Debunking Jacques Vallee

[Christopher O'Brien]

Chris, your constant accusations that I am somehow not informed on Vallee is just a trite, silly attempt to have other people dismiss my criticism. By your very words you are implying that anyone who reads Vallee will automatically support him and his claims. You are wrong. You are wrong. You are wrong. You can not address anything I've written without getting angry and using insults.

Dude, your like the blind man asked to describe the difference between colors or a flatlander asked to describe depth. Your ignorance concerning Vallee and his thinking is beneath my contempt.

 

[Burnt State]

Debunking Jacques Vallee? Why? Why not do something worthwhile, like debunking the many, many liars and charlatans that inhabit the field, instead of wasting your time nitpicking at intelligent, reasoned speculation from one of the deepest thinkers in this field?

Waste of a thread, imo.

i agree on all points but it's also a good opportunity to look a little more into how he thinks and what is in fact wrong with ufological propaganda.

 

[BoyintheMachine]

Dude, your like the blind man asked to describe the difference between colors or a flatlander asked to describe depth. Your ignorance concerning Vallee and his thinking is beneath my contempt.

Proof please. I'm at the point where I just don't care anymore. So provide proof or admit defeat.

Anyone who still wants to elevate Vallee's SPECULATION as somehow advancing our understanding all you have to do is provide PROOF that such is correct.

 

[DavidRavenMoon]

I found this information about a year ago and have been meaning to post it but something always seemed to come up.

While researching demons of various cultures I came across the following link. As readers may know, one of the classic myths that Jacques Vallee likes to tell and which became a popular subject and title of one of his books, is the myth of Magonia. Vallee presents this as a tale of potential extraterrestrials due to inclusions of air ships and lands in the sky. In reality it's a case of a man looking back at a past mythological tale and projecting his modern day concepts of aliens and extraterrestrials onto it. For you see, the Magonians are not extraterrestrials. They are demons.

So let's get this straight, you are going to "debunk" Vallee using a mythical entity? Explaining an unknown with an unknown? Explain what a demon is. Are demons real?

I think you have missed his point. If you have ever read any of Vallee's books, you will see that he makes an attempt to tie together all these various paranormal things. He points out the similarity with UFOs to fables of elves, and even religious events. He draws the possible conclusion that they are all aspects of the same thing.

Now Passport to Magonia is an old book, from 1969. The updated trilogy; Dimensions, Confrontations, and Revelations goes more into this in detail.

I have not read any of the replies here, so I'll assume I'm not the only one to point this out.

 

[boomerang]

I cannot begin to recall how many time I've heard the complaint that the scientific establishment just doesn't takes UFOs seriously.

Newsflash: Jacques Vallee is the scientific establishment. His resume outside of UFOlogy points to involvement in some pretty cutting edge "stuff". Judging from his considerable body of work, Vallee would appear to be one of those rarest of birds: A real life scientist with an open and inquiring mind on the subject of UFOs.

Anyone happen to recall the scene in "Close Encounters" where La Combe (a character modeled after Vallee) is striving to convince the military to allow everyday people who have been psychically summoned to board the mother ship? He says something in French to the effect that "Look, this is a societal phenomenon !" Yeah--This is Hollywood, but the script writers did their homework. There is never a clear demarcation between the mind and life of the observer and the UFO. This is not anti-scientific, but rather a theme borne out in the history of the phenomenon.

 

[Constance]

Yes, I love that scene too. But Jacques Vallee is not "the scientific establishment." In fact he's neither a physical scientist nor a life scientist. He's a computer scientist and that's where he puts most of his energy and his "venture capital." He's very likely to be able to draw many investors to his projects. What are those projects? Jacques Vallee has long been in a position in which he could have put together a research institute staffed with physicists and other researchers to study the ufo phenomena. I wonder why he hasn't done that.

 

[Burnt State]

Jacques F. Vallee
His training does make him a physical scientist and his work in astrophysics is what makes him qualified to complete scientific inquiry into the problem. He did make the first computer map of mars and mounted the first true case of scientific legitimacy for the ETH. I would still like to know which other Ufologists have brought more science to bear on the UFO question than him?

