Jacques Vallée — NewsNation “Reality Check” interview (May 2025)
- Speaker: Jacques Vallée, interviewed (Project Blue Book, the interdimensional/control-system hypothesis, space travel, military secrecy). ~1h23m.
- YouTube: https://youtu.be/RqptVKs7wbc (NewsNation, published 2025-05-02)
- Captured: 2026-05-29 via yt-dlp audio download → Whisper (speech_to_text_remote.py). The youtube-transcript-api and yt-dlp caption endpoints were both HTTP-429 rate-limited this session; the audio→Whisper fallback was used.
- Primary for vallee-interdimensional-hypothesis.
- NOTE: Whisper auto-transcript — proper nouns are approximate (e.g. “Heineck”=Hynek, “Stan Fraidman”=Stanton Friedman, “Colm”/“Kolm”=Colm Kelleher, “BASS”=BAASS, “Ned”=likely Knapp/network figure). Verify any quote against the audio before load-bearing citation.
Hello and welcome to Reality Check. I’m your host Ross Coulthard and today we have a guest I’ve long wanted to get on the show and we have the perfect excuse because he’s just published his latest book Jacques Vallée. If ever there was a 21st century Renaissance man he’s the chap. He was born in France but he lives between Paris and San Francisco, most of the time in San Francisco and he’s currently talking to us from Paris. He is renowned for his contributions to computer science, venture capitalism and especially of course the study of unidentified anomalous phenomena in the paranormal. Jacques’s CV is extraordinary. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the Sorbonne, a master’s in astrophysics from Lille University and a PhD in computer science from Northwestern University in 1967. His early work had him as an astronomer at the Paris Observatory and he co-developed NASA’s first computerized map of Mars in 1963 at the University of Texas. At Stanford Research Institute in California he contributed to the ARPANET which was the pioneer, the precursor to the internet. He’s a true internet pioneer and from Silicon Valley he founded and served as a general partner in multiple venture capital firms including NASA’s Red Planet Capital which focused on high technology startups. His notable venture capital initiatives include Electronics for Imaging, Accuray Systems who developed the Cyberknife for cancer surgery and NeoPhotonics which uses optical network nanotechnology. Aside from of course his brilliant financial career, Jacques a towering figure in the study of anomalous and paranormal phenomena UFOs, UAPs. His interest was sparked in 1955 when he saw a UFO over his Pontoise home and intensified in 1961 when he allegedly saw tracking tapes of an unidentified retrograde satellite being destroyed. He worked with the astronomer J. Allen Heineck who was the scientific advisor to the US Air Force’s Project Blue Book and yes of course he was the inspiration for the French scientist character in the Spielberg movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But it’s his books we’re talking about today, his learning over many decades. He kicked off with his Anatomy of a Phenomenon in 1965 which was one of the first scientific books on UFOs. His seminal Passport to Magonia in 1969 was the first to propose I think a multi-dimensional hypothesis for UAPs suggesting they might originate from realities beyond conventional space-time which was a challenge to the conventional extraterrestrial hypothesis. And this hypothesis, this perspective which has been expanded in works like The Invisible College and Wonders in the Sky, it posits UAPs as part of a complex phenomenon influencing human consciousness and culture across history. Now you’d think at 85 Jacques would want to slow down but he’s actually released another book in his formidable Forbidden Science series. Forbidden Science 6 is called Scattered Castles and it tracks the very interesting years from 2010 to 2019. Jacques Vallée, I had to do that enormous biography of you because I wanted people to know exactly who you are and why it’s such a privilege to have you here. Thank you so much for talking to Reality Check. Well thank you very much for having me and you know listening to this is you know a reminiscence of many challenges over the years and it never stops. I mean there are more challenges now. Now Jacques I wanted to get from you off the top I’ve got a pretty clear a good idea of where you stand but I thought I should ask you off the top because I haven’t seen you ask this for a very long time. You’ve got a friend in a group of scientists and ex-intelligence officials who collaborate in the old OSAP investigations for DIA with Robert Bigelow and you keep in touch with those people you call them the Lone Stars and in your book you talk about how they all take for granted that there is this US government craft retrieval program that the United States is hiding a covert UAP craft retrieval and reverse engineering program and I had a look at a lot of your interviews I’ve never seen you asked definitively where you stand on that. Do you accept that there is such a program? Certainly the information that we got within the team by the way you know highly even though we no longer work as part of an organized research we each do our own research and we compare notes once in a while but I’ve kept you know enormous respect for the group and for the talents in the group. The idea of the information about crashed objects from space that’s not new I mean this we were talking about this in France a long time ago. Do the Americans have you know something that they’ve picked up in the desert and so on and but it’s not it was anecdotal but they were books about that already you know speculating on this and it’s not until I think the 70s that Roswell you know came back into the news with thanks to Stan Fraidman you know Stan Fraidman was a respected engineer and physicist who had worked in high technology and aerospace companies in California and his analysis of Roswell was convincing that there was something had happened there even though there was no witness on site at the time but it became the model. So this was you know a long time before you know the Bigelow group became involved and so on. What we did was to try first with NIDS which was as you know not classified and not was sponsored by Mr. Bigelow, we tried to… That was the National Institute of Discovery Science, the Robert Bigelow National Institute of Discovery Science, NIDS. But this was you know the best we could do in speculating about what those whether those crashes had how many there were and how reliable they could be. Dr. Heineck’s team at QFOS had done research on site in New Mexico and other people had done that also and you know it was also a source of confusion. Everybody had their own theories and of course there were skeptics and the skeptical view was legitimate because there was no credible witness at the site gathering information that we could take to the lab. However as time went on certainly you know with my own resources I went there and as you know together with Paola Harris I reinvestigated a case that was still continuing to look at in 1945, two years before Roswell in a similar area of New Mexico. So by now there is a lot of information. There is a lot of testimony that has been well recorded and well