Jacques Vallée holds a special place for Magonians. After all, we owe the very name to his 1969 classic Passport to Magonia. But more importantly, there’s his against-the-crowd advocacy of the idea that the UFO enigma can’t be explained simply by the nut-and-bolts spaceships of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis: it’s way weirder than that.
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In his works, Vallée has explored the common ground between UFO experiences, the paranormal and parapsychological, folklore and religious visions. ‘Frontier phenomena’, as he calls them. And he didn’t come to this view from the sidelines. Vallée has been in the thick of the UFO scene since the late 1950s, working with scientific investigators such as J. Allen Hynek, as well as having a long relationship with intelligence agencies and classified projects in both his native France and adopted home in the USA.
He’s also an astronomer, computer scientist - one of the pioneers of the Internet and AI, and having fingers in many cutting-edge pies such as nanotechnology and biotech – a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and sci-fi novelist. And probably a wearer of other hats that I’ve forgotten. In all, a fine scientific and creative intellect, who manages to adroitly straddle the scientific, academic and fringe.
All of which makes his journals invaluable documents for UFO researchers and enthusiasts. He’s been publishing them for thirty years now, each volume covering a decade and in this, the fifth, he’s up to the noughties, years that were significant ones for ufology. And Vallée, as usual, was right at the centre of things, where UFO investigation, scientific analysis of the data – and official monitoring – meet.
There was continuing interest in long-established cases and other mysteries seemingly related to UFOs: the MJ-12 papers (for Vallée and his colleagues undoubted fakes, Cold War misinformation aimed at the Soviet Union), Roswell (taking it at face value is ‘silly’), cattle mutilations (the evidence ‘continues to point to human activity’) and much else. Alien abductions were still big then, though they seem to have gone out of fashion since.
But major new cases emerged that have since taken centre stage, along with key developments in the study of UFOs and Aliens (Vallée always gives them a capital ‘A’) as well as in the way the subject is presented to the public.
As the decade opened Vallée was part of aerospace multimillionaire Robert Bigelow’s National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), which came to an end in 2004. He was then involved in the setting up of Bigelow’s next endeavour, the DIA-funded Advanced Weapon Systems Application Program (AAWSAP), which remained secret until the New York Times created a big splash by revealing its existence in 2017. (In a note, Vallée says the NYT ‘wrongly attributed’ it to the sexier-sounding Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.)
In 2008 there was the revelation, by the Marine pilot involved who was now on the AAWSAP team, of the USS Nimitz’s encounter with the flying ‘tic-tac’ four years earlier, which has become the big thing today. And throughout the journals there are references to strange phenomena at the ‘Utah ranch’ owned by Bigelow – unnamed but now, as everyone knows, Skinwalker, which even has its own TV show.
Throughout, Vallée rubs shoulders with other big names in ufological and related circles, such as Joe Firmage, John Alexander, Kit Green, Ed Mitchell and, until his death in 2004, John Mack, with whom Vallée collaborated on ‘quiet research’. Vallée is scathing about conspiracy theories surrounding Mack’s death.
It was the decade in which the world wide web really took hold through the proliferation of blogs and social media - as Vallée puts it in his Introduction, ‘the rise of new media that were “free” – or appeared as such to naïve users of the Internet, unaware of the actual price they paid by relinquishing privacy and the subtle control of their lives’. The rise of the ’Net was to the detriment of ufology: as he lamented in 2007, ‘The few serious newsletters have given up, swamped under Internet garbage, fake data.’
The same goes for the media’s burgeoning post-X-Files interest in UFOs, with the subject becoming dominated by TV channels and websites that were ‘short on evidence but loud in argument and vibrant in controversy; cries for “Disclosure” (a term left undefined) became strident while mutual accusations of trickery drowned out the physical content of actual observations.’
Sadly, and to his frustration, the wide-picture, Magonian perspective has been steadily lost as the ufological community, especially since the 1980s, hardened on the ETH until, despite Vallée’s best efforts, by the 2000s it was near-universally considered the only option. This creates to an evident weariness, as when he declines an invitation to appear on Art Bell’s Coast to Coast on the grounds that ‘nothing could satisfy an audience raised on a diet of Roswell crash stories, MJ-12 paranoia, anal probes, and alien autopsy.’