He has devoted large portions of his life to the task, producing a body of work unequalled in the field. I'm sure he could have turned his brain to much more profitable ventures (and he eventually did) but he has stuck to this topic in a dedicated manner for decades. So many here like to champion different individuals' commitment to the task but he gets all this low level, uninformed criticism. I wonder if it's because he continues to push in new directions and other's can't keep up with him? Are his ideas too thorough, too innovative?

I'm sure, if it was a profitable venture to create a team to study UFO's he would have done so. However that model has already been created through Bigelow which is why he works there too on just that kind of team of scientists.

 

[Constance]

His training does make him a physical scientist and his work in astrophysics is what makes him qualified to complete scientific inquiry into the problem.

Your syntax is ambiguous; I can't tell whether you mean he's qualified to perform "complete scientific inquiry into the problem" or to participate intelligently with others in "complete scientific inquiry into the problem." As you've recognized, our material and physical sciences are not yet adequate to resolve the 'ufo problem', and perhaps no material/physical science can in itself ever comprehend the nature of the reality in which we exist. I personally think that that is the case. Everything we can learn and intellectually, as well as imaginatively, extrapolate about nature ultimately begins in perception, which itself is then theorized mentally, intellectually, in several disciplines -- predominantly in philosophy and science, which require one another. Vallee has contributed significantly to the investigation of 'ufos' by extending inquiry to the issue of how we experience and interpret them psychologically, and that is or should be a consideration in our attempt to understand all phenomena. But it can never be sufficient in itself given the demonstrated materiality of some ufos and the evident fact that they operate physically -- must do so -- in terms of the physical fields and forces existing in the universe, which we only partially understand at present.

 

[Constance]

I'm sure, if it was a profitable venture to create a team to study UFO's he would have done so. However that model has already been created through Bigelow which is why he works there too on just that kind of team of scientists.

There's personal or corporate profit and then there's profit to our species as a whole. I wonder which is most important to either Vallee or Bigelow. {Actually, I don't wonder.} The kind of research institution we need to address the ufo phenomena is one that would be a fully interdisciplinary and public institution, widely sharing what it learns. The privatized capitalist model does not work that way, and both of these men are intelligent enough to realize that.

 

[Burnt State]

There's personal or corporate profit and then there's profit to our species as a whole. I wonder which is most important to either Vallee or Bigelow. {Actually, I don't wonder.} The kind of research institution we need to address the ufo phenomena is one that would be a fully interdisciplinary and public institution, widely sharing what it learns. The privatized capitalist model does not work that way, and both of these men are intelligent enough to realize that.

Yes, that would be the desired institution but we don't live in a society that values imaginative thought, as this thread has demonstrated. If history had written the UFO narrative differently than the curtain of laughter path it went on, and if free and open discourse were true features of the state, then you could build institutions that value knowledge over power. But that's not our world, and as it is one that turns on money and power don't think that we will see public results from any private ventures investigating this field.

Those that may do so are rarely getting any attention. Again, I ask, who are the scientists that are actually investigating the phenomenon in the post-McDonald/Hynek/Friedman era?

Rutkowski and his team do that public work that you are talking about, and publish their very detailed findings regularly, yet I didn't really see a lot of people jump all over his data, reward him or express exuberance for such thankless tasks.

At the end of the day it's Vallée who has written the textbooks for the Invisible College and has produced that full on interdisciplinary approach to the problem that has in fact been widely shared. The article from ufoevidence clearly presents those facts as does his body of work. He has moved well beyond the psychological, has embraced the psi-potential, is thoroughly involved with all physical aspects of these objects, is inventing new ways of seeing it, its sociological effects and is postulating new approaches to unserstanding time and the physics of information in order to contend with its associative nature.

And, if Vallée was only interested in the cash why on earth would he bother spend so much of his life, career and reputation on UFO's?

 

[Constance]

Yes, that would be the desired institution but we don't live in a society that values imaginative thought, as this thread has demonstrated.

