Dr. Jacques Vallée’s 40 years of diary entries disclose a large body of science that’s been intentionally hidden.

Dr. Jacques Vallée is an almost mythical figure among those interested in UFOs.

(movie clip from Close Encounters of the Third Kind)

Who are you people?

Please, one more question. Have you recently had a close encounter, a close encounter with something very unusual?

Who are you people?

And while he wasn’t really in that movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, there’s no doubt the French UFO researcher you just heard was based on the real life Jacques Vallée. As it turns out, Vallée was right smack in the middle of not just UFOs but a lot of the most important frontier science that has shaped our evolving understanding of who we are. Take for example telepathy, mindreading – now falling under parapsychology – but go back 50 years to Stanford Research Institute, when Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ, who go on to run the US Military psychic spying program, are investigating this Israeli psychic name Uri Geller.

Dr. Jacques Vallée: …were at the SRI cafeteria having lunch, a big round table and Geller was across the table from me and Geller suddenly says, “I want to do an experiment with you Jacques, so I’m going to send you…”

This is a great story and you’ll hear the whole thing in this interview, but let me cut to the chase. So Geller instructs Vallée how to do this little experiment and it works. So they take the next step, they’re right there in the SRI café, which kind of blows me away. I mean they’re sitting down having lunch and they go, “Well, what the heck? We have some envelopes left over from the experiment we were just running; let’s use one of those, see what happens?

Dr. Jacques Vallée: I thought, I’m going to send it in two things. I’m going to send the whale, which is essentially a fish, I know a whale isn’t a fish but you know, I’m going to send a fish and I’m going to send a wooden shed that I see through the window. Geller said – all of a sudden he was all business – he took his pencil and he drew something and he says, “Look, I’m going to draw what I’m getting, but I’m not getting one thing, I’m getting two things. I’m getting a fish and then I’m getting a wooden shed.” So he drew the two things, he didn’t draw the target. There was no way he could have known that I did not send him the target, I sent him two things that I made up, and that’s what he got.

Now, it’s almost hard to believe that all this happened exactly the way he’s saying, I mean, this is Jacques Vallée and everything, but come on. Well, here’s the real kicker. He wrote it all down in his journal. So here’s a guy, who’s right in the middle of the computer revolution in Silicon Valley, a world-class computer scientist at the time, and he’s right in the middle of the parapsychology thing, and right in the middle of the UFO thing, and he wrote it all down. And that’s what we’re going to talk about here on Skeptiko.

Now, this interview covers a lot of ground in the one hour we had and I did have the chance to ask Dr. Vallée directly about the UFO consciousness link that we were talking about on the last episode of Skeptiko and I thought his answer was quite interesting.

Alex Tsakiris: …I hear people use your work as a manifesto against little grey men in spaceships from other planets, [but] I don’t know how you get around that data.

Dr. Jacques Vallée: You’ll have to get out of these little boxes, you know, physics on my left and psychology on my right, you can’t do that, you cannot do that in dealing with UFOs. What I’m saying is you cannot do that anymore in dealing with astrophysics. The problem that scientists have today is that time and space, the way we were thinking about them, don’t make sense when you begin to deal with particle entanglement and with entanglement of larger physical things. So we’re going to get to the same place eventually.

There you go; for me – someone interested in using science to find deep spirituality – ‘everyone getting to the same place’ sounds just about perfect.

Stay tuned, this is a good one. My interview with Dr. Jacques Vallée [about the re-release of Forbidden Science] is next on Skeptiko.

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