Thinking Allowed. Conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello and welcome. Our topic today is UFOs, and my guest, Dr. Jacques Vallée, is an expert in this area who, during the past 20 years, has written numerous books on the subject, including Challenge to Science, The Edge of Reality, Anatomy of a Phenomenon, The Invisible
College, Messengers of Deception, and others. Welcome, Jacques. It's a pleasure to have you. Thank you. I think one of the interesting things to mention about you is the fact that you were the person that Steven Spielberg modeled a character of a UFO researcher on in his classic movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I think he was intrigued with the idea of a French scientist running around the United States investigating the UFO phenomena. You've been looking at this phenomenon for a long time. You've worked closely with Dr. Alan Hynek and other UFO researchers. You've written many authoritative books, and yet your perspective on the UFO issue seems rather unique in the sense that you
don't seem to be jumping on the extraterrestrial visitors' bandwagon. That's what was the main point of disagreement with Steven Spielberg. When I met Steven Spielberg, he was about halfway through filming Close Encounters, and we had a long discussion about what UFOs could be. And of course, for him, the main point of the movie was entertainment, and it was appropriate for the UFOs to be extraterrestrial visitors. I think that from my own point of view, I'm going to be very disappointed if UFOs turn out to be nothing more than visitors from another planet, because I think there could be something much more interesting. something from another dimension, a space or time? I think what the UFO phenomenon is teaching us
is that we don't understand time and space. Here are objects, I think we have to call them objects, that are physical, that interact with the environment, that cause effects on the witnesses, on the psychology and the physiology of the witnesses, and leave traces on the ground, and yet are capable of, appear to be capable of manipulating time and space in ways that go beyond what our physics understands today. In your books, particularly your most recent book, Messengers of Deception, which is many years old, you suggest that UFOs are deliberately trying to manipulate our subconscious mind, to create a mythology in our culture about themselves,
which is one of the reasons that they're both physical and concrete, yet very elusive at the same time. Do you still feel that way? I think to answer that, I'm not trying to evade your question, but to answer that you have to step back a little bit farther. What we know today about the UFO phenomenon is considerably more than we knew 20 years ago or 10 years ago. And we have to understand it at three different levels. The first level is the physical level. And all we can say about UFOs at the physical level is that it's a lot of energy in a small space. In the space of this, if we could take the energy of a nuclear reactor and contain it within this studio, for example, you'd have something that would approximate what a UFO does.
It's a lot of energy in a small space emitted through light energy and through pulsed microwave energy. The second level is what happens to witnesses, what would happen to you and me if we were close to that source of energy. And again, now we're beginning to understand the physiological and the psychological correlations of a close encounter. And those have to do with a loss of the sense of space, loss of orientation. I've had witnesses tell me we were driving north when everybody knows we were driving south. They were disoriented at the time. Loss of a sense of time, people thinking that only ten minutes went by and three hours went by.
Very often effects on the skin, sunburns, I think that was shown in close encounters. Effects on the eyes, going from conjunctivitis to blindness, to temporary blindness in some cases. And sometimes you've mentioned people have actually been healed of diseases. There have been cases where after a UFO close encounter, it seems that the healing process had been sped up. There are known techniques now using electromagnetic radiation that will heal the fractures, for example, or will heal superficial wounds on the skin, but nothing that would heal as fast as the reported effects. So we're beginning to understand at least the descriptions, the symptoms of the exposure
to whatever UFO is. And then there is a third level, which is where I was, the level I was addressing in Messengers of Deception, which is a social level. The impact on our culture. Yes, and the impact on our belief systems. And at that level, and that's something that's very difficult to convey to the believers in UFOs, or believers in little green men from space, you know. That at that level, it really doesn't matter whether UFOs are real or not. If enough people believe that something is real, then it is real in its effects. In terms of its social reality. In terms of the social reality, in terms of what people act according to their beliefs. And that opens a question of, really at two levels, could the UFO phenomenon be manipulating
us? teaching system of some sort, perhaps something that we are creating ourselves, perhaps a series of images that we are projecting. I think Carl Jung came very close to expressing that idea in one of his books. Or could it be manipulated purposely by people who have the technology to simulate UFO sightings? And people say, well, of course not. Who would do a thing like that? Well, I would remind you that during Watergate, during the Watergate investigation, it was discovered that there was a plan originated in the White House to surface a submarine off the coast of Cuba and paint the second coming of Christ over the island of Cuba using holograms, which is well within our technology today. The idea was that since there is a large
Catholic population in Cuba, they would be so upset by this vision that this would saturate the communication channels, you know, the telephone system in Cuba, long enough for an invasion to take place. How interesting. I never heard of that. Well, I think that's, you know, a classic in psychological warfare, but that kind of manipulation is well understood. And I have personally investigated several apparently genuine UFO cases where there was, in fact, manipulation. My conclusion, the conclusion of scientists working with me, was that there was, in fact, a manipulation taking place and that it was not a hoax on the part of the witnesses, but a hoax on the part of somebody much better organized. So there are possibly all of these levels going on simultaneously.
