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Dec. 6, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:46:46
Edition 500 - Jacques Vallee
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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is the 500th edition of The Unexplained.
Yes, I am smiling because when I sat exactly here in my father's old leather chair saying those words in 2006, I never thought that there would be 500 shows, so many shows, that you could start playing them today and still be playing them three weeks from now.
That's an astonishing thing.
You know, the whole thing got into my blood.
One of these days I will have to take a holiday and just get away from everything for a while, but I'm so caught up in it all.
I'm constantly learning.
And thank you very much for everything that you've done for me, for being my friend, for being my supporter through these years, and for telling your friends about the show over this time.
My life has changed as your life will have changed over these years.
I've lost both of my parents in this time, and that's a hard one to bear, but it's something that all of us will have to reach and accommodate in our lives somehow.
So that's one way that my life has changed.
And today, here I am sitting here talking with you in lockdown.
A word that I thought applied to prisons.
A few years ago, that was all I knew about lockdowns.
They're locking down the inmates.
Now, in this world, we're all inmates and we're all locked down.
We can only hope for better times.
But look, I want to get quickly to the special guest on this edition, Jacques Vallet.
But I just want to say thank you.
Thank you for being part of this.
And thank you for being my friend through the years.
Thank you to Adam, my webmaster who I first met when he was 17 years of age.
And he used to come and fix technical problems at Radio City in Liverpool.
And I just thought this guy's a genius.
I would love to be able to work with him.
And Adam has given me his time and his effort for all of these years.
So thank you, Adam.
Thank you to Haley for booking the guests more recently and, you know, making that easy for me.
I'm not a good booker of guests.
I'm great at coming up with ideas, I think.
I'm not bad at coming up with ideas.
But I'm not very good at the physical thing of all of that administrative stuff of getting people sorted.
So Haley does a wonderful job on that.
And thank you, Haley.
It's been a bit of a ride, to quote Art Bell.
And who would have thought that my inspiration and hero, Art Bell, I would actually get to know towards the end of his life?
Okay, I didn't get that chance to work with him.
That nearly happened.
But I did get to know him.
And it was nice to have him listening to my work as I'd listened to his work.
And he thought there was some value in it, which is a wonderful thing.
and I will take that forward in my life.
Okay.
I think that's about everything, the usual stuff about...
And thank you if you have recently.
Go to the website, theunexplained.tv, click the link for donations, and you can do that there.
And if you've done that over the years that we've been taking donations here, which I think is about six or seven years now, thank you very, very much indeed.
Who knows what the future may hold in life and on this show?
I guess that's part of the excitement.
Let's get to the United States now.
Jacques Vallée, a Frenchman, born September 24th, 1939, computer scientist, venture capitalist, author, prominent ufologist and astronomer, currently in San Francisco, you know, very close to Silicon Valley, but also with a base in France, his native country.
So, Jacques Valley, special guest on this edition of The Unexplained, been trying to speak with him for years, and on the 500th edition, we've done it.
Jacques Valley, thank you very much for being the special guest on my 500th edition of this podcast.
It is a pleasure and a privilege to have you there.
Well, thank you very much.
It's my honor to be on that show, and congratulations on the 500 radio shows.
Jacques, well, 500 podcasts, it has taken me, Jacques, 14 years to get here.
I started by doing a single podcast every month, and then the demand for it grew.
People were asking for more than that.
So I started to do more than that many shows every month.
And it's sort of grown from there.
Well, and the technology certainly has changed.
I'd be really interested in your reflections at some point about how the technology is evolving.
Well, the way that the technology of doing this, and it's interesting that we're having this conversation between London and where you are, San Francisco, which is the throbbing heart, as we know, of silicon technology in this world.
But when I started doing this podcast, I had to buy a thing called a telephone balancing unit, which is a little box that essentially radio stations use.
They were very expensive.
I bought this one secondhand from a man in Cyprus for £200.
He gave me a special bargain price, and this is £800 worth of kit.
And that allowed you to connect a broadcast console, like the one that I'm using here at home now, to the public telephone network.
And without one of those, it was very hard to do any of this.
So, Jacques, you know, maybe that answers your question about the technology.
It's changed so much.
Well, I remember in the early years of the network, of the internet, as you may know, my team was involved in building some of the early conferencing systems on the and we had many tests with the British Post Office, which was very interested in that.
And there was when we were doing audio conferencing, there was somebody at the British Post Office who would come in and would say, mute the bridge, mute the bridge.
And we could never figure out what they were muting exactly on the London side.
But we had our own problems on the San Francisco side.
So that was a lot of fun.
Yeah, I mean the British were pretty well ahead of the, In fact, if you wanted to connect broadcast quality between two cities in the UK, you had to book an expensive post office line.
They controlled in those days everything.
Things are a lot better These days, even if people sometimes say they're not.
But I know that my brother-in-law worked for the post office telephone company at that time.
And they were doing, and this is back in the 70s, the mid-70s, they were doing digital development.
And I think he used to come home, and this is nothing to do with the conversation we're about to have, but he used to come home and talk about System X and Switch something, Switch 56 or something like that was a system that they were using.
But how far, I think basically what we're saying, Jacques, is that we've come a tremendously long way.
Well, in the research we did, which was funded by the Defense Department and the people involved in the early ARPANET, which became the Internet, which became the web that we're using now, we learned a lot from our British colleagues because we discovered that there was a team there, there was an intelligence team in the British Post Office, which in American terms is astounding.
And they had experiments that went back to the days of World War II.
In the early 40s, there was a concern in England, which was pretty obvious, that the government might have to evacuate London.
And they invented a way of doing what we're doing now.
And this was in 1942-43.
They created centers around Great Britain where ministers could be evacuated and could stay in touch.
