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March 12, 2025 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:47:31
Joe Rogan Experience #2288 - Jacques Vallée
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jacques vallee
02:11:59
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joe rogan
29:56
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jamie vernon
00:20
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unidentified
The Joe Rogan experience Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day What's up sir?
jacques vallee
Very good to see you Good to see you.
joe rogan
I really enjoyed our conversation last night.
We all went out to dinner and Hal Puthoff blew my mind.
jacques vallee
As you know, I've known him for a long time.
joe rogan
Yeah, when did you meet him?
What year?
jacques vallee
I knew him at SRI. Actually, I was at Stanford Research Institute before him in one of the very early internet research teams.
When there was no internet, it was called the ARPANET. It was a network of the Advanced Research Project Agency, and it was all, you know, computer experiment and so on.
We had engine number three on the internet at SRI in California.
Engine number three on the ARPANET. By the time I joined them, there were like 30 machines already.
And it was exciting.
And then, you know, Dr. Puthoff and Russell Tarr came in with a proposal to SRI to do parapsychology research at SRI, which had never been done.
And it was funny because they – so I was already there, you know, in a team.
joe rogan
What year was this?
What year?
jacques vallee
Oh God.
74?
unidentified
Wow.
jacques vallee
Seventy.
unidentified
So the ARPANET was around 74. Yeah.
jacques vallee
Wow.
It was funny because I was in my office and the vice president of SRI came in, closed the door.
And said, Jacques, you know, you've published some things controversial under your name on UFOs, and you haven't lost your scientific reputation,
which is why you're here working for us at SRI on the ARPANET. But, you know, there's a proposal from Dr. Puthoff and Dr. Tark to do parapsychology research here.
And we've never done that.
And I said, well, you know, it's a very valid, I think it's a very valid area of research.
We should, you know, we're in the kind of institution that should do that.
He said, well, let me draw something on your whiteboard.
And he drew a scale.
Horizontal scale.
And on one side, there was a little square.
He said, this is the most we can expect in terms of funding for research in parapsychology.
You know, it's maybe at most a million a year.
Okay.
And here is what I manage, you know, in this division.
I drew a huge cube, you know, it said $150 million.
Should we jeopardize the research we do for Xerox and IBM and AT&T and Bank of America and so on just to do some research on, you know, psychic things?
And I said, well, you know, the reason we get all this money from DOD and Bank of America and so on is that we do the research that they can't do themselves.
We do.
We go out and we take risks.
And I think we should take the same risk with Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ because this could be very big.
There is a lot of literature on this already.
And we can bring the science into it.
They can bring the science into it.
And he said, well, there is a meeting of the board.
Of directors of SRI, you know, in two days.
And most of them are against it.
What do I tell them?
And I said, well, I can write up the reasons why in science you have to take chances, and this is science.
I mean, this isn't just engineering.
And he said, well, give me a memo by tomorrow at 12. So I went home and I wrote a two-page memo, which was confidential.
I don't think anybody has seen it, for the board explaining why there was scientific evidence, you know, enough of it so that good research could be done.
And I, you know, obviously that may have helped.
Getting the approval for them to come in.
And then after the first year, you know, they were there because, you know, the money kept coming and the results, you know, good scientific results came in.
joe rogan
So when you say parapsychology, specifically, what were you attempting to study?
jacques vallee
So most of parapsychology, as the name indicates, has been studied by psychologists.
You know, people who have experiences and they relate their experiences and they have strange dreams, they have all that.
And then that has been structured by, you know, people doing experiments.
For example...
Trying to move objects with your mind, trying to, of course, send messages psychically to other people, or guessing what's written in a closed envelope, and so on, that kind of thing.
But again, those were done by good experimentalists, but where is the physics of that?
You know, because in physics, you know, those things aren't supposed to happen.
joe rogan
Without an understanding of a sense that perhaps we're not quite aware of.
jacques vallee
That's right.
You know, our physics has been dealing with objects and with atoms and all that.
But it's clear in modern physics that there are other things and that the theories we have about the different fields in the universe are in conflict with each other.
Relativity and quantum mechanics are in conflict.
joe rogan
I was reading something that was...
God, I glanced at it quickly and I was running out the door, but I was going to ask Jamie to pull it up.
There's new research that shows that human beings have the ability to detect the magnetic field the same way that birds do when they fly south and other animals they believe do when they navigate terrain.
They think that human beings have this ability, but perhaps it's something that we have ignored so long it's atrophied or it's not something that we use.
jacques vallee
That's a question for a biologist or specialist of the brain, although it may not be in the brain itself.
It may be diffused in the organism.
So I'm not really...
Qualified, you know.
joe rogan
Well, I was going to ask Jamie to pull up the article, but the point being that there perhaps are senses that we're either not aware of.
Humans, like other animals, may censor its magnetic field.
Yeah, this is it.
Okay, this is from a while ago.
This is from 2019. Okay.
This is not the same article, but it's probably a rehash.
jamie vernon
There's another similar one here from like a month ago that's the exact same title.
joe rogan
Yes, that's what I saw.
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jacques vallee
You know, if you look at the history of the islands in the Pacific, like I spent some time in Tahiti and I looked at their traditions, they were navigating the Pacific fine.
They knew where they were going.
Now, part of that was navigating with the moon, but part of it was something else.
And on every ship, they had one man who was gifted in guiding.
With respect, of course, guiding with respect to what the ocean looked like and to the moon and so on.
But also, that's never really been explained.
They had an uncanny ability to get to the right islands, you know, on the way to their destination and to guide those ships.
Otherwise, they would have been, you know, they didn't have compasses.
And there are books now coming out.
Certainly, I found some of those books in Tahiti about the history of that and the research that's been done into those people.
But they were special people.
unidentified
They were gifted.
jacques vallee
That's not something that I could do.
joe rogan
Have you heard or listened to the telepathy tapes?
The telepathy tapes.
Are you aware of this?
jacques vallee
Vaguely.
joe rogan
It's a podcast that's about nonverbal autistic kids that demonstrate psychic ability.
Provable.
They've got dozens of these cases on video where people in other rooms are looking at objects.
The child completely locked off.
Can't see them at all.
We'll say and write down what those objects are, colors, numbers in sequence, and very accurately.
And so they believe that this is something that, well, many of these parents have talked about it in the past, but felt foolish.
Felt like it was something that they would be ridiculed about, and so they didn't want to talk about it openly.
But once they started gathering up information, they got more people to open up about this, then they start documenting it.
And they start...
Coming up with ways to make sure that there couldn't be any possible way they could be communicating with each other.
And it's just utterly fascinating because they're showing that there is something going on.
There's some way of transferring information back and forth, including some of these teachers have figured out a way to not just receive but also transmit the same way these children have.
So people that aren't nonverbal and they aren't autistic.
These people are able to do it as well.
They've been able to create a bond with these children and communicate with them.
jacques vallee
And there are companies in Silicon Valley that are heavily involved in advanced processing and advanced programming, specifically recruiting young men and women with that.
I have three grandsons that I love, and one of them is—it's not clear whether he's actually autistic in the current definition, but he certainly has some of those indications of thinking and getting information in ways that are very different.
Now, it may be that in evolution, The reason, you know, sort of, quote, lower animals can do it and we cannot is that we've developed other ways of getting information that are more reliable in the long run.
So it may be just one of the dormant, you know, abilities that we have that most of us don't.
You know, don't develop.
And we're not encouraged to grow it in school because it's, you know, disturbing for the rest of the class and so on.
joe rogan
And perhaps it's something that people had before language.
And language and then written language and then, of course, media sort of eroded those abilities.
jacques vallee
Yes.
And you find that also in South America and in Australia.
Australia, New Zealand.
joe rogan
The indigenous people.
jacques vallee
Yes.
Natives, but up to the current population.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
So perhaps it's something that we all had and we've lost it.
Now, when you were initially studying parapsychology, what were the protocols that you were using?
How were you trying to determine whether or not people were capable?
jacques vallee
You know, again, in my own, I've studied parapsychology more as a personal interest.
But Dr. Puthoff and Dr. Targ were doing it with scientific controls.
I mean, that was the point.
To look at it from a physics point of view.
You know, not just from a parapsychology or psychology point of view.
So they were designing tests that were more tied to physical quantities.
And one of the people that they brought in was Ingo Swann, who was an artist from New York.
He was very uncomfortable with California.
The sky is always blue.
You know, it's boring and so on.
He liked New York.
He liked the animation of the city and his friends and so on.
But I knew, of course, of him.
I had read some of the things.
So when he came to SRI, he told me that...
You know, remote viewing is one thing, parapsychology, but it should be applied to science.
And also, you know, it had to be applied to intelligence in the sense of, you know, the intelligence agencies were funding SRI to do this.
The three-letter, you know, agencies, there were a number of them who were very interested.
Because I knew that gift existed, you know, in pilots and in a number of people.
joe rogan
And so they were trying to figure out a way to utilize this for military applications?
jacques vallee
Mostly to look at developments in the Soviet Union at that point.
joe rogan
Oh, so they were trying...
jacques vallee
But also, you know, lost spacecraft.
They found lost spacecraft in the middle of a jungle in Africa and so on.
Lost spacecraft?
By parapsychology.
joe rogan
Whose spacecraft?
jacques vallee
Ours?
No, it was Russian.
joe rogan
So they found it through, like, remote viewing?
jacques vallee
Yes.
joe rogan
Really?
jacques vallee
So Ingo was starting to go around the labs at SRI. He wanted to, he was...
He had never been in a scientific institution that's full of computers and gadgets and measuring instruments and everything else.
So he wanted to know...
He saw that as the next domain where parapsychology could be applied in a strict, scientific, rational way.
So I was one of the people that he wanted to talk to.
And I told him...
Do you know how a computer finds data?
You know, you have a computer, a machine full of, you know, chips.
How does it deal with the real world?
And he said, I have no idea.
I mean, I've never looked inside a computer.
And I said, well, there's three ways, you know, as a programmer, I can declare a variable.
I can say X is always going to be 3.14, okay?
But in many cases, I can give you the address of the place where I've put the data, but it's going to be different.
The address is going to be the same, but the data is going to change every time.
But I can give you the address.
It's 2314. 2314 is where I'm going to put the age of the patient.
But it's going to be different with every patient.
So that's direct addressing, but I can also put in that location, I can put the address of somewhere else, which I'm going to compute in my program, and that's indirect addressing.
And then there's the rest of the world, which is too big to put inside the machine.
I mean, the machine has a memory, maybe very big, but it's still limited.
So it's going to go get the information from some memory device somewhere else.
You know, maybe the World Bank or the Library of Congress.
And there, I cannot give you the address.
But I can give you...
A sort of imaginary process by which you can derive the address when you get there and bring it into the memory of your computer and then work with it.
And he said, you know, that's it.
That's what I need.
And then he came up with the idea of coordinate remote viewing out of that conversation I had with him.
So that was my contribution to the actual project at the beginning.
And then he thought as an address, he was going to take coordinates, longitude and latitude, because we were going to look at—they were going to—I wasn't officially part of the—but I was— You know, I had passed the qualifications to be at SRI in a Department of Defense project.
So I was one of the good guys.
So we had many conversations with Garfi and so on in the lab with Ingo and later with Yuri Geller that were absolutely fascinating to me.
So I tried to...
In some cases, they needed...
To talk to someone who knew technology and was interested in this, even though I wasn't, you know, on the project itself, but somebody who was inside, you know, so that the information didn't.
Get out into the world until they were ready to actually publish it because everybody wanted to kill their project.
I mean, there were so many skeptics saying, you know, this can't work.
They are making it up.
They are fooled by a prestidigitator.
You know, Yuri Geller is a magician and all those things.
Well, he is a magician, but he's also, you know, an extraordinary psychic.
joe rogan
So could you explain, so they're looking for this Russian spacecraft.
So how do they, what's the environment in which they remote view?
How do they set this up?
jacques vallee
So Ingo, after the project was pretty much over, there was some continuous studies and Ingo brought me back to work with him.
