Passport to Magonia by Jacques Vallée - Book Review

Transcript

what's up guys thank you for watching welcome back to my channel I'm Justin burkels and I am shooting uh filming here for the first time in my new office SL Studio check this out how cool is this guess what it's time for another book review this week I will be reviewing the uh classic uh UFO book probably one of the most referenced uh books in the UFO You Know Field um that has ever been written written by the goat of UFO research jacqu valet himself that's right this week we are talking about passport to Magonia all right guys this is such an interesting book I know that normally I'm more on top of you know more recent stuff but I'm relatively new to the whole UFO topic so I have a ton of catching up to do which means I have to go back to some of these oldies but goodies read them myself cuz I never read them before and uh and I want to review them for you guys while I do that so we're going to be tackling jacqu fet's Masterpiece today passport to Magonia do me a quick favor here if you're not already subscribed to the Channel please just hit that subscribe button real fast if you like uh book reviews or videos about UFO foes mysticism spirituality hit the like button share comment all that kind of stuff that's the best way to help me out thank you so much let's get back to it jacqu valet is one of the original kind of UFO researchers and he is also just a generally brilliant person um he worked on the earliest version of the internet and he has worked on a lot of other emerging technology uh over the decades but on top of his role you know as a scientist and a very serious one at that he also has a hobby studying UFOs one of the more interesting uh bits of trivia about jacqu valet is if you have seen the classic UFO movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind uh the French scientist in the movie played by Francois truo was actually directly based in modeled on jacqu valet he's basically supposed to be the cinema Hollywood version of jacqu valet it's simply because they never watched the television or perhaps they watched it but never made the psychic connection it's a coincidence it's not scientific listen to me maor it is an event sociological so that's really interesting he's been that well known for that long that even in that movie he was considered the preeminent UFO scholar and and scientist and researcher and and that still pretty much continues to today uh he's still active in the field uh giving interviews he's shown up in recent books like in Diana pula's American Cosmic uh she talks about him if you follow Jesse Michaels on YouTube uh he's spoken with shc and interviewed him uh so he's very much still in the Zeitgeist and and on top of this topic um but I had never read any of his books so I wanted to go back and read passport to Magonia um and start there because I've always been very interested in mythology and folklore and you know ancient history and all that kind of stuff if you watch any of the other videos on my channel outside of the topic I'm sure you know that uh and so I was interested to see the kind of parallels that he drew uh from you know folklore and mythology to the modern UFO phenomenon and that's exactly what passport Tonia uh does and so it says here you know the uh subtitle is actually from folklore to flying saucers all right so that gives you a little taste of what this book is about I also just want to read a quick section from jacques's own um preface here to the book uh where he explains kind of what his goal was in writing the book uh in his own words I like to do that for most of the books that I review um because I think it's helpful to know you know what the author's intentions were when they wrote the book so this is what jacqu has to say from the preface it says if we take a wide sample of this hisorical material we find that it is organized around one central theme visitation by an aial people from one or more remote legendary countries the names and attributes vary but the main idea clearly does not Magonia Heaven hell elfland all such places have one common characteristic we are unable to reach them alive EX except as we shall see on very special occasions emissaries from these Supernatural abodes come to Earth sometimes under human form and sometimes as monsters they perform wonders they serve man or fight him they influence civilizations through mystical Revelation they seduce Earth women and the few Heroes who dare seek their friendship find the girls from elfland endowed with desires that betray a carnal rather than purely aerial nature this book is an attempt to build a bridge between two clusters of rumors observations and reports on the one hand the claims of men and women who are alive today and state that they have observed such beings and on the other the large body of similar data that has come to us through tradition he continues to summarize then the book you are about to read is an effort to provide systematic documentation and literary illustration of modern folklore in the perspective of ancient myths and traditional legendary material so you can see here that jacqu valet is taking a similar approach to the UFO phenomenon he calls it modern folklore that uh Diana wal pooka took when she was studying it as a modern um kind of emergent uh religious phenomenon and I think that is the most interesting way to look at the UFO UAP topic because a lot of people think this started in the 1940s with Roswell but it absolutely did not and we will get into some really interesting examples here of some ancient aliens uh well ancient UFO sightings anyways and uh reports of flying earth and wear vessels you know saucers uh and other such interesting descriptions but a lot of what he talks about in the book is actually European fairy medieval folklore about people who experience missing time people who are abducted and reappear in a different place people who undergo weird genetic