analyzed. Unfortunately within Baths that technically should have access. Now if we had access to that we probably couldn’t talk about it. So we can we can talk about speculation though and the new information is surprising because the new information that you that you’re mentioning has to do with actual experiments out in the desert typically or trying to corral some of these objects and get them to land or to become visible so that they could be analyzed. And I don’t have a position on that. I have not been at the site but I trust the people who are making those reports. One thing that I like about your book is you offer a transatlantic perspective because you do move between France and the United States. You talk also to a lot of people in the French government, the French military, the French intelligence community. Do they take for granted that the United States is concealing knowledge of the UAP mystery? Yes but for a different reason. Going back to the days when I was working with M.A. Michel who was a French philosopher very interested in science and so on and who was my initial mentor in this. I kept telling him look you know I’m in touch with Dr. Hynek and so on and in the U.S. you know there is all this information about supposed crashed objects and so on and there is a study under a blue book you know how come France isn’t doing anything. And he said you know it’s a perfectly good question I ask my contact at the French Air Force you know who is gathering information. This was before the CNES, before satellites, before talking about you know the mid-60s. And he came back and he said well I had another lunch. Of course it’s Paris so you have lunch with people you know and then you talk seriously around dessert and coffee and maybe a little bit of liqueur. And you get much better information this way. So the men from the French Air Force said well you know I went to my contact at the U.S. Embassy and I asked him. I said you know you guys are talking about UFOs and so on. Should we cooperate because we’ve got files I mean we’ve got observations from pilots you know in North Africa you know in France and so on and we could compare notes. And he said my contact made a couple of calls to Washington. Then he came back and said look this was again the mid-60s so there are lots of bad things happening in the world you know it’s a cold war. You know the situation with Russia with the USSR in those days you know is very much you know and uncontrolled and we don’t need one more thing to distract everybody you know. So yes we keep track of that but we would not. So there was no cooperation at the time as we had hoped between France and the U.S. and there hasn’t been really since then you know on the academic you know whether there is something else I don’t know but it would have to be very very specific and not within the circles that I know about. What prompted, I’m fascinated by GEPAR, the French agency quasi-government agency that investigates UFOs, UAPs. Why did France of all countries in the world create, well before any other country, a formal office for investigating the phenomenon? Well you know French academics are very much inspired by rationalism you know that you know the study of science as a study of nature and the study of phenomena and but there was it wasn’t easy there was a lot of controversy about you know why do we spend that much money. It wasn’t that much money it was just one you know one aerospace engineer who’s still alive Dr. Poiret and that you know I had shared by fives with Dr. Poiret when he indicated his interest in doing this and we were working together and he then assembled enough formal information that he could present at the high level within the ministry to convince them to to create a small cell you know a small project within the space agency. So what is France’s position on UAPs? Do they believe, is there a formal government position on UFOs, UAPs? Do they accept that there is a non-human intelligence or is it still an open question? There was a crisis in the mid to late 80s when many French academics said why are we spending all this money on this? You know the Americans have stopped their project, Project Blue Book you know because they didn’t really have any answers and so we don’t have all the money that the Americans have. So why are we doing this? We could be there are so many other things in science that are unknown that would be interesting to study. My friends in France did a survey of French influential leaders in science and government and law and the press and they came back about 50-50. The weight of the advice and those were you know sort of day-long reviews of the data with each one of these people, there were about 50 people. So it was a serious study. The consensus was there probably isn’t anything to UFOs because otherwise the Americans would be doing something now. But the public is very engaged and if we don’t do something the public will think we’re hiding aliens. So we should we have a duty of information to the public and they restarted the study they were going to close down. I’m going to pin you down sir. What do you think? Do you think that the United States is concealing knowledge of non-human intelligence? Well you know that’s what’s being discussed in Washington right now. I know the you know of course I’ve followed every step of this. I’ve been asked to not to testify but to brief some of the people in the intelligence committee of the senate and you know I’ve had some experience before in my computer career with the way things work you know at the level of congress. Congress is not a scientific body. It’s not their job. So the funny thing is that we have a lot of scientists you know coming forward explaining the science and that’s of course it’s relevant but that’s not what congress does. Congress is there to feed into future laws and long-term decisions that involve budgets and maybe science and research. So I think there is a misunderstanding there. There is no misunderstanding in the skills you know with the staff, with the staffers for the intelligence community and so on. They know what we do and we know what they do. With respect Jacques, you’ve kind of avoided my question because what you often do is you deflect. I’m waiting to see what’s going to come I’m interested in your personal view and I want to because I mean for example you’re good friends with Gary Nolan, Professor Gary Nolan, a renowned Stanford immunologist and Gary’s quite up front about his personal experiences as a child and his strong belief that there is some kind of a cover-up going on that the United States is concealing knowledge of UAPs, knowledge of a non-human intelligence. Are you not able to say definitively where you stand on that yourself or are you being a scientist? You’re hedging your bets. I could not give you a statement you know from the BASS project which was classified and still is. A lot of the things that we did you know I was responsible for the computer side of it and the computer analysis which was cut off after two years, two of the five years we needed to implement AI on top of what we had. So that part has been partially declassified thanks to the work of Dr Keller and others so I