Case file · Disclosure & CE-5

Jacques Vallée

French-born astronomer, computer scientist and venture capitalist (b. 1939) who became the most influential thinker in UFO studies.

1969 CE · 37.46, -122.18 · status: account

The account

Vallée started at the Paris Observatory, helped compile NASA's first detailed map of Mars with Gérard de Vaucouleurs, then earned a PhD in computer science at Northwestern (1967), where he worked closely with J. Allen Hynek; the two co-wrote 'The Edge of Reality' (1975) and Vallée was the model for the French scientist Lacombe in 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind'. In 'Passport to Magonia' (1969) he rejected the simple extraterrestrial hypothesis and linked UFO encounters to fairy lore and religious visions, and in 'The Invisible College' (1975) he proposed that the phenomenon works as a 'control system' shaping human belief (see the next entry). In parallel he worked at SRI's Augmentation Research Center under Douglas Engelbart on the ARPANET network information centre, led an NSF project that produced the PLANET conferencing system, founded InfoMedia (1976), and spent decades as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist (Sofinnova from 1983, then co-founder of the Euro-America Ventures funds). In 2022 he co-authored a peer-reviewed paper with Garry Nolan on analysing unusual materials, and his journals are published as 'Forbidden Science'. Jeffrey Mishlove first interviewed him in 1973 and later devoted a New Thinking Allowed episode to his work.

The sceptical view

Sceptics note that his ideas rest on case collections rather than testable data, and that a 'control system' that can explain any outcome is hard to falsify; many American ufologists, for their part, disliked his rejection of the extraterrestrial hypothesis.

Connections in the atlas

Sources

  1. Wikipedia: Jacques Vallée
  2. New Thinking Allowed: InPresence 0147, Jacques Vallée and the Worldwide Web
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