hybridization human fairy processes and some kind of fairy land somewhere or who are transported to a magical cave and uh then disappear until you know much later all this kind of stuff and he talks about how there's these direct parallels from you know ancient indigenous folklore in mythology to Medieval fairy lore and uh all the way through to to today to the UFO sightings beyond that he talks about some absolutely fascinating sightings from just about the century before Roswell so going back you know to the 1800s to the 19th century through the early 20th century before the whole UFO flying saucer thing was in media and everything else and there are a lot of interesting descriptions of Encounters of uctions and other very interesting uh phenomena from that time period so I'm going to talk about a couple specific examples from the book as I go through the rest of the review one of my personal favorite parts of this whole book is right at the beginning and it's where he discusses ancient Japanese sightings of what appear to be UFOs and this whole part is super interesting I'm you know don't want to make this video super long I'm not going to read it all to you but there are a couple little Parts here that I just think are so great I just want to cover them real quickly for you okay so right here in the very first chapter uh there is a section where he states that you know the common belief at that time in the 1960s when this book was written was that it all started in 1947 with Roswell and those were the first UFO sightings and the investigation started after that however he gives a case of what he calls the very first documented scientific investigation of a UFO sighting and it is actually from Japan in 1235 okay September 24th 1235 and it says general yoritsu was camping with his army suddenly a curious phenomenon on was observed mysterious sources of light were seen to swing in circle in the southwest moving in Loops until the early morning General yits ordered what we would now term a quote full-scale scientific investigation and his Consultants set to work fairly soon they made their report this part is hilarious check this out this was what they stated the whole thing is completely natural it is only the wind making the Stars sway it's almost as bad as swamp gas uh and it says his source of information for this report was one yuk J matsumura of Yokohama who adds his own note to the Scholar's explanation and says Scholars on government pay have always made ambiguous statements like this so if it makes you feel any better absurd uh dismissals of UFO encounters didn't begin with the United States in the 1940s or 50s nope this nonsense has been going on since uh at least the 13th century in Japan and it seems like even at that time government Scholars were coming up with bogus uh explanations for things just oh that's all natural just lights swirling and moving in the sky it's just the wind moving the Stars around it's just swamp gas you know sometimes it appears in one place and then appears in another and it creates the illusion of movement yeah come on uh so I don't know I hope that makes you guys feel better it certainly just made me laugh and you know mysterious lights in the sky orbs of light that move in strange ways that is one of the most commonly reported morphology or whatever you want to call it of UFOs however one of the other most common types is the prototypical Flying Saucer right dish-shaped craft maybe a little bubble in the middle something like that right looks like a saucer skipping across water is how Kenneth Arnold famously described their movement and then a reporter took that and said oh they're flying saucers so that term has stuck ever since but long long long before Kenneth Arnold ever described a weird craft in the sky or actually he saw multiple crafts in the sky uh that looked like saucers there is a report from 1180 also from Japan that shc talks about in this book where someone describes a craft that he calls a earth and wear vessel saucer right uh that is flying through the sky uh it changes course and it has a luminous Trail behind it so I think that's really fascinating as far as I can tell that is the earliest report of anything like a saucer dish round circular object um of that kind uh that is reported there are far far more ancient reports of orbs of light Balls of Fire flaming Shields in the sky from Roman armies things like that um but they te tend to be the the orbs of light or the fiery ball type uh UFOs not the metallic round uh Flying Saucer type of UFOs so as far as I know that is the very first reference in uh human history of that specific type of UFO which is super interesting but the book doesn't stop there he discusses the ancient Jan statues so if you don't know about the Jan people they were a indigenous group of people to Japan that um predates the current cultures um that we think of as Japanese this was a super ancient culture one of the most interesting in the ancient world um and it was advanced in a lot of ways as far as we know they were the first people in the entire world to make pottery to invent pottery and make it um it also appears that their civilization lasted for somewhere around 14,000 years in some form or another and then was assimilated into uh modern Japanese culture and up till today but the ancient Jan made these really weird statues so their culture lasted for a very long time and like I stated they invented Pottery as far as I can tell they also started taking these really cool little statues out of clay and firing them and so some of those have survived well some of those weird statues look like people wearing strange sophisticated mechanical helmets of some kind let's just put it that way they look like astronauts or scuba divers or something like that they are clearly humanoid people wearing weird helmets helmets that don't really make sense in the cultural context they've never even found a helmet that looks like that from any part