Link: https://old.reddit.com/r/HighStrangeness/comments/1tq1qda/what_do_you_think_of_jacques_vall%C3%A9es_theories/

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The original was posted on /r/highstrangeness by /u/SilverSpaceRobot10 on 2026-05-28 12:10:52+00:00.

If you don't know about him, I urge you to go down the rabbithole but for now here's a brief rundown:

Vallée introduced the concept of 'ultraterrestrials', that is entities that are removed from us not necessarily by distance in space but by different dimensions or 'layers' of reality which we still haven't fully grasped. Think of it this way: For most of human history, people thought that the ocean was the only frontier for exploration. The idea of the sky being a frontier didn't exist and people certainly didn't theorize about life or civilizations being up there. Vallée asks: What if space is our era's ocean? What if there are other frontiers that we aren't even thinking of exploring? These are the frontiers where the ultraterrestrials reside.

That said, Vallée suggests that we might have been visited by ultraterrestrials and that is how a lot of our mythology, folklore and urban legends came to be. Now, there is no doubt that urban legends are culturally informed. The flatwoods monster looks like a stereotypical 50s B-movie alien, Sam the Sandown Clown looks like a 20th century animatronic clown. Mythological monsters too tend to look like mutations or amalgamations of animals that are found in the region of origin: Think of the Japanese Kappa, the native american Wendigo, the Indian Buru, the Norse Fenrir, etc. If that was their true form you'd expect them to show up in every culture the same way. But what if humans aren't capable of perceiving ultraterrestrials directly? What if all this diversity is the result of different brains trying to comprehend what they are seeing and innevitably projecting some cultural imagery/expectations? Similarly to how archetypes appear in mythologies and dreams accross cultures but with different specifics. If that's the case what we now perceive as a UFO would appear as a dragon to a person from the middle ages. What we see as greys would appear to them as elves or leprechauns. This also explains why even ufos themselves used to look like blimps in the blimp era, saucers in the sputnik/satellite era and black traingles in the modern stealth fighter era.