Because he wanted to write a book that would be a synthesis of his methodology, you know, to answer your question of how do you do this.
And he had a very structured way of doing that with a number of...
What he wanted to do was train people to do that, hopefully to his level.
So it was step by step.
So there was a first...
You had a pad of paper, you know, and a pen.
And he was sitting at the end.
The table was about like this, you know, except there was nothing on it.
In a room that had nothing on the walls, no windows, there was a chair here and a chair there.
So he was away from me.
I couldn't see what he was reading.
He had a stack of targets.
That were places on the Earth.
And, I mean, obviously, the idea was to look at what was going on in, you know, Vladivostok or in, you know, some...
joe rogan
When you say a stack of targets, can you explain, like, is it a map?
Is it just coordinates?
jacques vallee
It was just coordinates.
joe rogan
So just numbers?
jacques vallee
He had gotten the maps.
And those were test things from, you know, geographic features on the Earth, cities, mountains, and so on.
So he would read out the coordinates, and I had a pad of paper and a number two pencil, so everything was very coded, you know, very straight.
And I would draw something that he called an ideogram.
So it could be like this, you know, it could be a curve, it could be...
And then, just first impression.
His...
The theory, which I think, you know, having experienced it, we did that for a year.
Now, I had a job somewhere else, but I was coming two mornings a week, you know, to work with him.
This was classified.
So, other people at SRI had no idea what was going on in that room that was dedicated to his work.
And he would read out, his idea was that we can all get that signal.
You know, there is a signal.
If I give you a longitude and a latitude, you potentially can describe what's there.
If it's a city, if it's a mountain, if it's some place in the country.
The reason you cannot is that the signal is overwhelming.
The signal is extraordinarily large, much larger than we can hold it in our brains.
So the people who do that have a way of processing the signal and recalling it.
And that's the secret.
That's the main thing to me that's come out of the SRI study, among many things.
So his idea was you have to stop.
The signal, you have to catch it.
It's going to be very, very fast, and most people just go on with their life.
It's just a passing thing.
But you can recall the signal.
So he would read out the coordinates again.
Now my little scribble is going to turn into maybe a series of waves and then a city with skyscrapers.
After, if we do that a number of ways.
Now, there are a lot of errors that can come in.
And then we can think, we recognize it, and try to name it.
That's the thing you shouldn't do.
You shouldn't try to name it, because to name it, put it in the other half of the brain, which is logical and rational.
So, the idea is to...
Label that as an error.
You know, it's not a city by the bay.
It's something else.
So we go on and we keep just going on.
So you have to do that with a very patient guide, you know, to train yourself to do that.
And SRI, you know, Hal and Ingo did that.
You know, very well in training a cadre of people who could be almost, not quite, but almost as good as Ingo.
And there were a couple who were as good as he was.
One time, no, I said, but Ingo, you know, I'm not psychic.
He said, well, you know, think about that because you've shown evidence of having, of understanding the process.
You know, there are some things that I did that That would be classified as psychic.
But I cannot do it.
I cannot control it.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
It just happens randomly.
jacques vallee
Yeah.
joe rogan
What kind of things?
jacques vallee
Well, one time, I get there at 8.30 in the morning.
We close the door.
And he gives me a set of coordinates.
Longitude and latitude somewhere.
And I get very cold right away.
And I get dizzy.
You know, I mean, I have to grab the table, and I'm not drawing anything, and Ingo says, Jacques, what's wrong?
And I said, Ingo, I don't know where you're sending me, but I'm cold, I'm trembling, I'm afraid, I'm afraid of falling, and, you know, I really don't feel well.
And he said, you're on top of a peak in the Andes.
unidentified
Whoa!
jacques vallee
So he pulls out the thing.
He gives it to me that comes from, you know, a photograph of the Andes taken from an airplane with this peak.
And they computed the coordinates of the peak and that's what he was giving me.
And I was there.
joe rogan
You felt it physically.
Did you see it or did you just feel it?
jacques vallee
No.
It was just a physiological reaction on my whole body.
joe rogan
Exactly as if you were on a peak.
jacques vallee
I was freezing cold and I was very afraid of falling.
unidentified
Wow.
jacques vallee
I was falling.
unidentified
Had you had any of these that didn't work?
joe rogan
Did they try any?
jacques vallee
Oh yeah, sure.
You should not use me as a remote viewer to launch a tomahawk.
Over somewhere.
That's a problem that, of course, the Army has.
Is it good enough so we can launch a rocket to destroy that thing?
joe rogan
Who is the best at it?
Who's the best at remote?
Is there one person that's consistently accurate?
jacques vallee
There are a couple and they...
They are not...
You know, Ingo was known because he wrote about it and so on.
Many of them...
Joe McMoneagle is probably the best one alive today.
He described a structure and he described a ship.
That was being built by the Russians, which was a super submarine in a hangar somewhere.
And the Navy just laughed at him.
They said, that's crazy.
It's in a hangar away from the sea.
So why would you build a ship when you don't have the ocean?
Well, it turned out he was right.
And it was a super class.
A new Soviet submarine.
He described the inside of the building, which had no windows and so on.
And, yeah, I mean, from a satellite, they could see the building, but they couldn't see inside the building.
He described what was inside the building.
He described the submarine.
He described the length.
And, you know, he actually measured it.
Psychically.
And that turned out to be right.
And then when the submarine was built, they brought some bulldozers and they dug a channel to the sea and off it went.
joe rogan
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jacques vallee
I had heard about this.
Those things were extraordinary.
joe rogan
I had heard about this, but I didn't know it was that accurate.
jacques vallee
Yeah, that happened, and he was...
As opposed to, you know, one of us, he was right, you know, enough of the time that you could rely on what he was describing.
And also, they came up with a way of measuring, actually quantifying the value of your perception.
So, I told Ingo, you know, let's do another one because I'm on a roll here, you know, after this peak.
In the end, he said, no, Jacques, you know, you're going home now.
I said, it's nine o'clock, you know, we've only been here half an hour.
Why are you sending me home?
I mean, this is great.
I got it.
He said, yeah, you got it.
You don't need all the levels.
I mean, you got to the top level.
You were there.
joe rogan
Why did he want to send you home?
jacques vallee
He said, I want you to stay with that feeling.
I don't want to do another one that you'd miss.
So I want you to keep that in mind because you got the whole thing.
joe rogan
Is this based on past experiments and the way they were achieving results?
jacques vallee
Yes.
They were grading every test subject and so on.
joe rogan
So he didn't want to give you another experience.
He wanted you to take that experience and just sit with it.
jacques vallee
Keep the experience with me during the day because I got the whole signal.
joe rogan
Right.
And did you feel like that if you did that, it would aid you in your ability to do it in the future?
jacques vallee
It would...
Yes, I would lose that sense of direct access to something that bypasses the brain.
Basically, I was trained in mathematics and physics and astronomy, so I use the part of my brain that's analytical, and I'm a good programmer, computer programmer.
This is grabbing a signal which has everything in it, you know, and being able to catch it very fast and just get a little bit of information and then catch it again, recall it.
You know, that's what we were doing that, you know, five times, six times, ten times until making sure that you don't try to name it, you don't try to put, you know, a description on top of it.
It's just stay with the signal.
And I think that's an amazing contribution from what Dr. Puthoff and Targ and some of their subjects did.
joe rogan
Was there a specific...
A specific way that you achieved a state of mind that made you more able to perceive these coordinates or perceive what signal you're getting from remote viewing?
jacques vallee
I had a lot of admiration and love for Ingo for what he was capable of doing.
His art and his personality and so on.
He was, you know, very much admired in the whole team.
And here I think it was the structure also of the experiment.
You know, I trusted what he was trying to teach me.
joe rogan
So you were open to it?
jacques vallee
Yes.
joe rogan
You trusted it so you were open to it?
jacques vallee
You know, both the admiration and the trust.
joe rogan
Did he ask you to put your mind in a specific place?
Was there a way of counting yourself into...
jacques vallee
The idea is not to put my mind into it.
Just to let it...
joe rogan
Just let it come.
jacques vallee
Because my mind is analytical.
joe rogan
Right.
jacques vallee
Of course.
And, you know, I was always very good in math.
I mean, you have to be, if you're going to be an astronomer, so I can be very structured and so on.
This is not structured.
This is boom.
And then you can begin to analyze it, but you have to analyze it keeping your rational mind away from.
joe rogan
So you just have to let the information come to you somehow or another and not try to imagine the information or create the information or perceive it.
jacques vallee
Not to project what it is.
joe rogan
Right, just let it happen to you.
And so you had seen him do this.
And you knew that this was a valid field of research.
So you were just open to it and you just sat down there and tried to let it happen to you.
Did it happen any other time that resembled the Andes Peaks, where you have that overwhelming feeling of cold and falling?
Did you have that feeling with anything else?
jacques vallee
Yes, I had some of that, but this one was just completely shocking.
I think that's a characteristic of when you really get it.
There is no question.
And you know in the movie Patton?
joe rogan
Yes.
jacques vallee
Patton is sent to North Africa because to fight Rommel.
Rommel is there with his tanks and the American army is going to – isn't ready to invade Europe but wants to start controlling the Germans in North Africa.
He's sent there.
He lands.
There is a – You know, a lieutenant there with a jeep that takes him to the place where there was a battle and the Americans were decimated by Rommel, who was just a genius German general.
Great with tanks, just like he was.
Patton considered him as his major enemy because both of them understood tanks.
And so Patton gets in the jeep.
That's in the movie.
It's just absolutely perfect.
I've checked that this was historical, exact in the movie.
They drive to the site of the battle.
And they get to—in the desert in the jeep.
And they get to a fork in the road.
And, you know, the driver takes to the left.
And Patton said, son, you know, why don't we go to the right?
Because that's where the battle was.
And the driver says, sir, you know, with all due respect, I mean, I was there in that battle.
It's on the left.
He said, trust me, go to the right.
And they go to the right and they get to the edge of the plateau where you see a big plane.
And Patton says, this is where the battle was.
Hannibal came from the left with his elephants.
And the battle was there.
And I had been there.
I was there.
Patton thought that he was reincarnated from a Roman general who had been at that battle against Hannibal and his elephants.
And, you know, the poor driver said, you know, how did this happen?
You know, how did I get here with this general who thinks he's reincarnated, you know, who fought against Hannibal?
And I've worked with people, as you know, I've run a number of venture capital funds with people who had that kind of intuition, you know, and you think finance is driven by greed and so on, but at some level, greed doesn't really matter.
It's getting to the truth of something, especially in venture capital, where you're going to change the way things are done with these gadgets, with computers, with rockets and so on.
You're going to go to a new generation of things.
So it hasn't been done before.
And the financial people, you've got 10 engineers in front of you who can do it.
There is one who will succeed, nine who's going to fail.
And you have to pick the thinking that's going to succeed.
I mean, it's not the money, and it's not the technology.
It's the mind of the driver.
Who say, no, let's go to the right, let's not go to the left.
You know, I mean, Patton was extraordinary.
I mean, he was a remote viewer.
He demonstrated that again and again.
There are some interesting books that I've collected from some of his lieutenants.
joe rogan
You would also have to consider that's an extraordinary state of mind, to be a general in a world war.
And the consequences of everything you do and what is at stake in this war has got to be a state of mind that's very, very unusual.
With so many consequences and so much pressure that it probably makes some signals more clear if you have that ability to perceive them.
Because you must be in a heightened state of awareness because of the consequences of your life.
jacques vallee
Exactly.
But you also have to be detached.
I mean, you know, eventually he's going to go to the battlefield where the bodies of soldiers have been killed.
They're burning tanks and everything else.
They show that in the movie.
I mean, that's where he's supposed to go.
But, you know, his mind is at a different level.
joe rogan
When did they first start?
Researching this.
When did they believe that this was an ability that some people had?
jacques vallee
Oh, you know, way back in antiquity.
joe rogan
Really?
jacques vallee
Yeah.
And, you know, they had seers that the king would go consult whether he...
He should engage in a war.
The Greeks had the Pythia, who was a woman.
