Sunday, October 1, 2017

Rendezvous with Vallee: From UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) to UAMs (Unidentified Alchemical Manifestations)



Last week my friends Darren and Graham, hosts of The Grimerica Show podcast, regaled me with what is probably the greatest honor a UFO buff can receive: A chance to interview Dr. Jacques Vallee, the most renowned researcher in the field.
I actually had the opportunity to meet Dr. Vallee in person last year, and conversed with him in the company of my good friend and colleague Greg Bishop --you can read about it here-- but this new opportunity was clearly different. For starters, on that occasion I let Greg do most of the talking, since the main excuse we had to meet with the honorable astronomer and computer scientist was to hand him a copy of my friend's book It Defies Language! --I was just too 'starstruck' and intimidated by being in the presence of such a legend, anyway. Besides, that had been a private conversation away from any kind of public scrutiny; since I knew Vallee rarely concedes interviews these days due to his busy schedule, I had to prepare myself with a list of good questions for him --the kind that are rarely asked in shows like Coast to Coast, if you know what I mean-- to which I consulted with a few people whose opinion on the UFO subject I value greatly.
I did my homework diligently, but nevertheless the night prior to the interview I was understandably nervous, and couldn't sleep until way past 3 in the morning. I tried to calm myself by watching Star Trek Generations, which had been recently released on Netflix, and the movie reminded me of my forgotten love for the 90's series ST: TNG and my college years; of how at the same time I was beginning to make use of the computers in my university to access the early Internet in order to read monochromatic UFO bbs forums, I would return home and try not to miss the adventures of Captain Jean Luc Picard and the crew of the USS Enterprise on cable TV; of how I would join them on their voyages in my imagination, and dream of the Final Frontier...

It's fair to say I was still deeply entrenched in the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis as the 'best' solution for the UFO dilemma back then, and even though my thoughts about the phenomenon have evolved dramatically in the last twenty-something years, I decided that night --out of a pure whim-- that I would start rewatching the whole series of The Next Generation, available in its entirety on the Netflix platform.
(I'm mentioning this seemingly trivial anecdote for reasons which will result clear later on, dear Coppertops…)
The night of the interview came, and my Grimerican friends were kind enough to let me 'be at the helm' of the discussion for most of the time we had Dr. Vallee on --you can listen to the episode here. The Grimerica Show prides itself in not trying to copy the outdated radio model, hence it has no sponsors or commercial interruptions, and the guys have learned the finesse of letting their guest speak and trying to cut in as little as possible. This informal podcast format has its pros and cons: The cons is that of the looong list of questions I'd prepared I think I only manage to cover less than 15% of what I'd wanted to ask Vallee; the pros is that the conversation went into avenues I had neither expected nor anticipated. At all.
There's a lot of things we covered in the approximate 1½ hours we had Dr. Vallee on the line, but the REAL meat of the conversation happened when we began to discuss what he calls 'physical samples', and the research he's been trying to do with them. Firstly he made the distinction between two different type of samples connected to the UFO question: There are the so-called 'alien implants' which became popularized in the late 90's thanks to the work of the late Doctor Roger Leir; it was surprising to listen to Dr. Vallee admitting how, after being very skeptical initially about the nature of the odd objects being extracted out of the bodies of alleged abductees --justifiably so, given how dermatologists are well acquainted with all the kind of odd foreign bodies which get harmlessly lodged beneath the skin, to which patients will have no recollection of how they got there if they had an incident at an early age-- he is now convinced some of these implants deserve further scrutiny. Perhaps it was Jeremy Corbell and the work he made with Leir just before he died what made Vallee changed his opinion, but in any case it was refreshing to once again corroborate that the reason Dr. Vallee is exceptional in this field, is because he's not afraid of reinventing himself and change his mind about the phenomenon from time to time; unlike most researchers who may start by submitting one interesting theory or case, and then spend the rest of their career DEFENDING their position against any type of dissent and criticism --but then again, that's what good scientists DO when presented with new data.
