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Jacques Vallee: His Work; His Books; His Views

Nice to hear some good news for a change. Anything by Vallee is usually worth a lot of consideration, and he is, without a doubt, the best-informed Ufologist of all time. He was in a unique position to get information about UFOs and a lot of other borderline areas, and if he is promising something new and revealing then I'm sure we won't be disappointed (unless we are committed to the ETH, of course). If he has changed his mind about publishing anything else on the subject, then whatever it was that led to that decision must be pretty significant.
 
Sadly it's only available now in electronic form,,,not sure when the actual book comes out.
 
dr wu said:
Sadly it's only available now in electronic form,,,not sure when the actual book comes out.
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Only for pre-order.. We get to wait a few days for it, and I'm going to get it on my Kindle.
 
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At 82 JV continues his search.

FEB 18, 2022 6:00 AM

Jacques Vallée Still Doesn’t Know What UFOs Are​

After six globe-trotting decades spent probing “the phenomenon,” the French information scientist is sure of only one thing: The truth is really, really out there.


ON A WHITE restaurant tablecloth in San Francisco, under the glow of a stained-glass dome ceiling with images of laurels, fleur-de-lis, and a ship, rested a portion of metal the size of a shallot. Around it, three men were having lunch one day in the summer of 2018. Jacques Vallée, a French information scientist, was explaining to Max Platzer, editor of a top aeronautics journal, how the metal had come into his possession. The story wound back more than four decades, he said serenely, to an unexplained episode in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

On a cold Saturday night in late 1977, firefighters and police had responded to calls about a roundish, reddish object with blinking lights that hovered above the treetops in a public park, then dumped a bright mass onto the ground. When investigators arrived on the scene, they found a 4- by 6-foot puddle of metal, molten like lava, that lit the surrounding grass on fire before cooling. All told, 11 people from four separate groups gave similar accounts of the incident. ...

Vallée, who is 82 now, has celestite eyes, a strong nose, and a head of sterling hair that seems to riff on tinfoil hats. Beneath the rare hair is a rarer mind. His recollections from a six-decade career as a scientist and technologist include helping NASA map Mars; creating the first electronic database for heart-transplant patients; working on Arpanet, the internet’s ancestor; developing networking software that was adopted by the British Library, the US National Security Agency, and 72 nuclear power plants around the world; and guiding more than a hundred million dollars in high tech investment as a venture capitalist. ...

https://www.wired.com/story/jacques-vallee-still-doesnt-know-what-ufos-are/
 
Robin said:
.....................

No one book has all the answers of course when it comes to UFOs, it's a complex phenomenon. There are several plausible scientific theories (involving natural phenomenon) that could explain some instances of 'UFO' encounters, but I still believe that there is a real and unexplainable paranormal element in many UFO cases.
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This hits the nail on the head in that it is indeed a complex phenomena which is why I mentioned Dr vallee's trilogy. It covers all aspects of theories and looks into the bizarre nature of the enigma while pointing out some cases as examples. I have read over 50 ufo related books in the last 50 years and many focus on only one or two events or on one or two ideas only. There are many unusual aspects to what we call the UFO enigma.....not just saucers and the odd alien seen. I feel Dr Vallee has done the best job in covering all these aspects.

I am a little disappointed in his new promotion of the old lesser known case in the American southwest he seems to be supporting. Before in his previous work he was supsicious of all alleged crashes. I'm not sure what this means in relation to his current ideas.
 
I'm worried about what's happened to Dr. Vallee - I devoured all his earlier books and held his opinions in high regard but this latest UFO crash scenario he's attached himself to seems very dodgy. I heard him interviewed on a UFO podcast recently and after some superficial words about the book he wandered off into a diatribe about the lesser known facts of World War 2..the bemused host just let him ramble on and didn't reel things back in to the UFO topic really.
 
Well, 'reliable' is a relative term - the whole 'control system' idea is very much the kind of thing a computer scientist might come up with as framework to explain Forteana.

Vallee also has to be understood in the context that a) he's written science fiction; and b) he's seen a UFO (a 'daylight disc' too IIRC) himself.

While I find his choice of the Trinity case odd to say the least, his interpretation of it is at least of a piece with his earlier views. The hairdryer stuff...dunno.
 
