An Assessment -Dr Jacques Vallee

People in Ufology take it very personally when you criticise Jacques Vallee. Most I doubt have even read his books, I was once told "You CANNOT question Dr. Vallee!"  Screw you because yes I can.

Ufology has always done this. Harold T. Wilkins an early flying saucer author was a plagiarist and made stuff up and passed it off as fact. Things in his books I have back-tracked to the original sources and found them takenm out of context or even a different twist put on them. But, oh no, you could not criticise him.

Frank Edwards and his books gave out a lot of misleading information as did his radio show but he was a journalist with a buck to make. Yes, I criticised him and for good reason.

Donald E. Keyhoe was a legend and anything he wrote was true and the United States Air Force was lying. We KNEW that because...Keyhoe told us. facts twisted to push his agenda and it is interesting to learn now that he had racist leanings. But I go by what is written and presented and we know he was against Betty and Barney Hill because they were a "mixed race" couple.

John A. Keel -as with Keyhoe's books I enjoyed his work but he added "extras" to stories and again twisted facts because he had books to sell and the fact that he got a lot wrong in Operation Trojan Horse does not matter to Ufologists because they NEVER looked into what he was writing. They never check any sources.

I could go on but Keyhoe, Wilkins and Keel misled and lied to us and yet there was no open criticism of them allowed.

The same happened with Budd Hopkins. Nice guy. Delivering the facts and peer reviewed work. He lied. He knew that he was submitting faked evidence in his books and lectures and misused hypnosis. He corrupted Ufological research for three decades. Every CE3K or "abduction" case was rebooted so that now "Greys" were involved -even in the Hill case it seems!

David Jacobs. Historian. Used hypnosis incorrectly and totally lost the plot but when I criticised him, as I did Hopkins: "You cannot criticise an academic" -Hopkins and Jacobs, of course, "put bums on seats -sold tickets to events and made MUFON etc lots of money.

A small group promote Orbs and rods so that was another big thing. Explain the orbs or criticise the "stars" and "you cannot do that!"

Luis Elizondo and the whole counter  intelligence take over of Ufology where they have gotten people to stop calling UFOs by that term -we MUST call them "UAP" -and people are! These are people who have and are suppressing UFO reports and lying and having followers in Ufology attack people who for decades have tried to break into the secrecy. The truth seekers are now the enemy!

Yes I can criticise and ask for evidence just as you can. NO ONE is beyond question when it comes to research whether UFOs or not. Nothing is peer reviewed in Ufology.  With my own work absolutely no one is interested in papers on CE3Ks or the other work I have done for almost 50 years now. Therefore I present it in books. No big words (anything like that I explain because it is important that everyone knows what is going on and understands. Every case I write about or present is fully referenced which means that the data can be peer reviewed and the original sources  double and triple checked.

Here then is my assessment of Dr. Vallee and it is based on having read his books, watching interviews and reading what people who have met him say.

When I became one of "The New Guard" of Ufology in 1974 I was impressionable. But there was one thing I believed and that was that science needed to get involved in Ufology. Dear old Lionel Beer and his book service quickly supplied me with the two books that were must reading for serious Ufologists and after all the Adamski crap and decades of Contactees being the source of all technical UFO data.

The books were Challenge To Science: The UFO Enigma and Anatomy of a Phenomenon: UFOs In Space and both were written by Jacques Vallee (Challenge To Science being co-authored by Janine Vallee). Vallee, we were told was French. He was a scientist. And France was often far ahead of the rest of the civilised world and the French Academy of Science was, quite literally, the scientific body to be held in awe.

Vallee was a French scientist. That made these books far more alluring than a bag of chips to a young man (I am told that I should have gone from model soldiers to girls but I got side-tracked into UFOs).

Vallee was also young and willing to speak out so kudos to him. I sat down and read both books and tried to discuss them with others but found few had read them mainly because they were "a bit too technical"!

I digested most books  back then as much as I do now and I would often sit back later and go over things I had read and early in the morning I was still awake (my sleep pattern is...no sleep pattern!) and suddenly I realised something. I noted errors -in a graph for one thing but other things suddenly hit me.