They had an area, a volcanic area, where there were fumes coming out of the earth that was supposed to be one of the doors to the underworld and so on.
and there was a special cult around that place.
And the king would go there before a great decision and would ask the message from the underworld or the message from the mind of the woman who was interpreting what was coming from the earth.
So that has been regarded as – you know, Hitler, Adolf Hitler was in his – before the war, you know, when he got to be the leader of Germany –
he exhibited and he very much believed in those.
Those powers.
I think he got to the point where he trusted it too much.
He started making mistakes and that could be used against him.
Well, he was also doing a lot of drugs.
You have to get the ego out of the way.
Of course, that's the hardest thing for us to do.
joe rogan
Especially to a narcissist dictator who's on drugs.
jacques vallee
That's right.
Yeah, that's right.
joe rogan
Well, that's always the age-old problem with Sears.
Like, how do you know who's a charlatan and who's real?
Because there's always a bunch of fake psychics.
There's fake palm readers, fake tarot card readers, people that are just con artists, that are just trying to swindle people out of money.
But that doesn't discount the possibility that some people have these bizarre abilities.
That is something that people have sort of recognized forever, but it's always been dismissed, especially in this modern-day reductionist culture that likes to only look at things that are, you know, tried, true, proven, agreed upon, you know, and then trust the science, like this concept that...
jacques vallee
Well, I think as, you know...
In science, I mean, the burden is on you as a scientist to come up with an experiment that will discriminate between the random things and, you know, will give you guides to, you know...
joe rogan
Well, I think that's what they've done with the telepathy tapes and I'm hoping the success of this and then they're going to do a whole series on it where they're doing a documentary and they're showing all the footage so you're going to be able to see it for yourself.
I'm hoping that this stops the ridicule because there's a bunch of scientists, and I think this is with the UAP topic as well, the UFO topic as well.
I think there's a bunch of people that don't want to consider it because there's too much bullshit out there and there's too much of a possibility that you could look like a fool.
And to a very respected scientist whose research is very important as you were talking about with the IBM thing where there's hundreds of millions of dollars that are dedicated towards these.
Why would you risk all that and the credibility of all that on this nonsense about people seeing things with their brain in a closed room, finding coordinates, pretending they're on top of a mountain, all that kind of stuff?
jacques vallee
Well, fortunately...
You know, certainly, you know, in California, there are people who can take risk, you know, and put a few million dollars behind something.
joe rogan
Shout out to Stanford.
Yeah.
jacques vallee
And, you know, as you know, I come from France, and in France, it's very, very hard to do that.
Because the system is very structured and very conventional and so on.
Even though France has had some of the brightest people in that kind of research.
joe rogan
So it's just a cultural limitation of the culture?
jacques vallee
Yeah.
Sort of everything has to be rational.
Yeah.
joe rogan
America is a little more chaotic.
jacques vallee
And they also – as you know, France has had – For a long time has had a project on UFOs, an official project, and that takes reports from the public and they investigate them.
It's a very small team, but they have access to all the resources of French research.
So they can get the weather people, they can get the Air Force, they can get the radar people, they can get all of that.
So they can tap into the resources of a lot of different departments of the government.
So it's very powerful.
So they will explain, they find a rational explanation for about 95%.
It's about 95% of all the reports, which is true.
I agree with that.
You know, I've been there.
joe rogan
So it's about 95% you can explain away.
jacques vallee
It's not hoaxes.
Those are people who really think that they've seen something unusual.
But what was unusual to them may have been the moon rising through the fog and it looks like an elongated disk.
And then after a while, things change and so on.
joe rogan
Bald lightning.
Yeah, there's a few things.
jacques vallee
They really think they've seen a flying saucer coming over.
There are about 200 or 250 possible physical things that really could surprise you, that are unusual, that would create conditions under which a normal person would think that they are in the presence of a UFO. that would create conditions under which a normal person would Then what's interesting is the other 5%.
joe rogan
Yes.
jacques vallee
The other 5% is in your face.
You know, I have...
Reports of something that moved like the Tic Tac, you know, from the French Air Force in the 50s.
There was a French jet over Morocco that was flying and there was a radar tracking the jet.
And I had the reports from the French Air Force with the chart and that the thing he was chasing went up.
You know, all in a fraction of a second went to the top of the atmosphere.
You know, just like the Nimitz case.
So those things are not new.
I mean, they are in the files if you take the trouble to look at the files.
joe rogan
And they're in the files far back enough in history that it's impossible to imagine human technology achieving these things.
jacques vallee
Absolutely.
Well, especially in the 50s.
I mean, we didn't have anything that had gone into space.
joe rogan
Yeah.
There's a bunch of cases that...
Rule out the possibility of human technology when you're talking about people using propeller planes and seeing these things.
We were at a time technologically where it's not possible to imagine that someone had gone that far beyond us.
Now we are in that time where you see things, you go, well, how much of that is some sort of top secret government program, some military program, and they have drones that can move at extraordinary speeds with some undisclosed...
It's the propulsion system.
That's possible today, at least theoretically.
We entertain those ideas.
But back then, this is one of the most fascinating things.
I told you last night that I consumed three of your books in the last six months.
And there was this series of three that you did that had a bunch of different encounters, not just – right now I'm on The Invisible College, but the last ones that I read were – The ones on various contacts that people have had and the similarity of these stories.
And they go way back, way back, way back before it was sort of a cultural artifact.
Like right now, I think in people's minds, the gray aliens are so iconic, a flying saucer like that.
That's a copy of The Sport Model from Bob Lazar's Adventures.
These things are in pop culture to the point where you almost would expect to see them.
You look for them.
If you see something, you could imagine that you could twist it up in your mind and make it like that.
But the problem is these stories go way before that.
They're too similar.
They go a long, long way back, and there's too many that are very, very similar to what we're talking about today, to the point where a rational person would have to say, maybe there's something more to this.
What do you got there?
jacques vallee
Peter Robinson: I brought you this.
It's a token.
It's not a coin.
It's a token from Burgundy in France from the – a few centuries ago.
The Duke of Burgundy was under attack.
There was a lot of turmoil in French politics and the king was fighting the noble, the great nobility and so on, was in cahoots to get rid of the king and so on.
And they were going to be attacked.
And he needed money to raise an army.
And he appealed to people in Burgundy to send him money.
And this was a token that the king, the duke, you know, would give people who had given him money to raise this army.
And on the face of it is this disk that's holding up, that's protecting.
The land from forces above.
You know, there are all these arrows raining down on the land, and the land is protected by this flying disc.
So, it doesn't mean that they had seen a flying saucer at that time, but the idea has always been there of, you know...
Disc-like objects that were not meteors, that were not all the natural explanation, that were real discs.
You find that in legends.
You find that in history way back.
joe rogan
Jamie, can you see if you could find an image of this we could show people?
You found it?
Yeah, that's it.
jacques vallee
Yep.
Yes.
unidentified
Wow.
jacques vallee
And you see, it's protecting the land and it's hovering in the sky, protecting it from all the thunderclouds above.
Well, you know, there are a few of those things in history.
And, you know, as you know, I've collected those with a group of...
joe rogan
Couldn't that be interpreted as a shield?
jacques vallee
Well, it is shown as a shield, you know, that's going to stop all those arrows.
joe rogan
Right.
But that's what they used to stop arrows back then.
They used a shield.
jacques vallee
Yes.
joe rogan
So doesn't that just make, I mean, that doesn't seem to me to be a UFO. It seems to me to be a shield that they would protect.
jacques vallee
Yes, but it's also, you know, it's not exactly the shape of a...
You know, of a shield.
Most shields are, you know, more oblong, but some of them are round.
But the point is it's hovering in the sky protecting the land underneath.
joe rogan
I think some of the more compelling stuff is like the stuff in the ancient Hindu scripts, the Vimanas and all these different flying crafts that people described.
They've always been a thing that people have described.
jacques vallee
And we've been able to trace it to actual investigations or actual records because, of course, when people described something like that, especially if there was some sort of being associated with it.
joe rogan
Yeah.
jacques vallee
You know, it could be the devil.
It could be that.
unidentified
Right, right.
jacques vallee
So they had to see a priest and confess and, you know, and they were in trouble.
If you reported that thing, most of the time you'd be in trouble because it couldn't be a normal thing.
You'd be a heretic.
Today, they just fire you from wherever you work.
joe rogan
Yeah, probably.
Or think maybe you're a kook.
jacques vallee
At least they don't burn you alive anymore.
joe rogan
Yeah, that's lucky.
But people do have a fear, a legitimate fear, of being ridiculed, and that could stop their ability to be promoted within whatever organization they're in.
You don't want to think, oh, there's Kooky Bob over there who thinks the aliens are watching us.
jacques vallee
The best cases I get are from executives in Silicon Valley whose family has seen something or who have seen something.
And they've described, you know, frankly, UFOs to me.
unidentified
And they cannot publish it.
joe rogan
So that looks way different.
jacques vallee
That's right.
joe rogan
So that coin is much more compelling because that looks like something flying in the sky above the city.
That doesn't look like a shield at all.
And what is that peak at the bottom of it?
It's the same thing, whatever.
Yeah, that's very different.
jacques vallee
Much more compelling.
You can tell that those things have been in the culture.
joe rogan
Yeah, now I'm back in, Jim.
jacques vallee
They've sort of repressed in the culture.
And the anthropologists don't want to look at that.
joe rogan
There's a really old painting.
Like a biblical painting of these people that look like they're flying around and like seated in these crafts.
They're in the sky.
I've never seen any sort of a conventional explanation.
What is that artist depicting?
jacques vallee
So usually the explanation when you read what the historians have said, it's supposed to be some god or some higher level entity that's coming to protect people and it's supposed to be some god or some higher level entity that's But when you look at the detail, I mean it really looks like a machine.
It really looks mechanical.
joe rogan
See if you can find that image, Jamie.
You know the one I'm talking about, right?
Yeah, that's exactly it.
jacques vallee
Thank you.
joe rogan
The one on the lower right, well, both of them, but the lower, like, what is that?
That looks like a craft.
It looks like someone seated in a craft.
jacques vallee
It's an envoy from God or an angel who's been sent.
But the problem with those is that the painting...
It may relate to something that was written in the 3rd century.
The painting is a 16th century painting.
So we didn't look at that that much.
I mean, it's interesting like the one with the Virgin.
So it may be that the artist was witness to something and he wanted to memorialize it and he put it in his painting.
But it's not tied to the time of the Virgin.
joe rogan
Right, right, right.
jacques vallee
They just added it in there.
What is that supposed to be in the background?
We stayed away from that.
We wanted to go to records of somebody having actually testified that he saw something or she saw something.
joe rogan
Right, not just artwork.
jacques vallee
Right.
joe rogan
But it just is very bizarre that this...
Artwork continually depicts people in crafts.
And look, what is that thing?
Yes.
jacques vallee
Like, what the hell?
And there is a communication with the man.
joe rogan
Who's looking up at it.
jacques vallee
He's looking at it, and there is a sense of that he's actually seeing it and having a sense of what it is.
joe rogan
It's like an Easter egg someone put into the painting.
jacques vallee
So this may be that the artist sort of, you know, put that.
In as a side, of course, the main theme is the Virgin and the Child.
joe rogan
What's that one over there, Jamie, in the second row that says Inside Ancient?
Yeah, that one.
What the hell is that?
That's what really freaks me out is the paintings on cave walls that look just like greys.
These bizarre paintings of things that just...
Look like they are people wearing helmets.
jacques vallee
And the most interesting to me come from the Sahara.
You know, I have friends who are anthropologists who worked with the UN in Africa and so on and in part of the Sahara.
And one theory they have is that the culture that eventually moved to Egypt came from the Sahara.
So I say, well, the Sahara is just sand.
Well, it's just sand today.
But we know that at one time it was flourishing.
There were forests.
There was water.
In fact, there is water, but it's underground water.
It's a large amount of underground water.
There was a sea there at one time.
There probably was an earlier civilization, and some of those come from the Tassili.
The Tassili is a region in the Sahara where there are a lot of those representations.
