In Forbidden Science:  Volume Four:  Journals 1990-1999, The Spring Hill Chronicles, Jacques Vallée writes in the entry for 1 January 1996:

In one recent case an abductee reports seeing human arms and legs piled up like firewood in a corner of a dark room, lit by a blue glow. Ufologists take it at face value. To me the scene has a stunning mythopoetic connection to Germanic fairy tales where a hero spends the night in a haunted castle; little men force him to play bowling games as they knock down bones using human heads that keep dropping down the chimney. In the tale a horrible being reassembles itself out of the members that have appeared chaotically. Is that clear enough?

With Passport to Magonia (1969), Vallée began to probe the relation between modern UFO sightings and entity encounters with premodern narratives, myths, legends, tales, and chronicles of aerial phenomena and meetings with nonhuman intelligences, arguing, at times, that their similarities suggest something about the mystery behind the UFO phenomenon. His approach, in general, has been richer and more sophisticated than the approach summed up in the name von Däniken, though not always. His journal entry (above) is hardly a summation of his own positions, but it is representative of certain pitfalls the line of inquiry can fall into.

As I have argued on a number of occasions, it’s not only the ufologists who take things at face value (as if “face value” were a simple, obvious notion…). All other provisos aside, a preliminary question is exactly how are an alien abduction narrative and a folk tale equivalent kinds of narrative? Before comparing these stories one need get clear on the narrative codes that govern or governed their composition and reception. For example, anyone who takes “at face value” the Hebrews’ forty years wandering in the wilderness after fleeing Egypt and Jesus’ forty days and forty nights retreat before beginning his ministry is simply ignorant of the rhetoric or hermeneutics at work in Biblical narrative.

But even before engaging such substantial and necessary matters, a number of other problems come to mind. Taken “at face value”, assuming that the abduction narrative was retrieved by means of hypnosis, a more parsimonious explanation is that the abductee had been exposed to the fairy tale Vallée has in mind in his or her childhood and the forgotten (i.e., unconscious) content has resurfaced in surreal fashion during the hypnotic regression. Or, if one wants to indulge a more Jungian than Freudian approach, one might posit that the dreamlike memories conjured up under hypnosis and the imagery of the fairy tale both spring from the same mental source, the creative or collective unconscious.

But most tellingly is what’s revealed to be at work in Vallée’s own mind. The “Germanic fairy tale” is very likely the fourth in the Brothers Grimm’s collection, “Märchen von einem, der auszog das Fürchten zu lernen” (“The Tale of a Boy who Went Forth to Learn Fear”). In this tale,  there are no “little men” (that might count as analogues to the diminutive Greys presumably present in the abductee’s story), nor, strictly speaking,  does “a horrible being reassemble itself out of …members that have appeared chaotically”:  first one half, then another half of a man falls through the chimney; the two halves then reassemble themselves into a “hideous man.” Vallée has only dimly (mis)remembered the tale himself, fabulating a version as fictitious as the abductee’s hypnotically retrieved narrative in line with the point he desires both to perceive and make. Once we undertake the simplest philological labour, we see that the abductee’s story and the fairy tale as Vallée remembers it have next to nothing in common, other than, perhaps, certain psychological mechanisms that might be invoked to explain their respective creation.

Whatever what might finally be made of Vallée’s speculations concerning the sometimes very striking parallels between premodern and modern “UFO” narratives (as is the case with Faery and Alien Abductions), if his approach is to have more than a mythopoetic value (which I prize highly!), then a certain minimum of philological and hermeneutic reflection is called for. Is that clear enough?