[ Updated on February 19, 2026 ]
Archives of the Impossible, Rice University
Oral history interview of Dr. Jacques Vallee, online via Zoom
Interviewers: Timothy Grieve-Carlson and Learned Foote
Interview date: February 11, 2021
Duration: 02:03:18
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Tim Grieve-Carlson: Hello, Jacques.
Jacques Vallée: Good afternoon.
Tim Grieve-Carlson: How are you today?
Jacques Vallée: I’m good. And how is Texas?
Tim Grieve-Carlson: Oh, it’s all right. Yeah. Nice and warm down here even in the wintertime. And how about you? Are you in, uh, in San Francisco?
Jacques Vallée: Yes, I am. Yes.
Tim Grieve-Carlson: Very nice.
Jacques Vallée: Uh, um, can you see me all right?
Tim Grieve-Carlson: Yeah.
Jacques Vallée: Too much light or –
Tim Grieve-Carlson: No, it’s perfect.
Jacques Vallée: Okay.
Tim Grieve-Carlson: How about you? Am I, am I audible?
Jacques Vallée: Yeah, you are perfect.
Tim Grieve-Carlson: Great. I’ll go ahead and pause the recording here. All right. Hello, everyone. My name is Tim Grieve-Carlson. I’m a Ph.D. researcher at Rice University here to conduct the oral history interview with Dr. Jacques Vallée, and I’ll let everyone introduce themselves.
Learned Foote: Uh, I’ll jump in quickly before, um, uh, uh, Jacques Vallée, uh, we get into the discussion with him. I am also a, uh, grad student at Rice, uh, with, with Tim and have had the immense pleasure over the past few years of helping to, uh, assist with this, uh, this collection that’s being put together; and just the, the impact of seeing all the boxes and all the research over so many decades over, all over the entire world, these documents being collected is incredible; uh, and it’s, it’s just inspiring to think about, um, uh, what use will be made of these in the, the decades, uh, to come. Uh, so, uh, just want to say a huge thank you to making this, uh, this possible, Jacques.
Jacques Vallée: Well, uh, I should thank you and Rice, also, because, you know, usually, uh, a researcher leaves a bunch of boxes and papers and so on; and then, uh, uh, you know, his, his wife or his children have the task of either throwing it all away with great guilt or trying to do something with it; and if they give it to a university, it usually goes into a basement, and, you know, it’s available in theory, but it’s, it gets quickly forgotten; and I, I’ve seen that, of course, again and again with colleagues of mine and, and things I, I would’ve liked to look at that were not available. So, um, it’s a, actually a great pleasure for me to, um, you know, to, to know that this will be preserved and that it’s available to, to people now. Um, as you know, in the paperwork, uh, I, I put a 10–year, you know, period during which it’s not available generally publicly; and that’s mostly, it’s not to protect me because I, you know, I don’t think there is anything very objectionable. I mean, everything can be critiqued, but I don’t think there is anything objectionable in, in any of this; but I do have to protect the witnesses and the people who’ve corresponded with me and so on. Uh, and, uh, I think a 10–year, you know, lag is, uh, now, this, it’s not accurate to say that it’s not going to be available. I think it’s, but the decision will be certainly, you know, Jeff has access to it. His, you know, body of, of, uh, students, the student body and working under him, like you guys, you know, certainly has free access to it and to me since I’m not dead yet. You know, so I can, if, if there is some ambiguity in the data, uh, I can still explain some of it; uh, but, um, it could be, you know, if there is bona fide researcher outside, and I’ve designated, uh, you know, uh, Dr. Nolan and, uh, Dr. Pasulka, you know, obviously, have access to it now, uh, and others, it’s on your, you know, your discretion and Jeff’s discretion to give access.
Learned Foote: I was wondering and it, it’s clear when thinking about a donation of this kind, there are so many dynamics to consider in terms of, uh, the witnesses, as you said, when does it become available to a, uh, a researching, um, body; and I’m curious, as to, uh, in terms of making that decision to entrust your archive to Rice, could you tell us more about what’s, uh, enabled that decision to, to make that donation. Uh, possibly your relationship with Jeff may have played a role here. I’m curious about what motivated you to, uh, to choose Rice as the repository.
Jacques Vallée: Well, um, over the years, of course, I, I’ve seen, um, collections being donated to universities with no further, you know, even, even indexing and, uh, you know, boxes and boxes of books and documents going to, as I said, into a basement somewhere; and, obviously, I, I’ve thought long and hard about what would happen to the stuff that I had collected; and, uh, you know, I was in, inspired by, I think, by a sense of pity for the poor librarian who would get all this, you know, without any organization or, or direction. I mean, who are these people that, you know, uh, Vallée thought were so important, you know, that he would write to them every week? So, um, to the extent that I, and I’m the best person to sort of sort through that. Believe me, I’ve thrown out just as much material as what you have, which was either repetitive or I knew was already there, you know, on, scanned on the Internet or whatever; and I concentrated on the things that would not be so easily found and, and then, uh, you know, I wanted to organize it. Now, Rice, obviously, um, you know, Jeff played a big part of that because we’ve worked on material before; and, uh, Rice, um, um, of course, is, you know, has a superb, and I visited the library and, and the stacks and so on, and, uh, actually, they are the ones who told me what kind of folder to buy, you know, for, for some of the files. So I learned how to do it so it could be easily transferred. Um, so that was very professional. The fact that, uh, I know that Jeff intends to write a series of, of books now on the development of the phenomenon and the problem in, in general, and he told me that this could feed into, into that; and so I wanted to make it available, you know, to him. The, the other, so this is the overt thing. The covert thing is, uh, you know, uh, the, uh, the department where you are, um, is studying spirituality in a large sense and under the name of religion, but, but beyond religion, it’s spirituality and, and, you know, philosophy of, uh, uh, both perception and reflection on the world. Um, I would be afraid of, I had been, um, contacted by Northwestern and by Stanford to give the collections to them; and, you know, there are horror stories in this field where things have been, that were important at some time, had been donated to a university, and then the physics department says, “Why are we wasting shelf space for this garbage? You know, let’s throw it away”; and, uh, I could cite some universities where things that were donated by the founders of the university, it ended up being thrown away because they had to do with stupid subjects like parapsychology. So, um, and there is one not far from, from here south of where I am. Uh, and I think that’s a scandal, and the fact that you are not subject to sort of the, the abuse of, uh, all the vagaries of, you know, ideas and doctrines and theories, uh, in this way, that you can, you can keep things over a long time and, uh, and I, I know you intend to do that, so that’s reassuring to me because I’ve been in, in a way I’m the custodian. I mean, I’m, I’m giving it as a gift, but I’m really the custodian of thoughts and writings that have been entrusted to me by, you know, by people, by witnesses, by other, you know, people corresponding with me and so on. So I have a duty to preserve it and to make it available through people who care, and that’s a
relationship that I feel with, with Rice and with Jeff.
Learned Foote: Thank you. I wanted to follow up on one of those remarks. You mentioned how the Rice department is, um, especially Jeff, uh, is studying spirituality in a larger sense, religion, philosophy; um, and it’s, uh, within the Woodson Research Center, uh, it wouldn’t necessarily just be a reli, it’s not coded as just religious studies, of course. Your, your, uh, donations are much broader, uh, significantly broader than just that lens, and you have, uh, much scientific material, as well. Um, and I’m thinking it strikes me what you said about, uh, universities, other universities might want to pick and choose, whereas we’re really interested in the whole kit and kaboodle so to speak.
Jacques Vallée: Mm.
Learned Foote: Uh, we don’t want to leave things out, and I see it from a historical perspective. It’s important to have as complete a picture as possible, um, but I’m curious if you could speak about these, these different disciplines. If someone were to only approach it, say, through science or only through religion or only through humanities, what are the ways, does your work transcend these, um, these categories in some way? Uh, and is it important to have it all together to get that, the complete picture?
Jacques Vallée: Well, it, in a way it transcends it because we don’t know, we don’t understand the phenomenon. I mean, if we understood it, we could say, “Well, it’s, you know, astronomy,” or “It’s physics,” or “It’s, you know, uh, it relates to this particular theory,” and so on. So there would be a label on it, and it would go into, into that label. The fact that the, the phenomenon is so varied, it can be approached, you know, from Carl Jung’s point of view, uh, in psychiatry in a wide sense but, you know, extended to spirituality. It can be approached as religion. I mean, look at the Bible. I mean, and, and some of the writing here goes into, as you know, I’ve tried to go with different groups of people into the medieval history, into the, you know, ancient history of the phenomenon to see when did this begin. I mean, and was it different in those days than it is now. Is there something that we haven’t picked up in, you know, the history of civilization? I mean, it, um, or anthropology or an, anything else. Um, I think what, you know, nobody has one key to this. So, uh, that makes it more exciting, in a way. Uh, now, from a, a purely scientific point of view, it’s a disappointment because we’d like to have, you know, one methodology, one, you know, set of criteria we could apply to it; but we can’t do that. We are, it’s too early. So the diversity of the, of the collection, uh, I think is, is an asset in a way.
Tim Grieve-Carlson: Jacques, earl, earlier you mentioned, uh, a few of those people that you, uh, found yourself corresponding with on a weekly basis, and I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about the French ufologist, Aimé Michel, who was an important influence on your early interest in UFOs and I think your decision to pursue serious scientific work in this area. Um, this correspondence is part of the collection. I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about Michel and your relationship with him.