And they had hexagonal tables, you know, six-sided tables with six microphones in each city.
And the cities were linked with special lines.
And this was all audio, like we're doing now, but it was a dedicated system to be able to run a modern government from the countryside.
And, you know, that's, of course, London in the end was not evacuated and they didn't have to use that system.
But this was extraordinary.
And we studied that carefully in our own research on computer conferencing and other media.
We learned a lot from England.
Here comes another strange question, Jacques, because look, your beginnings were in computer science.
You are still a computer scientist.
That's where it all sprang from for you.
We are seeing an awful lot of downsides of everybody having high-speed communication, fake news, people spreading all sorts of things about the place, and sometimes people going online and appearing to be something that they are not, maybe posing as somebody else, but trying to cause all kinds of havoc in all kinds of places.
So this technology that you were a pioneer in has a big downside, doesn't it?
It strikes me, it's not all excellent.
It's not all good.
It's almost as if I always say to people that maybe in this day and age, people should have to pass some kind of examination to be able to use this stuff.
You're absolutely right.
And there is a lot of distress among the people who built that technology, both the hardware, but especially the software, the web.
The web itself, which is on top of the old internet connections, are really working on this.
Berners-Lee, who was the inventor of the web in Switzerland, is starting a new software effort to address that, to improve, because so much has to do with fake news and so on, but also on the internet you can't tell if you're talking to a robot or to a human being.
But on top of that, private life is being invaded.
And the problem is that the technology has been ahead of the legislator and of the awareness among the people who write the laws.
And so it's sort of the wild west.
And it can't go on like that.
You know, for one thing, we have to protect private lives and private knowledge and private goods and private ideas.
One thing that Tim Berners-Lee was said to be working on, and presumably by the sounds of what you've just said, you know him, but one of the things he was said to be working on recently was a people's internet because he was concerned that the internet was becoming a dark place and a number of large players were in charge of everything.
And that was not a good thing.
So he wanted to try and take it out of the hands, I think, of a lot of those big players, and we know who some of them are, and put it back in the hands of the people.
Are you aware of that research?
He announced it about two years ago, and we've heard nothing about it, I don't think.
Well, I wish him well.
Of course, we need something like this.
He would be the right person to introduce it.
The problem is that on the Internet, you are the product.
I mean, you are what these big companies are selling to each other and to the commerce networks in general.
So if you strictly re-establish privacy, they don't have anything to sell anymore.
So you have to, collectively, we will have to come up with new business models.
And that will make companies, even companies like Google, Facebook and others, obsolete when these new business models are evolving.
But so far, if you ask people, if you send people a questionnaire saying, how important are the following things for you on the internet, privacy, And then you send them a questionnaire that says, what are you willing to give up if we give you free access to football?
Privacy is on top of both.
In other words, people say they are very concerned about their privacy and that of their wives and children and homes and so on.
But they are willing to give it up if you give them free footballs free football shows every summer.
And that is precisely where we're at at the moment, isn't it?
That people have the right.
And I do this too.
I can watch some of favorite old TV shows.
I've been watching The Fugitive from years and years ago.
And I've been catching up on this massively long, beautifully acted series online.
And I don't doubt that the sources that I'm getting this from are harvesting my information.
And that is the price that I am paying in order to be able to do things like that.
Yes, yes, but there should be guidelines.
But we don't have the model.
So we can re-establish privacy.
On my computers, I don't have Facebook.
I don't have Google.
I only use Google Earth.
And I'm still pretty nervous about that.
And why have you removed those very popular portals from your devices?
Well, because they don't just do what they say they do.
They also reach through your computer into everything else you have on your computer, or they try, and they gather that information and they sell it to the advertisers.
And then, you know, even your private medical files that usually are under keyword and so on, you talk to your doctor on those supposedly private sub-networks.
And then you look at your computer and you've got three ads for aspirin, you know, or for a special procedure.
I sometimes wonder, Jacques, how I can be, and we'll have to get onto the UFOs and the ufology very soon, but this is fascinating.
And this is part of the modern world in which we live.
I often wonder how it's possible for me to be talking to a friend about something and then see an ad for the thing that I've been talking about appear in my newsfeed.
Strange things keep happening.
Like, for example, that old series that I've been watching, The Fugitive with David Jansen from the 1960s, beautiful piece of Americana.
I was watching it and talking to somebody about how good it was and how well-produced it was.
And then into my newsfeed popped a link to an American newspaper story that said, police in whatever state it is, hunt fugitive.
Now, fugitive is not a word that is used that much in media.
And I can't remember when I last saw the word fugitive used in a news story that appeared certainly here in the United Kingdom.
So maybe that was just coincidence.
But it got me to thinking that maybe that's how things are now.
Yes.
And it's all AI, you know, artificial intelligence.
It is now at that level where it can understand language and it can make inferences.
And sometimes those are funny because it misses a point and it sends you, you know, it starts selling you vacations in faraway islands because it has misunderstood something you said.
And so it's kind of funny, but it's really not funny at all when you think of the implications about the way your lives are guided.
You know, in the early days, I worked at places like Stanford Research Institute and so on, where we had engine number two on the ARPANET.
We had the second computer that was linked to that kind of network.
And for my listener, we'll just explain that the ARPANET was the forerunner, the predecessor of the Internet.
Yes, it was a prototype.
And the idea was that you would have access to everything.
You could, instead of just reading the front page of the Times every morning, has been engineered to give you the best information the fastest.
But that may not be what you want.
What you want may be on page seven.
Well, now with the network, you can decide what you want and you can control the arrow of information.
That's the way we were talking about it.
Well, that's not true anymore because the network analyzes everything you do and then it decides that you should change your car, you know, that you should buy this new convertible based on your behavior.
And now it takes you to places where you had no intention of going.
And that is what we need to correct at some point.
