Documented as Vallée's formulation across Dimensions (1988) and lectures: schedule the appearance, observe the cultural response, adjust the next appearance. His supporting pattern is the documented drift of the phenomenon's form with technological eras, and the recurring structure of absurdity, encounters that make no engineering sense but maximum mythological sense. Vallée explicitly framed it as a hypothesis, not a finding.
The folk proof-text is the absurdity itself: entities that smell of sulfur, offer pancakes, deliver harmless platitudes about the cosmos, then vanish. Rational visitors would not bother; a belief-management system would, because the message is the point and nonsense immunizes it against verification. The trickster literature, Keel's Ultraterrestrials, converges on the same shape.
The claim: the control system is the prison's public-relations arm, the display that keeps the search for exits chasing lights, Archons with a stagecraft budget. The soul-trap synthesis absorbs Vallée whole: the thermostat keeps belief warm but never lets it boil into method.
If every era gets the anomaly its mythology can carry, is the phenomenon adapting, or are we?