Vallée, Kastrup, Friston — Three levels of explanation
A coherent reading of the UAP phenomenon and consciousness can be articulated in three complementary levels: observation (Vallée), ontological explanation (Kastrup), and mechanistic formalization (Friston).
Vallée: the observation
The phenomenon behaves like a distributed intelligence system.
Jacques Vallée, from Passport to Magonia (1969) and his work for the Defense Intelligence Agency (AAWSAP database system), describes the UAP phenomenon as a control system that adapts to cultural context: Marian apparitions, fairies, flying saucers, drones. He does not posit a single “extraterrestrial” origin in the classic sense, but a distributed intelligence — an architecture that observes, predicts, and modulates manifestations according to the beliefs and cognitive framework of witnesses.
His recent synthesis (2024–2026) incorporates the hypothesis of artificial biological entities (“noticing machines”) and advanced AI as the operational backbone. The phenomenon thus behaves like a network of agents — or “alters” — capable of persisting over time and adapting without revealing a single nature. This is the observation: the “what” of the behaviour.
Jacques Vallée · Themes (consciousness)
Kastrup: the explanation
Consciousness is the substrate; the mental and the physical are not separate.
Bernardo Kastrup (Essentia Foundation) defends analytic idealism: consciousness is the fundamental substrate of reality; what we call “matter” or “physical” is not a substance separate from the mental, but an expression of experience. Individual minds are dissociated “alters” of universal consciousness.
In this framework, the fact that the UAP phenomenon presents both physical aspects (radar, ground traces, biological effects) and mental ones (visions, abductions, altered states) is not a contradiction: if everything is experience, a “distributed intelligence” can manifest in both registers without having to choose between “it’s in the head” and “it’s objective.” Kastrup provides the ontological explanation: the “why” it is possible — no metaphysical wall between inner and outer.
Friston: the formalization
Active inference, Markov blankets, and free energy minimization.
Karl Friston (University College London) formalized the free energy principle: systems that persist — from the neuron to the organism to the mind — do so by minimizing “surprise” (or free energy), maintaining an internal model of the world and acting so that sensory inputs match predictions. Active inference is the perception–action coupling by which an agent updates both its beliefs and its environment.
Markov blankets define the statistical boundary between a system’s “internal” states and “external” states: everything on the other side of the blanket is only inferred indirectly. A “self” or “agent” can be described as a Markov blanket that minimizes free energy. A distributed intelligence can then be modelled as a set of agents (blankets) influencing each other through their actions and predictions — without positing a distinct physical substance. Friston provides the mechanistic formalization: the mathematical “how.”
A key paper: Cognitive Dynamics (Friston et al., 2014)
Friston K., Sengupta B., Auletta G., “Cognitive Dynamics: From Attractors to Active Inference”, Proceedings of the IEEE, 2014.
Read the paper (PDF, IEEE Xplore) — Direct PDF
For beginners
On this page, Vallée describes the UAP phenomenon as a "distributed intelligence", Kastrup explains why the mental and the physical are not separate, and Friston provides the mathematical formalization. The paper below is a cornerstone of that formalization: it shows where "agents" that perceive and act come from in theory — without appealing to a creator or an external programmer.
The central idea: any system that "holds together" over time (a cell, an animal, a mind) must constantly do two things: (1) predict what it will perceive, and (2) act so that reality matches its predictions. As soon as it does this, a boundary appears between the "inside" of the system (its internal states) and the "outside" (the rest of the world). This boundary is called a Markov blanket: it is the limit beyond which the system only knows the world indirectly, through what it perceives and what it does.
A few simplified keywords: "surprise" is when what we perceive does not match what we expected — living systems tend to reduce it. "Active inference" means we act to make the world conform to our expectations (instead of just enduring it). An "agent" or a "self", in this framework, is a region of the world that maintains such a boundary and minimizes surprise. Nothing magical: these are emergent properties of physical systems obeying precise statistical laws.
The paper presents two simulations. The first: start from a chaotic "bath" of randomly fluctuating variables; without programming anything by hand, a stable "bubble" emerges — a zone that keeps a boundary and minimizes surprise. The second: one agent performs an action; a second agent, by minimizing its own surprise, ends up reproducing that action (it "imitates"). We thus see a form of understanding others emerge. These results link the theory to real cognitive processes and intersubjectivity.
In short: a distributed intelligence (like the one Vallée attributes to the UAP phenomenon) can be conceived as a multitude of such "agents" — each a Markov blanket minimizing free energy — in interaction. The Friston et al. paper gives a formal demonstration and numerical illustrations.
Karl Friston (Wikipedia) · Free energy principle, active inference
Synthesis
Observation, ontology, and mechanism reinforce each other.
Vallée observes that the phenomenon behaves like a distributed intelligence system. Kastrup explains why this is coherent: consciousness is the substrate; the mental and the physical are not separate. Friston formalizes the mechanism: systems that minimize free energy, bounded by Markov blankets and coupled through active inference, give predictive structure to the idea of interacting “agents” or “alters.”
The three levels — observation, ontology, formalization — do not contradict each other: they illuminate each other. A scientific approach to the UAP phenomenon and consciousness can build on this triangulation.