Today, with the current technology, that would be possible. One of my interests, as you know, has been to look at ancient sightings, old sightings before World War II, for example, when there is really no confusion with modern technology. And if people described, say, 1925 or in 1825, a disc flying through the air, then it can only have been very, very few phenomena could have produced it. And there have been some well-documented sightings going back to the 19th century, for example. There was, starting in 1896 and going into the spring of 1897, there was a remarkable wave of sightings of airships. Those were described as oval objects flying through the sky with lights on them.
And of course, the people in those days could only compare it to dirigibles, only compare them to airships. And those objects were capable of doing all the things that UFOs do today, including taking off very quickly and making 90-degree turns and landing and occupants coming out of them. And if nothing else, I think this is part of our folklore. This is something that we should be studying as part of our folklore. What have you been doing since the publication of Messengers of Deception? Well, I've been doing really working in two directions. I think that one of the contributions that I can make is trying to develop, to help develop new methodology to deal with this phenomenon.
This is not, we don't know where the phenomenon belongs. We don't know if it should be part of psychology or part of physics or part of meteorology or astronomy. We need to develop, and it takes a while for science to develop new disciplines around phenomena that don't fit. I think that's one of the opportunities with the UFO phenomenon. So I've tried to develop methodology that would enable us to deal with the complexity of the reports. And I'm doing this right now using artificial intelligence techniques to develop a very simple screening model. We do know one thing everybody agrees on is that 80% of all the cases reported are not UFOs. They are explainable phenomena. So if you type the data of these cases into a computer, the computer will probably screen that 80% out.
Exactly. Maybe not the 80%, but if you could just eliminate the 60% and put them into lower priorities, you would save a lot of time of investigators who could go after the high strangeness cases or high priority cases. So that's what I've been doing. As a byproduct of that, you get information on the structure of the phenomenon, the structure of the knowledge about the phenomenon that I think is going to give us some insight into how to approach it. The other thing I've been doing is personal investigations. I don't belong to any group or to any organization whatsoever. I'm doing this strictly on my own with a small network of friends and scientists and other investigators who help me. And I've been fairly frequently in Europe.
I've also traveled to South America and, of course, within the U.S., and I've tried to investigate cases that had not been reported to the media, had not been reported to UFO organizations. To avoid possible contamination from other researchers who may have made suggestions. Exactly, or simply the pressures on the witnesses themselves to embellish their stories and so on. So I try to go after cases that are reported directly to me. Have you come up with anything new or interesting in these cases? Yes. I go after cases where I have continued access to the witnesses and continued access to the site, where I can go back month after month or year after year and continue to follow those cases. One case that I'm especially intrigued with that I'm continuing to follow is a case of Dr. X in France.
That's an interesting one because I know I interviewed you in 1973 about this very interesting case. Well, it's a case that goes back to 1968. The witness is a medical doctor of some reputation in the south of France, which is why he never wanted his name published in connection with the sighting, so he was referred to as Dr. X. One night he saw some flashes of red light behind the shutters in his house, and so he opened the windows and stepped out on his balcony in the middle of the night and saw two objects that appeared appeared to merge into a single object and a beam of light went through the balcony where it was standing. Being a scientist, being a medical doctor, he had made a number of observations
during the sighting that enabled the investigators later to reconstruct exactly where the object had been and the apparent size of the object. The object was apparently very large. One One of the interesting sequelae of the incident is that there was a stigma or a marking that developed over his abdomen and also over the abdomen of his son. His son was 18 months old at the time. Over the years, that area of—it was like a red geometric shape over the skin, over the stomach. This has been now filmed on recurrent years.