The other samples Dr. Vallee is interested in, and the ones he's been focusing more recently, are what he calls Ejecta: Pieces of metal slag supposedly expelled by a UFO under unusual circumstances --as if the object was suffering some type of 'malfunction' or going through some kind of trouble-- and then material 'drips off' to the ground at very high temperatures, which may later be picked up by the puzzled witness after it cools off to keep as a curious memento.
Dr. Vallee mentioned the famous Ubatuba case from Brazil which came to light in 1957, but for the English-speaking UFO field perhaps a more recognizable example would be the controversial Maury Island case, which was investigated by Kenneth Arnold and ultimately led to the death of two Air Force members while they were retrieving a box containing samples of the slag ejected by a flying saucer.

Those type of samples had been analyzed decades ago, by both the Air Force and independent researchers like Prof. Sturrock of Stanford University, and at various laboratories in France. In the case of the Ubatuba samples, the researchers found they were composed of magnesium of a very high level of purity, which made them unusual… but not necessarily compelling if what you were looking for was a novel chemical element --i.e. something not of this Earth-- which would prove your case that UFOs are interplanetary craft. Eventually both the UFO buffs and the skeptics forgot about the ejecta material, which remained hidden in the drawers or cabinets of the still-puzzled witnesses.
The kind of spectrometer equipment Prof. Sturrock used in his analysis is very expensive and are under constant use by university researchers. What Dr. Vallee has been quietly doing instead is gathering samples provided to him from less publicized UFO cases, and go to his associates in Silicon Valley where they have newer spectrometers that are smaller and more affordable.
"We found something very curious," he told us. When analyzing the isotope ratios of these mineral samples, they discovered they neither conformed to the expected terrestrial ratios, nor to the extraterrestrial ones exhibited by meteoric objects. In other words, it almost seemed as if the isotopes had been reengineered, by separating them and giving them an exotic ratio only to reintroduce them into the metal alloy for some unknown reason.
Separating isotopes from Uranium was done for the first time by the Manhattan project, but separating the isotopes of 'ordinary' metals like magnesium? That would still cost millions of dollars, according to Vallee. And even if you could do it, WHY would you do it, anyway?
Now, Vallee has been making presentations on conferences recently, and also given radio interviews in which he's tried to explain this funny isotope business, but I guess nobody has been really paying the necessary attention to it. Perhaps it's to be expected; after all, most people interested in the UFO phenomenon are not scientists or metallurgists --including me!-- so talking about chemical ratios becomes too dry and technical very quickly, and it's not really what you want to hear from a man like Dr. Vallee, right? You want to talk about high strangeness, classic cases, the sorry state of the UFO field in the XXIst century --Tom DeLonge!-- or discuss the type of activity reported inside the infamous Skinwalker ranch, right? In other words, you want the 'hot chaff' my good friends Ben and Aaron love to discuss in their Mysterious Universe podcast!
But then it hit me.
I waited for Dr. Vallee to finish talking about how he and his colleagues are willing to share their samples to whomever wants to conduct their own experiments, and I excitedly jumped in
to ask him: "are you saying these results suggest we're dealing with an agency not only capable of manipulating the space-time continuum --the way you and other researchers have documented in plenty of cases-- but ALSO capable of transforming energy into matter, and vice versa?"

I almost jumped out of my chair when he replied with a resounding "Oh yes!"
And he went even further, speculating on how maybe this has more to do with the supposed 'cover-up' of the UFO reality by the US government, than any nefarious plan by the supposed 'Breakaway Civilization' or our 'Illuminati' overlords. If we assume the government has in fact recovered crashed saucers or other type of material over the years, the cover-up might have made sense in the 50's if what they were trying to accomplish was to find the secret of the 'alien propulsion system' before the Russians. Dr. Vallee firmly believes that as taxpayers the American people would have the right to demand an answer to those who might have kept these recovered items in secrecy for so long.