KerryDF said:
I'm worried about what's happened to Dr. Vallee - I devoured all his earlier books and held his opinions in high regard but this latest UFO crash scenario he's attached himself to seems very dodgy. I heard him interviewed on a UFO podcast recently and after some superficial words about the book he wandered off into a diatribe about the lesser known facts of World War 2..the bemused host just let him ramble on and didn't reel things back in to the UFO topic really.
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I fear 'old age' might be creeping up on him....he is currently 83. Perhaps his BS detector has slipped a few gears?
:dunno:

But seriously....hair dryer burns??? Really? :crazy:
 
BS3 said:
Well, 'reliable' is a relative term - the whole 'control system' idea is very much the kind of thing a computer scientist might come up with as framework to explain Forteana.

Vallee also has to be understood in the context that a) he's written science fiction; and b) he's seen a UFO (a 'daylight disc' too IIRC) himself.

While I find his choice of the Trinity case odd to say the least, his interpretation of it is at least of a piece with his earlier views. The hairdryer stuff...dunno.
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I was not aware he ever saw a 'daylight disc'. He has related that he saw radar and other evidence in France when he worked there in the distant past in an astronomical capacity. Where did he say that...which book or interview?
 
dr wu said:
I was not aware he ever saw a 'daylight disc'. He has related that he saw radar and other evidence in France when he worked there in the distant past in an astronomical capacity. Where did he say that...which book or interview?
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It's in the first volume of Forbidden Science, he claimed to have seen a grey, domed disc or cigar like object in the sky over the local church in Pontoise. This was when he was about 15 or 16 I think.

Edit: tracked down the reference (page 25). He claims it was a Sunday in May 1955; his mother saw it first, and shouted to him and his father (the latter didn't bother going to look). Vallee saw a "a grey, metallic disc with a clear bubble on top. It was about the apparent size of the moon and hovered silently in the sky above the church of Saint-Maclou". Next day a schoolfriend independently claimed to have seen the same object from about half a mile from Vallee's position.

His father (a judge - apparently someone who felt flying saucers beneath his dignity, anyway) prevented him from making a report and told him they must have seen a new sort of plane.
 
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KerryDF said:
Wired did a pretty good profile article on him earlier this year..mentions his own sighting:

https://www.wired.com/story/jacques-vallee-still-doesnt-know-what-ufos-are/
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Having read this properly, I am still really intrigued by his own sighting and by certain aspects of his background. The article is standard enough fare; it ridicules the bulk of ufology while being careful to establish Vallee as credible, a "scientist", "cautious".

Dig around a bit though and a couple of details stand out. Vallee's father was a criminal court judge but his mother was, it turns out, "a space exploration enthusiast". He had a telescope; was it his mother's present? He collected clippings on saucers from the 1954 wave before his 1955 sighting. Remember that his mother saw the object first; his father refused to come and look at it. I know my psychosocial preferences are showing here, but aren't the roots quite obvious of a psychological explanation for Vallee's willingness to believe UFO experiences, perhaps even for his sighting itself?
 
In fact - if I wanted to go even further in exploring the opposition of the exciting and mysterious against the dull and rational implied by Vallee's experience, is it coincidental that the saucer was in his own words hovering "in the sky above the church of Saint-Maclou"?

images.jpeg


...on a Sunday no less!
 
Very good piece in Wired about Vallee posted above.
I still think he is right in saying this is not about aliens from outer space but a deeper mystery (reality) tied to human consciousness.

"Whatever the scientific truth here is, Vallée suspects that it may be knotted up with the secret of consciousness itself. The thing that philosophers call qualia—the conscious experience each human has—seems to be more than the sum of our physical parts. There’s an unsolved x there. Vallée’s friend Federico Faggin, for one, argues that consciousness is a basic property of nature, that the dimensions we call spacetime are in fact byproducts of some deeper reality. Maybe UFOs, Vallée suggests, are that reality welling up into ours."
 
dr wu said:
Very good piece in Wired about Vallee posted above.
I still think he is right in saying this is not about aliens from outer space but a deeper mystery (reality) tied to human consciousness.