We need to put the user back in charge.
Yep.
And you and I need to have another conversation about that because what we've just been talking about, in my personal view today in 2020, as we stand on the threshold of 2021, it is at the very center, the very forefront of so much that is happening in our lives.
And if you don't think it is, I'm talking to my listener now, then please do your research.
I think it is.
What makes the man who devised a computerized map of Mars in 1963 become interested in UFOs then?
Well, I grew up in France.
My master's degree was in astrophysics.
I wanted to be an astronomer.
My first job was at Paris Observatory.
I became aware of what people were writing to the observatory about things in the sky that at the time were not acknowledged publicly.
So I was exposed to a lot of information and I had seen something as a teenager Near a small town where I grew up, close to Paris, that I could never explain.
And there were three witnesses in different places.
You know, bright afternoon, what I saw was essentially a disk in the sky with a dome on top.
And a friend of mine who was half a mile away from me looked at it with binoculars and saw a dome on top.
At the time, we thought it was a prototype of some new aircraft, but there is no such aircraft.
And so that got me interested.
And suddenly, working at Paris Observatory, I realized that astronomers were seeing all kinds of things that they were not reporting to the press or to the public.
So I realized that there was a phenomenon there that was sort of silent.
And when I was in the United States, you know, my first job was at the University of Texas where we were working on NASA projects.
And I became even more interested.
And the people I worked for said, sure, I mean, if you think that's an interesting area, go ahead, use a computer for that, and let's see what we can learn.
Well, that's amazing that they did that, because we constantly hear stories, certainly on the show that I do, of people involved in orthodox science who've asked difficult questions about what is this really and what are people reporting that isn't really being put before the public in the way that it should.
And sometimes those people have their concerns and their interests swept under the carpet.
But you were encouraged.
Yes, I think there is a sense in American science, of course, most American scientists would be just like what you described.
They would say, well, don't bother me.
I'm busy discovering something about a new virus or something new about the stars, and I can't take time to look at these vague stories.
But by now, people realize that those are not vague stories.
We have very detailed reports from pilots, from radar, from good observers, from professionals that are documented and they have patterns.
So as a computer scientist, I'm interested in the patterns.
And things are changing also in Europe and in the UK.
And I see that in the letters I get and in the messages I get.
What do people tell you?
Say people from the United Kingdom, from Europe generally.
What are they telling you these days?
They have started to buy books on the subject and then asking for more information.
Some of my readers are from the UK, and they want to know more.
And some of them are scientists, and they have their own ideas about...
And certainly radio astronomy was born both in the US and in the UK.
And General Bank and so on were in the late 40s and early 50s.
And the idea that we could pick up radio broadcasts or radio signals from the rest of the universe was, of course, a new science that got its letters of nobility in the 50s.
So immediately you begin to ask, well, in all those signals, is there evidence of intelligence?
And it hasn't been found yet, but it's certainly something that we can hope for.
And of course, people like Seth Szostak at SETI continue the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and I think he's pretty sure that it'll happen one day.
We'll get that information.
Whether it'll happen within our lifetimes or some other time, I think is the biggest question of all.
But more and more people seem to be coming convinced that we will discover we are not alone.
And there are tantalizing discoveries, aren't there?
the recent apparent, although I think it's now being disputed, discovery of phosphine around Venus, which, of course, had everybody excited.
Yes, and the idea of something that could...
And they are discovered in the atmosphere, in a particular layer in the atmosphere of Venus.
Now, that still has to be confirmed, but that kind of thing is really interesting.
The problem with radio and with CETI, and CETI is headquartered close to here, and we have regular contacts with scientists there, radio may not be the best way to do it, because radio, you know, works at the speed of light.
And light is pretty slow on, you know, cosmic distances.
Who wants to have to wait 500 years to get the answer to a question?
The problem here is with physics.
I mean, we need to find something that's instantaneous.
We don't want to wait for the answer.
And so radio may not be the best way in which an advanced race would communicate across the cosmos.
Do you think that quantum physics, which we are more and more getting into in this world, is going to be one of the answers to helping us make that communication?
It may be, you know, it may be, Of course quantum physics is there, but it may be more the entanglement.
If the things are entangled at large, very large distances with significant physical objects, then everything changes.
Because if the entanglement is, we don't know at what speed that entanglement happens.
If it happens instantaneously, then it's a whole new ballgame.
And that's where modern physics is.
So in some ways, modern physics is ahead of the speculations of the UFO believers.
Because the UFO believers are still stuck with the idea of spacecraft coming here and so on.
But science has already gone beyond that.
And in fact, you were going beyond that way before anybody else was.
You were saying, look, I totally understand that you think probably there's some kind of ship that you put a lot of gasoline in and you travel at great speeds on your fabulous engine that we don't understand to here.
But in terms of science, that's not very practical.
There has to be another explanation.
And maybe that other explanation is somewhere to do or something to do with dimensionality.
Perhaps whatever it is isn't coming from a place where you would expect it to come from.
Well, that's what science is telling us to look at.
And that's also where, you know, in those days, in the early days, in the 60s and 70s, when I started really building databases of what people had seen and trying to find patterns in the computer,
the best hypothesis we had was that the phenomenon came from outer space and had to do with visitors from an advanced civilization.
I mean, we were pretty sure that there must be advanced consciousness in the universe.
So we would hope that there are people who are smarter than we are out there somewhere, because otherwise it's pretty depressing.
Well, it would be nice to think that they might have, sorry to interrupt, they might have greater abilities and more problem-solving prowess than we have.
Yes, and maybe more empathy.
However, since then, the observations have accumulated, and they are not of things that look like spacecraft.
They are also, I mean, you have things that look like spacecraft or advanced, you know, advanced light objects that can move around, but you also have things that seem to go through the wall.