I asked Franklyn Daviun-Wilson and we went over the books. I still have, after decades, Franklyn's copies and he annotated the actual pages (in all my books you will see LOTS of post-it notes) because writing in books was an old fashion thing -I have examples from 19th and early 20th century natural history and science books and so on. It was mainly so that you had your own thoughts on the actual page rather than later sitting there and thinking "What page was it I queried? What did I query??". Anyway, here are notes at the front of Anatomy of a Phenomenon:

My own note on Vallee's graph:

When I was putting together data for The UFO Report I threw out Desmond Leslie and George Adamski's fictitious The Flying Saucers Have Landed but felt Vallee's work was still "safe". Then I started finding that I was correcting things like dates, etc. and I realised that this scientist who was bringing UFO research respectability was far from scientific in his approach to gathering and presenting data. it was quite bad.

Of course I did leap at getting a copy, from Lionel again, of Passport to Magonia: From Folklore To Flying Saucers because though I am a "nuts and bolts" kind of fella I am a sceptical researcher. I do not say "Folklore...flying saucers???" I keep an open mind and I read what is presented and then form my own opinion.

Before I forget; Dr J. Allen Hynek gave his approval of Vallee and that helped get Vallee's name "out there" to Ufologists who generally ignored anyone who was not British or American (there is a long list of French Ufologists who Vallee stands on the shoulders of but who are unknown outside of France).  Hynek made all the introductions and to read Vallee later talk down at Hynek and display an egotism -he apparently got quite angry and stroppy at one point because someone got interviewed and he was not.  All the information is online but Vallee also shows his ego and arrogance at times in his own books.

Passport To Magonia I read through and noted the various UFO related entity cases but then realised a big problem. Sources -or lack of them. A report is given but no source of the account or "a friend told me of..." which needs back-up. Who was this person? Were they a scientist or a lay person?  Seeing a "pan-like entity" could have been an altered state incident or even hallucination.  Witness confidentiality yes but why should we accept this as a genuine incident?

I have never met Jacques Vallee and so my opinions are not based on whether he is a "pleasant guy" or not.  His Catalogue of UFO Landings is pointless as it contains known hoaxes and misidentifications at the very time they were added. Quimper-Corentin, France, 1620: never happened as Vallee described.  Alencon, France, 1790: UFO and entity case -never happened and no report in the archives of the French Academy of Sciences as Vallee claimed:and he could have checked!

And to still use known hoax cases and cases proven to have other explanations and cite them as evidence to back up his personal theories.  Unforgivable.

For some cases cited there are no original sources given and we are expected to accept those reports and (those very few people who do research) are expected to base work and analyses on these? No. That is not how science works and Vallee who loves to keep pointing out (and hearing others stating) that he is a scientist knows that.

The number of Ufologists who go like giddy girls who have just met their favourite boy band when they state "I met Dr Vallee" or discussed something with Vallee is almost ridiculous. The fact that Vallee's data is included in catalogues without anyone checking it is the worship of dogma.

For years I kept contacting Ted Phillips to try to get some data on all of his Physical Trace evidence and the test results -I have asked his colleague Farrairo- nothing. How can you claim to be gathering scientific evidence on the phenomena (NOT phenomenon) to present to science and yet as far as I can find Phillips submitted no papers or test results for peer review from the 1960s until the time of his death (let's not go to the Marley Woods fiasco). Looking at what I eventually found of Phillips Trace catalogue contained entries that cannot be accepted as evidence. Anything prior to 1900 and up until trace samples began being gathered (1950s to a degree) and that you cannot see with your own eyes or have no test results on is junk data. Useless. Phillips was another worshipper of Vallee and his catalogue listing includes Vallee sourced stories; again the known fakes.

Vallee was the inspiration for the French scientist in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. So what? That fact is cited by Ufologists and wannabe Ufologists on You Tube and elsewhere as if it is one of the greatest achievements ever. A French film director played a French scientist...not named Vallee. Dr J Allan Hynek was a consultant and IN the movie. (that is never mentioned).

Vallee, had he carried out first hand analysis of UFO reports would have seen that there is an unexplained natural phenomenon (I termed UNP back in 1983) and the reports of what appeared to be solid, constructed craft (whether hoax or genuine). Then you have the misidentifications, fraudulent interpretation of known phenomenon and insufficient data due to no investigation taking place. Instead he states that after all these decades he has no idea what "UFOs" are (his connection with some involved in the recent Elizondo affair is worrying) but strongly believes or hopes that they are multidimensional in some way because extra terrestrial "would be boring". 

The "great man" has "no idea what UFOs are" but knowing better than the rest of us concludes multidimensional. Which sounds like an egotist with his head up his own ass -the fact that people buy his published and very over priced diaries must be a great boost to his ego.

There is one photograph which, I think, sums up Vallee.

The End.