpetrate such an arcane hoax?

Jacques Vallee: Well, let me tell you a little story. About fifteen years ago there was a group that suddenly appeared in San Francisco. They had a big party downtown. And they invited everybody who was anybody in parapsychology. And they made a little speech saying, "We have all this money from somebody who wants to do good and help research, we know that there isn't much money in parapsychology; we will entertain proposals for research, give us your best ideas; we will send it to a panel who will review it and we will fund the best research." After the party, a lot of people rushed home to their computers and typed in all their best ideas, sent it on--but the organization never existed, was never heard from again. Somebody was fishing.