"Whatever the scientific truth here is, Vallée suspects that it may be knotted up with the secret of consciousness itself. The thing that philosophers call qualia—the conscious experience each human has—seems to be more than the sum of our physical parts. There’s an unsolved x there. Vallée’s friend Federico Faggin, for one, argues that consciousness is a basic property of nature, that the dimensions we call spacetime are in fact byproducts of some deeper reality. Maybe UFOs, Vallée suggests, are that reality welling up into ours."
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He pursued this belief in the excellent “Witness of Another World”:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7027162/mediaviewer/rm2411814656/?ref_=tt_ov_i

 
BS3 said:
I can see why that case appealed to Vallee: various things about it (particularly the 'glove' given by the occupant to the witness that was then taken away again by a flying ball thing) have a distinct air of fairyland about them.
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I must have missed the part about the glove......what time stamp was that?
 
dr wu said:
I must have missed the part about the glove......what time stamp was that?
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Not sure if it was mentioned in that video but was one of the main details of Perez' experience: the tall creature gave him one of its gloves, apparently as proof, but as Perez departed the glove was taken back by a small flying 'probe':

https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2020/11/the-strange-alien-encounter-of-juan-perez/

One thing that considerably weakens the case, at least as an experience to be taken literally, is that the smaller robot thing seen inside the craft seems clearly inspired by R2-D2.
 
BS3 said:
Not sure if it was mentioned in that video but was one of the main details of Perez' experience: the tall creature gave him one of its gloves, apparently as proof, but as Perez departed the glove was taken back by a small flying 'probe':

https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2020/11/the-strange-alien-encounter-of-juan-perez/

One thing that considerably weakens the case, at least as an experience to be taken literally, is that the smaller robot thing seen inside the craft seems clearly inspired by R2-D2.
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Is it likely that he would have seen the film only a year after it was released when they lived on a ranch in a rural part of Argentina in 1978?
 
dr wu said:
Is it likely that he would have seen the film only a year after it was released when they lived on a ranch in a rural part of Argentina in 1978?
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It might come down to how much contact he had with boys of his age, if he went to a school or hung out with boys from other ranches. I was 9 when Star Wars came out and it was groundbreaking for that era, the hype around it was absolutely massive with merchandise and promotional tie-ins everywhere, especially breakfast cereals aimed at children. I feel it would have been talked about in the playground regardless of whether they had seen the movie or not
 
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I'm not sure how remote this ranch is from civilization. The town of Venado Tuerto has a population of 76000 so it's hardly a village and likely has a cinema.

Interestingly, his mother had a UFO experience when she was the same age as Juan.

https://www.cronica.com.ar/paranorm...lo-gaucho-de-Venado-Tuerto-20220603-0065.html

Google translate produced this -

Juan Oscar Pérez, is a gaucho who lives in Venado Tuerto, province of Santa Fe. At the age of 12, in the middle of the field, he not only saw a UFO, he got on one of these devices, presumably extraterrestrial, and maintained contact with their crew. That happened on September 6, 1978.

Now, that is the story of Juan, about which much has been written and said, not only in documentaries, but also in films that can be seen on various platforms. But I want to tell you something that happened to Juan's mother.

At the age of 12, the little girl walked through the fields with her sheepdog, "it was her companion, like her brother," Juan tells us. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a mysterious light appeared from a ship, and snatched the animal from him. To this day the woman remembers the name of her friend who was taken by aliens.

Side effects

Today, the woman continues to have premonitions, "a special perception," says Juan. Recently, she was cooking and started talking about her grandson, Nicolás. A few minutes later she received a phone call from her sister-in-law warning her that something had happened.

The woman's last experience with UFOs occurred recently, when a light appeared in the back of her house. When he heard the screams, Juan realized that something was wrong. He began to hear as a high voltage cable and saw an intense glow. The lady ran out and went inside her house.

From another angle of the scene, one of Juan's sisters watched in astonishment as a dog barked at the ship that floated 4 meters above the ground. Since that day, the animal never returned home.

The experiences with extraterrestrial ships of Juan Oscar Pérez do not end, and now we know that the connection with the phenomenon could come from long before his encounter at the age of 12, even before his birth.
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There are several similar articles but they are all in Spanish.
 
Erinaceus said:
I'm not sure how remote this ranch is from civilization. The town of Venado Tuerto has a population of 76000 so it's hardly a village and likely has a cinema.

Interestingly, his mother had a UFO experience when she was the same age as Juan.

https://www.cronica.com.ar/paranorm...lo-gaucho-de-Venado-Tuerto-20220603-0065.html

Google translate produced this -



There are several similar articles but they are all in Spanish.
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Thanks. Like so many UFO reports that involve a close encounter with the craft and/or humanoids there is so much more to the case than the initial report. Unfortunately, Ufologists over the decades have been guilty of disregarding paranormal aspects of such encounters because they were at odds with their nuts-and-bolts theory of visiting aliens from another planet.