I don't think that's a fair estimation of the thread. Imagination is involved in all thought and indeed in all perception as Merleau-Ponty recognized. It's certainly a part of the thinking of theoretical physicists and all ordinary people who engage in the possibilities of extraterrestrial or extradimensional intelligence among other subjects.

If history had written the UFO narrative differently than the curtain of laughter path itvwent on, and if free and open discourse were true features of the state, then you could build institutions that value knowledge over power.

'History', including the history of the modern ufo phenomena, didn't write itself ; we wrote it by our choices in what we would think about and do with the resources available to us in what we make of our world and what we encourage others to make of it.

But that's not our world, and as it is one that turns on money and power don't think that we will see public results from any private ventures investigating this field.

Humans can change the economic power structure of this planet with enough will and intelligence and solidarity. In the meantime, I think that those possessing knowledge and financial power in the world today have options, choices they can make concerning what they do with their knowledge and power. We do not live, yet, in a police state.

 

[Burnt State]

Working backwards from your points I would say that the fascist police state is in full swing especially given the new erosion of civil rights and increasing loss of privacy through the post-9-11 surveillance laws and practices. When you throw in our relationship to consumerism & the weak democracies of North America I don't see a lot of independent choices taking place outside of the choice for fifty percent of the population not to exercise their privilege and hard fought right to vote.

And not to bring this all back to Vallée again, but he does warn in his Impossible Futures TEDx talk that in the information age there now sits a power above all us little people that knows our every move and contact, who we email and what kind of cereal we like. Total information control is no joke. The growing disparity between the wealthy and the poor is also not a good indicator of anything except more social control.

Then, when you take a step back and look at how the real kings and queens of the world live - the billionaire and trillionaire sets, who command corporate and physical armies, while writing the national and global media scripts on their toilet paper, you can see how the idea of free thinking is somewhat diminished. Across that historical progress, something as bizarre and imaginative as UFO's never stood a chance of becoming anything but the butt end of a joke throughout the 50's-80's as they served a purpose for power.

That being said I'm not entirely a nihilist and do hope our global future works to create an equitable, more free thinking society. But this current age of digital technology appears to have consumed us as we jumped like lemmings off the digital cliff gleefully. Believing in UFO's is either perhaps one of the last examples of a free-thinking society or one that is under a different kind of social control.

 

[DavidRavenMoon]

Yes, I love that scene too. But Jacques Vallee is not "the scientific establishment." In fact he's neither a physical scientist nor a life scientist. He's a computer scientist and that's where he puts most of his energy and his "venture capital." He's very likely to be able to draw many investors to his projects. What are those projects? Jacques Vallee has long been in a position in which he could have put together a research institute staffed with physicists and other researchers to study the ufo phenomena. I wonder why he hasn't done that.

He was an astronomer. While at University of Texas, he co-developed the first computer-based map of Mars for NASA. That's not a scientist?

What work he later went on to do is irrelevant. He has an M.S. in astrophysics, a B.S. in mathematics, and got his his Ph.D. in computer science.

 

[Constance]

I understand your viewpoint.

 

[Tony B.]

Those that knew Hynek personally claim that Hynek changed his mind before his death and realized that if it's not ETH and nuts and bolts then it's not worthy of study. However, we don't have any public statements from Hynek to prove such.

In the immortal words of Baron von Munchhausen:

"Vas you dere, Charlie?"

I'm wondering what this particular assertion is based on. Not saying you're wrong (yet).

 

[Open-Minded-Earthling]

I think Jacques Vallee is still very open minded about the UFO mystery. He does emphasize there is some nuts and bolts aspects about UFO's that don't seem to fit-in with present technology, but I think he knows there are top secret military technologies, including psyops, that are futuristic prototypes that can do amazing tricks, especially, in the nighttime hours.

He interviews many people that have these sightings over years if need be, and I appreciate that he keeps these private without publicity.

Vallee has DEFINITELY demonstrated a fear of the PTB decades ago, and so he cloaks some of his ideas inside fictional books he has written. He has hidden actual messages from the military that were passed onto Hynek too, so I'm sorry to say he is very cautious about what he can and cannot say about how the military manipulates the public on a grand scale with propaganda to cover-up their prized UFO technologies and psyops operations too.