of ancient Japan um and they they don't all look the same either some of the helmets have like slits like this some have like perforated holes with like a a mouthpiece looking thing kind of like a a Hazmat like face shield mask with the the the breathing apparatus on it right whatever those weird Jon statues with helmets were one thing thing is for certain we can tell there was a lot of weird stuff going on in the Skies over Japan there are numerous reports going back uh to at least the 10th Century from what I saw here in Japan um of weird objects in the sky all the way through you know to the present in fact right outside of Fukushima where there's the nuclear um you know reactor there power plant uh there is a UFO Museum and the local town there uh is obsessed with UFOs and they've said that they have seen you know numerous UFOs in that area forever uh their ancestors saw them they see them there's a lot of UFO activity that has gone on in Japan going back at least a thousand years and if you count the strange Jan helmet things as possible visitation from Aliens or future humans or what ever UFOs are uh it could potentially go back thousands of years even 10,000 years or so uh visitation there we don't know uh what we do know is like I said lots of strange stuff in the sky over ancient Japan that I didn't know much about until reading passport to Magonia there is one more specific uh incident that I want to talk about from the book here because I think it is highly relevant um to Americans and to my American audience to myself I thought this was super interesting and this is a report from none other than Alexander Hamilton who observed quite the UFO that's right the Alexander Hamilton had his own UFO experience States here that on April 2st 1897 Alexander Hamilton wrote that he was awakened by a noise among the cattle and went out with two other men he then saw an Airship descend gently toward the ground and hover within 50 yards of it quote it consisted of a great cigar-shaped portion possibly 300 ft long with a carriage underneath the carriage was made of glass or some other transparent sub alternating with a narrow strip of some material it was brilliantly lighted within and everything was plainly visible it was occupied by six of the strangest beings I ever saw they were jabbering together but we could not understand a word they said upon seeing the witnesses the pilots of the strange ship turned on some unknown power and the ship Rose about 300 feet above them it seemed to pause and hover directly over a 2-year-old Hyer cow which was balling and jumping apparently fast in the fence going to her we found a cable about half an inch in thickness made of some red material fastened in a slip knot around her neck one end passing up to the vessel and the Hyer Tangled in The Wire Fence we tried to get it off but could not so we cut the wire loose and stood in amazement to see the ship cow and All Rise slowly disappearing in the Northwest Hamilton was so frightened by this that he couldn't sleep Rising early Tuesday I started out by horse hoping to find some trace of my cow this I failed to do but coming back in the evening found that link Thomas about 3 or 4 miles west of Leroy had found the hide legs and head in his field that day he thinking someone had butchered a stolen Beast had brought the hide to town for identification but was greatly mystified in not being able to find any tracks in the soft ground after identifying the hide by my brand I went home but every time I would drop to sleep I would see the cursed thing with its big lights and hideous people I don't know whether they are devils or Angels or what but we all saw them and my whole family saw the ship and I don't want any more to do with them so I find that report incredibly fascinating not only because it's from the late 19th century and from someone as prominent as Alexander Hamilton but that it also has the ties to the cattle mutilation phenomenon that seems to be strangely mixed up in this whole UFO thing you know I don't know what's going on with the cattle why they disappear why they get bowled up into the Sky by an Airship and we only find few parts of them afterwards no tracks in the ground it had to been dropped there after they dissected it or something but that phenomenon continues to this day and obviously people have heard about cattle mutil it's not a fun topic to look into I get it it's gross I don't even eat meat so I you know I I don't even like eat beef I don't want to see cows being torn apart cut apart open that kind of thing I get it but you can't leave that part of the UFO phenomenon now it's an important piece of the puzzle and I find it super fascinating that it goes all the way back to Alexander Hamilton and for those of you who have been following very recent developments uh in the UFO UAP uh field I'm sure you're familiar with the term psionics uh maybe you've seen the news Nation interview or the Jesse Michaels interview with Jake Barber or any of the other people on his team from skywatcher who claim that they can psychically communicate with summon call uh non-human intelligence and these uaps UFOs that they can actually connect to them with their mind and summon them uh at will and that they will appear well it might interest you to know that sh talks about this in his book and what he talks about is actually ancient writers and the kind of occult literature as people call it of uh people who would summon fairies or demons or Angels or whatever and communicate with them well this is almost exactly what the whole psionics thing is about today and it's how I first got interested in the UFO Topic in the first place I was studying esoteric and occult literature I was studying people who believed that they could summon or contact non-human intelligence and get information uh from from those intelligences and downloads and things like this and it directly led me into the UFO topic and the psionics thing the summoning of