So there were a lot of people living there at one time, and they painted that on the rocks.
joe rogan
See if you can find some of those, Jamie?
Yeah.
You see similar things that indigenous people in Australia have painted.
It's all over the world.
Yes.
Completely separate environments, very similar features in these cave paintings.
jacques vallee
And, well, I think archaeologists wouldn't disagree with that, I think.
They would say, the problem is that we don't correlate it.
I mean, they didn't write anything.
joe rogan
Right.
jacques vallee
You know, the...
joe rogan
It's open to interpretation.
jacques vallee
We don't have a good correlation, so we have to keep looking for that.
But that's fascinating.
But in our book, we made the rule that, number one...
We don't want isolated human figures, even with suits and so on.
We really want a device, a flying device.
Otherwise, you could fill 40 books with images of strange creatures.
I mean, what are the things that people see?
Around the ranch now, you know, in Utah, in Arizona, in all of that.
So, have to be careful on the boundaries of those things.
But we wanted to get to a place where there was testimony about somebody seeing a flying disc that was...
Strange to them in their culture.
And remember, in those cultures, those were agricultural cultures.
So with people who were used to interpreting the weather, looking at the phases of the moon, looking at the rising time of the sun, and all that was important for their...
For their agriculture.
So they knew their environment very well, better than we do as people living in cities.
So we can take that to some extent that has a scientific value, especially when you can build a model of a number of those across different...
But in that book, we were careful to break the book into sections.
You know, corresponding to different evolution of the culture, explaining first a couple of pages what was happening during that time in terms of new inventions, like when the telescope was invented, when certain things were discovered and so on.
So we were careful to put it in context with every – reinterpreting the – The description by the witness in the context that was appropriate.
joe rogan
Well, it was very thorough and very objective, which is what I really enjoyed about it, where you were very clear what we absolutely knew and very clear what could be nonsense and myth, and that one of the things that keeps occurring over and over again is these similar stories.
The stories are really similar from the 1700s to the 1800s into the 20th century.
And then you, again, now it gets more muddy because now you have a bunch of people that realize that there's value in concocting a story and then talking about it and selling a book.
And there's, I think there's people that are grifters and I think they...
You know, I probably had a few of them on.
They are capitalizing on this desire that people have for stories.
jacques vallee
Also now we think that the government has the answer, so people spend their time.
You know, writing to different agencies and listening to reports from pilots, which is fine, of course, and people in the military, people in the intelligence community.
Those are very valuable because now they have instruments to actually measure what they see on an F-18 and so on.
And they are covered by radar and by AWACS and everything else.
So we can rely on that.
So scientists and many people like the numerical aspect of it.
I don't do that.
I mean, I don't pretend to have access.
I mean, we had access under Bigelow and under Bass to some of that, including some of the classified things that had happened.
But there is a much richer pool of data, which is...
You know, a friend tells me about a sighting in the country somewhere.
I can go there, I can go see the people, and I can find out exactly what happened.
And I continue to do that, and that's most of my data.
And it's ten times bigger than the stuff they talk about from the Pentagon, you know.
I mean, it's real data from that.
I don't need to have a clearance to go see the people and sit down.
If I'm lucky, they'll invite me for lunch and, you know, I can talk to the kids, I can talk to the wife, I can talk to the people who took care of the cattle, and they'll tell me.
That's where most of my information is really coming from.
And it's not, you know, it's just very much in your face.
And it's consistent.
joe rogan
How consistent are the shapes of the crafts?
jacques vallee
It's a tough question, you know.
Many of the descriptions have to do with disks.
joe rogan
And eggs as well, right?
jacques vallee
Different sizes.
Some of them are very large.
A number of descriptions have to do with, for a long time, with cigar-shaped objects.
Cylindrical, rounded at the end.
Sometimes with...
What people describe as windows that may just be openings with light, you know, in the side of it.
Doesn't have to be what we think of as a window.
And then you have some irregular shapes, you know, just balls of light that...
Physicists interpret it as maybe plasma, but plasma doesn't survive in the air, you know, shouldn't survive in the air more than a minute maybe, but people have, you know, seen some of those things for minutes and longer, you know, long enough to take pictures of it and so on, and it's not necessarily glowing.
It's not necessarily luminous.
The way, you know, plasma would be.
So, we don't know what they are.
And they've been reported all over the world.
Again, there are, you know, paintings of that kind of thing from the 18th century or the 17th century.
So, that I've collected and published.
So, we have these different categories.
joe rogan
What are the most compelling paintings that we could find right now from like the 1700s or 1800s?
jacques vallee
I think there is a beautiful painting of hills and three blue spheres that are not moving, that seem to be suspended in the air, that seem to be suspended in the air, but it's not moving.
Very distinct blue spheres that were seen and somebody, you know, recorded it and somebody did a painting of the scene.
Those are things that people wanted to remember because they knew it was...
joe rogan
And what year was this painting from?
jacques vallee
I don't remember the year.
I couldn't tell you.
joe rogan
But it's a very old painting.
jacques vallee
16th, 17th century.
joe rogan
Do you know the name of it?
So Jamie could try to find it online?
jacques vallee
No, I could send you the picture.
joe rogan
Okay.
So, there's also a bunch of depictions of egg-shaped crafts.
jacques vallee
Yes.
joe rogan
This is very common as well, right?
Yes.
The couple that you had in one of your books from, was it the mining people from, was it California or was it Nevada?
jacques vallee
I wrote a book with Paola Harris called Trinity about an egg-shaped object that happened in 1945 near White Sands.
And now we have reinvestigated it.
The first book was criticized appropriately by someone who said, I hadn't gone to enough of the written records.
Well, now I've done that.
So we've republished the book.
It's called Trinity.
And it covers three cases.
In all three cases, the object is X-shaped, the size of a medium-sized truck.
It would fit in this room.
It would be about the size of this room.
Then there is a case in Socorro, and there is a case in Valenzol.
Socorro and Valenzol, and people have concentrated on the first one, you know, the one that, because it's two years before Roswell, and there were witnesses there.
You know, it was where there were no witnesses.
There were people who came later who found the stuff and they reconstructed the story and it's a very interesting story.
But at Trinity, they saw it arrive and they saw it crash.
And they were there for 10 days afterwards watching the recovery.
And they went inside.
One of them went inside and his father went inside also.
So we have a very rich description of that.
And where is it in the literature?
Nowhere.
I mean, you know, Paola Harris found this, did research for four years on that, and then told me about it, and then we did another four years of research together at the site.
And we found a lot of correlations.
But the Socorro case and the Valensol case...
joe rogan
Could you explain, tell me before we move on to those other cases, what correlations did you find?
jacques vallee
Well, in all three cases, it's an egg-shaped object.
In all three cases, there are traces that could be seen, could be...
Described.
It could be analyzed.
In all three cases, the beings are short.
They are about three feet, three and a half feet.
They breathe air.
What kind of extraterrestrial is it that comes here and breathes the air?
If we go to the moon, we're not going to breathe the air.
joe rogan
How do we know that it breathes at all?
How do we know that these things breathe at all?
jacques vallee
They had no breathing equipment.
joe rogan
They were functioning normally.
jacques vallee
They had two eyes, a small nose, a small mouth.
joe rogan
But couldn't they possibly be some sort of a creation?
Instead of being a biological entity, couldn't they be some sort of artificial life?
jacques vallee
So I've asked Gary Nolan about that.
I'm not a biologist.
And I think...
It would be known if somebody had created a metahuman.
joe rogan
I don't mean somebody.
I mean another life form from somewhere else.
jacques vallee
There were stories of the Russians actually thinking about creating a dwarf, you know, human to pilot their ships because they didn't expect to have the energy, you know.
unidentified
So they were trying to get tiny people to power their ships because they were lighter.
jacques vallee
But the CIA was looking into rumors that the Russians in the 50s, you know, before Sputnik, that the Russians were trying to create a humanoid.
joe rogan
Well, I know that the Russians, there was some talk of them trying to create a human-ape hybrid.
They were trying to do something with chimpanzees and try to create some sort of a human-chimpanzee hybrid for war, which is a terrifying thought.
First of all, if they were successful, how terrifying would that be?
But just that they were interested in doing that, creating a race of chimpanzee-human warriors.
jacques vallee
There was no...
To my knowledge, there hasn't been any correlation of that.
And the creatures that are described in Socorro in New Mexico and in Valensol in France, so those are three cases that I've been very involved in from the beginning, from day one, involve creatures that are about...
You know, three feet tall, that breathe our air, recognize our signals, you know, communicate with us in funny ways, even mentally.
I mean, the witnesses describe getting images in their minds and so on, in all three cases.
What's interesting is people can argue about Trinity all they want, like they argue about Roswell, but the case in Socorro and the case in France, in Valensol, were investigated by governments, you know, not by...
You know, the local UFO group, although the local UFO group did a good job in all those cases.
But they were, in Socorro, it was first the, you know, the local police.
The local policemen saw the craft and the beings and described what happened.
He was terrified, but, you know, when the thing took off, he thought it was...
Something to do with some new gadget or some work in the desert.
It's an area that's still in the same state today.
I've gone back there with Dr. Hynek's son, you know, with Paul Hynek a few months ago.
I've gone several times there.
And so after the police...
Turned out the FBI was in town on another case.
They had no jurisdiction in New Mexico for that particular case.
It wasn't a federal case.
But they helped preserve the traces, you know, the FBI way.
And the local police was happy to have them there.
And then there was the state police came in.
And did an investigation and then people from the base, you know, came in with experts in explosives, experts in recovery of weapons and rockets and so on, because they thought it might be something that had come from...
You know, from the Trinity Range that was out of its way and had crashed near Socorro, in which case they might have responsibility, including financial responsibility if something was destroyed or whatever.
So this was very serious.
I have the whole file.
Okay, it's a big file.
Nobody's looking at it.
I mean, the investigation in Washington now, they are saying we're going to look at the cases of the last 12 months.
Well, what kind of science is that?
Can you imagine scientists reading this?
And this is the way they are going to solve the UFO problem?
By looking at vague pictures of lights in the sky for one year?
You know, why don't they go back to those records?
Those are federal records.
Okay?
The case in Valensol, five agencies of the French government.
So, this guy...
He was a farmer.
He had a field where he was growing plants to make perfume.
So this was high-level, you know, expensive crop.
This wasn't just, you know, alfalfa or something.
And he goes there at five o'clock in the morning because, you know, he wants to do some—to water the thing and so on before the sun is up because it's going to be very—it's in the south of France.
It's going to be very hot.
You can't work in the field during the early afternoon.
So he wants to be done with that.
He sees this contraption.
You know, in the middle of the field, crushing the plants.
And so he sneaks in, and he's paralyzed.
Now, there is an egg-shaped object, just like the one at Trinity, just like the one in Socorro.
It's the size of a mid-sized truck.
There are two creatures in front of it, human, you know, human-looking, two eyes.
Breathing air.
They look at him, sort of amused, and one of them has something on his belt.
He takes out points.
I pointed at him, and that's when he's paralyzed.
Now, he's not, you know, as you know, I'm not a doctor, but I've gone to doctors about what kind of paralysis is that, where you can stand up and watch something, you just can't move.
They said, well, there is a type of paralysis that will just inhibit the motor, you know, motor nerves, but you'll still be...
Up and aware.
You're not going to fall down, you know, in a heap.
And from there, he sees them going back inside the thing.
The thing takes off.
It takes off like a shot out of a gun and it vanishes in mid-air.
Now, he goes to see the gendarmes.
This man is fairly wealthy.
He owns...
Quite a bit of, you know, several fields, expensive crops.
His wife is the mayor of the town.
The gendarmes are going to be very careful with him because he's also from the resistance in World War II. When he was young, he joined the resistance, and the resistance in that part of France fought in the Alps against the Germans.
You know, they were regarded as heroes of World War II. And so the gendarmes are very careful with him.
There are some things he's not going to tell the gendarmes because he thinks...
And I went there.
He didn't want to talk to anybody from Paris.
He didn't want to be on TV. He wanted to concentrate on his experience because he thought there was going to be something else.