It comes back on an annual basis. On the anniversary of that sighting. That would be hard to explain in physiological terms, I should think. There have been several attempts to—of course, this has been observed by his colleagues in France. One of them wanted to write up a communication to the French Academy of Medicine, except that that couldn't be done without naming the witness, and he did not want to be named. I've spoken to several people who continue to follow the case in France, and I met him last year again. The markings continue to appear. Even after over 18 years. And there is no, this cannot be explained as psychosomatic, there is an actual change. Now, when I interviewed you about this many, many years ago, you indicated to me that Dr.
X seemed to have acquired certain psychic gifts. In fact, his whole life was changed. His attitudes changed. That's not unusual. Many of the... When you investigate a case like this, what you find is usually a witness who is in a state of trauma has been shocked into very often their view of themselves, their view of the world around them, their view of the universe has been shattered by this experience, whether they are religious or not religious, whether they are a cop driving on a lonely road or a PhD or a bank president. I mean, they go through this very shattering experience. And people react, many people react with an awareness of abilities that they didn't know they had before.
They will tell you, I don't think the experience itself gave me that ability, but I just became aware that there was more to life than what I thought before. Well, now having had time to look back, have these changes been well integrated into his life, would you say? It's very difficult to answer that question. I know him, I think, fairly well. He has certainly continued to hold to that belief that there was another dimension to life. his whole life. He's become almost a mystic in terms of his awareness of life and death and the place of man in the universe. At the same time, he has developed a belief system
that is difficult for me to accept in which he has no critical awareness of the phenomenon anymore. In other words, he's accepted it totally in his life, the way a mystic would He's developed a religious attitude. Almost a religious attitude. And that's very difficult. I mean, I have to respect that. But it makes it very difficult for a scientist to preserve distance. Except if you look at it maybe as a social phenomenon, as you have in the past. This may be part of the phenomenon itself. Exactly. You have to shift your point of view to a social point of view. How about the case for physical evidence for UFOs? Is it getting better?
This is the one thing that we often hear from NASA and from other skeptics, that there really isn't a shred, as they say, of physical evidence. Well, I brought you a photograph that I recently was in Costa Rica investigating some cases and talking to investigators there. I have not done extensive analysis yet on this photograph, but it shows an object. Perhaps we can have our viewers look at that. It shows an object seen over the ocean off the coast of Costa Rica. What is unusual about the photograph is that it was taken by a mapping aircraft with an excellent camera, and it's shown looking down.
The camera was obviously pointing down, and the aircraft was flying horizontally at 3,000 meters. Which is rather low. Which is—that altitude gives very, very good detail on the terrain and also on the object. Now, the one explanation that we tried to pursue was that the object might have been the rotor of a helicopter flying underneath the aircraft. But with the— It doesn't look like that. It doesn't look like that, but nothing else looks like that either. So that's where we are. I see. There will obviously be a further analysis done on this. And you've been to Costa Rica yourself on investigations? Yes. There is a...
In every country, still today, there is active... Well, this is a phenomenon that goes through waves. It goes through periods of intense activity. We are clearly all over the world, things are relatively quiet. But in practically every country, you will find if you have to look for those reports. But the reports are there, and the phenomenon continues to be manifesting. And France, where you're from, is one of the stronger countries in this area, aren't they? Yes. What is happening, though, is that people are, because of the attitude of the scientific community, being very negative on the topic itself, that people are just not reporting what they see anymore.
And so we're losing the opportunity to obtain good data about the phenomenon. France may be the exception, because in France, for many years, there has existed an organization called GEPAN, L-G-E-P-A-N, which is a subset of the French equivalent of NASA, the CNES, the French Committee for Space Studies. And they have funds and a small staff. This is not by any means a large organization, but they do have a budget to investigate UFO reports, especially those coming through the police and the gendarmerie in France. So the procedure is very well established. JEPON has contacts with every part of the French government and receives all the sightings that...
And I understand in Brazil there was at one time some official acknowledgement of UFOs. There have been, in fact, I was in France last year at a briefing of JEPON and the staff of CNES on the UFO phenomenon as seen from the United States. States. And I was there with Professor Hynek, who since has died unfortunately, and with a medical doctor who is with the U.S. Air Force and has been very interested in cases like the Dr. X case. And we briefed, there was a very two-day exchange of views with the people at J.P.O.P. There is a considerable amount of data that has been gathered by those
gathered by those organizations, GEPO had been approached officially by several countries wanting to use GEPO as a model to do the same thing in their own countries. You mentioned CNAS? CNES. That's the French NASA. I see. There are the people responsible for Ariane, for Ariane Espace, the Ariane rocket. Oh, yes. And there are the people responsible for Spotimage, which is a new satellite for exploration of the Earth. Certainly the European space program seems to be making some strides now. Yes. For a while, there was a committee in the Soviet Union that was active in UFO research. I don't know what the current status of that committee is.
