New Vallee book - Forbidden Science-Volume Two (1970-1979)

[dorkbot]

This seems to have been released with no press whatsoever. Publishing date was December 6, 2008. I just stumbled across it by accident looking for something else. Did anyone else see a press release for this?

Forbidden Science - Volume Two (1970-1979)

This would be a followup to the original Forbidden Science which was comprised of Vallee's journals for the years 1957-1969. Volume two would cover the period of his work after Passport to Magonia up to Messengers of Deception. It will be interesting to read the backstories leading up to Messengers of Deception.

 

[Gareth]

Its not a reprint or re-issue of an old book?

 

[dorkbot]

Its not a reprint or re-issue of an old book?

Nope. Brand new. It's a little baffling because I generally scan the types of news outlets that would be promoting or at least mentioning a release like this and I don't recall seeing any mention of this anywhere. Admittedly a book comprised of one researcher's personal journals is probably not going to merit a publicity campaign but I think I would have seen somebody put a blurb up about it somewhere.

 

[Gareth]

Maybe thats a good reason for him to come back on the Paracast

 

[Schuyler]

Yikes! $44 list, $40 at amazon. Not exactly a mainstream publisher: Documatica Research. Never heard of them.

 

[dorkbot]

So I bought this and just finished reading it yesterday. I'm starting to feel that, in the long run, Vallee's journals are going to be viewed as being as least as important as his formal books if not more so.

Biedny often brings up the point on the show about how there are the things people say publicly and then there is what they tell you in the bar after a few drinks. This book is probably as close as you are going to get to getting Vallee liquored up. There are no revealed ultimate secrets here but if nothing else it fills in much notable detail to what would otherwise be a rough sketch of the true state of 1970's UFO research.

It's hard to believe that a guy who can write such clumsy fiction (sorry Jacques) is capable of being completely brilliant with personal journals. If ever there was a man whose real life was stranger than fiction, Vallee is him. Throw out the UFO stuff and you still have a guy who repeatedly seems to intersect almost all the nexus of everything and everybody weird in the 1970's. He's there at the foundation of computers and networking in Silicon Valley, right in the middle of the SRI research on psi, connected to almost everybody in both the counterculture and military intelligence fields and at least runs across just about anyone who has ever touched the UFO field. At some point in reading this you begin to wonder if Vallee can possibly be this big a rock star. A soiree at Anton Lavey's house one day and briefing the NSA on UFOs the next. This man needs a biopic.

A major current in the book is the interaction of the intelligence agencies in the field and Vallee's impression that they really don't know any more than he does. There are secret research projects but they are short-lived, in competition with one another and generally unproductive. Much of the intelligence community efforts seem focused not on researching the UFO question but on uncovering what some other intelligence agency knows about the subject. The UFO crowd is chasing FBI is chasing Naval Intelligence is chasing CIA is chasing NSA is chasing AFOSI and NRO, etc. When called in to formally brief some NSA personel, Vallee find them more interested in whether or not he can shed any light on a secret "Black Air Force" that they believed might be hidden from even NSA.(edit.-acronym jumble-my bad- This "Black Air Force" story is related after a day of briefing NASA and CIA, not NSA. p244) Viewed individually, any given secret seems deeply intriguing but over time the high-level view suggests a whole lot of confused people doing not much at all.

Everybody is trying to get somebody else to "disclose" what they know and nobody is doing actual research. Doesn't that sound familiar?

If you read between the lines a bit(my interpretation here) you might also get the impression that MJ-12's origin lays not in a premeditated scheme of disinfo but in legitimate 1970's frustration by some people in the intelligence community to finally, once and for all, get a research group of 12 heavy hitters together with the ability and resources to enact a serious, long-term, cross-agency project. How it morphed into the MJ-12 document scam is still up for speculation.

If you already know all the player's names this book goes a long way towards filling in the gaps. For me, this book has proven to be a gold mine of little known detail. In terms of painting a picture of powerful 1970's historical undercurrents it really needs to be consulted by straight historians.

I'm something of a Vallee fanboy so this is hardly an unbiased review but if nothing else I hope this might prompt some other people to read the book and respond with their thoughts.