And he was aware of some of his buddies.
This is a part of France where people talk, but they have secrets too.
I mean, historically, you know.
Things like that in the U.S., you know, parts where people are not going to talk to strangers.
The only reason I could go there was that I went there with a lady who was from Paris, was with the government.
She was with the Gaulle's government.
She had the rank of ambassador, and she had a vacation home there.
So we went there for three days, and she knew everybody there.
And he told us.
What he thought might happen again.
So he didn't want the gendarmes mixed in with what he was doing.
joe rogan
Why did he think that something was going to happen again?
jacques vallee
Evidently, and he swore us to secrecy about what it was, but evidently there was communication with the beings when he was there.
unidentified
And so these beings are just tiny, look like people.
joe rogan
Did they have different features than us?
Or was it just human features?
jacques vallee
They are just like the ones at Trinity and like the ones at Socorro.
So in that book, you have actually two, two, and three.
You have seven creatures that are humanoid, that breathe our air, that seem to understand us, you know, the visual.
You know, there is visual contact.
Well, we can have visual contact with animals.
I mean, that doesn't mean they are human or meta-human, but there is messages that come through all of that.
The witnesses are reluctant to talk about in all three cases.
So in Socorro, finally, the Air Force went there.
They threw the Air Force out because the Air Force said, well, you know, that's just a gadget from the base.
And that was stupid.
So they finally...
I sent Dr. Hynek there.
And Dr. Hynek asked me to organize the files that were coming.
I was at Northwestern at the time, you know, working, working.
I had done my PhD already, and I was on the staff of the Computing Center.
And we had a small team trying to help, you know, free, trying to help Hynek keep the files together.
So we were...
You know, in communication with him the whole time.
And then I put the files together and I have a file.
You know, this is the official file.
joe rogan
So these people were reluctant to talk about what these creatures were communicating with them.
But did they talk about it at all?
jacques vallee
It was very personal.
joe rogan
Very personal.
jacques vallee
Yeah.
There had been a communication that transcended.
Their life.
There was something else, something outside.
So you could almost call it sort of a religious feeling, but it wasn't about divinity or God specifically, but it was about, you know, the other side of life, a bigger meaning for life.
That's their interpretation.
It may not be – there may be other things that they are trying to communicate.
joe rogan
But it was very profound.
jacques vallee
Yes.
joe rogan
And all three cases had similar stories in that regard.
jacques vallee
And in all three cases, there are traces that were measured.
There is technology of salt and And in the case of Socorro, people came up with all kinds of ideas that maybe it was a balloon, you know, I mean, a special balloon.
There were only 12 of them in the world.
Well, in the book, people haven't noticed it, but in the book, I was able to solve that problem because I found a transcript of a conversation with a man who was head of a motor pool on the army range at White Sands.
And he had given his team some instructions on, you know, how to make sure that the motor pool was working really well because white sand is so big.
When people went home...
They could get lost, you know, at White Sands.
And then how are you going to find them?
I mean, there are tracks, but there is no paved road at the time.
How are you going to, you know, find them?
So you can launch a helicopter the next day looking for, you know, a lost car somewhere with a family in it.
But so he made rules that they had to call periodically to report where they were when they went home.
You know, 50 miles away across the desert.
So they could find them if there was something wrong with the car.
He's driving home with his family.
This is after the Socorro thing is done.
You know, they are all interrogating Lonnie Zamora, the cop who was driving that thing.
And he sees a light over the mountains in the southwest.
Towards Mexico.
But it's still, you know, it's still in New Mexico, but it's in that direction.
A light that's not a star.
It's really bright.
And the light gets brighter and brighter.
And his car dies.
Now he's head of a motor pool for the base.
Everybody reports to him and they have all the, you know.
All the army cars and the trucks and everything else, the half-tracks.
So he looks at that thing.
He tries to call his team.
The radio doesn't work.
The radio should work.
The radio doesn't work.
And the thing gets very bright, and then it recedes.
It goes away the way it...
Apparently it came in.
We don't know if it came in or if it just got bright.
The car starts.
He goes home and then the next day he goes to his shop.
He gets his staff together.
He says, you guys are going to take this car apart.
I want to see every screw and every piece of it and every level and everything and the seats and so on.
I want to see all of that on the floor.
And you're going to test it and you're going to tell me what's changed or if anything, how that car stopped in the middle of the desert.
And they couldn't find anything.
And that report was an official report that was never published.
And it nails the whole thing, you know, that this was not a balloon.
This was not an hallucination.
The patrolman wasn't drunk, like they accused him of, or making up a story and so on.
Lonnie Zamora, when Dr. Hynek interrogated him, He said he wanted to talk to a priest and confess to a priest before he would talk to Dr. Hynek.
That's the kind of man he was.
And they essentially destroyed this guy because they thought it was, you know, bad reputation for the town of Socorro.
The tourists wouldn't come there because they'd be afraid of strange things flying.
And the Air Force said, well, it's a one witness case.
You know, there's this patrolman who saw this.
There were 12 witnesses.
There was a guy who was driving on the main road, the same road where the patrolman had been driving, who the thing passed right over his car.
He thought he was going to be driven off the road by this big oval thing that just went right over the roof of the car into the desert.
Well, he called the...
Called the police and reported it.
There's a written report.
He signed that report.
We know his name.
joe rogan
Without him having any knowledge of what happened.
jacques vallee
That's right.
I mean, he saw this some...
joe rogan
Independently.
jacques vallee
One of your gadgets tried to drive me off the road.
There were several people on the road on the other side of this little desert thing that's...
When it rains, the water rains all over the place, washes everything out, just sand and rocks.
But on the other side, there is a main road.
Several people on the road saw the thing take off and reported it because it was just so strange.
So the Air Force put that aside.
They neglected to, you know, this was...
And they just kept saying it was a one-witness case.
It wasn't.
Most of those cases where they say it was one witness, you have to look for the other guys.
And again, I brought you something.
Can I tell you about it?
unidentified
Sure.
joe rogan
What did you bring?
jacques vallee
So this is something that the case was so interesting that Dr. Nolan and I and a couple of friends wrote it up and published it in the Prime Astronautics.
It took a couple of years for them to agree to look at it and so on to look at the analysis.
This happened in a suburb of Omaha, Nebraska.
But on the Iowa side, there is this town, this suburb, with a park.
This is about a week before Christmas in 1977. People are there having a good time in the park in the evening.
It's getting dark.
And I want to make sure I'm...
They see something in the sky that looks like one of those boxes there.
It looks like a round box with lights around it, and the lights are going around.
And it's pretty high, and it's flying over the town.
And then a mass of steel, liquid steel, falls in the park.
It falls on the levee in the park.
There is about half a ton of it.
Liquid, glowing.
It has nothing, no business being there.
So you have this mass of metal.
So is it glowing?
joe rogan
You say it's molten?
jacques vallee
Yes.
The weather is freezing.
We know the temperature and everything else.
It's freezing.
The grass is on fire around it.
They call the firemen.
The firemen call the police.
The police gets there.
And the firemen get there.
They stop the fire.
The fire would have died by itself.
There's no problem there.
They take pictures of the thing glowing.
I have the pictures, infrared, you know, polaroid pictures of the thing glowing in the grass, burning.
I mean, liquid.
And it's going to stay liquid for a couple of hours, and it cools down gradually.
And then people take pieces of it as souvenirs.
So I have the pieces of it, and there they are.
Now, there was analysis done by two labs.
Obviously, the question is, where did that come from?
And there is chromium.
Titanium and iron, which you can find in ordinary steel, but this isn't really...
The composition isn't exactly what you'd expect industrial steel to be.
So, one of the chemical analyses is done at the lab, you know, for industrial steel.
Investigators call the company.
The company says, yes, we make steel.
So we have furnaces, but we empty the furnaces.
This is over a weekend.
The factory is closed.
There would be nobody there.
And so there's no liquid steel in our factory on that day.
joe rogan
They have a ton of it.
jacques vallee
They have, yeah.
joe rogan
This is a half a ton that they found sitting there.
jacques vallee
So then they call the Strategic Air Command because B-52s fly over that town.
B-52 is a big thing.
And the people saw something in the sky.
So, you know, maybe it was the Air Force, you know, politely laughs at them and says, you know, we carry atom bombs, but we don't carry furnaces with molten steel.
Okay, so go look somewhere else.
And they say, good luck.
By the way, this is a way you could test it.
This is a way.
I mean, the Air Force, we think… People think, number one, there is nothing in the Blue Book files worth looking at.
That's not true.
I spent four years.
Dr. Hynek had copies of all the files.
The files were not classified.
There were a few random cases that were classified for other reasons, not because of the UFO, because of where it was or whatever, that I didn't have access to.
I was just a graduate student, a PhD.
I went through, we convinced, Dr. Hynek and I convinced the Air Force to do a computer file of everything they had about UFOs.
Because before then, it was just paper files all over the place.
And if they were challenged by Carl Sagan or somebody like that at the time, they wouldn't be able to provide good statistics.
So they agreed for me to...
Get the files and redo, punch them into punch cards, take it to a computer, redo the statistics, looking at their explanation and then my explanation for the cases.
I did the whole thing.
Thousands and thousands of cases.
They were right that majority were explainable.
What we were looking for were the ones that were not explainable.
This one cannot be explained.
And there are enough of those, there are hundreds of those, that scientists could have looked at.
I went through the Air Force Base with my French passport.
At the time, I wasn't a citizen.
You know, you had to wait five years before you could apply for American citizenship.
So I was working.
I had a small contract that was completely, you know, unclassified to recalibrate the statistics of the Blue Book files.
So I had access to essentially all the Blue Book files.
But I went into the base with a clearance for three days with Dr. Hynek to go to the division that was looking at the UFOs and spend those three days with Major Quintanilla and his staff going for the files.
And they had lots of remains of things and stones and strange metals and so on, which at the end of the project, all that was thrown away.
So this is – everything is going on now.
This is for you, by the way.
joe rogan
Oh, thank you.
jacques vallee
This is for your special collection of weird things.
joe rogan
Yeah.
jacques vallee
This is essentially steel.
Here we go.
unidentified
So that's the area where the mass of steel is glowing.
joe rogan
And so this steel you can make on Earth?
Yes.
It's a composite of a bunch of different materials?
jacques vallee
It's not exactly the steel that you would use in construction, but it is essentially steel.
And so I gave my samples to...
You know, to Stanford so that we could redo the analysis, not the chemical analysis, but the isotope analysis.
So Dr. Nolan and I took it to the lab.
Dr. Nolan had two series of instruments that could do the analysis.
We did both, and we confirmed essentially this.
So there was no special...
Change in the isotope ratios.
If there was, that would indicate that somebody had manipulated the isotopes, which is not a hoax.
Then you know for sure it's not a hoax because that's high-caliber scientific laboratory work and you need special instrument experts to interpret it.
joe rogan
Right, but that wasn't the case, right?
So the isotopes hadn't been manipulated.
Have they found, because I've heard this about Gary Nolan in particular, that they do have samples of things that they can't explain?
jacques vallee
So I gave him essentially all my samples, all the ones that I could relate to, reliable cases, because I don't want to give him junk.
There's a lot of junk floating around.
People think it's strange.
So, yes, we're going through all those, you know, and the idea is to publish it as we go, you know, to publish everything as we go.
There are some that give the indication of being, but, you know, as always in science, we have to be careful.
Our colleagues will say, Very good.
You know, congratulations.
You did that with one instrument.
Now you should redo it with a different lab, with a different machine, and see what they find.
Because Dr. Nolan has – some of those machines are machines that he's invented at Stanford.
But they are – I mean, this is not a biology.
This is steel.
And this is iron or copper or whatever.
So we have to redo it with a different...
So in this case, we have redone it with a different line of machines.
There is a French machine that costs something like $6 million that would fill half of this room.
That's extremely good for testing for isotopes but only on four different elements.
With the other machine, the biological machine, we get the whole spectrum.
So except for some of the extreme elements like radioactive elements and so on.
joe rogan
So what samples have they found that have been the most compelling?
jacques vallee
We're still working on that.
you know.
