Jacques Vallée is a French scientist described as a researcher, astronomer, and computer scientist.1 He held US government clearances related to the investigation of UAP.2 As a young researcher he worked with J. Allen Hynek, organising papers from the United States Air Force (USAF)’s Project Blue Book.3 He also supplied material to Flying Saucer Review as a correspondent.4 Working at the Paris Observatory in France, he tracked and photographed unidentified objects.5 Drawing on French case data in 1964, he established that Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) landings tended to occur in desolate places, a pattern he and Hynek later verified using United States Air Force data.6,7 He and Hynek travelled to Boulder, Colorado, to brief the Condon Committee investigating UFOs for the United States Air Force.8 The bulk of the committee’s computer file was drawn from three thousand punched cards that Vallée had turned over to it.9 The committee split into two opposed factions after a minority group rebelled,10 and published an internal memorandum they presented as evidence that the committee had never intended to seriously investigate the UFO problem.11 Edward U. Condon fired the minority group and ran the project without serious consideration of the phenomenon’s possible reality.12 Vallée described what he called a “first coverup” - the discouragement of UFO reporting by figures in authority, ranging from a local deputy sheriff’s laughter to intimidation of pilots by their commanding officer.13 He called the release of official explanations that explained nothing but gave sceptics grounds to dismiss a case the “second coverup."14 He attributed the resulting confusion in UFO reporting and disclosure to bureaucratic disorganisation rather than a secret military policy or “Silence Group."15
In December 1973, Vallée and his wife Janine Vallée investigated a UFO sighting at Carteret in Normandy during a research trip through western France.16 Janine Vallée travelled to Carteret to interview a witness and the police investigators, while Jacques Vallée checked other information.17 A large radar installation at Mauperthuis, near Cherbourg, stood thirty-eight kilometres from Carteret and had an antenna range of two hundred kilometres.18 At 6:10 a.m. on 1973-12-02 the installation picked up an echo on a course consistent with an object flying from the direction of Carteret toward Great Britain.19 Military radar operators in Cherbourg were later ordered to deny their statements about that night.20 Vallée hypothesised that the nearby wreck of the trawler Archipel resulted from erroneous readings on its magnetic navigation system, caused by magnetic perturbations he said were frequently observed near a UFO.21 In March 1974, French Minister of Defence Robert Galley took part in a series of radio interviews featuring witness reports and statements from three French scientists who had studied the phenomenon: Pierre Guerin of the Paris Astrophysical Institute, Claude Poher, and Vallée.22
Vallée’s investigations extended into contactee movements, most notably the Order of Melchizedek. In December 1975 he saw a poster in the Paris Metro reading “The Lord is an extraterrestrial who has returned in a flying saucer,” giving an address for the group on rue Jules Valles.23 He visited the apartment the following day.24 He and Janine Vallée later attended an Order of Melchizedek meeting at the Hyatt Hotel in San Francisco, paying three dollars each.25 From these and other interviews he compiled a catalogue of recurring contactee themes, including intellectual abdication, racist philosophy, technical impotence, and social utopia.26 At Order of Melchizedek meetings he observed the same vacant, blissful expressions he had previously seen among followers of other movements.27 He also drew comparisons between the Esoteric Fraternity teachings of Hiram Erastus Butler and modern UFO contactee groups such as Heaven’s Gate, observing that both spoke of regeneration, transformation, and contact with a higher level.28 He considered that contactee groups could capitalise on public fear under certain combinations of economic and social circumstances, a concern connected to wider alien contactee movement political manipulation.29 According to Jason Samosa, in his book Messengers of Deception Vallée warned that a mass appearance of UFOs worldwide could cause cults to blossom while trust in government collapsed, changing the global status quo overnight.30 He also examined figures connected to psychic research: Jim Hurtak, a friend of Andrija Puharich, was involved in the Uri Geller affair and claimed psychic abilities and UFO encounters.31 Vallée considered Geller’s case one in which the self-negating factors of the UFO phenomenon were “all gathered around a single person,” making it exceptionally complex to research.32 According to Jason Samosa, an anonymous source identified in Messengers of Deception only as “Major Murphy” suggested to Vallée that people may have created flying saucers during World War II, pointing to 1943, and that the technology’s real advantage lay not in its flight capability but in its psychotronic effect.33
Vallée later collaborated with religious studies scholar Diana Walsh Pasulka, who wrote that his approach to the UFO phenomenon addressed three aspects: the physical, the testimonial - represented by experiencers - and the social, concerning how belief in the phenomenon persists regardless of verifiable evidence.34 Researcher James Master and Vallée counted each other as major influences and mentors, forming an instant bond.35 Master observed that Vallée achieved his standing precisely because he had never concluded that the UFO phenomenon was anything specific,36 which Master said infuriated most ufologists, since Vallée would not commit to a single explanation.37 According to Pasulka, Vallée has suggested that the UFO might not be an object at all but a kind of “window” into another dimension.38 Vallée has proposed that apparitions and UFOs may both be manifestations of a single the Control System (Vallée’s hypothesis) that works like a schedule of reinforcement.39 Applying a comparative method to the 1917 Fatima Marian apparitions, he said he was not claiming the apparitions were UFO events, nor that UFO events were apparitions, but instead broke them into constitutive parts to chart their recurring patterns in what he calls a “Morphology of Miracles."40 He suggested that the sequence of sightings culminating in the Fatima apparitions began two years earlier with what he characterised as a classical sequence of UFO sightings.41 Applying the same non-committal approach to abduction testimony, he has refused to affirm or deny that Betty Hill and Barney Hill received messages from extraterrestrials from the Zeta Reticuli star system, as the Hills claimed, while declining to dismiss their experiences as unreal.42 His early career combined ufology with computing: he was steeped in information studies, computer science, and studies of Remote Viewing (RV) and telepathy,43 and his work on ARPANET, the precursor to the internet, took place within Silicon Valley during the 1970s.44
According to Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs, Vallée independently verified the events of the Colares Incidents.45 William “Will” Livingston flew to California with a team that included Colm Kelleher and Vallée to meet Garry P. Nolan.46 Vallée obtained material recovered from the 1977 Council Bluffs, Iowa, UAP incident,47 and the book reports that he suspected the multicoloured lights witnessed during the incident came from a wobbling craft in distress.48 Nolan and Vallée went on to analyse the elemental and isotopic composition of a molten metal aggregate recovered from the incident, according to Luis Elizondo.49 His research database, known as Capella, contains 260,000 cases.50 He was part of a group referred to as the Lone Stars, alongside Eric Davis and Hal Puthoff.51 His journals, published as Jacques Vallee’s journals (Forbidden Science), are said by Jason Samosa to corroborate that conversations took place between Tom DeLonge and John Podesta’s circle,52 though Samosa also describes Vallée as generally quite sceptical about the modern UFO disclosure movement.53