You have things that seem to appear and disappear on the spot.
Now, I realize that, you know, if you invoke general relativity and so on, well, maybe they can disappear on the spot.
And we have the idea of other dimensions that I've also looked at.
And that also is an idea from modern physics.
I mean, to do quantum mechanics and so on, you need more dimensions than just with three dimensions or four dimensions we use.
So that's okay.
You can speculate about that.
Of course, in those days, it was forbidden to speculate about that, but we've moved away from that.
We've moved forward.
Why was it forbidden?
Do you mean that it was not seen by people to be the right thing to do?
You risked ridicule?
Or were there rules that forbade it?
Well, there was no evidence in the laboratory that was clearly indicating that you needed a theory, a new theory of physics that would go in that direction.
But the progress that has been made just in the last 10 years tells us that this is the way physics is going, completely independent of people seeing UFOs in their backyard.
But when you look at the observations now, the discussion we have certainly today in Silicon Valley is that maybe those observations by people looking at things in their backyard can guide some of the physics we're thinking about.
I have a friend who was one of the actual founders of the Silicon era, the first really advanced chips here in Silicon Valley.
And he says, somebody asked him, why are you interested in all that speculation?
And he said, the day we stop asking that kind of question, we'd better sell Silicon Valley to the Japanese.
Because, you know, they can take it from there.
We have to ask those questions.
I mean, that's what we do here.
Do you work, of course you do, with silicon chips, computer technology?
It's been your whole life.
And you've been able to meld that research with the search for whatever might be out there and perhaps monitoring our planet.
Do you hold with the idea that some of the technology we appear to have developed very quickly, like silicon chips, people are often saying this, a lot of the things that we have in our modern world, we got really fast after World War II and after Roswell.
Do you believe that some of that may not have come from here?
My quick answer to that is no, because, you know, the patent for semiconductors is a German patent from the 30s.
Then it was considered as just an interesting little phenomenon that would never have any application.
And then it was rediscovered in the 40s.
And then Bell Labs started working on it during the war.
And then in 1944-45, of course, the three Nobel Prizes worked on it.
And that was a transistor.
But the transistor effect had been known for decades.
It was just thought to be just one of those little things you would give as an assignment to a student in physics, but would have no application.
And then the application was found, of course, in the early days of electronics.
And, you know, same thing with the integrated circuit.
Federico Fagin and others, you know, developed it.
But Federico is still alive.
I mean, he's a colleague of mine.
And he can, you know, if you come here, I can introduce you to him.
And he'll tell you how he invented it.
I've loved it.
Which is pretty interesting, by the way.
Because he saw the structure in a dream.
He had been working on this in the lab, you know, on how to build a completely integrated computer.
And he saw the structure in a dream.
So, we know the people who built all that technology.
Some of them have died.
But some of them are still alive and still running companies and inventing things.
So...
How do you think he saw it in a dream, by the way?
Sorry to take you down this path very quickly.
But I'm fascinated by dreams and what they mean.
Sometimes I think dreams can be predictive.
Dreams can be problem solvers.
But they can also be predictive, I think.
You know, the same thing happened in chemistry, of course, with the structure of certain molecules.
The helical structure of molecules and so on.
I mean, some of that.
Well, you know, your brain is working when you sleep.
And it's working on the problems that you couldn't solve rationally during the day.
And images come up and those images are cues to new directions in your thinking.
And that has happened, I wouldn't say often, but it has been reported time and again in science discoveries.
Very often it's not reported because people think it's silly, you know.
And, of course, the rational analysis has to take over from the dream.
And you still have to build the damn thing.
But, you know, the image can come in your brain when you sleep.
And, I mean, that's...
Now, there is something else in your question, though.
The question is, could it be that we've recovered things after UFO...
you know landings or crashes well i've had so many guests tell me that they believe very firmly that there were things that we developed very quickly and isn't it mysterious that they suddenly appeared in our modern world a couple of years um after roswell you know they tell me that maybe they're back engineering stuff at area 51 or wright-Patterson Air Base or some other place where this kind of stuff is done and only an elite group of people know about it.
That is likely.
Oh, really?
Yes.
But not so much in electronics, but in the area of materials.
Because I've been working with materials that people have given me that they picked up after a close encounter.
And we're starting to look at that in the lab.
And we're starting to look at the isotopes, not just at the composition, but at the isotopes of certain elements, certain chemical elements.
So Jacques, are you talking just to be very clear about this?
And again, sorry for jumping in, but are you saying that you have in your possession or have been given fragments that may have come from craft?
Yes.
Yes.
And we're ready to publish a book about what we found so far about that.
It's very intriguing.
And we know of there are companies, especially in the aerospace business, fancy airplanes that use titanium compounds like titanium aluminide and things of that type,
very fancy alloys that are used in some of the spy planes and some of the very advanced rockets and so on that could have come from reverse engineering of UFO fragments.
How would we ever prove that?
Well, you have to go back to the databases of patents and see when some of those materials were first introduced.
Titanium is an interesting substance, you know.
The SR-71, which was probably the best spy plane that has been, at least known publicly in the last, you know, 20 or 30 years, was built of titanium.
Titanium aluminide has certain properties.
There are a number of these compounds and ultramaterials that can be used, well, can be used in fiber optics, they can be used in the modern networks, high transport computer networks and so on, that are coming into our lives.
And so it's not always for aircraft or rockets or satellites, but it is also when you need materials with very special properties.
Now, that has, you know, there are limits to what you can discover because, you know, if you, people say, well, you know, what if you gave your garage door opener to Leonardo da Vinci?
What would he do with it?
Well, I don't know what he would do with it because he didn't have a garage, you know.
For starters, he'd be fascinated by it, but he'd have no clue what it was for.
That's right.