Jacques Vallée: Um, Aimé Michel was, um, maybe typical of, um, no, I, I, I couldn’t say he was typical of anything; but he, he was part of, um, a, a, a, a French way of thinking that, uh, was both, um, you know, rested on, on rationalism and, and science, but he was also a scholar, um, of antiquity, uh, Greek and Latin; and, uh, he was, uh, very interested in spirituality, and he was also, I mean, professionally, when I met him, was working in a unit of the French radio and television, mostly radio in those days, started right after the war, that was very, very
experimental and very, it doesn’t exist anymore except in little, little pockets; but there, there was a cadre of, uh, young people who emerged from World War II, uh, enthusiastic about electronics, about broadcasting, about reaching the public with big ideas and were scholars, uh, which, I mean, obviously, you know, the, the media has become businesses, and it’s driven by business now; and there is no, none of that opportunity for real-time experimentation with a public medium; and because at, at that time right after the war, you know, uh, the French radio was a state organization, um, just like, you know, a state university, they could do research and could do whatever they wanted. So it was very, um, they made, did a, a number of, um, uh, interviews, uh, with, uh, leading thinkers, uh, and then he contributed his own research; and, and when the, uh, UFO problem and, and other things in parapsychology, uh, came up, he had, uh, both the talent and, and access to people because he came from the state organization, uh, but he also had sort of a license to talk about anything. So he looked at, at parapsychology, and he started looking at UFOs. He started looking at UFOs as a fad; and, you know, Hynek will tell you the same thing. He says that he, he started thinking it was, like, you know, swallowing gold fish, you know, a fad that, something that people did that didn’t amount to anything. It was just a
strange sociological thing; and then, uh, actually, Jean Couteau, who was a friend of, of Aimé Michel, is the one who told him, you know, “You’re wrong. These people have seen something, and they’ve seen something you should research because we don’t, we don’t understand it. It’s new. It’s, um,” so, and he, you know, listened to that advice, and he, uh, started corresponding with people; and there was a major wave in France in 1954 that I remembered because, eh, uh, I remembered it as a teenager. I collected, you know, uh, papers from that era, uh, cutting it up out of newspaper and fixing it on, you know, copy books and so on, uh, to try to make some sense out of it because it was so, so amazing; and, um, uh, Aimé started digging into that because he had access to, of course, to, to the information network of, of the French radio and television which, again, was a state agency. Uh, and, uh, so when, uh, uh, I met him through, uh, Pierre Guérin, who was a, an astronomer that I consulted, um, when I was working at Paris Observatory, and he said, “You should go talk to Aimé,” and that’s how the, our friendship developed; and he turned over his files to me because he was delighted to see that there was somebody who could put this on a computer and start looking for patterns because he thought that there were patterns behind the data.
Tim Grieve-Carlson: So, Jacques, you mentioned that, that was wonderful. Thank you. You mentioned, uh, J. Allen Hynek for a moment there, and I have, he’s another person who’s represented in your archive and another person with whom you worked very closely for a long time; and, um, Hynek’s also kind of undergoing this kind of popular, uh, reevaluation. There’s a, a new biography, uh, and, uh, this television program. Um, you, you knew Hynek very well, and I wonder, uh, what you might tell us about Hynek in light of all this kind of recent publicity.
Jacques Vallée: I think the most important thing to understand about Hynek that people didn’t understand at the time in part because he kept it from, as a, sort of, not, not as a secret, but as a, as a personal quest, was that he was very interested in spirituality. He was very interested in, uh, the metaphysical traditions; and, um, among other things, the Rosicrucian tradition. Um, he was interested in parapsychology and even in astrology. So no wonder he wasn’t bragging about that at, you know, Harvard College, but, uh, he, his mind was, was very, uh, uh, very much advanced; and, uh, remember, he came from a, a Czech, uh, fa, family, uh, immigrated to the, to the U.S., and I think he brought that. He was raised, I think his mother was very influential on his thinking, and, uh, uh, you know, he, he told me that, that sort of family tra, origin from Central Europe contributed to, to, um, make him aware of, of those larger issue behind, behind science; and, and he always said, you know, you, you do science because you want to understand the world at a higher level. You don’t just do science, you know, for engineering or for, uh, or just to write some nice equations. You’re trying to understand something larger, and that’s where we, we met because I had very much the same, you know, still do, um, you know, the same trust and the same, uh, um, uh, hope to understand more about the world through science which is one set of tools; but there are other sets of tools. Um, so, uh, when we started talking about that, we found that we were very much on the same path, uh, even though we might disagree on, you know, some aspects of, you know, some UFO reports or some, some quarrel that was going on among ufologists that, um, we rarely found the, the right approach at the higher level.
Learned Foote: Uh, I have a, a follow-up question here, and I, I’m thinking back to both of those correspondences of which there are many decades within the archive of conversations going back and forth, uh, over many years; and I’m thinking about what you mentioned with, uh, sort of the, the UFO wave that occurred in, in France. You mentioned 1954, uh, and people thinking at the time it might be a fad and might sort of come and go; and you as a, as a teenager, had a keen interest in how this was playing out, uh, direct experience, um, and so forth; and I,
I’m curious. It now has been nearly 70 years since that time. Uh, it clearly has not, if it’s a fad, it’s a, it’s a long-lasting one so to speak. Um, and I’m curious. Did you have this sense when you were getting into it as a teenager, uh, that, did it feel like something that was new? And I know that your, your research then pointed to some of the, uh, antiquity that you can look at this phenomenon through, but when you were first encountering it, did it feel like something new; or did you think it could be a fad? Are you surprised by the longevity that the, that the research has had?
Jacques Vallée: I, um, remember, I was 14, I don’t know, 14 or 15. Uh, I did have a telescope and an interest in, in science, and I was good in, you know, in physics and very interested in astronomy. Um, I didn’t, I didn’t think it was, I never thought it was a fad. Um, to me it was a real mystery. I think that was, um, the reaction of most of the public in, in France. It wasn’t, of course, the, the channel through which we heard about it was the radio. I mean, we, my parents never had a TV set, okay? So you have to put yourself in that, that time. France was still recovering, you know, slowly from the devastation of the war and so was the rest of Europe; and then this happened. Um, I thought that, um, it, it might be certainly what, what I saw, and, of course, when, when I saw it, that sort of made it pretty clear to me that, you know, this was real; but it could be real, and it could be a new development that was being tested. A, again, in those days, um, there were, you know, the first jet airplanes were being tested, or pilots were being trained to fly jets. Uh, there were, you know, helicopters. There were things that hadn’t existed before. So there was, uh, a great sense of novelty and so on. So it came within that, but at the same time, um, there were all these stories about landings, about, you know, strange beings, robotlike entities, you know, running round; and there were so many of them that you, you couldn’t say it, uh, that it, that people were making it up. You know? I mean, the, the people were just as surprised, and the first reaction was, was, was surprise and, uh, uh, curiosity, uh, from, from everybody; and when, um, so, I, I never, um, I, I thought this is something that feeds into, you know, my interest in science and, um, that would be, that I thought we would be able to resolve because of a power of science. You know, uh, when you are a good student, you know, you think that, uh, uh, this is going to help you understand the world; and then later you find that, yes, it helps you understand something about the world, but it, it only expands your opportunities for wonder and, you know, and questioning. So, um, I, I thought that at the time, I thought we are going to understand this; and, you know, later when I had access to computers and so on, I felt we, we’re going to look for patterns, and that will tell us what it is. So that was my, my initial sort of naïve but, but well-, well-intended, you know, uh, uh, approach to it.
Learned Foote: Uh, I’m thinking now about the research that you’ve done over the years, and the way that they have been presented to Rice is in the form of three collections, uh, A, B and C. Uh, and I wonder if we could, if we could talk a little bit about that. In particular, Tim and I, uh, spent, uh, time over the last year looking at B and C, uh, which in large part collects, uh, um, uh, secondary material such as newsletters, newspapers and so forth, research done, uh, by secondary sources, as well as your correspondence with many figures. Um, that is the B and C, uh, but there’s also this A category, uh, and I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about how your research is categorized into these, uh, and about the, the contents of, um, of A.
