Section I -- The Hypothesis

In 1975, Jacques Vallee -- astronomer, computer scientist, and the ufologist on whom Spielberg modelled the French researcher in Close Encounters of the Third Kind -- proposed a hypothesis that no one in technology would take seriously for another forty years.

The UFO phenomenon, Vallee argued, operates as a control system. Not a spacecraft. Not a hoax. A thermostat. It introduces just enough anomaly to destabilise consensus without replacing it. It teases, provokes, contradicts itself, and refuses to resolve. It adapts its presentation to the expectations of its audience: a rotating disc over Fatima in 1917, a Tic Tac off San Diego in 2004. The packaging changes. The function does not. His computer analysis of sighting waves concluded that the phenomenon resembled a schedule of reinforcement -- the kind used in behavioural training -- not an exploratory mission.

The hypothesis went largely unexamined outside ufology. It described a mechanism for which there was no obvious terrestrial analogue.

Then someone built one.