can talk about that. I can tell you what some of what what we did. There is no question as you know like Gary, I saw an object when I was 14 and a half or 15. There is no question about that it wasn’t conventional. This was you know bright daylight, blue sky, middle of the afternoon. You know my mother saw it first, called me. I saw it, it was a disc. It was not just some point of light in the sky you know this was a stable disc with a dome on top. The friend of mine about half a mile from my house had looked at it with binoculars so when I learned that I asked him to draw it and he drew exactly what I had seen. Both Gary and I share that direct experience with him. He’s had more profound experience with something more you know more personal than in his environment but I’ve had something like this as I mentioned in the book, in this book you know with essentially an apparition in my apartment. So there is no question that’s why we don’t spend a lot of time arguing with skeptics. I mean they have every right to be skeptical and that’s what the way science works you know. The discoverer of prions you know Nobel Prize in medicine was laughed at for 10 years by his colleagues at the University of California you know medical center you know the top research place in the country. One of the three top hospitals until people said okay you’re right I know a molecule that’s this way can turn this way and it can turn deadly just by changing some of its shape. That wasn’t known before so this is not unusual in science. I mean you expect that people will criticize. Now what we do know is that you know to not to escape your question is that those crashes are reported by reliable people you know and I’ve been there and I’ve spoken to them. I’ve spoken to people not only in France and California but throughout the U.S. you know I did a number of investigations with Dr. Hynek in those days. I went six times to Russia actually twice to the Soviet Union and four times to Russia under professional you know professional need and found that people at certain times were quite free to talk about it and we published an article in Russia in the 60s that had four million readers in Trude which is the Union magazine. So I think those things have been going on for a long time. Now it’s delightful that people are coming into this now and asking all those questions again because in science you know the answers you got 20 years ago are not the answers you’re going to get today. So I think that’s a normal process. I don’t have any problem with it. One of the things I love about your journals is you pepper them with incredible little insights and one of my favorite quotations that you have in the latest book is one from Colm Kelleher one of the scientists who worked with you on the I think the BASS project and also the NIDS as well and he says quote A central working hypothesis is that an ancient parasitic intelligence has been on earth for thousands of years. A related hypothesis is that there is a small minority of humans endowed with above average discernment. This cadre of humans belongs to a particular gene pool considered dangerous by the phenomenon because they alone can create countermeasures to the control system. What do you think of that analysis by Colm Jacques? I’m completely I think it’s the fruit of many discussions that we had as a group. Colm was running most of the day-to-day administration business and research for BASS for the duration and I worked with him and under him in the part that was my daily work. It’s partially hypothetical but that’s what you have to do in science. You make a hypothesis and now science doesn’t consist in you know throwing up hypotheses. I mean that’s the first half. The second half is designing research that’s going to confirm or shoot down the hypothesis and until you’ve done that you haven’t done science. I mean a hypothesis is a diagnosis. You have to have a way of testing it. So the implications though of that, I noticed this is something that you develop as well in your book Messages of Deception that you wrote in the 70s and you explore the psychic and abduction elements of UAPs. The idea that UAP encounters are a deliberate mechanism to influence human consciousness, culture and societal evolution. A kind of a control system to shape human beliefs and behavior and you speculated and I think you were the first to do this that this doesn’t involve physical ETs but a non-human intelligence that operates inter-dimensionally or if Kolm’s right it’s what is it intra-terrestrially using psychic interactions to provoke psychological and cultural shifts. I mean that’s a very different thesis isn’t it and it’s interesting. It struck me as interesting that Kolm had come to a very similar conclusion that the two of you have kind of put to one side the extraterrestrial hypothesis. Let me ask you this way sir, why couldn’t it be aliens from another planet playing with us and trying to control us on this planet? Why is it more plausible to you that it’s an inter-dimensional or intra-terrestrial if you like phenomenon? So when I first decided to apply the tools I knew and the tools I had which included computers at Paris Observatory and later in Texas and California, I tried to do what you’re supposed to do in science you know start from the data and begin to look for patterns. That’s what you do with an unknown phenomenon that you want to see if it replicates something that we already know you know from something else. And so I did that and in my first two books I argued about you know the extraterrestrial hypothesis that this was a good approximation of what people were seeing. Then you know when I wrote Passport to Magrania which antagonized people on both sides, the first edition was a complete failure and then people thought about it and came back and it was reprinted and reprinted and reprinted and now people consider it probably the most significant thing that I did. It’s a classic Jack. It’s a classic. I love your book. Well, I knew that I was breaking you know my choice. I was just breaking everything because if that phenomenon has influenced us in different guises across the ages, then there are other contradictions that people were kind enough not to pin me down but one of them, but I had to think of them first okay, one of them is how come the vehicle is the same. I mean if you buy a car today it’s not going to look like a car you bought 10 years ago or five years ago okay and the you know the guy will tell you in five years it’s going to look very different again okay so maybe you should lease the car instead of buying it. So that’s what we’re faced with if but then you know that kind of difficulty when you overcome it in science it opens up other things because the argument I was reading something this morning from a scientist again saying yeah you know NASA has discovered something that could mean that there is life on this planet next to a star 140 light years away but anyway we can’t get there. Well why can’t we get there? Well we can’t get there because of Einstein and you know Einstein said you cannot go faster than speed of light. People now are saying you know I stay in touch with Eric Davis who is my master in physics you know