I ended my review of Jacques Vallée’s and Paolo Harris’ Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret noting that the book, because of its suggesting a connection between the detonation of the first atomic bomb and the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP!) crash it investigates, finds “its place between the covert fictions of George Adamski (whose Venusians came to warn us of the dangers of atomic energy) and the overt fiction of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.” Since, I’ve become aware of certain uncanny motifs Trinity and Twin Peaks share.
Vallée has made no secret of his intuiting a connection between the Trinity “test”, “the emergence of our civilization into, essentially, the nuclear age,” and the San Antonio crash. What crashed was said to be egg-shaped (like an avocado). From a damaged side of the ship, diminutive pilots were said to have emerged, who were compared to Praying Mantises, Fire Ants, or Jerusalem Crickets.
It’s hardly unique to perceive the advent of atomic weapons as a fateful development in human history. For Vallée, evidence of our having entered the Atomic Age precipitated a non-human intervention, however ambiguous. In David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, Season 3, Episode 8, the Trinity test, too, disturbs a barrier between our world and some other, opening the way for no less mysterious, inhuman agents (the “Woodsmen”) and unnatural evil. The otherworldly origin of these beings and others is tied into the UFO mythology by Lynch’s recasting Project Blue Book (that thematically rimes with the series’ motif of “the Blue Rose”) as an investigation into just these beings and their nature.
In Episode 8, the Trinity test is followed in the next scene by the arrival of the Woodsmen through a weird portal in an abandoned convenience store somewhere in the American Southwest. The action shifts to an otherworldly void, where an amorphous if feminine figure emits an ectoplasmic vomit.
This extrusion seems a stream of unnatural evil that will manifest itself in our mundane reality in various ways. One of these is the landing of an egg (some visible in the still, above) in the general vicinity of the Trinity test and the convenience store, which will hatch a weird frog-moth hybrid that eventually makes its way into the mouth and down the throat of a hapless young woman, to possess or impregnate her.
The parallels are as striking as they are mystifying: the Trinity test is supernaturally momentous, triggering an opening between worlds and the intrusion into ours of the denizens of that other. In both imaginings (and Vallée’s and Harris’ is an imagining, being a reconstruction from hearsay), this intrusion manifests as an egg out of which emerge unnatural (however animal-like) beings. Here, I only register these shared motifs and venture no further speculations (though some suggest themselves: the oval shape of the first A-bombs and the connotations of the egg in general, the unnaturalness of mutated creatures, etc.), other than to note that the source of “the myth of things seen in the skies” works in mysterious ways!
Skunkworks 
Fascinating!
A possible motif for the insect-like critters emerging from the San Antonia egg craft might be an unconscious invocation of a chrysalis. This might be explained by Jorjani’s analysis of the more typical Grays as stand-ins for imagoes of insects that are warning us about our failed future in which we become totally enslaved to technology. The Grays (with their large, insectoid eyes) are reputed in many accounts to be emotionless and even rather like automatons. Praying mantises have apparently been reported in some alien abduction accounts. Humanity, in this scheme, is like a larva that is passing through a dangerous time in its development. As Jorjani suggests, the theme of the Gray is humanity calling itself from its own future, albeit psychically (Jorjani mentions Vallee in this interview, by the way):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WOgW48cvck (relevant discussion starts especially around 8:20)
(qualifier: I don’t care for Jorjani’s politics but I think he says a lot of interesting things. Nor do I think that there is anything to UFOs/UAPs beyond social and psychological phenomena triggered by stimuli that are prosaic. Perhaps at some deep psychical level, Vallee & Harris, the witnesses conveyed in their story, and the writers of Twin Peaks all manifested an insectoid motif that warned us about our future, triggered by the terrifying power of nuclear weaponry)
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Luis, we are very much on the same page here. Surely, what gets interpreted as insectoid “ETs” (Greys, Mantids, etc.) lends itself, ultimately, to just the kind of unfolding of its connotations along the lines you cite from (that latter day Nietzsche wannabe) Jorjani and that you develop yourself: insectoids as chrysalis, as horrible mutations, as inhuman (in their hive-mindedness, in their soulessness, etc.). That, in the San Antonio crash, they emerge from an _egg_ is, as I remark, not unsuggestive, either… At any rate, on the one hand, that we post-A-bomb people should imagine such things is perfectly understandable, while, on the other, that Vallée and Harris should imagine it as something _real_ and that coy, right-brained artist Lynch should imagine it as something, well, imaginary, is, as you say, fascinating…
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Awesome! Thanks Bryan.
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Watch this and understand your connection between the UAP phenomenon and Twin Peaks is closer to reality than you can possibly imagine.
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Thanks for the addendum, Coop’!
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Question though: if the interdimensional beings were allowed into our world by the Trinity test, how were they “always” here? (as suggested in the video) Is the video showing something that’s considered Twin Peaks canon? In any case, I wonder if Lynch had ever read Vallee before writing the series.
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The beauty of Lynch is its evasive, elusive suggestiveness, more than its allusiveness, i.e., on the one hand, the suspicions expressed in the video are just that, suspicions, speculations expressed, I take it, by a character; there is, therefore, no “canon” strictly speaking (though I would take the book the video is made from as a kind of fan fiction, even if the author is Mark Frost!).
I doubt Lynch read Vallée. This “unified field theory” of paranormal phenomena expressed by the video is “in the air”: you find both explicitly in George Hansen and I detected it, however correctly, at work in the X-Files. It’s even there in the way UFO, etc. books are _marketed_, on one shelf with the ghosts and monsters, etc. In the end, it’s more a question of what _Frost_ has read or been influenced by…
What is interesting is how the metaphysical / paranormal significance of the Trinity test is a feature in both Twin Peaks and Trinity: The Best Kept Secret. This confluence points at least to how great minds think alike!
A very compelling reading of season 3 is developed by Eric Wargo, here
http://thenightshirt.com/?p=4076
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Wow, thanks for this!
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