Vallee knows much more privately, imo, than he is willing to put "on record". What he should do is 'tell all' by having an online book released after his death.

I don't think Vallee's ideas and thinking are set in stone, so that he believes he knows what the answers are about UFO's. He is trying to understand this subject by interviewing witnesses and by uncovering historical accounts of potential witnesses to UFO's and ET encounters. I seriously doubt he believes he has uncovered even one event that MUST BE an off-planet UFO or ET encounter.

I think Vallee does believe there is a long Human history wherein Humankind has encountered the belief in seeing UFO's and ET/Other "beings" that are beyond our everyday experiences. Some of these encounters have definitely been believed to come from the heavens and sky above. That's really not a radical perspective by any means. Just consider the many religious and spiritual beliefs from around the world to understand this is our reality! How much is just centered from within the mind vs "out there" is the Mother of All Debates about the meaning of life, etc.

I don't think you can debunk Vallee by any means based on my thoughts above. Can you?

 

[Double Nought Spy]

There is so much BS in this field, it should be called a feedlot. Crammed full of bullshitters with some sensible people holding their noses and rolling their eyes.

 

[Badseed]

But Jacques Vallee is not "the scientific establishment." In fact he's neither a physical scientist nor a life scientist.

Really?
Vallee received a B.S. in mathematics at the Sorbonne and an M.S. in astrophysics at Lille University. Your really going to say he's not a physical scientist?

"He's a computer scientist and that's where he puts most of his energy and his "venture capital." He's very likely to be able to draw many investors to his projects. What are those projects?

Here's a partial list:
- Co-developing the first computerized mapping of Mars for NASA
- He worked at SRI International on the network information center for the ARPANET, a precursor to the modern Internet.
- He has spearheaded early-stage investments in over 60 startup (technology) companies, 18 of which have become traded on the public markets, either through IPOs or acquisitions. They include:

• Accuray Systems (Nasdaq:ARAY) a medical device company developing surgical robots
• Sangstat Medical (acquired by Genzyme) specialized in organ transplantation therapy
• Mercury Interactive (acquired in 2006 by HP) a software testing company
• Electronics for Imaging (Nasdaq:EFII)
• Harmonic Lightwaves (Nasdaq:HLIT)
• Class Data Systems (acquired by Cisco)
• Ubique (acquired by AOL)
• Mobilian (acquired by Intel)
• Nanogram Devices (acquired by Greatbatch) a nanotechnology battery manufacturer.

If you want to disagree with the guy, go for it - but don't attack his credentials, when he obviously is a physical scientist - and a credible one at that. Especially since most people in Ufology have exactly zero credentials - and the few that have a scientific background tend to agree with Valle's assessment.

 

[Badseed]

Proof please. I'm at the point where I just don't care anymore. So provide proof or admit defeat.

Anyone who still wants to elevate Vallee's SPECULATION as somehow advancing our understanding all you have to do is provide PROOF that such is correct.

PROOF = His work has you (and others) discussing the merits of his research. Pros and Cons, extraterrestrial hypothesis Vs. extra dimensional hypothesis etc.... That's what science does; and that is how fields of research get advanced. Just because you disagree with his "SPECULATIONS" does not make it otherwise.

P.S. - It appears to me Vallee is very carful and goes through extraordinary lengths to avoid making statements beyond what is fact (as most scientists do). What you call "SPECULATION" is just his assessment of those facts and I have never heard him try to represent his interpretation (Speculation) as the "right explanation" - I have however heard him say many times that he really does not know what UFO's are. To me that's far more honest and intelligent then the dimwits that claim they know what the "truth" is (because they don't).

 

[Badseed]

Your syntax is ambiguous; I can't tell whether you mean he's qualified to perform "complete scientific inquiry into the problem" or to participate intelligently with others in "complete scientific inquiry into the problem." ......

Is that the sound of you admitting that Vallee is in-fact a Physical scientist?

All you had to say was, "Sorry Jacque, I did not know you where a mathematician and astrophysicist". Instead you typed a page, about the current state of science. lol.