my physics is astrophysics of you know years ago and it still works but it’s not up to date okay. Eric is up to date and Eric says first you have to go do away with time and space as dimensions because there are secondary things you know what’s important is the quantum form and given the quantum form there is no reason why you could go faster than the speed of light. It’s just an arbitrary limit that was it’s true that the equations work with c speed of light as a limit okay so that’s good science but there could be exceptions to that. One of the exceptions was something that we were teaching at Northwestern. Dr. Hynek was teaching it to the kids at Northwestern in the 70s that there could be another universe five minutes ahead of us and then it takes them five minutes to come here at whatever you know at the speed of light and maybe even faster so we cannot put limits on that you know that’s one thing that Dr. Nolan has said very clearly there will be you know revolutions in science in our last lifetime you know there would there have been you know revolutions and there will be more and this is one of them okay so let’s let’s stop talking about the speed of light as a limit it’s a limit in the mathematics it’s not a limit in physics. So when you explain in Messengers of Deception what you mean why you argue for the inter-dimensional hypothesis you suggest that what they’re doing what the phenomenon is doing is it’s presenting itself in ways that challenge existing paradigms scientific materialism or religious dogma it’s inviting us humans to think about ourselves if you like ontologically it’s encouraging us to question reality it’s a long-term strategy you suggest to guide human evolution why why would another advanced life form want to guide the reality of a bunch of primitive apes on a rock in this solar system well you you could meet and interview some very good scientists who say we live in a simulation this is the way the way they simulate our so you know if you play a simulation on the web you know there is a control system I mean you you put yourself inside the control system or you’re not a player if you’re a player you have to to be to agree to be part of the control system however in when I first came up with that I was challenged by people here in France very good biologists from the Sorbonne and a couple of other friends who said Jacques you know that there are different kinds of control systems you know the Nazi death camps were control systems you know I spoke to Jacques Bergier who had been a French spy during the war and had been one of the people locating Penemunder you know the rocket centers and and was one of the first French atomists so he was interested in you know where they the whether the Germans could build an atom bomb and so on he said that in the camp where he was interned because he was caught as a spy tortured and and you know kept in those camps all of a sudden the firemen from Munich were arrested by the Nazi and brought into the camp for three weeks because they had talked about going on strike and the Nazi didn’t didn’t I mean this was a wrong time to go on strike so they put them there for three weeks and then they went back you know to where they came from and they were no longer on strike so he said Jacques you have to realize that even a closed control system can be a teaching center not necessarily something where you’re going to be destroyed or you’re going to be burned alive you know I mean you some people will be burned alive but you know so there are control systems that are that are you know like a system of laws or system or a prison and there are systems that are open a university is a control system the rules are not written down anywhere you know on whether you get your PhD or not you know you have to maneuver you have to find the right the right path through the control system it’s not written anywhere so we which one which one is it I mean that’s a question that’s a basic question that’s the only question I think I know someone who would agree with you about us living in a simulation I was watching Lex Fridman interviewing Elon Musk and Elon Musk was asked what would be the first question he would ask the ultimate AI and he said what lies outside the simulation so it’s obviously the big question I would never underestimate Elon Musk I was many years ago I was on a panel with him in Strasbourg about the future of space research and he was talking about communication on the moon you know and he had a scheme for communicating on the moon you know the moon doesn’t reflect radio waves so you can’t use radio on the moon you know so you have to use something else and he was busy designing it was very interesting that he was he’s very different today than he was then clearly Jacques what we do know and we know this from the tic-tac incident that I know your team were involved in researching and one of the stories you tell in your book is an incident involving two united states rc-135 elant aircraft who were intercepted by a ufo in the mediterranean in november 1993 and it’s an amazing story I’d never heard it before but essentially the unknown craft placed itself in formation on the starboard side of the US plane close enough so the crew couldn’t even see the whole craft the edges appeared to scintillate and the surface was composed of panels over inlaid panels that were rectangular and translucent with edges that would disappear dissolve or go out of focus as one stared at them they were luminous like opal with a hint of violet and it’s interesting because time and time again and you describe this in your book there’s always these guys who turn up in suits and spoil the party by basically making people sign an NDA so in this case they’re interviewed by men in civilian suits who turn up in a c-130 from Germany they make each crew member sign an NDA all the material they’ve obtained all the data they’ve obtained is taken into custody did you ever find out any more about that sighting and why why is there this cover-up what why do these men in suits turn up to take away the data just like they did in the 2004 tic-tac sighting as well what’s going on I’ve run I’ve raised and run five venture funds in California venture funds that are dedicated to essentially the first dollar not not the financial enhancement to a company but the first the first dollar and the the CEOs of those companies know obviously know of my you know my track record and and they also know that I’m you know interested in strange things the reason they create those companies is that they are interested in strange things too you know otherwise we would be working for IBM you know in somebody’s basement so the they when their family sees a UFO you know they have they like to have property on the coast looking over the pacific and so on and they they see all kinds of things and this obviously is not reported because we you know it would be controversial and when you’re running you know a high technology company in California you you have to be taken seriously by Wall Street and you know you have you keep thinking about your next round of financing and which bank you’re going to go to so it’s not the time to be in the papers you know talking