J Randall Murphy
Trying To Stay Awake
You're correct. It was Vallée who popularized the Interdimensional Hypothesis. He used it to add an air of mystique to a subject that he was gettting bored writing the same old stuff about. He needed something new for his readers to chew on. So he wrote the book Dimensions. At the time, he was known for saying something to the effect that he'd be dissappointed if UFOs were just spaceships..... is a popular catch phrase like 'quantum physics' has become. Wave that sparkly wand at something these days and all sorts of magical possibilities open up in pseudoscience and cable entertainment. As if the real implications aren't off-putting enough, we gotta make **** up.
I always thought the IH came from Vallee after his experiences, then later reinforced with the Skinwalker phenomenon simply to say that The Answer may not be quite so straightforward. I still find the nuts & bolts idea much more likely even though the mechanisms used to travel may be so very advanced as to appear magical - or what we might call interdimensional today. In other words, maybe the nuts & bolts theory and the IH are really just the same thing and it's a matter of perspective.
It wasn't very long ago we were speculating about Martians and Venusians, now here we are. I wonder what will be used to describe what's going on 50 years hence.
He has since abandoned the IH, probably after realizing that it makes no sense. It's a bit like the afterlives discussion we were having, where the assumption is that there is some "extra dimension" that things can come and go from, but in the case of the IH, it doesn't require them to be dead first.
Unfortunately, the IH hypothesis falls apart just as fast. In this case it's because the situation resolves into being the same as another universe with it's own three dimensional spatial constructs — not a single extra dimension. Canadian ufologist Chris Rutkowski and I are in agreement on this point.