Because MR has been touting these UFO communities, that have become, as Vallee noted, like cults
What "UFO communities" are these? (I don't doubt that they exist, I'm just doubtful that you can characterize and identify them.) When has MR ever "touted" them?
I think that what Vallee was referring to was probably the movement towards dark and conspiratorial ideation among a certain segment of UFO believers.
The reality is that Vallee, even in his beliefs, discounts such claims and argued that "ufologists" push a certain agenda, targeted at the vulnerable and those who are easily led *cough* into believing anything they see. He criticises skeptics and the scientific community for failing to study credible witnesses to UFO's and argues that that refusal drives even reliable witnesses into the arms of the nutbags.
Vallee is a UFOlogist, one of the best known and most interesting ones. If you ever saw '
Close Encounters of the Third Kind', the Steven Spielberg movie, the French UFO expert 'Lacombe' at the UFO landing was inspired by Vallee.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Vallée
https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-16c0ab7ccefa7e69bfa0194853577c8d-c
You should read his book.
I haven't read the book that MR quoted from and I'd wager that you haven't read it either.
But I did read Vallee's
Anatomy of a Phenomenon when it originally came out in hardback. I was still in high school and that book kind of stoked my lifelong interest in UFOs.
https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Phen...Q_1_12?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1508765365&sr=1-12
I proceeded to read several of its successors, books that got into the history of extraordinary visions in the sky and Vallee's belief that whatever is behind the UFO phenomenon is nothing new and is deeply intertwined with myth over the ages.
(I personally take a folkloric approach to UFOs. Even if there aren't any extraordinary physical objects darting around the skies,
the persistent belief that there are is itself an extraordinary phenomenon that cries out for investigation.)
MR seems to be more up to speed on the contents of Vallee's more recent books than any of the rest of us are. Many ideas that MR mentions seem to reflect ideas that I take it Vallee has written about in those later books.
I most emphatically don't endorse every one of Vallee's ideas. I think that his brilliance lies in his originality, his willingness to think of things in new ways, to think 'outside the box'. If nothing else, he's stimulating. He throws out ideas that nobody else has thought of before him.
I have often asked what leads people to go from bright light in the sky to something otherworldly.. And I never actually get a response that explains or articulates or demonstrates that reasoning.
People have always done that. Perhaps it derives from the traditional meaning of the word 'heavens' and from the fact that apart from a few passing airplanes,
everything seen in the sky is indeed "otherworldly". (The Sun, the Moon, the planets, the stars...) In ancient Mesopotamia people literally believed they were seeing the gods (or at least their activities) up there. That's where astrology came from, since it was hypothesized that divine events in heaven indicated times when it was auspicious to undertake various things on Earth. So they watched the heavens closely. By keeping records of those observations they noted regularities, so the idea of divine unpredictability and caprice gave way to the idea of the rule of eternal reason and predictability. We still see that in our contemporary visions of 'laws of nature'.
Perhaps "the heavens" haven't entirely lost their age-old significance in our brave-new-world.
One can just as easily ask the corresponding question of the "skeptics": What leads people to go from 'unexplained phenomenon' to belief that whatever is seen must necessarily fit comfortably into a nice little conceptual box? What reasoning justifies
that? There seems to be an implicit faith that our existing conceptual scheme is all-inclusive, that we already have the universe figured out. Or that if there are any remaining loose-ends, they will only be visible at the margins, at CERN or the astronomical observatories. (Nothing to disturb our life here on Earth.)
Note that
I'm not endorsing the conclusion that UFO's are alien spaceships. (I'm actually skeptical about that and would weight it with a relatively low likelihood.) My attitude towards some of the better UFO cases is that
we don't know what they are. Their nature is (at least for now) unknown. That's something that the misnamed "skeptics" seem curiously unwilling to admit.
I might have drifted away from Vallee and his ideas in my youth when I discovered philosophy. A realization struck me then that's remained with me for the rest of my life: The fact that most of what happens in everyday life is profoundly mysterious whenever its questioned and interrogated.
What are logic and mathematics? How do they relate to the physical world? How do human beings even know about mathematical truths? What is word meaning? How do words manage to refer to extra-linguistic realities? How do a small handful of confirming instances from experiment or observation successfully confirm universally applicable laws? And on and on, through every other aspect of reality and of life.
As soon as we start asking questions about even the most mundane features of existence, we almost immediately find ourselves at the frontiers of human knowledge. We are surrounded by mysteries at every moment
but most people (the non-philosophical ones) just kind of shut their minds to it. We seemingly just rely on
faith in order to conduct our everyday lives. (It certainly isn't
knowledge.)