about flying saucers but they trust me enough over the years they tell me what they’ve seen because they think somebody should know about that I mean the case I mentioned was um a man who was in California and now is with one of the you know three-letter agencies in in Washington he was coming back from actually watching some maneuvers in, in Southern California. And there were reports of strange things among the firing, you know, that was going on in within the maneuvers. And his question was, you know, this was not reported, you know, I saw it, because I was there. And I was there to watch the proceedings and to analyze it. So I had all the information, but it didn’t go anywhere. Why wasn’t that reported over to Washington? Well, I said, Look, you know, you have those clearances, I don’t anymore. You know, why me? I mean, I can’t answer that question. But he said, Yeah, but you’ve gone to other countries where the same thing happens. There seems to be, you know, a layer of just fog over the whole thing, that those things are almost accepted as, as part of, you know, they show up and they go away and, and there is no need to report it. And furthermore, if you report it, you could be in trouble, you know, from your superior officers. So he was, he gave me another example. This was after we had left our telephones, you know, with the waiters and so on. And we were sitting in a corner of the restaurant. And, you know, another example where a ship had encountered an American vessel, you know, Navy vessel had encountered something. This was not an image. And had been seen by everybody, recordings had been taken. And, you know, some, some guys came on the plane, landed on the carrier, went to see the commander of that fleet, and confiscated all the data and got back on their flight. He said, that’s not unusual. What’s unusual is that I saw the paper, nothing was signed. There was no name. That’s a violation. It’s a violation of security rules. That’s why they why are they doing that, though? I mean, we can tell countless examples, you know, this is what Congress should be looking at. It’s a violation of military security rules. The paper was not signed. Nobody knows who these guys were. Presumably the commander was given something that authorized this, that this overrides everything else. Now, I’m, I’m eager to, you know, this was not part of NITS. This was not part of anything else. This was just a personal conversation with someone, you know, from, who trusts me. Because he knows, you know, this is unusual information that tends to wash up, you know, and it gets picked up. But it means that there is another there, as they say, you know, in some science fiction movies, there is another machine somewhere. The Men in Black. Maybe, although I have trouble taking the Men in Black very seriously. You know, there was, there was a witness in Texas, something had fallen from the sky, probably some piece of some Soyuz or something. And they came to his, his home, the guy who’s a black officer who had been in Vietnam. And he said, And he said, well, this obviously came from God. So I’m not going to give it to you, because God dumped it in my garden. If he had wanted you to have it, he would have dumped it at the White House, you know, and he, he kept it. So the Men in Black were defeated in that particular case. So you wrote a book back in the 1960s, in 1965, called Anatomy of a Phenomenon, which made, I think, a very creditable argument for rigorous, transparent collection and study of UAPs data. You looked, you argued for physical evidence analysis and interdisciplinary research. Now, we’re 60 years on from when you first made that plea for that kind of data collection and data analysis. Have we yet done what you aspired for, Jacques? Even in terms of analysis? Yeah, are we really doing? Is there the kind of empirical data analysis that you aspired for? Um, you know, a lot of science is empirical data, I mean, a lot of biology and a lot. It’s empirical data until somebody has, can build a system of analysis that goes deeper inside. Just to develop this, forgive me for interrupting, but for example, you were doing the great, you know, I think you were involved with NEDS, there was the ORSAP project, there was the BAS project. In each case, the wonderful research that was happening there was frustrated by budgetary concerns or in the ORSAP case, there was obviously some kind of big gag that came down from on high where you couldn’t get special access program status. And it effectively hindered further ability to take the research any further. Somebody doesn’t want, I mean, you describe a UAP control mechanism, if you like, whatever the phenomenon is, it’s trying to control us. Isn’t there at the same time, also, a human control mechanism that the powers, the governments of the world, notably the United States, I think, to some degree, France, even the United Kingdom, Russia, China, there seems to be some collusion to shut down public interest and study of this issue. And I’m just intrigued as to why, you know, why is there that control mechanism there? What’s going on? Why do they not want us to ask these questions? So, you know, that’s, I mean, what you’re presenting is correct. I mean, that’s the way it presents. In science, you know, there are many times when you think that nature is against you. And just as you’re going to discover something looking at Mars, some clouds come between you and, you know, between Mars and the telescope or something. And it looks like there is something that wants, you know, I blame myself first, you know, that I’m just not smart enough to find because, you know, nobody has come knocking on my door. I mean, admittedly, I haven’t, you know, violated any rules or any laws, and I won’t. But I’m not a whistleblower in that case. But the fact is that usually when I attack a problem, and I fail, usually it’s because I made a mistake somewhere. And I have to go back, get advice, get somebody smarter than me or better informed, or someone I’m infringing on a discipline that I thought I knew, and I don’t really know it as well as I thought. So I need advice and so on. That’s what I do. I mean, networking like this is, you know, the key to Silicon Valley. So I’ve learned to do that. I think that there is a control mechanism outside. And in a way, it makes sense, you know, that the whole question of disclosure, what is it that we’re going to disclose, you know, we’re going to disclose that there is a phenomenon? Well, I can introduce you to some farmers in Kansas, who have known that for 20 years, you know, and they’ve seen more things than all the pilots in the Navy. Okay, I mean, and they know that and they talk to each other. And they talk to each other, they talk to the insurance companies, you know, if something happens to the cattle and so on. I mean, all those things are going on. I mean, we should stay out of Washington and look at the rest of the country. So the question for me is, how do I, how can I build something? Not so much in the classical physics, you know, there are people who do that very well. And there’s a tradition of that. But there is something called information physics, you know, information and energy. We get taught