But… what if they still don't have an answer yet?

Let's imagine the powers that be have managed to retrieve 10, 50 or even 100 crashed saucers. They figure out how to open them up, only to find them… empty. No control room, no guidance system. Not even an engine or a discernible power source. To us, that would not make any sense, the same way someone living in the XVIII century would find one of our automobiles equally nonsensical; they would open the hood trying to find where the horse is hidden!
Not only that, but the same powers that be can't really learn anything from the 'alien' hardware, because they sooner or later discover what Valle and his colleagues are finding out: that it is composed of 'mundane materials.' No Unobtanium or Vibranium to replicate for your military R&D, and nowhere to know the purpose behind this 'absurd' reengineering.
So... pretty insightful realization to be mentioned during the interview, huh? Truth be told I can't pat myself too hard on the back for it, and this is when we go back to the 'trivial' anecdote I mentioned at the beginning of this article. Remember that I had decided to rewatch ST:TNG on Netflix the night before the interview? [Spoilers!] It just so happens that in the two pilot episodes of the first season (Encounter at Farpoint) The Enterprise encounters a mysterious object --which initially has the classical appearance of a flying saucer, BTW-- and in the end they discover they are not dealing with a 'vessel' filled with hostile aliens, but with a living entity capable of manipulating reality, and 'manifesting' any type of object into existence by sheer thought alone, in a manner similar to the 'replicators' onboard the Enterprise which were used to convert energy into matter.

Synchronistic? Maybe not so. But at least fairly serendipitous...
But let us get back to the Vallee interview. The implications of this finding, if successfully confirmed by him and other researchers --and he reminds us they are not ready to publish their results yet-- are staggering. More than a hundred years after year Albert Einstein penned the most famous physics equation in the world (E=mc2) any child in elementary school knows that the atoms which build up ordinary matter can be divided, and the process liberates an enormous amount of energy; this power is not only the basis of fission energy, but is also the reason why our current geopolitical climate is turning ever more… interesting --in the Chinese sense of the word.
But reversing the equation and turning pure energy into matter? That still remains in the realm of theoretical physics. And yet the ancient precursors of our modern scientists already had a name for such a process: TRANSMUTATION.
The men who used such a word were just as intelligent as any MIT graduate; they just didn't have computers or large hadron colliders to work with, but beakers and retorts instead. They also didn't write their findings using mathematical equations, but rather relied on arcane symbols intertwined with myth and astrology, in order to protect their findings from competitors or the dangerous gaze of the Church. These men were Alchemists, following a philosophical tradition so old its origins has been lost in the sands of Time.

In our times Alchemy is considered nothing more than a 'proto-science', and although alchemists are credited with laying the basic foundation on which the modern edifices of Chemistry and Physics were erected, they are still regarded as superstitious dullards who wasted their life in pursuit of an impossible substance called the 'lapis' or Philosopher's Stone --some scientists even gloat on the fact that with our modern equipment, they have accomplished the alchemists' wildest dreams of 'turning lead into gold.'
But the real purpose of the Great Work was much more complicated than that: it was not the mere transmutation of base metals, but the transformation of the Alchemist himself. In the esoteric Western tradition philosophers talked about the quintessence, the celestial 'aether' or divine substance, different to the common elements of Earth, Wind, Water and Fire. Aether was the 'pure air' that the gods breath, and is that of which the heavenly bodies were supposed to be composed, similar to the Hindu Akash and other mystical traditions. Without the quintessence, none of the other elements could exist.
Could we use a different term to describe this ancient alchemical term, in order to make it more approachable to our modern thinking? How about… The Matrix?

Let us then speculate on how a possible intelligence (or group of intelligences) may be able to 'manipulate the Matrix' in order to manifest whatever they need, wherever and whenever they want; be that a metal craft… or a body, in case you need to interact with the natives for whatever reason.