Jacques Vallée: Yes, well, that’s, that’s important. Of course, um, you know, the, in, in a topic like this everything relates to everything else so the, the question is where do you start and how you, do you classify it so that you don’t presuppose a structure that, you know, people like you coming into the research will have to, you know, throw away and, and reconstruct in a
different way. So, um, in the case of C, that’s very clear. Those are letters. So the medium, you know, is correspondence with people. I, I forget how many there are, but, uh, you know, it, it’s pretty extensive; and it, it really covers, um, the, um, you know, the waterfront pretty well in terms of coverage certainly of, uh, uh, the U.S., France, England and, uh, you know, the, some major, major other countries like Spain and so on. So that is sort of a self-contained, uh, body. Um, you know, Section, Section B is, um, things that I collected over the, over the years. There are tapes. There are magazines that probably will exist at some point on the internet, but the internet is, is nice; but I pity people who do research just on the internet because, you know, feeling the, the paper, seeing the, the actual writing, seeing how it’s related side by side with other things tells you a lot; and, um, that’s in that period that I had saved those things, even those that I knew were available online somewhere, but you know, for example, Uranas is completely forgotten in France. Uranas was before everything else. It started in the, in the ’50s, uh, you know, before the, the CNES became interested, before scientists became interested in the subject; and those people were good writers, and they were reporters. They were journalists. They were writers, science fiction writers, like Jimmy Guerre, very, very much a, a popular thing. That was a high-quality magazine, and, uh, I’ve tried to save, um, you know, at least a, not, not, I don’t, there isn’t a complete collection here in, in, in what you have; but, um, I’ve certainly saved enough that you get the, the feeling for what it was. Your other reviews like Phenomena, you know, that are not really current, um, today, but they’ve captured a big part of that transition from, um, you know, the early years to the, uh, the development of, of the, of ufology in the United States that has then influenced the, the rest of the world. So, so those are, um, there is overlap, but, uh, there isn’t much, you know, so much overlap. A, um, of course, is, uh, the last one I did, the most recent one; and those are my files. So those are the things that sort of came, excuse me, um, uh, sort of came over the transom and landed on my desk, um, some by design and because I went there and gathered the data or randomly because somebody sent it to me or a friend or, you know, a, um, a UFO group I knew was involved and got me involved. So it’s a semirandom walk through the landscape, and some of those are actual cases that are still of, of interest and are still a mystery, uh, some, some of them with photographs and recordings, things like that. Others have been explained, and so it’s interesting to see how the explanation came, came about; and, uh, some are sort of in between. So, uh, there’s 200 of them, and they provide a
good, um, I mean, you know, if, if you looked at the body of data about UFOs, the way, uh, for example, Mr. Bigelow and, um, you know, the, the BAASS Project that I was involved with collected, uh, the, the, the total data is about 200,000 cases. Okay? Over the world, which is not much by modern computer database standards, but each one of them, of course, extends over many different fields. I mean, who are the witnesses? I know in some cases you have a hundred witnesses. Sometimes there’s only two or just one, uh, uh, but we, we knew a lot about them. So every witness is a part of it. The location has its own characteristics, and then the observation itself has its own characteristics; and it, it can, of course, extend. So now the, these are very long, thin records that extend a lot and may even point to recordings, radar data, whatever; and so the, the, it’s, it’s a complex database, even though it’s “only” 200,000 cases. Here you have 200, much of which is sort of explained. I mean, there is no more research and investigation to do, but they illustrate how society was exposed to something that somebody thought was an, an extraordinary phenomenon. So I think that’s what it, what it gives you. Uh, I have kept, and I, I, I keep the data I want to work on now in, you know, in the next few years, in two areas that I, I don’t think, uh, really belong in the same collection. Um, one is, is a collection of actual samples, actual material samples; and as you know, I’ve, I’ve started to work on this with Dr. Nolan and other people at, at Stanford and in, you know, in California. Uh, and that’s, that’s hard science. I mean, it’s material science. We want to see if, uh, the composition of these things, those are things that result either from “a crash” of something that left, that deposited some, some material, or was ejected from, uh, from an object, from a flying object and was recovered. Uh, we are trying to publish our first paper on this in a regular, uh, refereed journal, scientific journal, you know, about hard science, and if we do that, it’s going to be the first paper in history refereed in a general science journal. So that’s, that’s an important thing. Uh, we, we want to go on, you know, to, to sort of establish a methodology for doing this and maybe open the door for others to do that with whatever they found. So that’s something that is not part of the collection. The other thing that’s not part of the collection is another 200 cases that I’m continuing to work on because they are unidentified, completely unidentified, and I, and I want to continue to dig into them and to research them. Um, but those would not be of as much interest to you, I think, and eventually, they may, you know, they may come to Rice; but, um, I think those are part of what I’m doing now. So I’ve sort of narrowed my focus on the few cases where I could, um, I could build a case in, in, you know, for a scientific approach to the hard data; and some of those I’ve already published things about so they are not, you know, not unknown, but I, uh, I, I need to continue to, to work on those.
Learned Foote: Marvelous. So I’m curious, uh, thinking about the A collection. You mentioned you have about 200 cases, some of which are explained, um, some of which are still a mystery and some of which are a combination of both. Um, did you, did you categorize those as sort of saying, based on your estimation of looking at these, that these are the ones you feel have been explained, these are the ones that remain, uh, to be worked on? Is that, uh, part of how you categorized in the gift?
Jacques Vallée: Uh, uh, no, and by the way, in, in B, you also have some cases like that, for example, the case of Mantel, you know the pilot who died following an object. That’s still unexplained. I, I think that there is a good, good argument to say it may have been a balloon, and, um, most ufologists don’t believe that. They think it was a UFO at very high altitude. Um, I, I’ve looked at, at both. I started from the ufologist approach, uh, thinking this was, he was chasing something and just went too high, you know, and ran out of, I mean, essentially passed out because of altitude and, and crashed. Um, in UFO books today, I, I still see it as hostile intent from a UFO destroying, you know, an American airplane. Um, the, so there are cases like that that are still in question. The reason I think it’s a balloon was that there were extraordinary balloons called Skyhook that were classified, and, uh, Mantel could not have any idea of how high it was because those were very, very, very large balloons, and they were there to detect atomic explosions and that was a classified project. So he saw this. It was reported as a UFO. Of course, the Air Force explained it as the planet, Venus, which couldn’t have been in that part of the sky, um, so it, you know, you have cases like that; and that, you know, those cases are in, uh, there are some cases like that in Section B. Um, the, the ones in Section A are things that I’ve, I’ve done, I’ve gone through it. Some of them I’ve, I, I came to a conclusion, and I’m done with it. So I don’t need to see them again. Um, if I need to see them again, I’ll fly to Houston, but, uh, the, uh, essentially, I, I’m done. Uh, some of them are very, very interesting because you see the, the arc of belief and disbelief and controversy, in some cases lawsuits and so on. Um, so you, you see the full psychological and sociological, you know, richness of, of, of those cases. Some of them extended over several years, and people were, you know, screaming at each other about it; and, and in some cases, there is, um, actual data that deserves to be looked at. So in terms of looking at the, the mechanics of the whole phenomenon, I, I think it’s, it’s very rich, but those are not the ones that I want to specialize now in, just a few, a few things where, uh, I can make it, you know, a different kind of contribution.
Tim Grieve-Carlson: Well, Jacques, as much as I would like to just keep asking about your work with Dr. Nolan and, um, some of these materials, um, you know, you mentioned kind of the arc of controversy with some of these cases earlier; and, and one of the long-term research projects, um, that kind of culminated in your best-known, one of your best-known works, was Passport to Magonia, your 1969 book in which you explore the similarities between certain aspects of the UFO phenomena and, and European folklore, some particular, um, occupants, humanoids and beings kind of like the, associated with European fairy lore which appear in the works of doctors like Paracelsus. Um, I think Magonia is one of these books that you can really kind of tell a lot about a researcher by figuring out what they think about Passport to Magonia. Um, it’s still kind of a, uh, a debate or maybe, uh, maybe a fault line that, that remains in the UFO community; and I wonder if you can just speak about, um, first of all why you think the book had, continues to make such an impact, even, even today, nearly, you know, um, more than 50 years later and then sort of where you stand on the positions outlined in Magonia today.
Jacques Vallée: So, um, you know, coming from France, I’d always been aware of, you know, things categorized as folklore, but folklore doesn’t mean that, uh, that it’s mythical; and, um, I remember early only when I was sending, you know, papers, little articles to the, the Flying Saucer Review which was this very British, you know, invention by, by some enthusiasts in, in, in London; and, um, there, there was an argument about the word myth, and Gordon Creighton who was a, was a very, uh, articulate scholar, as well as a British diplomat. He had been around the world and been in China, had been in South America, and he was back in England. So he was somebody with a great awareness of language and traditions and, and, and so on; um, and, uh, I had been attacked by an American writer saying that why was I spending all this time on myths; and Gordon Creighton said, “You know, don’t react to that because there is nothing wrong with the word myth. Um, a, a, a myth is something which is more real than reality. It’s not that it’s not real.” You know, and, and, I mean, Jesus Christ is a myth. Um, you know, miracles are, are mythical, but they are mythical because they, they relate to a type of reality which is more real than ordinary reality. They’re at a different level of reality, but it doesn’t mean that they are not real; and, um, that, I mean, that was an age of the, of, of the dialogue and that’s, so in 1968, as, as you know, I got completely disgusted with essentially the hoax that the government was playing in, in Colorado; and with, you know, hindsight, I understand why the Air Force really, really, really wanted to get rid of UFOs because there was, there was no way to win with that. Uh, if they took it seriously, then they had all of Congress against them, and if they, if they dismissed it, then they had the rest of the population against them; and they did not have the resources or the skill to, to address the material, uh, and, uh, it was an endgame for any bright, you know, pilot or Air Force officer who was put in charge of this mess; and, uh, you know, these people want to go on flying. They don’t want to be behind a desk trying to figure out, you know, what kind of star these people have seen or whether it’s potentially a threat; but, you know, after 20 years of essentially no hostility on the part of the phenomenon, it doesn’t justify as a threat, and if it’s not a threat, you don’t need the Air Force! I mean, the Air Force isn’t a fix to do so they really, really, really wanted to get rid of it, and the Condon Committee was created for that, and it was, it was very of use in, um, you know, ’67, ’68, that they were going to write a, a negative report, and it would be embraced by the Academy of Sciences, so and so. Uh, at that point, I got disgusted and went back to Europe. Um, it turned out what I, I went to Europe, I went back to France at a very interesting time when, uh, for all kinds of political reasons, it was near the end of the reign of de Gaulle and so on, um, there was a general strike; and, and there was nothing to do for a month, and, uh, I was in Paris where there was still, at that time, you could still buy some of these old books on traditions and so on; and now that I
was outside ufology, you know, it was clear that the, the Condon Committee, the Condon Commission I should say, uh, was going to write negative report that would kill the research for 10 years, which it did, uh, I was free to think in different ways; and, uh, being back in, in good old Europe, I started looking at the, the, the data that I knew very well, uh, the data about the encounters, the close encounters; and, of course, in the meantime, I had convinced Allen Hynek that there were close encounters in the U.S. that you, even in the Air Force files, that you couldn’t see because they were dismissed immediately, and the joke in the Air Force was if it’s on the ground, you know, it’s not the Air Force. So we’ll dismiss it. Okay, and that was the, uh, an easy way to get rid of the problem, but they were there, in fact, there are more close encounter cases in the files of the Air Force than there are in the files of NICAP. So, um, that was kind of striking, and to me, that was the center certainly at that time the, the, the unexplored area. I mean, what are those things? What are those creatures? Why is there such a, a tremendous impact on society through those images of encounters in very unusual circumstances with objects we don’t understand, objects of light and so on; um, and has that happened before? And when you ask, which is, you know, the obvious question in science, “Has it happened before, or is it a new phenomenon?” and when you ask that question, you unlock an entire world, you know? I mean, yeah, I mean, it didn’t start with Kenneth Arnold in 1947, and there were observations before. We continue to dig up observations from, you know, the early 20th century. Um, you know, the Magonia group in, uh, all over, around the world is very active in digging that up from American newspapers that had never been looked at before because they were not online. Now, they’re online. So they are searchable, and you find that here there were 10,000 local newspapers in the U.S. in 1910, and many of them had little reports of, you know, Mr. So–and-So is coming home and he saw this and so, so now we have this continuity, and it certainly extends to the 18th century and the 17th century and before; and the, when you look at patterns, and, again, remember, I’m coming to this not as a physicist, not as a psychologist, but really as a computer nerd. I mean, you know, I, I’m good, well, I’ve been trained to look, to use computers to look for patterns in very complex data sets, and I’ve contributed to that as, as you know, in computer science, in AI and so on, and, uh, that’s what you do in science. You, you have a data set, and you, you, you try to look at its dimension, at its, its, uh, co, cohesion, its consistency, and that at, you know, what is connected to, to what. So that’s the approach that got me to Passport to Magonia. Magonia, as you know, then, where the name comes from. I mean, it, it comes from an encounter of, uh, cloud ships, uh, in over Lyon in France, uh, where a cloud ship, whatever it is, landed and people came out and the population thought they were devils, wanted to kill them, and the, the reason this was preserved, this is not a fairytale. This is preserved in the writings of the church. This was in the 9th Century, but people wrote books and published them in Latin; and, um, you know, the book was published by the ar, archbishop of Lyon, um, explaining that these people came before him and he told the crowd that, um, they should be allowed to live.