If you have to give him the garage and the garage door opener, and then he pushes a button and the garage opens, and then he would ask, you know, why does the garage door open when I push that button?
You know, that would get him thinking.
But without the garage, he can't do that.
So look, in our situation.
That's right.
Do you believe that governments and military development companies, and again, I'm sorry to jump in here, Jacques, because it's just a fascinating topic.
Fascinating point.
Do you believe that governments and military organizations perhaps have been given both the garage door opener and the garage by some intelligence?
Or do you think that we've just happened to stumble across these things, found them from Crashed Craft, from Roswell or whatever?
Well, you know, I don't have the clearances that would let me answer that.
And if I had the clearances, I probably would be banned from answering that.
I think that's the problem they have.
You know, I know, look, in Silicon Valley, people get together and they have a cup of coffee and they talk about what they are working on.
So, yes, there are secrets, but after 20 years or 30 years, you know, people tend to, I mean, those secrets are not really secret anymore.
So the problem that the security people have is that they have to fragment everything.
So if they find something, say they've recovered something from Roswell, they would give part of it to, you know, I don't know, IBM.
They would give part of it to Lockheed if it looks like an aircraft.
They would give some of it to, I don't know, Google if it looks like, you know, advanced electronics.
But the people who would get those fragments wouldn't know about the other people.
So there would be only very, very few people, maybe five or six, who could put everything together.
And that's not the way to do science.
I mean, that's the way they have to work in, you know, military intelligence because you're working in an environment with spying and all those things.
But in science, you need to get the whole thing.
You need to share it out.
Share it.
So I spoke, and I can tell you some of the people I've spoken to.
There was somebody from IBM, IBM Research Labs, who are right here in Almedin, in Silicon Valley.
He was the man who, he died about 15, 20 years ago.
But I knew him fairly well.
He had invented the magnetic coating for disks.
So you can imagine how much money IBM made on that.
I mean, IBM invented, of course, the magnetic tape for computers, digital magnetic tape.
Floppy disks.
And then they coated disks and they coated everything with magnetic material, both thin film and thick film that came from his lab.
And so IBM made billions and billions and billions and still does with that technology, which was extraordinary technology.
Well, he was given material that he was told came from a UFO crash.
And he analyzed it in his lab, which was, as you can imagine, one of the best equipped electronic labs in the world.
And he told me that he couldn't make any sense out of it, that it was a matrix of what he called orphal silicates.
And it was as if it had been woven.
And he couldn't understand how you could have that material woven in the way in which it was woven and what you would want, why you would want such a material.
Right, so it was a kind of super-grade fiberglass.
Yes, but in a matrix.
And so he was puzzled by that.
Now, this was somebody who was, you know, a giant in the electronic industry.
He was given his own lab, and he could work on anything he wanted.
Was he told to keep it quiet, Jacques?
Well, yes, but by then, you know, it had been many years, and he felt free to discuss it with me because, you know, there was nothing that they could think of doing with it.
And I think that's the problem you have.
I mean, it's Leonardo with my garage door opener.
You know, he can push a button, nothing happens.
And so he could, okay, so he could analyze it because he was, you know, chemistry was pretty good.
But even if you talk about giving the garage door opener to somebody in the 19th century, say, you know, 1870, they could do fine analysis.
They understood the elements, they understood all that.
I mean, all of chemistry comes from those years.
So they could analyze a transistor and they could find that, well, you know, it's germanium.
Now, they didn't know about germanium, but they could infer that there was a new, you know, a new element there, a new compound.
And so they could do pretty fine analysis.
And then they would find that there are impurities in that little device.
What would it take for them to think that the impurities were put there on purpose to create an electronic current switch?
Who would think of that?
And do we have the technology?
Could we have had the technology to do something like that ourselves?
I mean, if we didn't know what the material was, then presumably we wouldn't have been able to begin to do that.
No, that was...
And then after the transistor, of course, the integrated circuit.
And, you know, the man I was talking to who said we should study UFOs or give away Silicon Valley to the Japanese was the inventor of one of the inventors of the integrated circuit.
And he's still alive.
So it didn't come from Roswell.
It came from something that he personally invented.
And we, you know, we underestimate the power of the human mind.
You know, we keep doing that.
We say, well, you know, look at the pyramids.
We couldn't build the pyramids today, which is true, but it's true because of the workers' union contracts that we could never negotiate a contract like that to build something like a pyramid.
I think that's probably a good thing.
Yes.
Well, the pharaohs didn't have that problem.
But when you go look at the pyramids, you can see why human genius could build that.
If you had a civilization that was stable enough for long enough that you could build the whole thing, you know, so that's why we probably couldn't do it again.
But the audience came.
You've said two things, Jacques, though, haven't you?
You've said that some things are strange and we are in possession of them and we are developing things from exotic materials, but also we shouldn't underestimate the ability of the human mind to create things.
Yes, absolutely.
And maybe some of the things people see could be scenes that we're being exposed to on purpose to help us move along.
So that idea is an interesting idea.
What concerns me now is that, you know, the people who are saying we should study UFOs are trying to scare the public into saying, look, you know, they move faster than our aircraft.
So they could take over.
They could attack us.
Well, you know, we've been seeing those things for 70 years and maybe for centuries, and they haven't attacked us.
So the question is, why are we scaring people?
Of course, that's a way to get money from the government.
If you scare people enough, then they'll give you money to protect you.
Yeah, they'll fund you to deal with the perceived threat.
But look, the nature of the threat, well, I say threat, the nature of the manifestation has changed, hasn't it, over the decades?
In the 1950s, there were flying sources over the White House, over Washington, D.C. 2004, 2015, we're talking about Tic-Tac UFOs, possibly aided and abetted by a number of USOs, undersea objects.
How come the technology, if there is alien technology, keeps changing?