Revolutionary propulsion systems and exotic materials inside a UFO only make sense from the perspective of an alien craft that came from elsewhere and arrived to our planet. But when you play a computer videogame you (the player) don't need to 'insert' anything into the virtual system, and you certainly don't need to be physically transported to that digital realm. You push a few buttons and Voilá! You 'spawn' a digital avatar to interact with the game's environment. And in some games you can also manifest all sorts of transportation systems. Those transports are composed of the same 1's and 0's which make up everything in the synthetic landscape, and the programmers don't need to simulate every little intricacy or component in the vehicle in order for it to work, since they have direct access to the 'source code' controlling the dynamics of the whole game.

Preposterous? Not if you are willing to embrace Dr. Vallee's assumptions --and my own-- that our Space-Time continuum is just a subset of a bigger Reality, from which the UFO phenomenon may emanate. And if that sounds to you a lot like ancient Gnosticism, dear Coppertop, is because it is --Dr. Vallee himself conceded as much during the interview.
I know fully well all these wild speculations have gone way beyond what Jacques Vallee and his colleagues might be comfortable with endorsing, and it's true that what they are discovering opens up MORE questions than the answers it may provide. But one thing is for sure: When compared to the notion of unidentified alchemical manifestations (UAMs) invoked by intelligences capable of controlling the Matrix of our very existence, the ETH (extraterrestrial hypothesis) sounds positively quaint… and boring.
So here's hoping Vallee manages to get some big honchos of Silicon Valley involved in his research *cough*Elon Musk*cough*. And if you happen to know someone who may be in possession of potential debris ejected by a UFO, don't feel annoyed if a suave-looking French gentleman asks you about it. Cut him some slack --and give him some slag.
“There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.”
˜Mademoiselle Rose Bertin, French milliner and dressmaker to Marie Antoinette

UFOlogy is a senile discipline. By this I’m not referring to its age, or how after more than 60 years it hasn’t seemingly come any closer into solving the enigma which spawned its existence. What I mean is that UFOlogy as a field has the terrible tendency of narrow-sightedness, and of forgetting the valuable lessons from the past. Some of our critics on UFOs: Reframing the Debate, for example, complained we weren’t really saying anything particularly original compared to the thinkers and ideas of the late 60’s and early 70’s; our defense was we weren’t actually trying to be novel so much as remarking what was pointed out by the true mavericks preceding us, but hasn’t been paid attention to enough by the newer generations… to the detriment of the study of unidentified flying objects, and the intelligence(s) in control of them.
Take for instance the controversial topic of the Contactees: Most people believe it was in the 1950’s when common citizens like George Adamski or Truman Bethurum began claiming to be in contact with extraterrestrials hailing from Venus, Jupiter –or far more exotically-named planets like Clarion– and the main concern of our Space Brothers was the proliferation of nuclear weapons in our world, and the threat they posed to the survival of Humanity… or even to the stability of the entire Cosmos. Psychologists have tried to explain the sociological phenomenon of the Contactees as stemming out of Cold War anxieties, and a religious need from saviors from on-high repackaged for the consumption of the Space Age.
But those psychologists –and even most UFOlogists– would be surprised to learn warnings against a nuclear Armageddon can be traced back before the start of the Cold War and the Space Age –before even the fission of the atom had been experimentally achieved for the first time by German chemist Otto Hahn in 1938! And these warnings didn’t come from long-haired Venusians on board silvery saucers, but from a secretive individual who claimed to be in possession of a powerful legacy of knowledge, assembled from the scattered remains of a lost civilization.
These warnings came from an Alchemist.
The story I’m about to tell can be found on a book I consider to be indispensable reading by anyone interested in these topics: “Le Matin des Magiciens” (Morning of the Magicians) by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. Alas, this gem is barely known among most English-speaking UFO circles for three main reasons: It was published in 1960 (strike one); its main topic is not UFOs but philosophy and secret knowledge (strike two) and it was written by two French men (strike three! You’re out!!).