Now, this is, you know, this is a historic event. It’s recorded by the primary, you know, church, uh, who was an archbishop. His life is very well known. He has left a series of books about nature, about different phenomena and so on, about thunder. Uh, what came from God and what came from nature was a big problem for him, and he, he studied this as a philosopher. So we, we knew everything about this, and, I mean, today this would be another UFO case, and we’re still asking the same question. You know, what is it that comes from nature, and what is it that is supernatural or transnatural or, or mystical? So that, that’s what’s, you know, and once when I found, once I found that, and I was in Paris so I could, I could go get all those books either at the, uh, Bibliothèque de Sénart or, you know, some of them I could buy, uh, in, uh, in very, very, very good, um, uh, book, specialized bookstores, you know, antique, antiquity bookstores; and, um, uh, I, I still have that book collection, and, uh, it’s full of that stuff. So I really couldn’t say I’m going to walk away from that because, you know, it doesn’t fit the American idea of, you know, that UFOs are connected to space or to the space program and so on which is in our mythology here in the U.S., of course, that’s what it is; but you have to look at the larger perspective.
Tim Grieve-Carlson: Jacques, you, uh, you mentioned – thank you for that, um, for that wonderful answer. You mentioned, uh, professionally at least your, you know, you’re, as you put it, you’re a computer nerd, and, uh, I want, if it’s okay, I wanted to read a quick passage from your journal from Forbidden Science Volume 1, a passage that I really love, where you write, uh, this is in 1961 you were writing, quote, “The most beautiful sound I have ever heard is the pure and highly musical hum of the memory drum, the IBM 650 when the computer dies. All the power goes out. The motors are still. The console lights stop blinking and, of course, the program is lost. I become aware of the summer sun and the dusty courtyard behind me.” So it – as, as you know it’s rare to hear a technologist who writes, uh, so elegantly about machines and about their love of machines, and I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about how not only, your career in technology, but also kind of your love of technology and kind of this way of thinking, as you put it, of sort of being a person who’s trained to think in terms of data sets and locating patterns in data sets. If you could just talk a little bit about how this has sort of influenced your approach to the UFO phenomenon.
Jacques Vallée: Oh, um, it, you know, um, as a species we’ve developed, um, for example anthropologists have written lots of books about that, you know, our hands and the eye coordination with the hand and so on has developed because we use, you know, we use tools and we make tools. Um, you know, I’ve, uh, I worked for the, the man who invented this. I know Doug Engelbart at SRI; invented the mouse. Mouse is simply, you know, a little piece of wood in those days with, with two wheels one that goes like this and one that goes like that. If you move it around, you have a pointer, okay. Well with our bodies and the mind and body have developed in connection with a mastery of nature through the making of tools. Um, and the, the computer, um, you know, is obviously still evolving with us and is becoming more and more, more and more close to us as, you know, as a body, as an organism, as, you know, linked to, to our body but it, um, it, it provides an opportunity that one’s still not using very well to access the, the world. I mean you, you see it now in, uh, you know, in, in artificial environments and video games and so on and now that are immersive, but the at the time I mean to me, uh, 650 by the time I used it was already sort of an antique, uh, machine, uh, but it, it was powerful and it enabled you of do things that you just couldn’t do with pencil and paper. I mean, you know, you might be able to compute an orbit of a satellite but it, it you might do it once. Uh, the computer could do it again and again and again and again. And you could, you could program it. You could invest your, you know, intelligence of a problem, uh, into it and then use it as a tool the way you’d use, you know, a hammer or a screwdriver. And, and, and get those results and, um, you know, I, I’m still, um, fascinated with that. I mean I’m still and to, to some extent it’s, it’s a pity that, um, with the computers have become so, so good and so transparent that, you know, here we can look at each other, you know, all the time in space without thinking about it, but in those days you had to think about every instruction because if you didn’t it would stop and you’d lose 2 hours, but the, that, you know, it’s still there underneath and to me it’s, um, uh, I thought of it as a, as a magical tool, you know, the same way Paracelsus would think of, uh, a, you know, a
crystal or a mirror or, you know, a or a, um, you know, a device of some sort, uh, both in medicine or in other areas or in, in a magical sense so it’s, it is very much, you know, a magical tool. I’ve never stopped, you know, to think about it that way. Magical in a good way.
Learned Foote: I wonder if I could follow up on that with a question, uh, relating to, uh, spirituality was one of the terms you used at the, at the beginning. Uh, and I’m thinking about how you mentioned in your correspondence and friendship with, uh, with Dr. Hynek, uh, there’s a shared interest Dr. Hynek had an interest in the Rosicrucians, for example, um, and you mentioned your inspirations writing, um, Passport to Magonia and being able to go around to all these book stores and read this, this literature, uh, so there’s, there’s a, an abiding interest in, in that dimension. At the same time when you wrote, um, Messengers of Deception, in the 1970s, uh, it’s very aware of the California scene, the ways in which, uh, religious groups were developing and you pointed very, very early on before other scholars had to the group that would become Heaven’s Gate, uh, when they were, when they were still just a tiny group going around meeting with, um, with a very small number of people, um, before they eventually, uh, decades later, named them, themselves Heaven’s Gate. So you saw the, the foundations, uh, for what that would become and you, you raised warnings about the potential for that sort of, um, conspiratorial or, uh, that, those, that aspect of, of the UFO movement. So I’m curious when you think about spirituality how do you distinguish between, um, something more along the lines of what, uh, Hynek was doing or you were interested in doing in Magonia where you can think critically alongside engaging that material as opposed to some of the more, um, stultifying, uh, closed minded, uh, what I think of at least as closed minded religions groups like Heaven’s Gate, for example, how do you with this common interest in spirituality how do you distinguish between what is critical and what falls into, um, you know, you could call it a cult, for example?
