Fascinating interview of the legendary Jacques Vallee by religious scholar Jeffrey Kripal. Probably the most interesting, original, and knowledgeable ufologist alive today.
"On December 17, 2017, the front page of
The New York Times read “Real UFOs? Pentagon Unit Tried to Know.” Its results: inconclusive. But this and countless subsequent articles might suggest that UFOs or UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena) have gone mainstream. With newly established official Department of Defense offices researching them and congressional hearings discussing recovered non-human “biologics,” as NPR reported last year, one might think the truth is approaching.
French scientist and inventor Jacques Vallée isn’t so sure. A principal exponent of taking UFOs seriously since the 1950s, Vallée doesn’t doubt that these contacts happen. His research—as published in books such as
Anatomy of a Phenomenon, Passport to Magonia, and The Edge of Reality—shows humans have attested related experiences for centuries (take Celtic fairies, who, stories claim, abducted humans for reproductive purposes and left magic circles). He’s worked on classified projects, helped make the first digital map of Mars, and inspired the character played by François Truffaut in the film
Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He’s dug in the dirt; he’s looked through telescopes; he’s interviewed countless witnesses. He also, as a teen in France, saw what presented itself to him as a saucer.
I say “presented” because, through his combination of scientific, historical, and interpersonal research, for much of his career Vallée has suggested that rather than beings from space, UFO witnesses might be facing interdimensional humans, or some other such phenomena, in disguise. UFOs’ radical weirdness, he argues, suggests our current modes of “understanding”—scientific, political, spiritual—aren’t prepared to handle these experiences. “Are the UFOs ‘windows’ rather than ‘objects’?” Vallée wrote in 1969. By this, he means that there is something bewildering in their nature—that whatever they are, another reality lurks behind the experience of them. There’s contact, but the fantastical visions—inflected by people’s cultural specificities—may not be the things themselves. Perhaps, he’s suggested, the UFOs are even intentionally deceptive. Perhaps they are teaching us to look beyond this deception and into the mechanism of perception itself...."
".....As you may know, when I was about 15, I saw something that wasn’t explained at the time. My mother saw it first. It was over the little town where we lived—a bright afternoon, very clear blue sky. It was just standing there about half a kilometer away. And it was very clearly a disc with some superstructure. The next day, I spoke to a friend of mine who’d seen it from his house. He had looked at it with binoculars, and he drew it at my request. It was exactly what I had seen.
So I had the advantage of having a proof of concept very early. And I felt that if I was going to be a scientist, here was a problem. For a while, I pushed it out of my mind, which is what many witnesses do. This was the ’50s, and many new airplanes were coming up and so on. I almost convinced myself that I had seen a prototype of some new device that would become common. Well, it didn’t become common.
A few years later, I was working at the Paris observatory, tracking the early satellites—like Echo and others—and computing orbits, which was my first exposure to serious computers. Working for the government, we were getting observations from the public that we had to respond to. Some of those matched what I had seen. I reinvestigated the whole thing. I had access to the files of the French Air Force at that time and found that yes, there was a mystery. Astronomers didn’t want to talk about it because of their scientific reputation—which is still true today, by the way. There was a lot of data that the public didn’t know about. And I thought,
Well, I have a computer. I can start looking at this............"
https://www.documentjournal.com/2024/05/jacques-vallee-jeffrey-kripal-science-ufo-technology-ai/