Louis Pauwels (1920-1997) was a writer and journalist with a life-long interest in Eastern mysticism and the philosophy of Gurdjieff. In 1954 he met Jacques Bergier (1912-1978) whose life is probably more deserving of a motion picture than any lazy 80’s remake: Born in Ukraine and of Jewish descent, he was a writer as well as a chemical engineer who became a resistance fighter and spy during the German occupation of France, was later captured and sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp. After the Liberation he played a key role into the discovery of the Nazi nuclear program, and how far they have gone into the development of atomic weaponry.
Bergier was credited by his friends for having a prodigious intelligence and encyclopedic knowledge. When he was 6 years old he saw an ancient woodcut illustration of two old alchemists working on their lab, which sparked his interest in the forgotten lore of Alchemy. To him the modern discoveries about radioactivity and the composition of the atom held the promise of unlocking the true secret behind the transmutation of the elements, and creating a bridge between the Past and the Future.
But his contemporaries not only considered Alchemy a superstitious nonsense (the way we still do to this day) but even nuclear energy was still regarded a ‘fringe’ subject in theoretical physics, with no possible applications in real life (just like electricity and magnetism in the XVIIIth century). In 1933 Bergier is scolded by a teacher of his –one of the best chemists in all of France– for wasting his time in such ‘infantile’ interests as nuclear physics, and admonishes him to pursue a ‘sensible’ career in the sugar refinement industry instead.
Thankfully to us Bergier was not only smart; he was also stubborn, bless his heart. He disregards the advice and continues his ‘reckless’ studies in both cutting-edge physics and ancient Alchemy. From 1934 to 1940 he became a collaborator of the eminent physicist and chemist AndrĂ© Helbronner, who was among the first scientists trying to unravel the secret behind atomic energy, before he was murdered by the Nazis in 1944.
It was at the behest of Helbronner that Bergier had a strange meeting with a mysterious individual on June of 1937, two years before Germany invaded Poland and WWII began. The meeting took place in an empty testing lab owned by ‘Gas Society’ of Paris. The strange man started the conversation by saying he knew Bergier assisted Helbronner in the quest of the atomic secret, and mentioned their recent success in unleashing radioactivity in polonium.
“You are very close to success, as are many other contemporary wise men,” said the stranger (remember Hahn’s experiment in ’38) “but the work you and your peers are doing is terribly dangerous. And it is not only you who are in peril, but the whole of Humanity.”
The man explained to Bergier the liberation of nuclear energy was easier than what was believed at the time, and the resulting superficial radioactivity could poison the entire planetary atmosphere in just a matter of years. He also warned that atomic explosives could be manufactured using only a few grams of metal and they would have the power to vaporize entire cities. “We Alchemists have known about this for a long time.”
Before Bergier could protest or ask any questions, the man continued: “I know what you are going to say –that Alchemists didn’t know the structure of the atomic nucleus, didn’t have electricity or any detection methods. Therefore they could never release the nuclear energy. I shall not try to prove what I am about to tell you now, but I beg you to repeat this to monsieur Helbronner: It only takes certain geometric assemblies, without the need for electricity or a vacuum medium. And now I will limit myself to reciting a few lines…”
The man took from over a desk a book written by FrĂ©dĂ©ric Soddy: L’interpretation du Radium (The Interpretation of Radium), found a passage and read:
“I believe there existed in the past civilizations who knew the energy of the atom and were totally destroyed for the misuse of that power.”