in school, that those are two sides of the same coin, that information changes into energy and energy changes into information in nature, you know, let alone in the lab. Okay, nobody has really formally started teaching the physics of information. The physics of information comes right out of, of course, computer science. And there are many people who use their computer and they think they are computer scientists, because they can run a program. But that’s not the point. The point is you have an information machine. What we built with Mr. Bigelow was a very large information machine that was going to start giving us some answers once we find it. And we were cut off at that point. Okay. I think that what we did, it’s true what you say that we were limited within BAS. You know, BAS was given some very specific tasks as was proper. But within NIDS, we didn’t have that. And I think NIDS was, you know, thanks to Mr. Bigelow really deserves the credit as a researcher himself, who has had experiences himself and he and his family. And we went very far, very, very far with NIDS. In a way, BAS was a retreat from what we had done at NIDS. There’s a reference in your book to the Holy Grail. And I’ve been told a story, I’ve been told that what was coming out of the ORSAP project was a proposal by Lockheed Martin, that they transfer an intact craft to Robert Bigelow, and that he spent about a million dollars pre-preparing a warehouse for the receipt of that craft. And that this was going to be the next phase of, if you like, the ORSAP research going beyond the field research, the highly wonderful research that had been done by the team on the ORSAP project, that they were then going to have an intact craft that they could surveil. What happened, I understand, is that people of deep religious conviction inside the US Air Force in particular, took offence to the idea of any more serious research being done into the phenomenon. And they intervened to stop the Special Access Program status being conferred to that project, which effectively gagged any further research. Am I wrong, sir? So there are two things in what you said, Ross. I mean, the first one, I cannot confirm, I was not briefed on ORSAP. I was, of course, very familiar with BAS and cleared, everybody was cleared at the same level. But this did not come up in my, you know, if it did, I would say, you know, I can’t talk about it because it would be classified. It’s not within the classified briefings that I’ve had. So I don’t know, I cannot confirm the thing with Lockheed at all. So I’m not the guy to ask. What was the Holy Grail you were referring to in the book, Jacques, when you’re talking about how, if the project gets SAP status, there will be a Holy Grail? So the fact that, it is a fact that many people, but probably more within the Navy, from my own experience, than the Air Force or the Army, and those that I met, have a religious concern. You know, it may surprise you, given, you know, the fact that I haven’t, I’ve written very little about that. But I tend to share that concern. I think we should take it into account. I respect it profoundly. That has stopped me from, you know, publishing certain things that I want to think about. And I want to think about, you know, privacy of, you know, trying to put long term, some of these long term ideas together. Even though I’m not, you know, a practicing Christian, I have profound respect for that concern. I want to take you down that path, Jacques, because this is very interesting. And I’m glad you’ve started talking about that. Because you say in your book, there’s a quote, the phenomenon is hurting people. It is manifest and scary. You use the word evil. And what we’ve called interference, you say, is very real. And then you go on to say, as much as I thought the Collins elite, which is the term that you use for the people inside the Pentagon and the intelligence community who are blocking this, normally of a strong religious belief system, as much as I thought the Collins elite was wrong in its fundamentalist attitude, I wouldn’t blame anybody for talking about demonology here. That’s a really interesting comment, because I have to admit, I’ve recently been speaking to people who’ve been telling me that when they’ve had confronting and quite terrifying experiences with the phenomenon, and I’m not in the least bit religious myself, but they’ve invoked the name of Jesus Christ or Mother Mary, and invoked that to try and tell the phenomenon to leave them alone and go away. And in every case, they’ve said it’s left that it has respected that invocation of the name of Jesus or Mother Mary. Do you think it’s possible that Christians are right? Well, I don’t think all Christians adhere to this. I think it’s it’s one sort of formal interpretation of, you know, of the writings. The most Christians I meet, you know, are open to, after all, if you know that that’s a question that has gone on for ages, you know, if we if we stop looking at what evil side is doing, we’re, in fact, turning the world over to them. I mean, so it would be like saying we’re not no longer going to investigate murders, you know, I think we we should know as much as we can. And I think that’s the view certainly of many Catholics, we should know as much as we can. And I think we should know as much as we can about the evil side. If we accept that there is an evil side, that’s active, that’s actually impinging on what we think what we do. There’s a lovely quotation you have in your book where you say, Collins elite members believe that no one should be interested in anything that comes from Satan. I say, you say, if we’re with Satan, we might as well learn everything we can about his toys. And I like that quote, because I mean, it is a silly argument that because it involves the possibility of demonology, allegedly, we should ignore it. I mean, you’re quite right, if even if it’s evil, even if it’s something malevolent, we should know about it. So that raises the question of what exactly should we disclose? Because people have taken, you know, have put me on the spot for saying this on another talk show that we should be, we should not disclose without thinking of the consequences of disclosure. And they say, but everybody says we should disclose. Yes. But that’s true. But the moment you disclose, you have to answer 100 other questions. And many of those questions are questions about religion, questions about, you know, the basic texts. Certainly, you know, my friends in Israel don’t think about UFOs the way, you know, people in the in France or in America think about that. And I’ve had, you know, enough contact with people in Saudi Arabia, during meetings there and so on, to know that if you believe in the jinn, today, not the legends, the jinn today, you know, in sophisticated families, you know, in Riyadh, have had experiences with the jinn. And I was talking to them about how wonderful the, you know, Arab legends were. And they said, Jack, you know, what Arab legends? You know, we had a jinn and, you know, who turned one of one of our family members into a crazy automaton. And we had to call, you know, a holy man to read the part of the Quran that addresses the jinn. And you know, asking, bypassing