Jacques Vallée: Oh, you know, I don’t need to tell you that there is a, a thin line between a cult and a religion. Um, and, um, I’m not sure that there is a good definition of where the frontier is. I mean how does it, um, how does one turn into the other? Um, you know Jim Jones is also something I’ve studied; uh, as you know, uh, we, my wife and I bought the property in Northern California in Redwood Valley. Um, and that’s where Jim Jones had moved his church, you know, and we passed it every time we, we went to my little observatory there and to our property in the Redwoods. And he did it for the same reason we did, which is, you know, which to me is sort of, you know, uh, I see a parallel in thinking with Jim Jones, which is something that, you know, scares me. But, uh, the idea was, you know, the world is becoming extraordinarily dangerous, um, for all kinds of reasons, uh, mostly strategic reasons because we’re, we could have a nuclear exchange so I mean in the ’70s it was, you know, in the late ’60s and ’70s it was very much a possibility, and also there might be periods where you might not be able to survive in an urban setting so the, at the same time, of course, which made the difference between me and Jim Jones, I felt we are going to have the means of communicating at a distance and working at a distance, um, and, uh, you know, which is evident now because of the virus, okay. So it did happen, okay? We can’t really go to the office anymore. Uh, I mean once in a while but, uh, the we are in a situation where the people – I don’t know how it is around Houston, but people in San Francisco are selling their expensive condos, you know, to, to buy a house on the coast, you know, where they are 50 miles away from their office that, uh, Facebook or whatever and, uh, Facebook says, “Yeah you, you know, we don’t need you to use, to use the office, you know. Stay where you are. Work at a distance.” So we, in some, in some way we were ahead of that wave but we thought that there were a number of scenarios that would make it difficult or impossible to work from an urban area. And at the same time you could be in nature. You could raise your kids in a clean environment, uh, uh, you know, away from exhaust gases and everything else and you could enjoy nature so, um, we actually got together with a group of people including some, some geologists who were working with, with computers, and we actually thought of starting an organization that would buy a big piece of land and would assign it to the different members so they could build something and we would have sort of a community that way. This was in the 70s. Now lots of people were thinking of that, of course. There were hippie communes, uh, were doing it for other reasons, and Jim Jones had the same idea of going away from the politics of, uh, of San Francisco. Um, the, um, so the, the idea also was that spirituality was still alive outside of those urban areas and that you could, uh, you could be not just closer to nature but you could be closer to friends who had the same ideas and you could, you could thrive in that kind of environment. At the same time it was extraordinarily dangerous, and I, I looked at a number of cults, you know, all the way from the diabolical, you know, all to the way to the extreme, uh, um, you know, um, super-Catholic or super-religious, uh, groups, um, with their own traditions. Now think of the group in Waco, you know, that was, uh, horribly, you know, killed. I mean by, by the power of the state, okay? Uh, but they were also actually looking for that. I mean, in, in a way similar to Jim Jones so when, when the, the Jim Jones church starting moving in that direction, yes, I, I called attention to it and nobody thought that it would amount to anything; that they had no real power; that they were dismissed. But as we see now, you know, in, uh, uh, QAnon and others you, you cannot dismiss that kind of thing. I mean you really have to engage it on an intellectual level even if you’re repelled by some of the, you know, some of the things you see on TV so it, it deserves to be studied carefully and, of course, in the history of religion you have plenty of those things. So I’ve gone through that in, in various ways. I think what we’re living through now is going to be a redefinition of what it means to work together, of what it means to communicate, and what it means to be a thinker on a network and, you know, I’m sort of privileged in the way that when I joined Stanford, I joined the computing center at Stanford, which was, you know, either No. 1 or No. 2 in the country with MIT and they – one of the rules if you worked at the center, was you, you had a, a hard line in your basement that was hardwired into the main computer at Stanford from 30 miles away. Okay, so in those days there was no modem. There was none of that. Mean this was 1969, but my kids grew up with online access to the Stanford computer. And, uh, the idea was you can stay home and, you know, when there is a problem, we want to be able to call you at 3:00 in the morning to work on it. And you can take over the computer at 3:00 in the morning from 50 miles away. This was 1969. Okay, so that’s what I’ve lived with all that time. Now this is what people discover now with their laptop but, um – although they cannot in most cases take, take control of the network but they, they can control of their environment, and that’s, that’s a major, you know, it’s a major revolution. Now in terms of spirituality, my approach to it was I mean like everybody else I looked at the Rosicrucian groups and so on. Um, Allen Hynek had, uh, belonged to some of those groups some of the early groups in America and actually studied with them. Um, and was, you know, very intent in, in studying that material. The, you know, the classic Rosicrucian material. And very quickly, as I did, moved away from that and there’s nothing wrong with – many of those organizations are very well meaning, and they will give you access to teachings that are valuable and I think are the basic Rosicrucian writings, you know, are an illustration of that. I mean they – let’s not forget that that’s where science came from, you know, in, in England, of course, with the Royal Society emerged from that, those traditions, and those are traditions that give us chemistry out of alchemy and astronomy out of astrology and, and all of that so they – there is a continuity that modern scientists don’t want to see but that continuity is to a spiritual base of how do we, uh, both, you know, observe nature but observe it in a sense that we, you also participate in it when you observe it. I mean it, it’s almost a ritual act when you observe a star, okay? And it should be. And I think, uh, Hynek and I very much had the same, same thing and we had independently come to the conclusion that which is written in the Rosicrucian writings that there are – the people who do that have to be self-, um, selected. I mean you, you decided that this is what you want to do whether or not there is an organization you’re going to join and, in most cases, there is no organization because the organization is at a different level. But and, uh, Dr. Hynek and I very much jumped independently to the same conclusion that if you, if you want to more you know where to go. I mean it’s not in, in a book, you know. And, um, the, um, I’ve always loved the, that, that image, uh, of a, you know, the Rosicrucians when they were asked, you know, what is it – how did you learn all this, uh, they said you have to buy the book of nature. You have to get the book of nature and study it. And, uh, of course people would say how much is it, you know, and where do I get it? And the book of nature is all around you. I mean that is the book. You, but you – there is a certain way to look at it, which is different from what most people do. And that’s what that’s the key that’s the trick. So and, you know, in astronomy it’s observing, uh, at the telescope, which fewer and fewer astronomers do now because it’s all digital stuff from satellites, and we’ve lost that, that connection. But not, not everybody has lost that connection. I mean there are still people who have telescopes in their backyard. So it’s a long-winded answer to your question. But that’s where – to me that’s where the spirituality comes, and you can have the same relationship with a computer and certainly with a computer network where you can get on Google and ask a question and you have access to all of those things that are randomly distributed and, um, and then you have to drive it and be prepared for no surprises.
Learned Foote: Um, I have one follow-up question which is that, uh, in most of, most of your work you’re not taking the explicit focus on religious organizations like you do in Messengers of Deception, um, it is, it’s there as a, a thread through your work, and I’m thinking of, you know, all the way back to people like Mrs. Keech from When Prophesy Fails, the idea that there’s this group of people that is, uh, you know, trying to interact in some why with, uh, the UFO phenomenon, um, and, uh, and thinking of someone like John Mack, for example, who took a much like, he wanted to look at, uh, how, um, Shamans were interacting with spirits and how did that play out and connect to the UFO field, and your work doesn’t necessarily take that same angle. You’re more looking at, uh, reports, um, from, you know, various officials and how do we assess these reports, what are the material responses, but considering the, that, that religious angle, I’m thinking of people like Mrs. Keech, I’m thinking of even people like Whitley Strieber who, uh, uh, studied Gurdjieff, uh, before doing the work that he did. Is there potentially some connection between, uh, an altered state of consciousness, the kinds of perceptions that become, uh, uh, feasible through religious practice or through intensive meditation, might there be some connection between, uh, uh, UFO perceptions and, uh, these, um, you know, spiritual exercises, so to speak?
Jacques Vallée: Um, yes, and I’ve, I’ve, I’ve become more and more conscious of, of that to the point where with me it’s, it’s, you know, I’m, I’m trying to develop sort of a methodology is a big, big word, but, um, an approach to cases, you know, I, people think of me as a theorist, but I’ve spent most of the time, I’ve spent with this phenomenon was in a, on, on the computer sort of hashing through the data or in the field with the witnesses, and, as, as you know, I think the best example is that, uh, the case of Juan in Argentina, okay? Where, which is the only case in the archives in, in, in the history where, um, the subject was in fact followed and studied when he was 14 and all the way to being an adult, late, late in his late 40s. Uh, and reconstituting sort of the, again, the arc of what happened to him. Uh, the, in, in doing that, in the case of Juan for example, before I, I went there, um, I, I spent 6 months relearning enough Spanish, I was fluent in Spanish when I was 14, but the vocabulary, you know, flies off. I had spent a month in Spain and was, was pretty good in Spanish, and I’ve, you know, obviously lost it, and so I wanted to regain enough of it to be able to speak with him one-on-one. Uh, not so much that I didn’t want, you know, an interpreter to jump in the conversation, but I, I wanted to hear his words and, and sort of process them and be in his linguistic environment and he, in his thinking environment, and uh, and be able to communicate with him at a level of trust that you can only have when you speak the same language. And so that’s very much my, you know, preferred methodology when I can now, and I’ve, with one case that I’m looking at now that I’m writing up and trying to publish, now I, I’ve taken one other step which I think Paracelsus would have agreed with, of, of actually asking the, the, the landscape and the time to tell me their experience, I mean, the, of, of actually, you know, going there, hopefully in the same conditions when the thing happened, and, and first letting the, letting the setting and the, you know, the, the, the, the time, the weather, the land educate me about, about the thing that happened. Then I can put the witness, obviously, I’m going to, you know, be there with the witness, he’s going to tell me where it came from, you know, if there was light, if there was no light, if there, uh, you know, what it did on the ground and everything else. But I, I also want that to, to come from, you know, respect of the setting. Is there, not that there is necessarily anything special about that particular place, maybe the thing could have fallen anywhere, but it didn’t, you know, that, this is where it fell, and so I want to know their history, I want to know who else has been there, what they were doing there, you know, was there a town there, was there a market there at some point. Was, was there, you know, what happens when it rains, and those are things that I need to know if I’m really going to understand a, a case that’s worth really investigating, I’m really going to go there, and, you know, in some depth. Now that’s, that’s not exactly a spiritual practice, but, you know, it comes pretty close to it in terms of, you know, respect for the, for the land and for the, the people there, and their relationship to the land. And we’ve lost that in the United States because, you know, um, most places in the U.S. you, you get there and you ask for the, the name of a street and the, the people there can’t tell you the name of the next street, you know, and, and, uh, and it’s right behind, you know, behind a couple of trees, and they, they don’t know where they are, okay? And, uh, that’s very, uh, shocking to people that come from Europe. And, and Aimé Michel when he came to, to San Francisco, wanted to visit the grave of his aunt who had died in, in the North Bay somewhere, and, uh, his cousin had no idea where the, the old lady had been buried. And he was really shocked at that, because to him he wanted to be there at, at the place. And he came from the Alps where places are very important. So, uh, that’s one thing that is, is important when, you know, when I see Americans, not in, I don’t use the term in a disparaging way, because I’m American, but when they, they go to places like Brazil or Argentina or Russia, they don’t have that concept of the land and their relationship and their history, how people got there. And, uh, so they make gross mistakes in, in, uh, interpreting what the witness is saying, so I’m not sure I’m answering your question, but, you know, I not, not sure how I got here.