The man closed the book and continued his exposition, asking to an astonished Bergier to entertain the possibility of partial techniques of such ancient knowledge being able to survive throughout the ages. That knowledge had been kept in the safe hands of men who tempered their experimental curiosity with moral and religious concerns; whereas our ‘modern’ physics in his opinion was a “Science without Conscience,” having been born during the XVIIIth century for the amusement of “lords and libertine rich men” –here the Alchemist was no doubt referring to the Royal Society of London, founded in 1660 under the auspice of King Charles II, which saw considerable expansion in the late 1700s.
The strange man kept explaining to Bergier he had tried to warn other researchers like him about the dangers of their work… to absolutely no avail.
Bergier finally managed to ask a question: “If you yourself are an Alchemist, monsieur, I cannot believe you employ your time in the attempt to make gold, like Dunikowski or Doctor Miethe.” –Dunikowski was a Polish engineer who had announced in Paris he had discovered a new kind of radiation capable of transmuting quartz into gold, but was found to be a fraudster; Dr. Adolf Miethe (not to be confused with Richard Miethe, a name often mentioned in the swampy subject of Nazi-made flying saucers) of the Photochemical Department at the Berlin Technical High School claimed to have found small deposits of gold inside the mercury vapor lamps used on his lab as a source of ultraviolet light. In 1924 he claimed to have changed mercury into gold in a high-tension mercury vapor lamp. Alas, he had produced approximate $1 worth of gold… at a cost of $60,000 due to the staggering amount of energy employed in the process.
Bergier continued: “For around a year I’ve tried to document myself on the subject of Alchemy, and have only stumbled upon with either charlatans or interpretations I find ludicrous. Could you, monsieur, tell me what your own investigations consist of?”
The Alchemist replied: “You are asking me to summarize in 4 minutes 4,000 years of philosophy and the efforts of my entire life! You are also asking me also to translate in clear language concepts which do not admit any plain explanation. I can, nevertheless, tell you this: Surely you are aware that in the official Science now in progress the role of the observer is evermore important. Relativity and the Uncertainty Principle show just how much the observer intervenes in natural phenomena” –Let’s remember the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was proposed in the late 1920s.
“The secret of Alchemy,” the man revealed to Bergier, “is this: There is a way to manipulate matter and energy in such a way that it produces what contemporary scientists would call a ‘force field’. This field acts upon the observer and places him on a privileged position in the Universe. From this vantage point he has access to Realities that space and time, matter and energy tend to hide from us. This is what we call The Great Work (Magnum Opus).”
“But, what of the Philosopher’s Stone?” asked Bergier. “What of the making of gold?”
“That is nothing more than applications, particular cases” answered the Alchemist. What’s essential is not the transmutation of metals, but that of the experimenter himself. It is an ancient secret which few men will find throughout the centuries.”
“What do they transform themselves, then?” questioned Bergier.
“Perhaps, one day, I shall find out,” were the final words of the mysterious man.
Bergier never saw the Alchemist again. As for his true identity, it remains unknown to his day. Bergier himself was convinced the man was none other than the mythical Fulcanelli, the pseudonym of an anonymous individual who was the author of  two books which are highly regarded as among the best in the whole Alchemical bibliography:”Le Mystère des CathĂ©drales” (The Mystery of the Cathedrals) and “Les Demeures Philosophales” (Dwellings of the Philosophers). Fulcanelli had a protegĂ©, Eugène Canseliet, who was the one entrusted by his master to publish his books in the 1920s. Pauwels and Bergier were convinced Fulcanelli had survived the war but had gone into hiding, never to reveal anything more about his hidden knowledge.
It is said the last time Canseliet met Fulcanelli was in Spain during the 1950s, and he had gone through an incredible transformation. Instead of being an old man, like his pupil remembered him, the Alchemist had miraculously rejuvenated and acquired an androgynous appearance, proof that he had managed to complete the Great Work, and the reward was a total physical –and spiritual– metamorphosis. The caterpillar had been changed into a butterfly.
