Recently a person who calls herself “Concerned Earthling” wrote a fan letter (1) to Jacques Vallee (2), a noted computer scientist, venture capitalist, and UFO investigator to express appreciation for his past UFO research. Vallee wrote back(3), reassuring the fan that he was not planning to ever separate himself from UFO studies, but plans to continue delving into the phenomenon.

Vallee would be a fascinating character even if it were not for his interest in UFOs. He was involved in the Arpanet, the predecessor of today’s Internet. He was an astronomer while living in France in the early 1960s and wrote a science fiction novel “Le Sub-Espace” (Subspace.) He later became a venture capitalist specializing in a number of high-tech business ventures.









The Legacy of Jacques Vallee

But Vallee is most famous for his interest in UFOs, which started in the mid-1960s when he moved to the United States. He was mentored by J. Allen Hynek (4), an astronomer who started as a UFO skeptic and who eventually admitted to the possibility of alien visitations. Vallee served as the model of Lacombe, the character played by Francois Truffaut in the Steven Spielberg movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

Vallee’s journey with regard to UFOs took a different path than that of Hynek. He started with the belief that UFOs are alien spacecraft, but then began to develop other theories to explain the phenomenon. He described his new ideas in a recent interview on “Coast to Coast.” (5)

As a computer scientist, Vallee started to notice common patterns in not only UFOs but also religious visitations, sightings of cryptids, and psychic phenomenon going back throughout history. He believes that every one of these events, once one accounts for events caused by natural phenomenon, is the result of a nonhuman consciousness, likely from another dimension, attempting to manipulate the consciousness of human beings to effect social change.