This paper is important, even though we didn't find something out of range, but that's, in a way, that's validation of what you have to do when somebody presents you with that kind of sample.
Those are the steps.
This is where the science is today.
This is what the technology can tell you, okay?
So this is sort of a stake in the ground, even though we didn't find E.T., okay?
But we didn't find E.T. science.
joe rogan
We found physical evidence of something.
jacques vallee
But we've got the technology.
Now we know how to do it, you know.
One problem we had was that neither one of us is...
You know, an expert in materials.
We're not experts in steel.
So the people who – this was reviewed by, you know, people who were materials experts.
And they came back with a whole page of questions.
Why didn't you look at this?
Why didn't you measure that?
So Dr. Nolan and the team had to redo about a year of work before they would accept the paper.
So that's what you have to go through before scientists will look at it.
But this one is in the literature, in the scientific literature.
It's not in some UFO magazine in New Mexico.
And now we have the methodology.
We can apply it to the others.
There are some that we've done with one machine where there are indications.
Now, at Stanford, Stanford, it's funny because you've had three generations of people.
You know, at Stanford, looking at this, you know, before Dr. Nolan, I was there, and I was gathering data, and I was using the computer to do statistics and so on.
And I worked for Professor Sturrock, who unfortunately died a few months ago at over 100, but he was still working in astrophysics.
And, you know, I was on his astrophysics staff for a couple of years, looking at...
At galaxies looking at the structure of the sun and looking at certain types of strange stars that had special emissions and so on.
So I was this computer guy and we also looked at UFO materials, especially a case from Brazil which he published.
He got financial support to do the isotope analysis, and some of it was arguably different.
So we want to redo it.
He donated all his materials to me when he retired.
So I have all that, and I passed it to Dr. Nolan.
So Stanford now has...
It's acquiring a reputation as being a UFO analysis place.
joe rogan
Yeah, for sure.
jacques vallee
But it went from essentially solar physics and very high energy physics, you know, that I was working on with Dr. Sturrock, to me with the computing center and now with Dr. Nolan in the medical school.
So we've had, you know, they are in trouble.
joe rogan
Well, I'm glad you're willing to do that.
I had heard that there was some alloy that was very difficult to comprehend that someone would be able to construct, that it would cost billions of dollars to make this particular type of alloy, that they had discovered something along those lines.
jacques vallee
Well, I've seen those books.
I've heard those things on the Internet.
The question is, you know, scientists will want to look at this.
They want to know, well, how did you do it?
How did you prepare the sample?
We were given access to a sample that, in fact, is very strange.
And it has different colors on it.
It fits in the palm of your hand, you know, so it's a significant size.
Remember, Dr. Nolan is looking at individual...
The human cells, you know, with this device, okay?
So, you know, anything more than 10 grams, you know, we don't need.
I mean, we can work with very little material.
Although, of course, we want to do different things with different parts of it.
But this thing had some very interesting incrustation of a red deposit.
And all the people who had looked at it, including some official labs and some signed disclaimers saying they would not scrape off the interesting deposits that were on it.
Well, all of them did.
I mean, after signing the thing.
By the time it came to me, most of the...
Interesting red stuff had been scraped off.
So I don't know what they did.
And I don't know what machine they used.
And they didn't publish a paper.
It took us four years to publish this paper.
The paper came from Stanford with four PhDs writing it.
So the bar is pretty high.
If you're going to actually publish this in an international review.
joe rogan
Yeah, and with an interesting title, too.
jacques vallee
So we'll do others.
You know, that's the plan.
joe rogan
If people want to find this, it says, improve instrumental techniques, including isotope analysis, applicable to the characterization of unusual materials with potential relevance to aerospace forensics.
jacques vallee
Yeah, he doesn't talk about UFOs.
joe rogan
There it is.
That's a very tricky way.
Relevance to aerospace forensics.
jacques vallee
People read between the lines.
joe rogan
What do you mean?
Aerospace.
Who's aerospace stuff?
So this is the question.
If these encounters happened, if this egg-shaped craft was real, and if these small people-like things that breathe air did communicate with people.
Where are they from?
Is this something that has always been here?
Is this something that visits here?
Is it something that is here?
jacques vallee
So, in the BAS project of Mr. Bigelow that was funded by the Defense Intelligence Agency, we had a template of things that...
The Pentagon wanted to have.
And it said, you know, trajectory, composition, luminosity, radiation, and so on.
Well, yeah, those are the things that you'd need if you were looking at a Russian aircraft, you know, or you were looking at, you know, the Nimitz thing, whatever it was.
You know, is that really relevant?
I mean, in science, you don't start from the conclusions.
You're going to look at this.
This is not something you've seen before.
And you go on from there.
You know, in the Nimitz case, we've all seen those photographs.
And they are...
I've stopped counting how many...
Papers are from the New York Times on down with the picture of, you know, the photograph that the F-18 was taking, the pilot took from the thing.
Well, nobody mentions that this isn't a photograph.
People think it's a photograph.
So in the file, there is a memo from the folks at Raytheon.
Raytheon makes the device, which is a big thing that you hang under the wing of an F-18 that's going to take these images.
It's an image.
It's not a photograph.
It's looking into the infrared.
It's not looking at the details.
There is a number painted on the thing.
It's looking at the heat.
So when this was published by the New York Times, there was a very interesting memo with a little touch of humor from Raytheon to the Navy saying, you know those things you've published?
It was taken with one of the devices which we sold you to put under the wing of your aircraft.
It's not...
A camera, it's not a photographic camera.
You gave us specifications for what you wanted us to build, and that's what we gave you.
You wanted something that could measure the temperature of the exhaust of an enemy aircraft that you're going to shoot down.
You know, the F-18 goes behind that Russian thing or MiG or whatever.
And the camera is painting the exhaust from the Russian guy so that you can distinguish between, you know, American Airlines 723 and a MiG.
That's going to help you discriminate what kind of enemy you've got.
You know, is it friend or foe first?
If it's friend, you peel off and that's fine.
If it's an enemy, you're going to engage the guy.
That's what we gave you.
You didn't tell us you wanted a device to track flying saucers because we don't know what flying saucers are.
If you do, you know, we'll build one.
And that memo is just so funny.
You know, it's an official, you know, I make it a little bit funnier than it was, but it's an official memo and it's very straightforward.
joe rogan
Jamie, see if you could find a good photograph, excuse me, an image of the infrared image that was taken by those F-18s.
jacques vallee
You have an image of a heat source.
joe rogan
Yes.
Of that Tic Tac.
And then they also got the video representation, the video of the thing taking off at some extreme rate of speed.
That's it right there.
So that's the image, right?
jacques vallee
Yeah.
Well, the radar said that it took off and popped up somewhere else.
We accept that at face value because it's in the New York Times, and that may be true.
In my work in venture capital, I've looked at all kinds of technology.
That's around.
So I go to technology meetings.
Those are open.
They are not secret or anything.
And people talk about their gadget or their device.
They are looking for money, you know, to make in larger quantity.
So I found myself in a conversation with a guy from one of the aircraft companies in Southern California.
And I asked him, you know, there is a device that has a funny name, like DISPRO or something like that.
And it measures, it acquires radar signals.
I think it's a DSPR, you know, for radar.
And that gadget, I never heard of it, and it's actually not classified.
Now, it was developed initially so that you could...
Analyze radar data that was coming to you.
If somebody was painting your aircraft on the radar, you could detect the characteristics of the radar pulse.
Why would you want to do that?
Well, you want to do that because...
I said, well, what does it look like?
Is it classified?
He said, no, it's not classified.
Many airplanes...
Civilian airplanes can carry it.
You put it in the nose of your Piper Cub or whatever, and you fly around Los Angeles, and it will acquire the characteristics of all the radars in the Los Angeles area digitally.
It's a digital thing.
It's a computer, essentially, that requires radar data.
And then it feeds back radar characteristics.
Of any aircraft you want somewhere else.
So if you want your paper cap to look like a B-52 20 miles away, you turn on, you know, I'm making it simple, but you program the thing and you can redirect the defense, the air defense, for example, to another place.
joe rogan
So you can send a signal to another place that makes it look like there's a B-52 there?
jacques vallee
Yes.
Or make it look like you've disappeared in mid-air and reappeared somewhere else.
joe rogan
Oh.
jacques vallee
Digitally.
It's a digital radar feedback device that once you know the characteristics of the radars that are painting you, you can, I mean, obviously...
Suppose you want to travel to Moscow over the Iron Curtain without being shut down by the Soviet Air Force.
You'd want to redirect all the radars.
I mean, you're on 20 radars.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
One of the things that they said about the Tic Tac was that when they encountered it, it was somehow or another blocking their detection signals.
jacques vallee
Well, you know, I don't know.
I don't know how far it's gotten in the last 30 years.
The guy I was talking to was telling me about technology of 30 years ago.
unidentified
Wow.
jacques vallee
It blew my mind.
I didn't know you could do that.
joe rogan
Right.
I didn't know until just now.
jacques vallee
You could just paint.
I'm not sure where the technology is and who is cleared for that.
You know, pilots are cleared for certain things, obviously for all their equipment on board.
They are not necessarily cleared for...
So you have to ask, in the case of the Nimitz, what clearances did these pilots we see on TV, what clearances did they have?
No, they have the electronic countermeasure clearance.
They don't necessarily have it.
I mean, some of them didn't have the camera.
Some of those who are on TV today talking about these images, the image didn't come from them.
It came from one of their buddies who came afterwards.
joe rogan
There's also the question of where they take place.
jacques vallee
So half of the data is missing.
joe rogan
I've always questioned where they take place because they take place in the same areas where the United States always runs military training exercises.
They take place off of San Diego, off of the East Coast, all these areas where we know that they run exercises all the time, restricted airspace.
If you were going to test equipment...
jacques vallee
I think this was in international waters.
joe rogan
Yes.
Yeah, it was.
But it was still off the coast of San Diego, where they do these things, which is why the fighter pilots were there in the first place.
unidentified
But it's not restricted.
jacques vallee
I mean, the Russians could fly there.
joe rogan
Right, not that area, but isn't the area off the East Coast where some of those things are restricted?
jacques vallee
I don't know.
joe rogan
Okay.
jacques vallee
Long Island is restricted.
joe rogan
It says, China's electronic war gadget turned small drones into flying stadium on radar.
jamie vernon
So this is an article from January of this year, and then I'll show you something else I found.
joe rogan
Wow, so they can make it look like a flying saucer.
jamie vernon
The size of an iPad can make it look like as big as a sports stadium.
joe rogan
Whoa, look at this.
The effect, similar to a giant flying saucer suddenly materializing in midair, would be reminiscent of a scene from a science fiction film, but is achievable according to a peer-reviewed paper published on January 8th.
Whoa.
jamie vernon
Also, so then the month before that, here's their new stealth fighter that's painted with the stuff you just said that scatters the frequencies or something.
jacques vallee
You know, this isn't my field.
unidentified
This is just something I stumbled across, typing in the words he was saying.
joe rogan
Yeah, just pretty cool.
So they're testing this too.
What I was getting at was, if you're the United States government, if you're the military, and you have this kind of equipment and you want to test it, what better way than to test it on people that don't know you're testing it on them?
Send your fighter jets out there, have them encounter these things.
Run your whatever experiment you're doing with making something appear and reappear and take off and give them these signals.
Give them these disruptive, deceptive signals and see whether or not they...
The problem is they had visual confirmation of these things.
That's the real problem.
The problem is they actually saw these things.
Like the Tic Tac was they visually saw it for people, right?
jacques vallee
I have a colleague in Silicon Valley who's been a distinguished army career, and he told me that there were, in fact, tests of especially nuclear facilities, not necessarily the military, but mostly the military facilities.
To test the ability to penetrate the perimeter.
So those flights are not cleared with the people who manage the plant.
So it's either a nuclear plant that makes...
You know, fuel for bombs, or it's a base where nuclear weapons are stored, and there are guys around the perimeter with machine guns, and they are going to sound an alert if they see something coming over the fence.
