Here is a first draft of something. There is still a lot of work to do, and I am forgetting a ton of stuff that I need to look up.
Very early on, and as far as I can tell independently, Quebec Ufology developed a spiritual orientation and situated UFOs as one of many phenomena in a much broader field that included spiritism, secret societies, esoteric christianity, time travel, and paranormal phenomena such as telepathy and telekinisis. Jean Casualt was probably the first published Ufologist in Quebec. In his 1972 Manifest pour l'Avenir (A Manifesto for the Future), he examines the relationship between UFOs, religious faith, Catholic mysticism, and secret government. Significantly, the book is dedicated to a spirit guide called Monak. This dedication marks the work as fundamentally different from the classic American contactee strand in that Monak is not obviously an extra-terrestrial entity, or even related to the UFO phenomenon. Monak's guidance merely brings the author toward the light, and in the process reveals truths about all phenomena, including UFOs.
It isn't surprising that following the rapid collapse of Quebec's virtual theorcracy in the period 1959-65, in the wake of the Quiet Revolution, Ufology would emerge as one of the elements that fill the conceptual vacuum. And it isn't surprising that it does so in the context of a wider spiritual awakening, and as an element of it, rather than as its own field.
In that same year of 1972, Jean Ferguson publishes the first work in what would rapidly become the minority nuts and bolts, physical ET strand of Quebec Ufology. It may not be a coincidence that Ferguson's Tout sur les Soucoupes Volantes (Everything About Flying Saucers) was published out of Val d'Or, the capital of the outlying mining region of Abitibi, more than 500 km north of Montreal, and an area still today quite physically and culturally removed from the rest of the province.
Both Casault and Ferguson are still active, and still largely true to their original orientation. But while in 1972 the rest of the world was still firmly in the late classic nuts and bolts phase of Ufology, Ferguson's version of the field never really took off in Quebec. In some ways, it felt to early French Canadian Ufologists like Casault that the rest of the world was slowly catching up to their holistic vision of UFOs as beings of light and as bearers of messages from ourselves to ourselves.
In his 1975 Le Procès des Soucoupes Volantes (Flying Saucers on Trial), Claude MacDuff does not take position explicitely on the nuts and bolts vs spiritual UFO question. He simply approaches the phenomenon like a prosecuting attorney out to prove the existence of UFOs and the book is laid out like the transcript of an imaginary trial. As in most of Quebec Ufology, the bible is never far, but it is used as people's exhibit A, under the theory of Ancient Aliens.
In 1976, Richard Glenn began broadcasting Esoterisme Expérimental, the most watched program in the history of Quebec public access television, and which ran until 1997 (for a typical sample
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vf6Z41bCEI). He moved Ufology rapidly away from nuts and bolts toward holistic, even all encompassing, spiritual UFOs. In the same episode, sometimes in the same breath, he covered bible prophecy, spririt healing, secret government, and UFOs. He brought to a mass Quebec audience classics of the UFO field from George Adamski to Billy Meier and Jacques Vallée and Whitley Streiber, in an era when information was hard to come by. Over time, he tied all these strands together by developing a concept of intra-terrestrials that gave all phenomena an inward looking cast. Early on, although he identified the access point to the world of these intra-terrestrials at Mont St-Hillaire in Quebec (an obligatory nod to Quebec nationalism in those days), it wasn't clear that they were physical. As the concept developed, it became clear that this was not simply a version of hollow earth theory, but that his intra-terrestrials were spirtual and in some ways intra-humans; reflection of us.
Glenn became a figure of controversy when he was convicted of sexually molesting a minor in the late 90s. He argued that he had been teaching tantric meditation to teen boys and that the practice should be protected under freedom of religion. The argument didn't keep him out of jail. Since his release, he has continued his successful series of esoteric seminars all over Quebec, in which he still discusses Ufology, but apparently in the context of the coming of the Great Monarch, a strand of French Catholic prophecy.
The mid-70s also marked the first forays of Claude 'Raël' Vorilhon in Quebec, which rapidly became and remains a bastion of Raëlism. In the post-Catholic angst and devastation of Quebec's spiritual landscape, his message of intelligent design of the Earth and creation of humans by benevolent extra-terrestrials found fertile ground. I met Raël at an esoteric book fair in Montreal in the very early 80s, and his booth was by far the most popular there.
A darker incarnation of this same kind of message took root in Quebec in the 80s in the form of the Order of the Solar Temple. This organization, which had elements of Raëlism, ultra-conservative Catholic ideology, Ufology, and millenarism, deeply penetrated some important Quebec institutions (Hydro Quebec, for example) and eventually self-destructed in several mass murder suicides in Quebec and in France in the mid-90s.
The Solar Temple episode, Glenn's legal troubles, and the birth of the Internet, all contributed to a change in attitude in Quebec towards Ufology. It remains primarily spiritual in orientation, but the reality check of the tragedies and scandals and the increasing availability of information from diverse international sources has led to the explosion of the tradition.