I was just reading the 1984 case of Gwen Freeman from Blairgowrie, Scotland which is mentioned in Philip Mantle's 'UFO Landings UK' and was investigated by Ron Halliday. Gwen was in the garden when she was illuminated by a blinding beam of light that then shone on a bush and then upwards to a silver, bulbous craft "shaped like a Yale key" and which then moved off and varnished in a flash of light.

So, a classic UFO case except that earlier that day the Freemans had watched twelve men in black suits with black hats walk in single file into the house next door and then leave again, yet when they checked on their neighbour she was oblivious to the visit. Next, Halliday reports that Gwen developed "the power of heal by touch' after her encounter.

In actual fact, the whole episode seems more like a religious experience than anything alien. She is hit by a blinding flash of light (as per Paul in the Bible), when the light hit a bush it appeared to be burning. there were five prongs on the 'key' and this flags up all sorts of Biblical connotations, some of the twelve men (apostles?) had Jewish-style braids (described as 'pigtails') and so it goes on...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/UFO-LANDINGS-UK-Philip-Mantle/dp/B095GSMHL8
 
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Erinaceus said:
I'm not sure how remote this ranch is from civilization. The town of Venado Tuerto has a population of 76000 so it's hardly a village and likely has a cinema.

Interestingly, his mother had a UFO experience when she was the same age as Juan.

https://www.cronica.com.ar/paranorm...lo-gaucho-de-Venado-Tuerto-20220603-0065.html

Google translate produced this -



There are several similar articles but they are all in Spanish.
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Interesting that their animals were involved in both mother and son's encounters, the mother her dog and the son his horse. Both are reported as incredibly fond of their animals and both meet their end ofter their encounters (Juan's horse was injured whilst tied to the UFO ladder and apparently never recovered. Starts to feel as if there is some link to folklore, spirituality and the afterlife going on here, something that Vallee also alludes to.
 
Paul_Exeter said:
Interesting that their animals were involved in both mother and son's encounters, the mother her dog and the son his horse. Both are reported as incredibly fond of their animals and both meet their end ofter their encounters (Juan's horse was injured whilst tied to the UFO ladder and apparently never recovered. Starts to feel as if there is some link to folklore, spirituality and the afterlife going on here, something that Vallee also alludes to.
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The religious(spiritual) connection is there in many of these cases from all over the place going back a long time ,but why are people seeing 'crafts with ladders then and beings in 'space suits'? Does 'God' and his angels drive flying saucers? If this is human consciousness and religious experience how do we explain why a rural person from Argentina has a religious experience with such imagery? Why are people all over having what seems to be spiritual experiences that look like 'space aliens/ travelers' ? Is 'God' pretending to be an alien or are aliens pretending to be God ?
 
dr wu said:
The religious(spiritual) connection is there in many of these cases from all over the place going back a long time ,but why are people seeing 'crafts with ladders then and beings in 'space suits'? Does 'God' and his angels drive flying saucers? If this is human consciousness and religious experience how do we explain why a rural person from Argentina has a religious experience with such imagery? Why are people all over having what seems to be spiritual experiences that look like 'space aliens/ travelers' ? Is 'God' pretending to be an alien or are aliens pretending to be God ?
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If you look at the history of Ufology pre-Kenneth Arnold then the phenomenon has always mimicked the emerging technology of the time: airships, (ghost) rockets, space capsules... Note how emerging drone technology allows drones to behave like classic 20th Century flying saucers , that is hovering, rapid acceleration, flashing lights etc.
 
Paul_Exeter said:
If you look at the history of Ufology pre-Kenneth Arnold then the phenomenon has always mimicked the emerging technology of the time: airships, (ghost) rockets, space capsules... Note how emerging drone technology allows drones to behave like classic 20th Century flying saucers , that is hovering, rapid acceleration, flashing lights etc.
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Yes...I know this..I have been following Dr Vallee's work from his beginning with Dr Hynek.......asking again ,are entities mimicking our science or are we misinterpreting metaphysical events and our brains creating the technology themes? Or are both models worng?
Either this is physical in some manner beyond our level of understanding or it is metaphysical in origin and is not amenable to science as we know it.
 
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