We're not hearing a lot from the Soviet Union. There is active interest. There is an active, as I understand it, an active exchange of correspondence between the Soviet Union and France on this topic. I thought I heard some years ago an official pronouncement by the Brazilian government that this is an area that should be looked into? Brazil has always been interested in the phenomenon. There are remarkable cases in Brazil. I had the opportunity to reinvestigate a case in Brazil where two people had died during, I don't want to say as a result, but in coincidence with a sighting of a UFO sighted by many people of a wide area. And I had the full cooperation of the police department in Rio.
And they sent, they have a detective who was detached to continue to study this case and to gather information about that case. Here in the United States, are there any trends that would distinguish us from the kind of reports you find around the world? Are they all similar? The reports in the U.S. are absolutely indistinguishable from those in other parts of the world. That's one of the remarkable things about this phenomenon. Because you might otherwise expect cultural differences. There are differences in the way the phenomenon is reported, the way it is treated by the media. In the U.S., the media tends to polarize everything. So either you have to be for or against UFOs.
So you have to be, either you believe in them, in which case you believe in extraterrestrials, or you don't believe in them. And it's very difficult to take a middle position, to say this is a phenomenon that does exist and we don't understand it, and it may be extraterrestrial, but it's probably something else. When you talk to the witnesses in every country, including the U.S., what they are telling you is that they have seen something that was there, that was part of their reality, part of their physical reality, and yet was capable of appearing out of nowhere or disappearing instantly. And that's why I'm interested. I think it's a challenge to our concept of science, to our concept of technology.
My business is technology. I cannot afford to ignore this phenomenon. Do you anticipate then that there may be some major impact on our culture as a result of this? I think even if we never understood the UFO phenomenon in the next 200 years, but we only understood how they manipulate the pulsed microwaves, for example, that itself would be a breakthrough in our technology, if we could only duplicate what that phenomenon does. I haven't heard much about these pulsed microwaves. Is this a new discovery? It's a convergence of work by several people looking both at the traces left on the ground, the impact on witnesses, the sounds and the visual effects that seem to be produced inside the brain,
the heating that is produced on cars or metal or the ground in the vicinity of the object of the object or the vicinity of the phenomenon. All this strongly suggests pulsed microwave radiation in connection with light radiation. One of the suggestions, Jacques, that you made in your book, The Invisible College, as I recall, is that the UFOs may be associated with some of the mystical or occult ideas of hidden masters or groups of very wise and beneficent entities that were trying to teach humanity. I didn't take it that far. I suggested that first any new phenomenon, even if you go back to the 15th century,
when you look at electricity, for example, electrostatics, as it was observed then but not understood, has the potential of being regarded as magical. I think Arthur Clarke said that any technology that we don't understand has to be magic, has to be perceived as magical. I'm paraphrasing badly what he said. Clearly, here is a phenomenon that is very complex and is showing abilities that we cannot duplicate with our current technology. So it immediately calls to mind magic and occultism. If it also contains something that electrostatics and electromagnetism doesn't contain, the potential of being intelligent. If it is intelligent, then we may not be able to study it with science alone.
Science is a way of gaining knowledge based on phenomena that are not manipulated by an intelligence. If now there is an intelligence involved, then it becomes much more complex. It requires a humanistic approach. Yes, it requires a much more diverse approach from many different disciplines, and it may be that the people responsible for that manifestation understand the impact that the phenomenon will have on us, on our own imagination. And that's one of the speculations that I proposed, was that perhaps the observations of UFOs were similar to a teaching system. But there is another way of thinking about that.
Perhaps we're clearly at a time of great potential crisis on Earth. We have the means of destroying the planet, which we've never had before in the history of man. It may be that there is a collective unconscious. If you follow the... The UFOs are ourselves, perhaps. That we are creating the visions we need to survive in order to transcend this crisis. we have and that there are no UFOs in a manufactured sense. Well, Jacques, we're out of time now, but it's really been a pleasure. And this is an interesting note to end on. There's so much that could be said about this topic. Thank you very much for being with us. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to pursue this subject. And thank you very much for joining us also.