non-human intelligences that is a direct through line from Ancient Ancient esoteric and occult practices to Modern UFO lore that is happening right now with Jake Barber and the skywatcher crew uh I think we need to take a new look at the history of demons and angels and fairies and all this kind of folkal and religious history and see if maybe there's a better way to interpret those stories rather than purely psychological and there's just one more quick quote from jock I want to leave you with today uh kind of summarizing the book If you like uh comparative mythology learning about folklore learning about how things in the ancient past relate to things today if that interests you I know know you'll love this book so let me leave you with one last quote from jacqu here at the end of the book he States if we decide to avoid extreme speculation but to make certain basic observations from the existing data five principal facts Stand Out rather clearly Fact one there has been among the public in all countries since the middle of 1946 an extremely active generation of colorful rumors they Center on a considerable number of observations of unknown machines close to the ground in rural areas the physical traces left by these machines and their various effects on humans and animals Fact Two when the underlying archetypes are extracted from these rumors the saucer myth is seen to coincide to a remarkable degree with the fairy faith of Celtic countries the observations of the scholars of past ages and the widespread belief among all peoples concerning entities whose physical and psychological descriptions plac them in the same category as the present day UFO knots fact three the entities human Witnesses report to have seen heard and touched fall into various biological types among them are beings of Giant stature men indistinguishable from us winged creatures and various types of monsters most of the so-called Pilots however are dwarfs and form two main groups one dark hairy beings identical to the Gnomes of medieval Theory with small bright eyes and deep rugged old voices and two beings who answer the description of the sils of the Middle Ages or the elves of the fairy Faith with human complexions oversized heads and silvery voices all the beings have been described with and without breathing apparatus beings of various categories have been reported together fact number four the entity's reported behavior is as consistently absurd as the appearance of their craft is ludicrous in numerous instances of verbal communication with them their assertions have been systematically misleading this is true for all cases on record from encounters with the Gentry in the British Isles to conversations with Airship Engineers during the 1897 Midwest flat and discussions with the alleged martians in Europe North and South America and elsewhere this absurd Behavior has had the effect of keeping professional scientists away from the area where that activity was taking place it has also served to give the saucer myth its religious and mystical overtones fact number five the mechanism of the apparitions in legendary historical and modern times is standard and follows the model of religious Miracles several cases which bear the official stamp of the Catholic Church such as the um Lady of Fatima in Guadalupe Etc are in fact if one applies the definition strictly nothing more than UFO phenomena where the entity has delivered a message having to do with religious beliefs rather than with fertilizers or engineering but the book doesn't just end there by uh you know with the narrative portion of the book that's only half of the pages here so if you take a look this half of the book is the actual narrative text I just described to you the second half of the book is a catalog of one century from 1868 to 1968 of UFO sightings he discusses when where who was involved all of that as much detail as he can and it just lists I don't know how many hundreds of reports um so if you want an in-depth catalog of early UFO sightings of that Century right so mid uh 19th century to Mid 20th century I don't think you'll find a better Source uh for that but if you also want some really fast fascinating speculation and comparison and all of that the first part of the book goes into all of that so once again this book here passport to Magonia by jacqu valet is just an absolute treasure in Masterpiece and if you are interested in the UFO Topic at all you've got to get yourself a copy you just you have to read the book it's going to be referenced in every other UFO book you read it kept happening to me and so I went oh my God I just I got to read this thing myself I had seen you know multiple interviews with shock and of course he's written a bunch of books since then the invisible College among them another really famous one I'm sure I'll get to that one soon but seriously you've got to you've got to get yourself a copy give it a read quickly flip through the catalog if you don't want to go through it in depth but man I'm going to be coming back to that for some future videos I can assure you that so that's it for my review today I hope you like the video if you are interested and any of that stuff I was talking about get yourself a copy and uh you know join me again next time for my next book review really quickly here uh do me a favor if you are not subscribed to my Channel please hit that subscribe button right now I am so close to 1,000 subscribers uh and being able to you know unlock some monetization here for the channel you know I don't do this to make money I do it to because I like it and to share you know interesting books with people to promote reading I think reading books is good for people for society and to promote open-mindedness about weird topics like mysticism and UFOs and stuff like that and so I do my best to cover them with an open mind you know an open heart compassionately listening to people 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