The cloud country of medieval European legend, from which sky ships were said to descend and to which crops and people were said to be carried away. Jacques Vallee took it as the title of Passport to Magonia (1969), the book that set fairy lore, Marian apparitions and modern close encounters side by side and argued that they are one phenomenon in changing costume: the same abductions, the same missing time, the same gifts of useless information, dressed for the century that reports them.
The argument is structural rather than evidential, and that is both its power and its weakness. It explains why the encounter literature repeats itself across cultures with no contact between them, and it is not constrained by the physical record, since a folkloric parallel is available for almost any modern detail. In The Invisible College the method becomes explicit: a comparative table sets the miracles of the Marian record item by item beside landing cases drawn from the earlier book, and the enabling definition, that a miracle is any event, real, imagined or faked, that creates verifiable paranormal effects, admits the whole of religious history as data. Magonia is the historical arm of the Control System Hypothesis, and the reason its author reads Fatima 1917 as a case file rather than a devotion.
Connections
Jacques Vallee · Control System Hypothesis · The Invisible College · Fatima 1917 · Ultraterrestrial Models · John Keel