Learned Foote: No, I, I really appreciate it, and especially, I spend time, a lot of time in Nepal and talking to Tibetan people, and just thinking about the importance of place, the importance of history, uh, to any time there’s sort of a, a conversation that seems to move beyond, you know, modern sense of what is possible, it’s deeply connected to place, and –
Jacques Vallée: Yes.
Learned Foote: – it’s connected to the landscape, and it’s connected to, uh, all these things, um. So, I, I appreciate those connections, um, those connections being drawn. Um, I want to be, to be conscious of, of time, uh, because we have been going for about an hour and 20 minutes. Um, I wanted to, to ask, uh, maybe a quick follow up on, sort of, your experience as you moved outside of the, uh, American framework or even the Western European framework, and you’ve, you know, you’ve talked about spending time in South America, uh, looking at research in Russia and so forth. Um, and I’m curious as to, as you took a, a more global perspective, uh, how did that, how did that impact, um, your perceptions of, of the, of the field? Looking beyond the American, um, place
Jacques Vallée: Um, the, uh, of, you know, uh, I live in Silicon Valley. I mean, Silicon Valley is my backyard, um, and I love it, uh, and I know it well, and I know it’s a little, it’s little secrets, like, after, you know, 40, 50 years, and I, I think it’s extraordinarily rich and it’s also, uh, you know, a, a way for which the, the, the, you know, a matrix for which you can look at the world in, in ways that are extraordinarily efficient and, and, and clear. At the same time, uh, it, it masks or it makes a lot of other things disappear. There is no history. Uh, I mean, people don’t even know their history of the internet that I’ve tried to preserve some of it and, uh, but it’s, uh, it’s hard because people assume the internet was built in order to have Facebook. I mean, it, the, uh, I mean, what else can it do? Uh, that, that’s important. The, so, uh, at the same time, you know, I, I, I, I go slowly back to Europe or other places two or three times a year, so I have not lost that, that connection, and I can still think in, in that particular way. And the phenomenon is global, and it’s not an American phenomenon. You know, the U.S., U.S. is 5 percent of the land mass of, of, you know, the world, the habitable world. So, um, the, the phenomenon at, at its essence, which is what I want to study now, I mean, that’s where I want to focus, is extraordinary, and it’s not just lights in the sky. It’s not just something that flies over the limits, which is extraordinary enough, but it, it’s, uh, something that, and I think the only, the only way it has been depicted right on, uh, in the cinema is, uh, you know, in, in close encounters by Spielberg of, of showing, I mean, they are building a runway and they are expecting something to land. And it, it doesn’t need to land, you know, it’s bigger than the mountain. And, uh, the,
uh, it’s not the little lights which fly around, you know, it’s a big guy. And I think, uh, it’s very difficult for, for us in our technical civilization to imagine something like that, and even the scientists have, have trouble. You know, there are projects, you know, without getting into, uh, personalities and details, but there have been well-funded projects that went back to Brazil with the idea of checking up on what I had published about the, the Brazilian Air Force, you know, facing these things that came out of, uh, of, of the Amazon. And, so, they, they sent competent people. They sent, you know, uh, investigators, uh, military guys, uh, didn’t speak one word of Portuguese, and, uh, they went there and they tried to buy their way through, you know, the data. And they came back with essentially nothing. I mean, the, the, either because they, they never really respected the culture where they were, which on the surface looks like an inferior culture to us, but it isn’t. And, um, you know, if you were left alone there, you may be American, but you’re going to die in 48 hours if you don’t know what the local people know, and the only way you’re going to, your life can be saved is if they want to save you and they teach you what you need to do to get out alive of certain situations. So, the, um, the naivety with which we, and I, I identify now with, you know, those, those investigators, uh, we approach these other cultures, whether it’s Russia or Brazil or Argentina, uh, is, is, is horrible. And, um, I was never completely comfortable in Brazil because I don’t speak Portuguese. I’ve, I’ve never studied it. Um, uh, I’m much more comfortable in Argentina or in Mexico because I, at least I understand what people are talking about even if I don’t understand every word, but I, I get the tone of the, and in most cases I can participate in, you know, at some level. So, they, um, there is a relationship, but, uh, that, and you need that relationship to build trust, and if, if there is no trust, it’s not that they will deceive you, they won’t try to deceive you but you’re not going to understand what they are telling you. And you’re not going to understand the – and what happened in Brazil is a, uh, you know, case in point. I mean, for 3 months, there were UFOs. I mean, there is no question that there were UFOs, and it couldn’t be anything else. You know, the, something the size of an airliner coming out of the water of the Amazon, all lit up, you know, flying over an island, uh, and this happened again, and again, and again, and again. And the, the people on the island because they, their survival depended on being able to hunt and fish at night for climate condition because you’re under the equator and you have to understand all those things; you have to be there to understand that, no, you cannot go out at 2:00 in the afternoon or you’ll, you know, you’ll be sick, and, and, uh, you won’t be able to think, you, you won’t be able to move, you won’t be able to do any of the things you want to do. And, um, these things were happening at night and people left the island, all the people who could, and the people who were left, you know, so, the, essentially the, uh, Brazilian Air Force being deployed there on those beaches, camping there, and taking notes, and they changed the patterns of all the airlines around the mouth of the Amazon so that anything that flew there was a UFO. I mean, it was just as simple as that. And the, the reason I had, I was able to document this at a particular time was that the people who had been in charge of that task force were still there, you know, in that, uh, Air Force base. And, uh, that Air Force base is, uh, the size of France. I mean, the, the territory it covers. And the man in charge was head of intelligence, and the reason he wanted to talk to me was he wanted to tell his story to somebody. He had read my books before. Some of my, my books have been translated into Portuguese and he had read them, but he wanted to know what was going on in France and if there were similar things to try to understand what had happened to him and to his men during those 3 months when they had total control of the airspace over the mouth of the Amazon. And night after night after night, they were documenting these objects dropping from the sky or coming in and flying over or coming out of the water. Now, that is, that is a phenomenon, and, and it couldn’t be anything else. I mean, this was not mirages. There are no mirages at night over the Amazon, okay? And that come out of the water. So, the, um, those are the, sort of, the extreme cases. There was something similar when, um, um, one of the times, I’ve gone to Russia six times, but, uh, and one of the times was under official auspices at the beginning of the Gorbachev era where things were open. And so, this was, sort of, the tail end of the Soviet Union merging, reconnecting with its, sort of, Russian identity, and it was extraordinary. And the, the, the cases that they were documenting were, you know, were of that scale. And, um, I don’t speak Russian. I can decipher a little bit of Russian if I have to and, with a dictionary, but, um, the, after being there, again, with interpreters and with guides and so on, I could participate in what they were telling me at, at the right level, at the level of trust again. And, uh, again, we were there, um, as, you know, two, two French people, uh, not as Americans, and there were, you know, long, tortured relationship between France and Russia that went back to the days of Tsar. So, that, that was baked into the culture, you know, in spite of all the, the difficulties that happened after that. So, uh, there, there was, uh, that connection, and of course there was also an American connection at the same time, so it was a very rich kind of exchange, but I knew that I was only understanding a couple of levels, and the deeper levels I, I didn’t have much access to. But in, in Russia, even through, you know, the, all the things that happened under communism, there was that same sense that, um, Hynek and I had about, you know, the Rosicrucian tradition. I mean, as someone like Kazantsev, uh, Alexander Kazantsev was very much inspired by spirituality, you know. And, uh, he had fought World War II, he was decorated in World War II and that gave him access to, you know, certainly to the, the media and to, and to higher-ups because he was respected as a writer, but what he was writing about was spirituality. And, um, when you, when you ask them, “How come you still have those traditions and they were preserved, under Stalin, I mean, of all things?” But Stalin went to the same monastery as Gurdjieff, okay? So, um, well, and the, well, the answer is they laugh when you ask them that question, and they said, “Well, you, you killed all your witches. We didn’t.”
Learned Foote: That’s, that’s great. I love that. That’s, um, a really, really interesting way to put it. And going back to the Royal Society, you know, that’s sort of, like, um, as that is being founded is when, um, Britain is very intent on killing its witches, so to speak, uh, so it’s an interesting aspect of the, uh, the history.
Jacques Vallée: Yes. Well, the aristocrats were capable of, you know, rising above that and, uh, uh, you know, that was the invisible college.
Learned Foote: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.
Jacques Vallée: And, um, uh, Hynek was very much inspired by that. I mean, that’s where science comes from. And, uh, I think even the, the English have forgotten that, but, uh, we didn’t.
Tim Grieve-Carlson: Jacques, you did, um, you did mention earlier, um, Close Encounters, and I, I think, you know, we’d be remiss if we didn’t bring up that you were kind of a major inspiration for this, uh, you know, now obscure, largely forgotten filmmaker, Steven Spielberg, um, and his character, uh, in, in Close Encounters, the, the French UFO investigator. Um, and I just wonder if you could talk about that for a moment. I know that you met with Spielberg on, on at least one occasion, I think, and I wonder if you could just talk about the occasion and making that film.
