EELRIJUE: Variations on a Theme

Earth’s oceans may appear limitless from a human perspective, but look closer and you get a different picture. They aren’t vast, structureless seas of liquid stretching uniformly to the horizon. To most of their inhabitants, in fact, they are not liquid at all. The oceans turn out to be—well, jelly.

Not very thick jelly, it’s true. Certainly not thick enough to notice when you swim in it. But for the marine world’s smallest creatures—the tiny plankton and microbes that make up the bulk of its inhabitants—seawater is not a uniform fluid, but a tangle of intertwined chains of sugar molecules that trap water within their meshwork to form a gel.

The long strands in the oceanic gel are mostly crosslinked polysaccharides. If the polysaccharides in 1 milliliter of seawater could be placed end-to-end, they would stretch out to 5,600 kilometers! Coexisting proteins would span 310 kilometers ; DNA, 2 kilometers. This same milliliter may also contain up to a million bacteria and ten times as many virus particles. Also in this brew are, on the average, 1.000 protozoans and 100 phytoplankton. It’s a microscopic metropolis, about the size of a sugar cube, and one in which you may never wish to swim again!



As physicist Richard Feynman observed in his seminal essay, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” there is nothing in the laws of physics which prevents building armies of molecular-sized machines. At present, scientists have already built atomic-sized curiosities, such as an atomic abacus with Buckyballs and an atomic guitar with strings about 100 atoms across.

Paul Davies speculates that a space-faring civilization could use nanotechnology to build miniature probes to explore the galaxy, perhaps no bigger than your palm. Davies says, “The tiny probes I’m talking about will be so inconspicuous that it’s no surprise that we haven’t come across one. It’s not the sort of thing that you’re going to trip over in your back yard. So if that is the way technology develops, namely, smaller, faster, cheaper and if other civilizations have gone this route, then we could be surrounded by surveillance devices.”



VALLEE: Now, if you go to the movies while the movie is playing, it’s suddenly different because now it is a sensory experience—you see it; you react! It speeds up your heart, and does all kinds of physiological things to you. But does it mean that Bambi exists?

Of course not. There is a basic flaw in that level of analysis, and I think that’s a pitfall in which the whole of UFOlogy, especially American UFOlogy, has fallen. There is only a first-level reading.

Instead of looking at the screen, what I want to do is to turn around and look the other way. When we look the other way what we see is a little hole at the top of the wall with some light coming out. That’s where I want to go. I want to steal the key to the projectionist’s booth, and then, when everybody has gone home, I want to break in. And what you find there is a meta-system.

It’s a system of wheels that can generate anything you want—Bambi, Rambo, “Close Encounters"… That’s my next project; I would like to play with the projector. One way to do that would be to interfere with the phenomenon itself. I think if you did that you would force it to react...If it’s a control system, then there is a feedback loop somewhere. Once you find the feedback loop then you can screw around with it.



VALLEE: There are two kinds of control systems. There are control systems that are open, like a university, where you take tests for what seems to be a long time, but eventually you graduate, and go out into the real world a little bit better equipped to deal with it.

Then there are closed systems like jails. If I was going to build a control system, it would be an open control system because I don’t think I would derive much pleasure out of running a jail. If I assume the UFO phenomena represents some kind of consciousness out there, then I would also assume it would be dealing in terms of an open system. That assumption may be wrong. Maybe this a jail, and there is no hope. But I’m going with the assumption that if we respond to these tests, we will learn something. There is a feeling that I get in the course of my investigations of being in the presence of a form of consciousness that is truly remarkable.

That consciousness has a great sense of absurdity, and also a great sense of humor. The bottom line is that I feel that I’ve learned something out of this whole exercise, and as long as I’m continuing to learn something I’m going to continue to do it.