Well, suppose you come over the fence looking like a flying saucer.
Are they going to start shooting or not?
You know, he told me that he had actually flown some of those missions.
And I know another member of the BAS team who confirmed that told me he had been on some of those missions.
They make their plane look like, you know, they put lights around it so it can look like a flying saucer, essentially, or look like...
What a UFO, what would be a UFO to the guard?
joe rogan
Right.
jacques vallee
So that the guard is, they want to see if they can penetrate, if you can disguise yourself to the extent that psychologically you can inhibit the reaction of the guards and you can fly over the fence.
joe rogan
Wow.
jacques vallee
Because if you can fly over the fence, you're in.
unidentified
Right.
jacques vallee
You know, you can do a lot of damage.
joe rogan
Wow.
jacques vallee
So pretend you're a UFO. So those, those are, but I don't think they do, they do hundreds of those.
I think they probably do it, you know, very carefully at a couple of places.
joe rogan
But it's interesting that they have that ability.
That's, that, that's fascinating.
That throws a lot of this stuff into question, like what are we actually seeing?
jacques vallee
Yes.
joe rogan
But it doesn't explain all these things.
And that's the, the problem that I always have is that they just, Abundance of encounters and how similar a lot of them are and then what it must feel like I've never had an experience But what it must feel like to have that experience What that you probably would be very I wouldn't be reluctant because I'm a known Person to talk about silly things,
but if you're not if you're like a serious person you have some sort of an encounter I would imagine there's a lot of pressure on you to not tell people If you're a lawyer or a doctor or you're any sort of, like, respectable person that's a serious individual in whatever you're doing for a career, you don't want people to associate you with nonsense or think that, oh, maybe Mike is losing his mind.
jacques vallee
Yeah, you can, because you have people relying on your ability to...
joe rogan
So maybe you tell your friends, maybe you tell your mother, maybe you tell your wife, but you probably don't tell the press.
If you're a scientist, I would imagine you would have to have, like, significant evidence for you to stick your neck out.
Or you're a person like yourself that's been very brave for all these years.
Because you were talking about this stuff in the 1960s, which is pretty crazy.
jacques vallee
Well, you know, I had seen, essentially, a flying saucer when I was 15. Can you describe it?
I grew up in a town that's about 45 minutes out of Paris on the road to Normandy.
And my father was a judge in that town for a while.
And a beautiful afternoon in the summer.
I don't know the exact date.
It would have been late June or July.
In 1955. So I was about 15, 16. I was still in school, and then the following year I was going to go to the university.
And my mother called me.
I was working with my father, who was relaxing, doing some furniture, and I was helping him.
And I heard my mother call from the yard and went down and saw an object that was absolutely a saucer.
It looked like it was over the steeple of the cathedral there.
And we were about half a kilometer away from it.
And it was just suspended.
It was silver.
And there was a clear dome on top of it.
And we both saw that.
It was very clear.
And then the next day, I asked a friend of mine from school who was, you know, we were the two good students in physics and so on.
And I told him I had seen that, and he said he had looked at it with binoculars.
He had seen it too, and he had looked at it with binoculars, and I got him to draw it, and he drew exactly what I had seen, essentially a lens-shaped thing with a clear dome on top.
joe rogan
How long did you see it for?
jacques vallee
I saw it for less than a minute.
I think I went inside.
I don't remember what I did.
Logically, I probably went inside to get my father so that he could see it.
joe rogan
And then when he came out, it was gone?
jacques vallee
Well, he didn't even come out.
He said it was probably one of the new planes that were flying around.
Because this was a time when the meteors and the early jets were being...
I tried, and they were training pilots with them and so on, both for civil aviation and for the Air Force in France.
So he said, well, let's wait.
Maybe this will be disclosed at some point.
So I didn't say anything about it.
Also, you know, the son of a judge, the family of a judge isn't supposed to see strange things.
In the air, over the town.
unidentified
Right.
jacques vallee
So it was sensitive.
joe rogan
What year was this?
When you were 15?
How old do you know?
jacques vallee
It was 1955. 1955. So back then...
I was 15, 16. Okay.
joe rogan
So we could also apply that, like, if it was a jet, it would probably be very loud.
jacques vallee
Well, and also it wouldn't just stand there.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
It wouldn't be able to just sit there.
Was this thing quiet?
jacques vallee
After that...
You know, I understood that it was...
After that, I worked at Paris Observatory after I had my degree in astronomy, tracking satellites.
We tracked the very early satellites.
And we were a government office, so people were writing to us with what they had seen.
And most of it we could explain.
For one thing, they were seeing echo, and they were seeing some of the Russian rockets, you know.
And so we would write back.
I mean, we had to write back, you know, to a French citizen.
I had a card with a French flag on it, and, you know, we were serving the...
The population.
So we would explain those things pretty much the way they do now.
You've seen the moon rising through the fog or you've seen satellite, you know, so much Alpha 23. But then there were cases where just like that, where they saw something we could not explain.
But then we would tell them, but we wouldn't publish it.
We wouldn't send it anywhere.
For one thing, it wasn't our job.
Our job was tracking satellites.
joe rogan
Right, but that one experience that you had when you were 15 is what ignited your interest in this for so many years.
Yeah.
Well, if you hadn't been doing it, I mean, the thing that's very important about people like yourself is that you're so careful in how you document these things and the conclusions that you draw.
Because I think this field of UFO study is filled with so many people that claim to have answers, claim to know things, and this is going to happen, and this is coming, and this is—disclosure's imminent, and this—and that's not—it never comes true.
It's always—you're just left waiting for some new evidence that supposedly they have.
And this is the more frustrating— Aspects of it, like when talking to Christopher Mellon, he's telling me there's high-resolution photographs and video.
How about showing me?
Show me some stuff.
Show me something.
Because as a person, when I was 15, I didn't see anything.
So I don't have that experience that you have.
I just have this fascination with it, but also tempered by a little bit of cynicism.
Because there's so much malarkey that's attached to this subject.
jacques vallee
And some of it is, you know, some of it is legitimate.
And I think ufologists in general, you know, they want disclosure, disclosure, disclosure, but we don't know.
You know, I'm very respectful of, you know, when I had the clearances, I was just very respectful of those clearances because there are people who know.
What's on the other side of that?
There was one case in the Air Force files that was classified.
It was marked in the index with a star, and I'm punching the card, and I put an asterisk there, and I had to ask Dr. Hynek, you know, what happened?
Can you tell me what happened there?
And he said, yeah, I can.
There was enough time.
That I can tell you, this came from a woman in Alaska called the Air Force because she saw what she thought was a flying saucer, certainly something that should not have been there.
It was dark on the ground, but the sky was still light, and there was definitely, I don't know, a light.
That looked like it was under power, that was flying west.
Now, west of Alaska, you know, there's a Kaurai Peninsula and there's a Soviet Union.
So she thought it was a UFO. So it was reported as a UFO, but it was...
It was classified and it was called unidentified.
Well, you know, that was an inside joke.
It was a U-2.
But this was at sunset and the U-2 was...
I mean, U2 is painted in such a way that it shouldn't be visible, but there are some conditions where you're going to see it.
And so it was classified, and if you had the clearance, you would read that it was unidentified.
It would be listed in the statistics as unidentified.
joe rogan
But it was actually a YouTube.
jacques vallee
Exactly what it was from the beginning.
joe rogan
Interesting.
So some things are listed as unidentified because it's so classified.
Yeah, that makes sense.
jacques vallee
I have no problem with that.
joe rogan
Right.
jacques vallee
But, you know, tell me if you ask me to write a computer program about it.
Right.
Tell me if it's...
If it's worth my time or not.
joe rogan
What was your take on the Ryan Graves stuff?
Like Ryan Graves and the fighter pilots that started seeing these squares within a sphere?
jacques vallee
To me, that's still a question.
And the people I talk to are still wondering, you know, what is that?
There are...
Strange physical systems that are floating around to gather faint signals, and they have very strange shapes.
So it could be, those are balloons within balloons with little things attached to them.
Going back to the days of...
No, 1947, looking for atomic explosions, Russian, you know, that's the way the Russian tests, atomic tests were detected first, was with balloons that had large antennas, you know, that were...
joe rogan
The thing about the Ryan Graves stuff, though, is the physical characteristics and the way it moves.
These things are able to stay stationary and 100 plus knot winds.
jacques vallee
I don't know.
joe rogan
You don't know.
jacques vallee
I have not researched it and I wouldn't be the guy to research it.
joe rogan
If we are being visited, how many different civilizations do you think are visiting us?
Because if there's all these different characteristics that these beings have, if some of them look like tall, albino, almost like human beings with large eyes, some of them look like the greys, some of them look like dwarfs.
jacques vallee
Yes, and that's an embarrassment of riches in a way.
joe rogan
Right.
jacques vallee
Of course, that opens a question.
You know, is it a simulation?
And Reswin Work has published a couple of books about that.
He's a friend of ours and Dr. Nolan, and we've had many conversations about that.
You know, we could be living in a simulation of sorts where the people running the simulation might send whatever they want.
I mean, it would be like a video game.
So all of a sudden, you've got a new...
But that's not completely...
You can only go so far.
In fact, the first reaction is, well, you know, but look at the detail.
We can't reproduce a detail on that scale.
That's true, but, you know, wait 10 years and we'll be able to do it.
I mean, with quantum computing and all that.
That's not a good argument.
It's an okay argument now, but it doesn't stand the test.
The other argument is, you know, who would be doing it and why?
I mean, that's true that there are some strange things.
I mean, the fact that the moon is exactly the size to hide the sun, it's exactly, you know, 30 minutes of arc, like the sun.
So it gives us total eclipses and it gives us a measuring tool.
The Greeks knew roughly how far the sun was with respect to the moon.
They knew the ratio of the distances.
They didn't get the exact distance.
But they already knew that because they had done the math, you know, the geometry.
So that's...
Pretty strange, you know.
joe rogan
And it also protects our environment by keeping us stable.
jacques vallee
And there are lots of things on Earth that, you know, seem to be accidental that are just right for us to exist.
joe rogan
Yeah.
jacques vallee
But I'm not completely happy with that explanation.
joe rogan
Nor am I. I'm not happy with it, but it's very compelling.
What's fascinating to me is that it is inevitable that if technology advances the way it is currently within maybe even our lifetime or within another lifetime, another hundred years, we will most certainly have an artificial reality that you cannot discern, indiscernible between that and the reality we currently experience.
So if that's inevitable, you would kind of assume that perhaps it's already taking place.
And if it had already taken place, it would probably be very similar to what we're experiencing.
Whereas enough of it seems fake and enough of it seems scripted, enough of it seems very coincidental how things line up that it almost does seem like a simulation sometimes.
jacques vallee
But there are also things that are strange but that we could research that we are doing a very bad job of researching.
I got a phone call a couple of years ago from a woman who had been a student at a school, a high-level school.
Preparatory, you know, school on the East Coast.
And I had published a book in the 80s, early 80s, about UFOs.
And she was head of a lecture bureau for the kids.
And she thought it would be fun to bring me there to talk about flying saucers.
Because it would excite the students.
So I went there and I gave...
You know, a lecture at the level of, you know.
But those were very bright students, you know.
It was sort of an elite girl school.
And then, you know, she drove me back to the airport and I went home.
Never heard from her again.
I don't know, what, 35 years pass and she calls me.
And she says, you may not remember me, but, you know, I was the one who brought you to give the lecture at the school.
Do you ever come to Washington?
And I said, I do remember you.
And I go to Washington a couple of times a year.
And she says, well, I'd like to tell you about an experience I had.
And next time you come to Washington, ring me up.
And when you're done with your meetings, you know, I'll pick you up and I'll drive you to Dallas Airport.
And so I do that.
I call her.
She picks me up in a very nice Mercedes.
And she says, I've never forgotten your lecture.
I saw something.
Here, on the way to the airport, where we're passing now, that I'd like to describe to you, because it reminded me of your lecture and I had never heard that anywhere else.