the kid, you know, talking to the jinn inside the kid, saying, look, we have to apologize, but recognize that this is a kid, he didn’t know that there could be a jinn there, he impinged on your space, he didn’t know that you should please go somewhere else. Now, this is, this is talking directly to, this is not talking to God, this is talking to the jinn. Okay. This is today’s Saudi Arabia, you know, sophisticated family that has sent one, you know, one of their sons to Stanford. So this is, this is real. I mean, we’re not just saying, look, you know, UFOs are real, the aliens are here, that doesn’t, that’s a beginning of a lot of problems. And I’m not saying we should have answers to that we don’t have answers, but we should have a structure within which people can express their concerns, their terror, you know, their own experiences, and where we can discuss it. There’s another good reason cited in your book for why we should be cautious about what we wish for when we talk about disclosure. And that’s, it’s interesting, because there are polar arguments in ufology. There’s one group in ufology who argue that whatever the phenomenon is, it’s loving, it’s kind, it’s benevolent, and it bears no threat at all to humans. And that we should, we should forget this threat narrative. And they have a go at Lou Elizondo all the time for talking about threat. And it’s interesting, because at the other side of the pole, there are incidents that you’ve spent a lot of time looking at, that the Brazilian Air Force looked at in the Calaras incident, and the quite shocking chubba chubba attacks on Brazilian people during the 1970s and the 1980s. There is no doubt at all, is there Jacques, that the phenomenon, whatever it is, has, on occasion, killed people, murdered people. So, I wouldn’t say that. Interesting. What I would, what I said, and I know there’s a somebody has taken my, my word out of context, as often happens, is, as, you know, has made it sort of a joke that I believe the, I think he used the word murder, you know, that they, the, what has happened, and we’ve known that for a long time. And, you know, that’s something that Ned’s looked at, that Bass has looked at, certainly in the medical files, we have instances of people losing their life, as a consequence of being close to a UFO, or being exposed to the light of a UFO. And those are documented, medically, some of them are medically well documented. And I’ve participated in some of that, some of that research. Obviously, I mean, that’s something that we should be interested in. So that’s if you like incidental damage, it may be that these people have just, unfortunately, come into close proximity to UAP, whatever the phenomenon is. Yes, but if a six year old kid runs after a ball, in front of a Mack truck, that that that girl is going to be killed. And there is nothing we can do about it. And there is nothing the driver of the Mack truck can can do about it. Okay. So what about what about the cases like the chubba chubba? Clearly accidents, okay. Yeah, there is radiation. There is radiation, we don’t understand. I mean, there are distressing cases, though. And I’ve seen the photographs from the Brazilian Air Force, where they show people who have been mutilated, dead bodies, dead bodies with holes cut into them, parts of flesh cut away. I mean, that does look like a deliberate injury. And more importantly, in the Calaras incidents, there are descriptions of people being hit with what appear to be directed beams of energy. Yes. Can we exclude the possibility that that is intentional? Are you suggesting that that’s incidental damage? So I asked that question. Remember, there have been expeditions since more recently and so on. But I was there when the men who had been in command, you know, invited us to the military center that controls one quarter of the Amazon, of Amazonian descent. He speaks the dialects of the Amazon, and he understands the territory. I also spoke to three of his officers separately, after the discussion at the military center, we went to a private house, where they wanted to show me more about what what they had experienced and what the people they had interviewed. And we can’t do that anymore, because that, you know, they’re, they’re dead, or they are scattered somewhere else. The leader of the task force died about 10 years ago. And he was the one who spent the most time because, and the reason he invited me and our group, which included Brazilians and Americans who spoke, who had worked in Brazil, was that he wanted to know what was going on in France. He didn’t exactly believe what he was told by his American contacts. And he wanted to combine it with what people knew in Europe. And he knew that I had done research there. So furthermore, Brazil has a common border with France, which many people don’t realize until they look at the map. Okay, so that’s no, a lot of funny things like that, culturally, that are just delightful. But the, there were, there was an intent to hit people. But I also spoke to the doctors who had attended to, especially one woman who died, you know, in their care. And the doctor said, she was in a state that was weak, she had a weak heart. We knew that, we don’t think, yes, she died as a result of exposure to the trauma of, you know, a big, big scene with UFOs in the sky and so on, which would have horrified anybody, it was low altitude, no craft and so on. But she died out of the trauma of the nervous, you know, reaction to this. But she was not hurt by a beam, she was not singled out to be, to be killed. She just died there. In other cases, people that I’ve interviewed, including one guy who was in perfect shape, was an athlete and so on, had been running all night, you know, through the forest, it’s not the jungle, it’s not, it’s not exactly the Amazon forest. It’s the border to the Amazon. So in those days, it was an agricultural area, but unpaved and so on. And he was actually targeted by an object, they call them chupa chupa, you know, that was positioning itself within the trees to hit him with a beam. And he was fortunately in good enough shape that so he would hide behind trees, he would run towards a village, he got to a village and found shelter there. But it took him a week to recover. He was just completely exhausted. And I published the picture, you know, that I recovered there of a woman who had been hit. Now, she had been hit. But what’s what’s interesting to the physicist is that she was pinned to her hammock. You know, when you go there, and you learn very quickly, you don’t want to sleep in a bed for a lot of reasons. And the so she was in close to a window, there is no, there is no glass in the window, because what you want as much air to circulate as possible, you know, it’s very warm, it’s very wet, you know, and so on. So she was in the hammock, a light beam, a collimated beam, you know, came through the window from that object and hit her in the shoulder, and pinned her mechanically down to the hammock. Okay, this is not just a beam we can do. I’ve spoken to physicists who said, well, you could generate a force, you know, collimated within the beam and so on. I don’t know what they’re talking about. I just don’t know. Maybe