You said that they want to maybe keep showing us different things.
Is that what this is about?
Well, you know, in the late 1800s, people were seeing dirigibles in an era where there were very, very few dirigibles.
And those were very experimental.
They made short trips.
But people were seeing large objects, you know, and that inspired Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and these people.
But that was based on actual observations, thousands of observations all over the Middle West of dirigibles that were flying, that were racing trains and they were landing and they were taking off at high speed and they had sails.
I mean, why would you put a sail on a dirigible?
And they had steam engines.
There was a whole era of, and some of that, of course, was invented by hoaxers and jokers and so on.
But most of the cases, and I've worked with researchers who like to collect those newspaper clippings from the 19th century and study them.
And sometimes they go back to the spot and they look at who was there and what the towns were like.
And it doesn't make any sense.
But these people were seeing something.
And are we in the same position that we're being shown something?
So there are people now in, you know, people I know from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and from Stanford and so on that are going one step beyond and they say, this is a video game.
In fact, we are part of a video game.
And so we shouldn't take these things for necessarily We can present you with things at very, very high resolution that you cannot distinguish from reality.
So those things that were seen by the pilots of the USS Nimitz in 2004, do you think that something was actually putting on a movie show for them?
Well, it certainly looks like somebody was displaying itself.
I mean, those things, I mean, you have to distinguish, and I think we haven't done a very good job of that, distinguish between things that were seen with the eye by these pilots who, by the way, have very good, very good eyesight and are used to noticing things at very high speed.
And especially the first pilot who with his eyes saw that object, circled around it for over a minute, close to two minutes, I think.
And indeed, there was radar tracking.
Well, there was radar tracking, and then there was infrared tracking with a very special device.
But he didn't have that special device.
So when people write it up, they mix everything.
They mix the radar, they mix the infrared readings, and they mix what he saw with his eyes.
Now, what he saw with his eye is the most important thing.
He did see an oval object that was over close to the surface of the ocean.
There seemed to be something in the ocean.
He circled it.
The thing was under his aircraft, under his F-18, and that's what he reported.
Now, the thing flew off at high speed.
Now, he saw it go away very fast, but everything else comes from other aircraft and from the companion ship to the Nimitz, which was the electronic warfare cruiser that had all the radars and the advanced radars and everything else.
So we have to be careful we don't mix everything together because with instrumentation, especially with complex electronic instruments, that's where you can make mistakes.
Now, the thing was tracked on radar, but on radar it would go from essentially the surface of the ocean to the top of the atmosphere in 0.08 seconds.
Well, you can't do that, of course, with any kind of physical object, so it would have to be an object that defied modern physics, which is where, of course, it's a fascinating idea.
And so it would have to be relativistic or some other thing.
But there's another possibility, which is that constant time of when the object was flying from one place to another is simply the refresh rate of the radar you're looking at.
So I have not seen, I'm not part of the team that's analyzing it, but you know, the sweep on the radar takes a certain time.
So this may not be a whoosh in one direction, a movement.
This may just be a reappearance.
Well, it may just be the signal that you get.
And you're misreading the signal for something out there, which is, of course, a pitfall that you have when you're looking at instrument.
I mean, they've never looked at anything that moved, that seemed to move that fast.
So those instruments were designed for something else.
They are designed to track aircraft.
There is a memo from the company that's Raytheon, which is a fine electronic company that makes electronic warfare devices.
They make the infrared camera.
They sent a memo to the Navy, which is not classified.
I have that memo.
It's a six-page memo that explains their technology.
And they say, well, you know, this is fine that you're tracking these objects with our camera, but keep in mind our camera wasn't designed to do that.
And you're inferring distance from what you see on the camera.
And you can't do that because we're not giving you a radar.
We're just giving you an image.
We're giving you an infrared image.
And yes, the image moves from one place to another.
But that's not, you cannot make the inferences that you're making.
And you have to look at what we give you in connection with other things, like the pilot observation and where the aircraft was and what the radar is showing and everything else.
So I think we're just at the beginning of that because we're jumping to conclusions a little bit too fast.
Right.
So at the very least then, even if it isn't what it appeared to be, like a solid physical craft flying at tremendous speed, if it was something else, if it was some kind of display or almost computer game, the fact of the matter is, if you believe that, then something somewhere is trying to put on a show For us, for some reason.
Well, that seems to be.
By the way, I absolutely believe what Commander Fraver saw with his eyes, because there was no electronic involved.
And when you hear him interviewed, he sounds, as he was in the phenomenon documentary that I know you were part of, he sounds completely credible.
Oh, absolutely.
And I mean, you know, we rely on this man for the security of our society.
I mean, there is no question about what he saw with his eyes.
And he had something like two minutes, which is a very long time when you're circling over an unusual object.
He saw it from different angles.
I mean, I believe there was something physical there as described by him.
And what I question is the electronics, because you have to qualify the characteristics of the device.
And these devices were built for other things.
They were not built to track UFOs at relativistic speeds.
I mean, that's not what the engineers were told to do.
So we're extrapolating from things that have not happened before.
And that's very interesting, but it's dangerous.
So the question is, could it be a display?
Now, if you analyze the transcript of the conversation, a controller comes in at some point and he says, guys, you're not going to believe that, but they are back at your cut point.
Well, that would imply that the objects knew what the point of convergence of the F-18s was.
Now, how would the phenomenon know that?
It had the plan for the maneuvers that they were executing, and it was anticipating where the F-18s were going to reconnect.
At least that's my interpretation of it.
And again, I'm not cleared for any of that, so there may be things that I just know.
So how could they have known that?
Were they mind-reading?
Are they just aware of everything?
How could they have known where those aircraft were going back to?
However they were maneuvering, they were maneuvering ahead of the tracking aircraft and the tracking equipment.