Forbidden Science really brings home the bewildering and frustrating complexity of the UFO enigma, which is ‘so varied and diverse that one can always find enough data among the sightings, if selected appropriately, to “prove” any theory, including its non-existence.’
It’s not just the elusive nature of the phenomenon itself, but the complications of rumour and out-and-out scams such as Billy Meier’s faked photos, as well as the ‘propensity of ufologists to brag about the smallest bits of data, good or bad, with no checking’. And the waters are further muddied by the undeniable spreading of misinformation – sometimes misinformation about the misinformation - by government agencies, something Vallée encounters in the USA and France. But is it to cover up the presence of Aliens or fostering a belief in them to cover something else up?
Referring to the study by his friend Dominique Weinstein of the DST (the French MI5), Vallée writes that he has come to the same conclusion Vallée himself set out in his 1979 Messengers of Deception: ‘Someone is in the background to promote a particular version of a new extraterrestrial ideology, while hiding the real files.’
It’s not all UFOs and Aliens. Vallée keeps up his parapsychological interests, such as in remote viewing – including a project to track down Osama bin Laden – and taking a close interest in experimental evidence for precognition (‘presponse’) then emerging from the work of Dean Radin, Dick Bierman and others: ‘All of that suggests again to me that the major flaw in contemporary science is our incomplete concept of time.’
He also sets down his own experiences of ‘intersigns’ – extraordinary synchronicities that crop up in his everyday life (if a life like his can ever be described as ‘everyday’).
Vallée’s record of that life is set against the backdrop of a tumultuous period, a ‘lost decade’. There’s 9/11 and its fallout in form of the invasion of Iraq and the rise of Islamist terrorism in the West. At the start there’s the dotcom crash of 2003, and at the end the banking crisis of 2008 – in both of which Vallée had a personal stake.
The journal is a travelogue too, as Vallée records his trotting around the globe for meetings with investors, pleasure trips to China, Egypt, the Hawaiian Islands and other places, as well as regularly criss-crossing the Atlantic between his and his wife Janine’s homes in California and Paris.
Having a foot in those two cultures, both Western but so very different, is key to Vallée’s perspective. On one side is France’s more open attitude to the esoteric and metaphysical, as expressed in its artistic and philosophical traditions, and on the other is the hardheaded and materialistic USA. The French side has given Vallée a breadth of interests beyond the scientific, particularly in esoterica: he’s familiar with alchemical lore, Hermeticism and many other esoteric and mystical traditions – things that most ufologists (and scientists) wouldn’t touch with a bargepole but which are highly relevant to getting to grips with the Alien enigma.
And Vallée writes like a Frenchman, his lyrical prose making what could have been an informative but dry personal 500-page record a much more engrossing and pleasurable read.
Another very French element is that, for him, studying UFOs and other ‘forbidden’ subjects isn’t just a pursuit of knowledge for its own sake but part of an existentialist quest: ‘My own focus remained the mystery of human existence’. He often alludes to his search for secrets to the meaning of life, the universe and everything.
It’s a deeply personal record too, as Vallée, approaching his 70s, experiences all that comes with getting older, looking back on what he has learned – and what he hasn’t. He regularly receives unwelcome news of the deaths of old friends and colleagues.
Most movingly, in the last three years covered by the journal is his wife of fifty years struggle, sadly ultimately unsuccessful, with a brain tumour – Janine passed away just a few days into the new decade. Vallée’s last journal entries and his afterword about her death are heartbreaking but beautiful writing.
All in all, Forbidden Science is crucial reading for anyone with an interest in the UFO phenomenon, although sadly I suspect that many will sideline it because of Vallée’s doubts about the ETH as the only solution, or pick out the parts that support their position and ignore the rest.
Given his then fifty-plus years of experience at the heart of ufology in all its aspects, we might expect Jacques Vallée to know where the bodies are buried. And yet, tellingly, he writes of himself and Janine in 2008:
‘Few people know the parameters of this giant puzzle better than the two of us: We’ve met every significant researcher and most of the influential witnesses in the last half century . . . We’ve heard all the theories and initiated a few of our own. Yet our quiet dialogue in the soft night boils down to this confession: that the physical reality of a transcendent unknown, which I see so clearly, cannot yet be formulated into a scientific statement that makes sense.’
- Clive Prince
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