French born Jacques Fabrice Vallée is described as a highly-respected astronomer, computer scientist, author, ufologist and venture capitalist (1).

A former mainstream scientist, Vallée co-developed the “first computerized mapping of Mars for NASA.” But, this wasn’t his only significant accomplishment. Among his many achievements, he is noted for the work he did at SRI International. It was here that Vallée worked “on the network information center for the ARPANET, a precursor to the modern Internet.”

He became interested in UFOs after having his first encounter several years before moving to the US.

In 1955, Vallée claimed to have spotted a UFO over his home in Pontoise, located about 18 miles northwest of Paris. His alleged experiences with UFOs didn’t stop there.

In 1961, he was a staff member of the French Space Committee. This was the year he “witnessed the destruction of the tracking tapes of an unknown object orbiting the earth.”

Vallée and his fellow scientists assumed the object they’d witnessed in a retrograde orbit, meaning that it was traveling in the opposite direction of the Earth’s rotational direction, was an asteroid. However, when his superior erased the tracking recording of the object, Vallée was confused since at the time, “there were no rockets powerful enough to launch such a satellite.”

Vallée’s interest in UFOs seems to have been sealed after experiencing these encounters. He’s been involved in scientific research of UFOs ever since. He currently serves on the French Genopole science board and is an elected Trustee of the Institute for the Future (2).

Over the years, Vallée has called for the legitimate scientific study of UFOs (3). He’s considered one of the leading experts on the phenomena. In fact, the character of the French scientist, Claude Lacombe, in the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” was based on Vallée (4).

Vallée authored several “scientific” books on the UFO phenomena. Many other leading UFO researchers like Jerome Clark believe Vallée’s “first two UFO books were among the most scientifically sophisticated defenses of the ETH [Extraterrestrial Hypothesis].”









Vallée’s 2014 Paper on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP)

In July 2014, Vallée was still urging that the study of the UFO phenomena be taken seriously and called for the scientific study of UFOs to be officially undertaken. In his paper, “UNIDENTIFIED AERIAL PHENOMENA: A Strategy for UAP Research Paris,” Vallée states, “After years of ideological arguments based on anecdotal data the field of UAP research appears ready to emerge into a more mature phase of reliable study” (5).

Vallée puts forth an argument that many countries have a “renewed scientific interest” in UFOs and this interest is “based on credible official or semi-official documents.” The types of research he believes should be undertaken include:

–> Investigation

–> Hard data analysis

–> New theoretical exploration

Vallée warns that steps toward serious scientific research should “avoid repeating past errors.” To achieve this, he suggests:

–> “Such projects need to generate new hypotheses”

–> To test hypotheses rigorously “against the accumulated reports of thousands of observers.”

Of course, he admits that the biggest drawback to this approach is the lack of an existing repository of what he calls, “reliable global data.” He states that the task of trying to assemble any kind of reliable global data is daunting due to the past data having either been ignored or “underestimated”.

This doesn’t stop his determination and Vallée points out that the purpose of his paper, “is to briefly review previous work in the compilation of UAP databases and outline some new directions for research.”