maybe they’re right. It would be, you know, it would be an interesting weapon. But, you know, it didn’t, it didn’t kill her. I mean, my photograph is of a doctor, you know, looking at this and attending to her. I was there 10 years later, she was fine. I mean, she was, she had recovered from that she no longer had. It all, the thing that really sticks out to me from your book is, you’ve been doing this shark for 70 years, investigating this phenomenon, pretty much ever since you had that sighting as a young boy. Are you any closer to an answer, a definitive answer? You could ask this of, you could have asked, you know, a man I worked with, you know, Professor Sturrock at Stanford, we were working on the structure of the sun, and the structure of a corona. Are you closer to understanding it? He would have said, well, we’ve done a few things, but you know, there is another layer that we haven’t, you could ask, you know, Dr. Nolan, are we closer to eliminating cancer? He would say, well, you know, my colleagues and I make progress every day in documenting what cancer is. And we are saving a few people now that we couldn’t save five years ago. Okay. And that’s, that’s the job, you know, is, you never, once you resolve a problem in science, so you come up with relativity, you’ve opened up 100 other problems. Do you think we’re meant to know Jacques? I mean, do you think the phenomenon wants us? I mean, you say it’s twigging our consciousness. I’m treating it as, you know, the faculty have a very, very interesting, very interesting university where I have a privilege of, you know, being a student, and that my professors are not the folks in Washington. I mean, they, they are doing their job trying to regulate, you know, the access on a large scale for, you know, what we can do. My teachers are in, you know, in Kansas and Texas and, you know, other places, the Pacific. And they tell me what they’ve seen. Well, it’s a very honorable life’s work. It does beg the question, though, there’s a moment in the book, and I’ll, I’ll, I’ll wrap this up fairly soon. But there’s an exchange you have with Bob Bigelow, where he says, the cover up must be the work of a supra national group, a brotherhood, rather than one single agency or country. And when I read that, it resonated with me, because of course, we’ve just had this new whistleblower, Matthew Brown come out. And he said, we have the US as a country have allowed ourselves to be penetrated, co-opted, and corrupted by an internationalist force that serves their interests and views nations, peoples as tools, and means to an end. And it struck me that both Bob Bigelow and this young fellow Matthew Brown have come to that similar conclusion, that whatever this is, it’s beyond nations, it’s, it’s an internationalist thing. Supra national, as Bob, Bob Bigelow called it, what do you think? So I’ve, as you know, I’ve worked in finance for the last four years. And I’ve met some, some people who were influential in, you know, the theory of finance and internet. It’s, it’s a topic that’s current now in the United States, you know, with what’s going to happen to the stock market and investment and so on. And in many cases, not just now, but in many cases, what happens is chaotic. I mean, you really have a feeling, there are so many variables in the system, that the only reason the system hasn’t blown up, is that we don’t really understand what buttons to push. And it somehow reasserts itself, because there are many actors, you know, there’s a theory of actors, of financial actors, you know, what you buy, what you decide not to buy until next year, you know, why you save money or why you spend money. And that’s true at every level. And some of the people that I’ve worked with, and some of the people from whom we got funds for venture capital, those are the leaders of, you know, bank investment in unknown future areas, you know, venture capital, venture is, you know, and venture has a different exception in French than it does, it’s a French word, okay. And then it is in Anglo Saxon, the French think venture is a danger, you know, you tell your kid, don’t venture into this, okay. And in, in the US, which I find delightful is the venture is, you know, like the, the great explorers, you know, the sails of, you know, the ships moving across the ocean, thinking that there may be an abyss, you know, where the ship is going to fall anytime. But then that’s how you discover India. And then you realize you were not in India, you were in America, and India is somewhere else. But that’s, that’s the way you know, venture works. And that’s been my world for 40 years, you know, you take intelligent risk, you know, you if you want to take risk, you’ll go to Vegas, okay, you know, that if you come to Silicon Valley, you have a reason to write a particular check. And so you have to think about where the where the money comes from, and how it’s regulated. And there is, I’m convinced that there is no superior, you know, cohort or cabal of extremely wise financiers who decide, you know, now we’re going to give precedence to China or India. There are people who think that, but there are people who think exactly the opposite, and they are going to be fighting. And I’ve been on enough boards, you know, watching the interaction and the, and the fight on the ball. Of course, the ball, you know, report is not going to reflect the fact that, you know, they were at each other’s throat for two, two hours. And the there is an impression of a great mystery unfolding in finance and the way computers came about the way the web came about and so on. It’s, it’s not that it’s, it’s not that it’s guy, you know, mostly guys sitting together. Now, fortunately, some women as well. And fighting not so much for the money. I mean, again, the money is, I mean, the money is important. But I’ve seen companies that had no money and changed the world in their own area. Okay. Again, it’s not the money, it’s an alignment of will among knowledgeable people. And I think that’s, that’s what we’re dealing with. Now, I’ve been with UFOs, I haven’t found them yet. Okay. I don’t, I don’t think there is a board of directors. Well, without risk, there is no reward. And certainly, Jacques Vallée, you more than anyone in the last 70 years, have ventured into the realm of the paranormal and the unidentified anomalous phenomena with rigor and vigor. And I think I speak for everyone when I say thank you for the work that you’ve done. And I sincerely hope that both of us in our lifetimes, get the answer as to what is truly going on. Because I don’t know how you’ve done it for 70 years. But I find it intensely frustrating that it’s so hard to find the answer. Well, you have the key to that with all the people at your meeting now. Certainly what’s going to happen in Washington is next few weeks is going to be fascinating. So I salute what you’re doing. Jacques, I salute you back, sir. Thank you so much for speaking to Reality Checking. Congratulations on your latest book. And I look forward, sir, to many, many more. And thank you for your contribution to ufology. And before we go, please don’t forget, we do our weekly question and answer. 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