What to make of this wonderful, and yet unprovable story? We only have Bergier’s word that the meeting between himself and the man (possibly Fulcanelli) took place. The source for the account is a book that was published in 1960, 15 years after the reality of nuclear energy had been proved in the most horrendous way possible, with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
What I personally find fascinating about this pre-WWII warning about the dangers of nuclear weapons, is not only that it preceded ALL of the similar admonitions given by the so-called ‘Space Brothers’ to the Contactees in the 1950’s and 60’s –and isn’t it interesting how those ‘superior beings’ were often described as having androgynous features?– but also that, if it really happened as admitted by Bergier, all of the things declared by the Alchemist were essentially true: In 1986, the radioactive cloud produced by the Chernobyl nuclear plant literally covered the entirety of Europe. The Hiroshima bomb contained only 141 lb of enriched Uranium –not “a few grams” like the Alchemist had claimed… although maybe there are methods to further amplify the destructive power of fissible material we (luckily) haven’t discovered yet. And after the Allies defeated the Nazis they discovered Heisenberg’s rudimentary Uranium battery, consisted of extremely pure substances placed together on an specific geometric disposition –the Germans hadn’t placed it on a vacuum, just like the Alchemist had ‘predicted’.
But I guess what has fascinated me the most about Alchemy, ever since I read Morning of the Magicians in my early teens, is the idea of an ancient knowledge which parallels our current understanding on the nature of energy and matter, and perhaps even surpasses it. And yet, unlike our modern times, the men who’ve possessed that knowledge knew they had to keep it away from kings and rulers, lest it would be corrupted –or worse, used to unleash a power capable of wiping out our entire civilization… as it might have happened before.
Werner von Braun said that “Science does not have a moral dimension. It is like a knife. If you give it to a surgeon or a murderer, each will use it differently.” Perhaps so; or perhaps these are words meant to acquiesce the conscience of a man who had no qualms in killing innocents in his selfish pursuit to achieve his dreams to conquer the stars. “The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet,” von Braun is credited of saying with regards to his V-2 rocket bomb launched against London. “If we don’t do it first, somebody else will” have been the words used to justify everything from the creation of bacteriological weapons to automated killing drones. Science without Conscience, indeed…
In Morning of the Magicians, the authors tried to interest their peers in the hidden treasures buried beneath the dusty manuscripts and codices written by the ancient Alchemists, which managed to survive into our era –thousands of volumes, and yet a pittance when compared to all the scrolls turned to ashes in Alexandria. They argued that chemists, engineers, and even nuclear physicists should team up with historians and symbologists in order to crack the codes of those treatises, and see if they contained techniques and processes which could be of any use in our modern industries and laboratories. A fool’s errand, some might think, and yet Pauwels and Bergier claim that after the war in Europe was over, there were many American agents trying to get their hands on any alchemical book their could find. Bergier also narrated how when he was collaborating with the French government in the study of the nuclear capabilities of the Germans –something nobody paid any attention to in Europe… prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki– he was asked to meet with an anonymous American commander, whose real interest was not the Nazi nuclear program, but finding the whereabouts of Fulcanelli.
Given how Dr. Jacques Vallee’s recent studies with UFO’s ejected material seem to point out to a reingeneering of seemingly common metals which are almost suggestive of a bonafide alchemical transmutation —the way I speculated upon recently at The Daily Grail perhaps it is not unreasonable to assume the art of Alchemy is one of the key pieces missing in the UFO puzzle, and that someone in the high echelons of power may be in hot pursuit of the alchemists’ ancient secret.
And yet, if they are, then I suspect they will never find it. Because if Alchemy is the true Science with Conscience, as Rabelais –and our anonymous Alchemist– maintained, then the ultimate goal of this ancient art goes far beyond the gaining of material wealth and power. And the Great Work can only be fulfilled by men of ambitions tempered in the melting pots of their laboratories, through years and years of indomitable hard labor. Until they find themselves transformed from common humans into… something more.

…Perhaps the Philosopher’s Stone is the true Red Pill.