FOREWORD by Jacques Vallee

SEKRET MACHINES: GODS

When Tom Delonge asked me to introduce this book, which constitutes a bold re-examination of the meaning and nature of unexplained aerial phenomena, I felt at the same time honored and challenged by the opportunity he offered, because the field has reached a crossroads.

The sightings have been ignored by academics, summarily brushed off by politicians, censored by churches, classified by the military and ridiculed by the media. Yet the reports continue to come. The experience of the unknown has only deepened, raising unsettling questions about the intrusion of the uncanny in our shiny modern world of convenient machines and superficial entertainment.

First, questions about history. When the mythology about the origins of human cultures is confronted with environmental and biological fact, what truth emerges about the birth of humanity? What forces, what influences impinged upon its development? Were there gods on the earth in those hoary days (in illo tempore)? Or did we invent them to account for our spiritual need to touch the stars—a need born millennia ago, yet more urgent and powerful than ever in our own century?

The second question is about reality itself. It is even more scientifically fundamental and psychologically troubling.

Let’s concede to the skeptics, for the sake of argument, that UFOs don’t exist, as the experts of SETI and the consensus of Academe keep assuring us. Let us assume that reports of such objects are indeed inconsistent with anthropocentric ideas of physical reality as the sophisticated edifice of modern science understands it.

In a subtle twist of logic that would have delighted the philosophers of the Derrida school, this denial of the testimony compiled from hundreds of thousands of sightings all over the world suddenly enables us to accept them freely: What harm could there be in acknowledging these meaningless stories in the light of day? As the authors of this book argue brilliantly, once we agree that UFOs are impossible, nothing stops us from opening the files—even the secret ones: Indeed, “The UFO can be ‘known’ only by not asking what it is.”

Which logically leads us to realize something else: If UFOs and physical reality are incompatible, maybe the time has come to re-negotiate physical reality. Because, as we all know, these impossible UFOs that don’t exist are not going away.

Tom DeLonge and Peter Levenda, who have had privileged access to long-denied information, have re-opened the debate around these two questions. The persistence of the phenomenon in the full glory of its impossibility forces a fundamental re-examination of our history and our presence on earth, and it opens the heady prospect of a breakthrough beyond the confusion and ugly contradictions of modern physics.

Nothing is easy or simple once you take this step. As a reader of this book, if you agree with us to question old ideas and entrenched theories, you enter a world of dusty records, tentative interpretations and irreconcilable ideologies. As Jeffrey Kripal has noted, we dwell here “in a form of gnosis or forbidden knowledge well beyond reason and completely beyond belief.”

To their credit, the authors are well aware that this ancient material is brittle. They bravely question the scholars’ various hypotheses and the respectable traditions of established pieties, but they do not try to force upon us a new ideology of their own. Retaining the analytical sense that is critical in approaching this material, they display it before us in all its complexity. They invite you, as they have invited me, to join in a completely new phase of research, informed by the oldest and the most recent sources.

The “Sekret machines” have a message for us. The time has come to decipher it.

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