And, you know, that's very interesting.
So we cannot jump to too many quick conclusions based on that without the experts.
And I'm not an expert.
I'm completely out of my field here regarding the characteristics of that equipment.
But again, I have to go by what the experts were saying, that their equipment was not designed to do what we assume it does.
So we need to get these people in one room, get them to talk to each other, and I'm sure that's what the U.S. Navy is doing now.
Do you think somewhere on this planet of ours, some human beings at some level of security clearance or whatever know what we are dealing with, or do you think that as a human race we are still trying to work it out?
So, you know, I try not to speculate.
I try to go by patterns that I can observe.
I think if we had that knowledge, I think, and I've had that argument with my friends, including well-placed people who have at least some access to some of that.
And, you know, we, of course, we speculate about that.
That's the, you know, $10,000 or £10,000 question.
And we disagree.
I don't believe that we have that knowledge because other things would happen if we did.
And, for example, you know, we're still building rockets the conventional way, which is the way the Chinese invented it 5,000 years before Christ.
Okay, I mean, you take a cylinder, you put powder in it, and you light up the powder, and it goes up.
And, of course, we've improved on that, but it's still, you know, it's still the basic idea.
It's a propulsion, it's brute force propulsion.
And the UFOs don't work that way.
I mean, they don't leave residue in that way.
They don't display themselves in that way.
They don't leave a trail.
They don't do any of that.
They just seem to jump from one place to another in space-time.
And so I believe if we had that breakthrough, there are a number of things in science that we would see changing, and we don't see it changing.
I mean, even semiconductors, computer technology, that takes people by surprise because it moves so fast.
But think of the accumulation of brains and the incentive and the money incentive to advance the technology.
You know, I've worked for the last 30 years in venture capital, where we look at the technology and we try to finance companies that are going to build the next generation.
I mean, the idea that you're going to copy somebody else And try to compete that way.
You could never compete that way.
You have to invent the next wave of technology.
And we're very good at that.
So, you know, now people are looking at quantum computing, quantum memories, and so on.
And that's where the big battles, commercial battles are going to be.
And we're going to see commercial quantum computers in the next five years.
They haven't built yet.
And we need breakthroughs that haven't been done yet.
But you can project them.
You know what you're going to have to do.
And then you can, if you have enough money, you can accelerate the pace of science in very specific areas.
That's what Silicon Valley is so good at.
And, you know, what the Chinese are now very good at as well, and a few other places.
So that is not surprising when you look at, when you go to the kitchen, and, you know, and I am in the kitchen.
And we've done things that people told us you couldn't do.
And of course, in venture capital, you don't have a lot of money.
I mean, you have a few million dollars, but you don't have billions of dollars, especially at the beginning, to do the experiments that will prove the technology.
So people will tell you, you have to work on things that people are telling you are impossible.
Because if they were possible, IBM would have done it already.
And you're going to compete with IBM when, you know, in 10 years.
So you have 10 years to build something that IBM thinks is impossible.
And that's the game you're playing.
And that's a game that Silicon Valley is very good at.
Of course, we don't tell you about all the things that fail because it was a little bit too ambitious.
But some of it works.
And what works is tomorrow's medical technology.
I mean, look at how fast people are coming up with a vaccine for COVID.
A vaccine takes 10 years.
And this was done in, what, nine months?
That, of course, I think experts would tell you, I suppose, that's what happens if you apply a great weight of human ingenuity to one problem and you know you have to do it quickly.
Yes.
Yes.
And it's a survival issue.
And money is no object.
And you can do it in parallel.
You don't try one vaccine, you try 20.
And then you take the six that seem to work and you put billions and billions of dollars into accelerating the manufacturing of that vaccine, knowing that maybe one or two, you know, maybe one or two will be the good ones.
and you're wasting all that money, but it's worth it in the end.
So it's a completely different It's a business model.
It's a business model that's different.
And that's what people don't see.
You know, it's a way money is being applied that is revolutionary.
Well, I understand.
So would you say that if we decided that we wanted to finally answer the question as to whether or not we are alone in this universe or whether there is something interplanetary or interdimensional interacting with us and has for hundreds of years perhaps, I think you're implying, are you, Jacques, that if we all got together as a human race, if there was more honesty and we worked internationally, we could actually answer all of those questions.
I believe, yes, if I didn't believe that, I would have given up a long time ago.
I believe that, but there are a number of things that you have to do that are hard.
It's not just getting a bunch of Nobel Prizes in one room and voila, you know, you got the answer.
I was part of a project, very ambitious project, started by Mr. Bigelow.
Robert Bigelow is an entrepreneur.
He's a brilliant aerospace entrepreneur, has built devices that are now in space, that have proven his technology.
And he got together a group of, you know, an advisory group with physicists, with doctors, with me as a computer guy, and a number of other people to look at that problem, specifically with UFOs.
And unfortunately, we had to stop the project to build the database that could begin to give us the answer.
Now, what we have to do is we need to get the best observations from all over the world, not just the military observations.
The military, you know, I mean, are maybe 10% of the problem.
And of course, people are saying, look, it's a threat.
And because it's a threat, you have to give us money to study the countermeasures and so on, which is what the military-industrial complex is doing.
And they go back to their secret lab and they spend billions working on it.
But that's not the problem.
The problem is that the best data I get, I get from colleagues of mine who are not going to report it to the military.
They're not reporting it to the police.
There are people, you know, CEOs in Silicon Valley who have seen UFOs.
And they come and tell me what they have seen, but they haven't reported it anywhere because they want to go public with it.
Why don't they want to go public?
They don't want to be ridiculed.
They don't want to have their...
And so they have to maintain that reputation.
I'm lucky because I've been able to manage five venture funds.
So I've been entrusted with millions of dollars to invest.