You know, there are trees along the freeway on both sides, beautiful.
The freeway was dark and the sky was still blue.
She said, I saw an elongated object, which was like, to me, twice 747. With what people would probably think of as portholes or windows.
There were just lights along the thing.
The thing was elongated.
And it was moving slowly.
Minding its own business.
You know, it must be on 10 radars, including the airport.
And it was moving over, and then the sky was perfectly clear, no clouds, no fog.
It blended with the sky.
I could just see the outline still.
It didn't speed up.
I could see the lights, and I could see the lights fading, and then there was nothing there.
And I remember in your lecture in the 80s, you talked about things that could be going into another dimension, okay?
But I thought that was interesting, and the kids thought it was an interesting idea.
And yeah, in science, you know, people, you talk about different dimensions in physics and so on, but I had never seen it mentioned anywhere else, and there it was.
You know, this thing faded from our universe, and I have no idea where it went.
But it didn't speed up.
I said, thank you very much.
Can I publish that?
I said, no way.
I'm the CEO of an international commercial company.
We work in several countries and I can't have my name associated with it.
Now, I've had probably a dozen cases like that with people from Silicon Valley, people, you know, they...
They report on Wall Street about how their company is doing.
They don't want a reporter saying, are you the same guy who sees flying saucers?
You're the CEO of this such-and-such microchip company in San Jose.
So they don't report it.
They want me or some of my colleagues to know about it because they know it could contribute to the research we're doing.
And Dr. Nolan has had that experience as well, as you know.
But it's not going to the Air Force.
It's not going to the newspapers.
It's not going to the New York Times.
Now, if those things can just jump out of our universe and go somewhere else, That rewrites the whole thing.
You know, we're not talking about propulsion the way we think about propulsion.
We're not talking about, you know, environmental environment.
We're not talking the passage of time, you know, in the same way that, you know, I would experience with my watch and so on.
We're talking about something that has the rules are different.
And we need to go up and start thinking along those rules, or at least the possibility of those rules.
It doesn't prove that there is another universe five minutes ahead of us, but there could be.
Papers that they publish saying there couldn't be flying saucers because there isn't life, you know, closer than, you know, 2,000 light years from us.
And they would take, at the speed of light, it would take 2,000 years to come here.
Well, there could be another universe five minutes ahead of us.
It would take them five minutes to get here, okay?
So that would explain why we have visitations throughout history.
And they look the same throughout history because, you know, our technology, I mean, this technology or this microphone didn't exist 20 years ago.
You know, it's a new microphone.
And there were no microphones, you know, 200 years ago.
There were no microphones at all.
So how come those things look the same?
How can we compare them to something somebody saw in the 18th century?
unidentified
Right, right.
jacques vallee
That shouldn't happen unless your technology is stuck.
joe rogan
Right, right, right.
Yeah, that is a fascinating aspect of it.
You would expect that if you thought about how fast our technology evolves, technology from 1947 from some other planet would be exponentially more advanced than what we experienced in 1947. Just based on how our technology evolves.
jacques vallee
And you'll have to think, I mean, we think about an aircraft in ways completely different.
I mean, there are things that, yes, it came from the Wright brothers and so on.
And there were speculation before on how you could fly.
But what an aircraft does today is radically different.
The whole physics is different.
joe rogan
And we're only talking about a hundred and some years ago.
Which is pretty crazy.
You go from this thing that Wilbur and Orwell Wright, you know, kind of like get it to take some air for a little bit to the Chinese jet, which is disguising itself from radar and travels at insane speeds.
And then the possibility of other propulsion systems that have been kept under wraps.
jacques vallee
Oh, to the harrier that stays.
joe rogan
Yes.
And then lands like that.
Yeah.
No, just the technology that we know that we're aware of.
Over the last 200 years, it's pretty extraordinary.
And if you imagine something from somewhere that's had thousands of years to evolve past us.
jacques vallee
There are a couple of things I wanted to bring up that are in the book.
Well, one is in the book.
The other one isn't.
What's in the book is I've tried to continue the parapsychology experiments.
We're done at SRI and now at lots of other places.
And I got advice from people who said if you put yourself in some types of conditions, you could try to manifest another form of intelligence or another form of essentially an apparition.
It's not necessarily related to UFOs, but if you can do that, that would teach you what you could do also with some of the encounters that people describe, that the witnesses tell me.
So if I'm a good scientist, I should put myself in their place first and experience it myself.
So I did a couple of sort of mental experiments like that in my home.
I was alone at the time in my home, and nothing happened.
And then nothing like what I expected happened.
And then I was asleep one night, and all of a sudden I'm propelled outside of my body into another room, and there is an entity there, a massive sort of rectangular Mass, you know, entity.
Clearly, you know, something that knows where it is and is thinking.
I'm terrified, not terrified so much of the entity.
It's like a sort of black rectangle.
But I'm terrified of being outside my body.
I know people do experiments with that and there are people who can do it almost as well.
I've never tried to do that, I think, because I've heard, you know, cautions that it's very dangerous because what if you don't find your way back?
So I'm terrified.
I find myself back in my body.
You know, I sit up, completely terrified, crying, screaming, which is not usual.
Because it was just, you know, it really was horrible.
Then I rationalized it, you know.
The experience wasn't supposed to happen outside of my body.
When people describe entities...
Like Whitley Strieber describes it and so on.
There is a very strong psychic impact.
But to me that was very shocking.
It hasn't happened before and hasn't happened since.
I'm not trying to make it happen, but I wanted to flag it.
To get advice mostly from other people.
joe rogan
Did you feel compelled to try it again?
jacques vallee
I would try it again.
joe rogan
But you have not yet?
jacques vallee
No.
joe rogan
No.
I can understand.
It was that terrifying if you woke up screaming.
jacques vallee
I want to get counsel from, you know, my peers.
joe rogan
That's like similar to the monolith in 2001, right?
unidentified
Yeah.
jacques vallee
You know, there is a scientist I know well in Silicon Valley who also started a number of companies that are publicly traded now who invented the integrated circuit.
His name is Federico Fagin.
He is a physicist from Italy with a PhD from Italy.
To Silicon Valley in the very early days of the transistor.
Worked with the initial teams in those places.
And then, you know, there was a problem of how can you pack those things together in smaller and smaller places.
And he's, you know, recognized as the father or one of the...
Two or three people who invented the integrated circuit.
So, for a long time he was celebrated in that capacity.
What he didn't say is that he had seen the design outside of his body one night and that he had had multiple experiences outside of his body.
Now, this is...
Someone, you know, one of the fathers of Silicon Valley.
I mean, I recognize him as one of my mentors, you know, in venture capital, in high technology investment.
But now he started to, I mean, he's made enough money that he doesn't care anymore and he's sort of semi-retiring.
He doesn't like what's going on, you know, right now.
Probably going to go back to Europe.
But there are a number of people like that whose names are in the Wall Street Journal or in the New York Times who've achieved something, but you find out that they also had, and they experimented with it.
In his case, he experimented systematically with...
You know, the ability to go out of his body and...
joe rogan
And acquire this information from some other source.
jacques vallee
Well...
joe rogan
Or a vision.
jacques vallee
There isn't much...
There are a couple of books that mention, you know, steps you can take, but it seems to be pretty much up to the individual.
In my case, I certainly wasn't trying to do that.
You know, it just...
I was precipitated.
Instantly to the place where this being was.
There were also a couple of things that I never wrote about, not that I wanted to hide them or was afraid of them, but I wanted to understand the context of it before I did.
And I talk about it in this book.
In the late 70s, my wife, my first wife, Janine, was a psychologist.
We bought a place in the country, in Northern California, a place in the redwood forest, because I wanted to re-experience the pleasure of...
Doing astronomy as an amateur, you know, a small telescope.
But I don't care.
I want to look at the moon.
I want to look at planets.
I want to look at Magellanic, you know, clouds, you know, whatever.
And the...
So we built this...
We had...
There was a house there, but I built an observatory in the middle of the forest.
This was a redwood forest, you know, uncluttered and, you know, unspoiled.
Pretty much inaccessible.
You know, if you didn't own the land, you know, you couldn't go cut the trees.
So those were...
There were some old redwoods there, and the closest neighbor was about three-quarter of a mile away.
And I thought, this is going to be like a discontinuity in the forest, and maybe it will attract whatever is out there.
And maybe we'll see UFOs.
We never did.
We owned the place for 18 years.
We'd go there with our kids, and it was wonderful.
But we went there not every weekend, but pretty much as much as we could.
And then our kids grew up and moved away.
We moved back to the city.
We sold the place.
The last night, of course, we had cleaned the place.
We were selling it to friends of ours who were our neighbors at a winery.
They wanted to expand the land.
We had some flat land they wanted to use for the wine, and they wanted the house.
And so, the last night, everything has been moved out.
My wife is still there because we had a car that was going to be taken back to the city, and she had her car, and she was ready to go.
Middle of the night, there's a light.
Filling the house.
No, by then there are no curtains, nothing.
Filling the house.
Blue, sort of UV, white, blue, ultraviolet light.
She goes outside and the light is making everything clear, the forest, everything else.
And it's moving.
It doesn't have a specific shape.
You know, it's like a mass of light with light all around it.
It's going down the driveway, which is a dirt road, to the main road, to the small road.
And it's just moving along, politely, in front of the ranch and down to the street.
It has no business being there.
No sound.
It's not a car.
It's not a car on fire.
The light, again, everything, all the details are there.
You can see the grass.
You can see the leaves on the trees.
And why that?
joe rogan
Maybe you called for it and it took a long time to get there.
jacques vallee
Well, yeah.
Or they just wanted to say goodbye.
unidentified
Yeah, maybe.
joe rogan
Maybe they were there the whole time and they just didn't want to show themselves.
So let's put on a show for Jacques.
jacques vallee
There was one time we used to sleep in the observatory.
There was a small bedroom there with old books that I had collected.
And she saw, she woke up and she saw a light that was like what people describe, small light.
See where it came from or where it went.
But it was moving along the walls.
There were two of them.
And then it vanished.
She woke me up, but I had not seen it.
It was gone by the time I woke up.
joe rogan
I talked to a man when I went to visit Skinwalker Ranch.
A few people wanted to talk to us, but then once we brought the cameras out, only one guy wanted to talk to us.
And he was a very rational, very normal guy.
Who lived in a modest home, and he told a story about this ball of light that entered through his home.
And it seemed to be somehow or another aware that he was there.
He felt like it was, if not a living thing, controlled by something that was alive.
And then it went through the walls and disappeared again.
He said it was in his home for a few minutes.
He was moving around.
jacques vallee
Well, as you know, Mr. Bigelow has done experiments of his own with lights and with things like that, putting interesting objects in certain places that are enclosed and seeing if something is going to look around or move them and so on.
So very, very interesting.
joe rogan
Well, it's such a fascinating subject.
And like I said, I really appreciate all your years of research and the way you're so measured and so objective in your analysis.
It really helps people like myself get at least some sort of an understanding of what's going on.
jacques vallee
Well, what's important is to have guidelines, you know, for research.
joe rogan
Yes.
jacques vallee
I look to some of the people you have here, you know, who've done some other exploring.
I try to learn from them and sort of refine my own criteria.
joe rogan
Yeah.
Well, thank you very much.
And your book, again, the one that's available now, this is Forbidden Science 6. This is the sixth of these books.
jacques vallee
Scattered Castles is a...
It's not classified.
It comes from the classified world.
It's a repository of classified projects.
So if you're cleared at a certain level and you want to know what else is there that you would have access to or where certain things are being sent to you and you're authorized to, you could look up the names.
Of those projects.
It wouldn't tell you what the project does unless you're cleared for it.
But it would tell you that there is a project.
And so those names of secret projects are picked by a computer.
They are random.
And I thought this was funny.
You know, scattered castles is sort of like, you know, all these files about strange UFOs and strange creatures.
unidentified
Wow.
joe rogan
I can't wait to read it.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for everything.
It was great having dinner with you and Hal Putoff and everybody else last night as well.
So I really appreciate you very much.
unidentified
Thank you.
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