Jacques Vallée: We, we met on two, two occasions; there were two. Um, the, the character – there, there was, um, there was a character in the initial script. Of course, all scripts get written and rewritten and rewritten, sometimes, uh, on the fly, you know, in front of the camera. And, and, you know, people take notes and the script is written later. But the, um, the ch, the character, first, was, was an American. Uh, it wasn’t a Frenchman. Then, um, Spielberg, uh, became aware of the work of a friend of mine, Claude Poher, who was a physicist and engineer in France who had been inspiring the French government to start, you know, to, to look at that. And then, um, that, so th, that character evolved, and then he had been aware of my work. He told me he had read Anatomy of a Phenomenon when he was a, you know, a, a, a student in, in cinema, and, in fact, had done a movie at that, at that time, in 16 millimeter, you know, uh, sort of inspired by, by that, and there were things in Close Encounters that came out, straight out of, um, Anatomy of a Phenomenon. Like the little light that, and, and the, the road sign vibrating and so on that was actually in Challenge to Science, in one of, one of my books from that era. And so the, uh, so eventually the, uh, character was, final character was based on me, but it, it came through that line of being rewritten three times. The, um, when I, I met with him, that was, that was sort of funny, because the, uh, a, uh, a reporter, you know, brought us together. She was writing an article in, in a, uh, magazine about the, the movie, about Close Encounters, and, uh, she brought us together over luncheon, in Hollywood that time, and, uh, that’s when she asked, uh Steven Spielberg if it was true that the character was based on me, and he, uh, told her, um, that was in, in, recorded in her article, so there’s no, no question about that part of it. But he told me that, um, he said, you know, “You’re, you’re a scientist. Maybe you can help me, because I spent the morning at JPL looking for ideas on – because there is, there is a gap in the script. They know that the big mother is coming; that something is coming. They don’t exactly know what it looks like, and they don’t know where. So they, it’s important for them to go meet it. And, uh, as you know, it’s going to be Devil’s Tower in, uh, in Wyoming, and, uh, but they don’t, they don’t know that. So they,” he said, “at JPL they told me all kinds of scientific things that made no sense, and it was just too technical. I can’t use it.” And I said, “Well, you know, maybe something very visual and direct would, would work. Like they get a signal and, uh, they get a signal from Point A, and, you know, it points in a particular direction, and they get a signal from Point B, and the two lines intersect, and that’s where they should go.” He said, “Well, there are two problems with that. One is, it’s too long to explain, and No. 2, it’s not funny. And it has to be something that, you know, will stay in people’s mind.” So I thought of, um, the – actually, I have, in, in what I sent you, you know, about the history of, uh, my computing, you know, beginning, there is that cover of Life magazine where the big, the big sphere, okay, I, I remembered seeing that on Hynek’s desk. That picture. Okay? With, with three astronomers trying to figure out the orbit of – and Hynek said, “Well, you know, that picture was taken when the Russians launched Sputnik 1, and, and nobody had a way of computing an orbit of a satellite of the Earth.” They were, there were programs, there were two programs computing orbits. One was an orbit of a comet, which assumed that the, the Earth was flat, because it’s close enough approximation because comets are far away. They are, they are thousands of, you know, of, of miles away, and so the, it doesn’t matter, the shape of the Earth doesn’t matter. Uh, which is fine, but, uh, when you track the, the, comet, but that, of course, doesn’t work for a satellite of the Earth. And the other one was, there was a program computing satellites of planets, like the satellites of Jupiter, but they assumed that, uh, the Earth, uh, was, uh, reduced to a point, okay? So, or, or vice versa. I don’t remember which it was. But in both cases, you, you couldn’t use it. So the, uh, when Sputnik 1 was launched, the director of Harvard Observatory was woken up at, in the middle of the night by a reporter from the New York Times asking for a comment. Uh, you know, ‘What is your impression? What do you have to say about the Russian satellite?” And he said, “What Russian satellite?” It’s 3:00 in the morning. And, uh, they said, “Well, um, uh, listen to the radio.” And they rushed to that place which is a lobby of, um, of the, uh, uh, museum, where there was this big sphere, and they were putting a piece of string around, including Hynek, was on the ladder trying to fit it, uh, over places where the satellite had been seen. And that’s the way they determined the orbit the first time. I told that to Spielberg and he just burst out laughing. He said, “That’s it,” you know? “They say, you know, we’ve got, we’ve got the, you know, $2 billion of equipment here with, deployed, you know, the intelligence, you know, army intelligence and so on, and, uh, you know, where, where, where is that?” And the, uh, the interpreter of Lacombe, you know, the French guy, says, “Well, I, I used to be, you know, a geographer, and the, the signal we get looks like longitude and latitude, and it, it’s up north somewhere, in Wyoming.” And he said, “Well, where in Wyoming?” You know, “Get me a map of Wyoming,” and nobody has a map of Wyoming. And that’s where they break into the museum next door and they bring back the, the sphere, and they look at it, and that’s how they know where they have to go. And that, that filled in – I was never paid for that, but, uh, you know, they, uh, that filled in the, the, the hole in the script. And I’m sort of proud of that because it’s funny, and it’s, it’s visual, and it’s exciting, and it’s funny. But that came directly from Hynek, you know, again. Uh, so small world. Uh, it came from American science being caught, you know, uh, completely unaware of what was going on, and it would be, you know, as you know, it would be a couple of years before U.S. was able to launch its own satellite.
Tim Grieve-Carlson: Yeah, and, I mean, um – that’s just such a f – I hadn’t, I hadn’t, I hadn’t heard that story before. That’s that, that is really interesting. Um –
Jacques Vallée: It was funny because it brought in Hynek, and I, I had always remembered that picture. It was the cover of, of Life magazine.
Tim Grieve-Carlson: Mm hmm.
Jacques Vallée: With the three astronomers fitting the string around the Earth, you know.
Tim Grieve-Carlson: Yeah. It is, it is kind of a cinematic detail. Um, just a, just a few more questions we got here for you, Jacques. One, um, and also, kind of, speaking here of Hynek, in this earlier phase of your career as a UFO researcher, at times you did, sort of, either, either alongside Hynek, and sometimes in other capacities, you did at times advise governments, um, work with other people who were working with, uh, defense agencies on the UFO phenomenon. You mentioned the, the Nimitz report a moment ago. Um, and following this report, of course, you know, questions surrounding government knowledge, military knowledge of UFOs, these are more popular than ever. And so I wonder if you might just, um, give us your take on kind of, not only these recent articles, um, in the New York Times, but also kind of the, the state of the question right now as, kind of, it’s developing, um, with what, um, you know, whether, whether you want to call it, some people like to call it disclosure, or just sort of the development of kind of more public knowledge of, of military involvement in the phenomenon.
Jacques Vallée: So, um, there are several angles here. You, um, and yes, uh, we, um, um, you know, a group of us are right in the middle of that, um, and, you know, many people have started to work on that. The military encounters are, are interesting, especially when you have something like, you know, the Pacific Fleet being, being involved with, um, a series of objects, um, uh, because the, the military, of course, has sensors that are very, very good. And it also has observers that are very, very good. I mean, those pilots, of course, you know, are highly trained, and they don’t panic, and they, uh, they know where they are, and they know their instruments, as well. So you, you get, you would think that you would get a lot of data that would help you, um, find out – well, certainly exclude if it’s something known; you’d know it very quickly. If it’s something unknown, you’d have the characteristics very quickly. Well, that was certainly true, you know, in, in Brazil. They had 3 months to record what was happening around them, and they had instruments and they had cameras to, to document what was, what was happening. We still don’t know what those things were. Um, there have been cases like that in other countries, where aircraft carriers have recalled it. Um, nobody talks about that because nobody knows about those cases, but there have been several cases where foreign navies have recorded things like what the Nimitz recorded. Uh, so it’s not new. Uh, it’s, um, it’s interesting because the, the instruments of the, the planes, including the infrared cameras, were very, were novel, and they were very, very good. And the p, and there were a number of pilots. Um, the, the danger that I see there is, is, is two, twofold. There is a, the, the, the military cases are only 10 percent of the database. You know? Even if you looked at the, the Air Force database, you know, Project Blue Book, uh, with it, you know, 10,000plus; maybe 15,000 cases, um, many of them came from the public, not from pilots. Or it came from people on the ground, or it came from instruments. Um, so, but, but many of them came from the public reporting to the Air Force. The, most of the cases in my files are not military at all. I mean, they come from, and those are more interesting cases, because I, I have access to these people. I can go see them. They take me to the spot; they show me which direction it came from and so on. I can reconstruct that with them, and I can, I can probe into their recollection, into their memory, you know, into their emotions, and, and all of that. So that’s, that’s, in a way it’s richer in another dimension. I don’t, I don’t have the, you know, the, the, the camera; I don’t have the infrared; I don’t have all of that. But, um, at the end of the day, we still don’t know what kind of thing was flying around the Nimitz. Uh, we don’t even know – I mean, there is a memo from the, the people who built the, the infrared camera saying, “You’re extrapolating from the instrument we give you, but you’re wrong. I mean, the, the instrument doesn’t give you the distance; you’ll have to get the distance from something else, and, uh, the instrument wasn’t designed to track UFOs. It was designed to track sources of heat, like the exhaust of a, of a missile. Or the exhaust of a jet. And so you’re extrapolating, and that’s fine, but remember, there are limitations to the instrument we gave you.” Okay? Um, so the, what happens now is, it can be misconstrued. It can lead us in, in, away, in fact, from, uh, what I
think would be of most interest to scientists, um, to the extent that, you know, most scientists would say, well, you know, there are lots of things the military is doing, or foreign military is doing, that are classified. We don’t have access to that, you know? I mean, there is lots of stuff. They don’t even have access to the, the satellites that record the weather on Earth, you know, for the military, uh, because it records all kinds of other things, and the characteristics of those satellites are classified. So the meteorologists, or the, you know, the weather experts, the climate experts, haven’t had access to it. And some of that is by design, because there was a political will to sort of make people forget about climate change, and those satellites would, you know, would scream planet, you know, climate change on a planetary scale, because l, they look at the whole planet across the spectrum, not just the clouds and rain, okay? They look from the UV all the way to the infrared, to the far infrared, and everything in between. They also look at Xrays; also look at radioactivity. So you have an extraordinarily rich thing that has n, has never been accessible to science. And would tell us about the real history of the planet over the last 25 years, okay? Uh, most universities don’t have computers big enough to analyze the data, so you, you would have to bridge a lot of things. So with, with UFOs, we, you know, the, the scientific community isn’t quite ready to engage into that, that type of data that comes from the military, especially from military intelligence and from some of those, uh, cameras are still classified. So, uh, it’s difficult, and, uh, when you talk about, um, disclosure, you know, I have a problem with that, because what is it we’re going to disclose? And, and if you say we’re going to disclose that there is a phenomenon that’s unknown, well, you know, we did that in 1955. I mean, um, I mean, Michel did that. Uh, Hynek did that. I mean, we, we, we know there’s a phenomenon we don’t understand, and it’s, it’s very rich; it’s, you know, um, the Bigelow projects did that. I mean, NIDSci, you know, was run by competent scientists, and, and a great business leader, Mr. Bigelow. So, uh, they did that. I mean, it was, it was done by that group, and it’s there. Uh, I mean, in the NIDSci advisory board there were two, two of the, um, Apollo astronauts who had walked on the moon, okay? So what else do you need? I mean it’s, we’ve disclosed that. Uh, if people won’t listen, it’s their, their business. The, so are we disclosing that, uh, that it’s a threat? Well, it isn’t a threat. I mean, the Nimitz is still, you know, going on its happy way. In fact, during that whole episode, I mean, the, the, the sailors were joking with the pilots, uh, you know. And so, uh, the, the Nimitz never felt that it was in danger because those things were flying around. So either they knew something that the rest of them didn’t, or it was just not, you know, not really a threat. There, there were threatening moments, uh, to the pilots. I mean, there is no, no question this was serious. But in terms of the, the big picture, um, it’s something that came and went. So it’s not, uh, disclosure of anything. Now, there are a number of people that want to use that as a way of, as a channel to disclose what they think it is. And, uh, but that ranges, you know, the gamut, um, from personal beliefs to, um, even scientific theories that these are mirages. I mean, when you talk to the city people, they say, “Well, either they saw balloons, or they saw mirages.” Well, I, I, I don’t think it’s an even fight between a balloon and an F18, but, um, if that’s, you know, that’s the way I’ve heard scientists here in Silicon Valley talking about the Nimitz, uh, thing. So, uh, the, we’re a long way from disclosure, and there may be, as we know from recent history, there, there may be groups that want to influence a disclosure in their particular, um, way of, you know, thinking about the phenomenon, um, and restrict it to a particular interpretation of what it could be. And, um, uh, essentially a manipulation of the mind of, of people to enforce a particular thing. And one example of that is, you know, one, one thing I’ve learned about sightings in Russia, um, is, what, that I learned from a skeptic. Because I, I do listen to the skeptics, and they, they, when they know the data – the main problem with the skeptics is that they don’t know the data. But the skeptics who have studied the data are, are very valuable, and one of them told me about some of the cases that, in, in the Russian archives, uh, recorded as UFOs were illegal launches of rockets that they disguised as a UFO, and that’s why all of a sudden it’s in Pravda, you know, it’s in the newspapers because they wanted people to think that those lights they saw over the horizon – of course, uh, the base is far from, uh, towns – uh, so they, they see a light that goes up in the sky, they want them to think that it’s a UFO because they are launching, you know, illegal rockets, and, in violation of the SALT Treaties, and the U.S. of course knew that, but the public didn’t know that, and maybe it was better for the public not to know that, both in Russia and, and here. So there are all these interpretations that, you know, are – and, okay, uh, I learned something. I said, “Thank you, you know, I didn’t know that. I had it in my database as a UFO. Now, um, again, you have to go through those filters, and when you talk about disclosure, um, you know, again, uh, y, you’re entering the, a, an area where the words are not well defined.
Tim Grieve-Carlson: Yeah. Jacques, so, um, first, I mean, first of all, that’s definitely gonna be my new response the next time someone starts talking about disclosure around me, will be, “Disclose what?” I like that a lot. Um, kind of, so perfect segue into this, what, what, what I
think will be our final question – and, again, thanks so much for taking the time to, to do this interview with it.
Jacques Vallée: Oh, my, my pleasure.
Tim Grieve-Carlson: Yeah. Um –
Jacques Vallée: Um –
Tim Grieve-Carlson: – as you point out, the, the terms around this phenomena are, are sometimes either poorly defined, or they have kind of complicated, or in some cases compromised, histories, and with an eye towards, kind of, the historians of the future; the researchers who might be turning to this archive, um, your, your collection, and, and the history of the UFO phenomenon, kind of as our, to conclude, I’d like to just ask, um, what would you like to say to those researchers now? What, uh, what mistakes would you like to kinda caution them against, and what, um, what sort of things would you like to tell them?
Jacques Vallée: Oh, uh, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s not for me to say. I mean, they will come with their own background. They will bring something new to the equation. So I can’t presuppose, um – I, I think I, I’ve done my work of documenting, you know, what could be documented. Uh, in my correspondence with both Aimé Michel and Hynek, you’ll see times when we disagreed. Times when we, the conversation almost broke up because we, you know, we were mad at each other, um, because I felt some things should have been done, and they were not done. And, um, or there were interpretations that were missed, and, um, and, uh, and number of ti, all of those times I was wrong, or I was just too young and, you know, uh, too impulsive to tolerate nuances. Uh, and there are lots of nuances. So, uh, I think that, uh, I, I see more the collection for, for those people, especially if they are scientists, as safeguards, you know? I mean, of, because, uh, we keep making the same mistakes again and again and again. And I see people who come into the, you know, I, I’ve, a very good friend of mine is a brilliant physicist, um, and he says, “Well, all this stuff now, we, we’ve got these big databases. You put all that into a Google machine of, you know, we have AI now. There’s artificial intelligence. You put it into an AI machine, and it will, it will sort out the patterns.” Well, I, I’m sure that, you know, you, you put all that into Google and push a button, that, that Google-intelligent machine is going to give you something. The, the problem is that it’s probably going to be very, very, very misleading. If, if you had to recruit a, um, you know, a staff of people to work on this, I don’t care where they come from or what PhD they have; it would take 2 years of looking at the records and training them before they could be useful in this thing, or they would have to go around the world, talk to witnesses, make those mistakes that everybody has made, of, you know, planet Venus, and so on, and, and, you know, the fog, and all, all those things before they could form their own unique interpretation of it, and th, this is not something where you can just recruit, you know, uh, three programmers, two AI experts, and couple of psychologists and go. Uh, when, uh, I had that job of building the database for BAASS, which was, you know, the, the second Bigelow project, the, the one that was tied to AATIP, you know, in the Pentagon. Um, I, the, I, I said, “We’re going to build a database in Excel.” And they said, “Well, what about AI? What about, uh, you know, advanced programming languages?” Well, No. 1, Excel is an advanced programming language. If you, if you really know Excel fully, you can program in Excel. And, No. 2, I can, I can hire Excel experts today, you know? I, they already know it. And the, the first level is just dumb level of populating an Excel spreadsheet with the data. Then we’ll build the second level, which is going to be looking for patterns to differentiate, you know, the, quote, the “best” cases to use – that, that was the wrong word, but you know what I mean. The, the important cases from the, the ordinary cases. And then, then we can have something that we can drive under AI. But you have to drive the AI the way you drive a truck. You can’t just give it to the AI and say, “Give me a pattern,” because the AI is going to go off the rope, or the cliff.
Tim Grieve-Carlson: Well, uh, Lauren, unless you have any other questions, um, Jacque, umm, thank you again for your time this evening. This has been lovely.
Jacques Vallée: Oh, uh, if you transcribe this, uh, I’d love to review it and maybe clean it up a little bit.
Tim Grieve-Carlson: ****.
Jacques Vallée: Because, uh, sometimes better words to use or references that you might want. And then, uh, after we look at it, if you want to do a second, uh, you know, a second iteration, I’m certainly open to that. As you can see with, uh, the computer I’m using, um, we did it over two, two sessions, and that was really useful, because, uh, the questions the second time were not the same ones.
Tim Grieve-Carlson: That sounds great. Yeah, that ****.
Jacques Vallée: So I’m, I’m open, you know, and I’m, thank you for doing this. This is great.
Tim Grieve-Carlson: Sure.
Learned Foote: Yeah. We can, we can definitely create the transcript. I think that’ll be a really useful document, and hopefully be, uh, the ground for future conversations. Um –
Jacques Vallée: Okay.
Learned Foote: – this has really been a wonderful, a wonderful treat, and we are, we are so excited we got to sit down with you today.
Jacques Vallée: Well, thank you.
Tim Grieve-Carlson: All right.
Jacques Vallée: Thanks.
Tim Grieve-Carlson: Thank you, ****.
Jacques Vallée: Good night.
Tim Grieve-Carlson: Take care. Be well.
Jacques Vallée: Good night.
Learned Foote: Good night.
Tim Grieve-Carlson: Good night.
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