And I've done a good enough job that I've continued to do that.
So people have trusted my judgment in spite of the fact that I've written UFO books and I've gone around talking to witnesses who told me some strange things.
But again, if we don't do that, we might as well give the Silicon Valley to the Japanese or the Chinese these days.
So people understand that.
And I've been reasonably sane in the investments I've made.
So people continue to trust me.
But there is a stigma still attached to the problem.
So how do we get around that?
It takes time.
And I think that things are changing because the old generation of, you know, keep everything secret and so on, those guys are dying.
And one reason they want to keep it secret is, which is what I was told, is we don't want people to panic.
Well, you know, by now, I mean, look at how many planets have been discovered.
You know, there's thousands of planets, of which many are similar to the Earth.
So we know that now.
It's not speculation.
So why couldn't there be civilizations out there?
And why couldn't there be undiscovered things right here on the Earth?
So that argument has vanished.
And people are more ready to look at the data, but you have to show them convincing data.
And to do that, so there are something like 15 or 20 databases that people have gathered.
Some of them are military databases, like the one from the U.S. Air Force.
I've seen databases from the British forces, from the RAF and others in Great Britain.
Some of that has been published.
Some of that they've said are not going to be published.
There is a lot of press that can be scanned in different languages.
But in order to, and I've looked at the problem, I've been asked to look at the problem of building a data warehouse.
I mean, no single database is going to do that.
So you need parallel databases with different constraints.
Pilots don't see the same thing that a farmer would see.
The farmer is much closer, and he can see the traces in the dirt.
The pilot is never going to see the traces in the dirt.
But the pilot is equipped with special equipment.
He has better eyesight, maybe.
So you need to take all of that into account.
Now, to do that, I need to train a cadre of analysts to deal with what people are reporting.
And that cadre of analysts does not exist.
So it would take, and that's what I told Mr. Bigelow, it's going to take two years to train 40 or 50 people who can look at those reports.
We may or may not have the opportunity to go there and interview the witnesses, so we have to guess at some of the things they've seen, which is, of course, dangerous.
So now we need psychologists and sociologists to understand where these people were, what language they speak.
You know, words mean something different in different shades of English, even.
So we need a multidisciplinary, multinational, comprehensive approach to this.
Yes.
And it's not just the military can't do that.
I need to be able to assemble a team of 40 or 50 people that you're going to have to pay for two years before they can get their arms around the data in front of them.
I mean, we have the data, but it's in Japanese, it's in Chinese, it's in Portuguese, it's in...
It took me a while to understand that when I spoke to, for example, Mexican colleagues who were scientists who were gathering that thing, contacto in Spanish doesn't mean contact in English.
Contact in English means you were in front of that object and some entity came out and spoke to you and you were in front of that humanoid or that human or that pilot or whatever it was, that form of life.
That's not the way they use the word contacto in Spanish.
So your algorithm has to be all-embracing.
I interviewed Thiago Techetti about UFO contacts in Brazil, and most of those cases we don't even know about in the English-speaking world.
Similarly, cases in Italy and France.
A lot of those cases have stayed in Italy and France.
So you're saying we need a big, comprehensive, all-embracing international approach.
Are you working on this now?
Is this going to happen?
Well, I'm working with a few friends, but it's a network of people trust me and send me the information.
I also go to the spot if I can.
So I've got to Argentina a number of times.
I've gone to Brazil four times, including some pretty isolated places.
And I've met with the people in the Brazilian Air Force who had those files and had worked, and some of them were witnesses because the Brazilian Air Force had done a remarkable campaign to send experts to the areas where those sightings were happening.
And I spoke to these people.
Now, that was a number of years ago.
The people in charge of that task force have died and have passed away.
So a lot of that information has been lost, except that, of course, I have it in my files.
But it's difficult to do that.
You have to do it consistently over a number of years.
But do you think it's going to happen?
I'm hoping it's going to happen.
I don't know.
What I see in the U.S. is, of course, a military effort, which is probably the right place to start.
But they're starting from under the Navy, which is, again, the Navy is interesting because they have very sophisticated observing platforms, namely large ships that are well equipped and are all over the world.
So they have at least 200 surface vessels that watch everything across the planet.
And so that's a good place to start.
Now, they don't have what I have, which is testimony from people who have recovered things from their backyard and maybe have not reported it to anybody except me and a few other people.
So I'm a little bit skeptical, you know, until we can bridge all that and until we can have the people with the experience and the multilingual, multicultural experience.
And that's not typical of the military.
And it's not even typical of the intelligence community.
So a mindset has to change.
Yes.
Yes.
You know, the data that I got from Brazil, I got through the trust, building up the trust with the witnesses.
Now, when I talk to people in the U.S. about going to Brazil and getting information, they say, well, you know, we can just bribe some people.
Well, I didn't do it by bribing anybody.
I mean, what kind of reaction is that?
Is that the way we're going to go to these countries and get people to reveal what they've seen?
Well, you're not going to get accurate information that way.
No, no, you're going to get something.
I mean, when I was in Russia, you know, 20 years ago, there were people at the door of our hotel who heard about what we were looking for because that had been in the newspapers.
And they were ready with photographs.
They wanted to sell us.
And we told them, we don't have any money to buy your picture.
You know, if you have something to tell us, tell us.
You know, we'll have a cup of coffee or we'll have a glass of vodka and we'll talk man to man.
But I'm not going to give you dollars for some fuzzy picture.
You know, so again, this is, but there are people who are getting those fuzzy pictures and they are writing books about it.
You know, more power to them, you know, fine.
But this is not the way we're going to work.
2021, the United States will have a new president, President Biden.
Do you think he will be the president who will allow congressional hearings, hearings at government level, into UFOs, UFology, and that sort of stuff, finally, so that people like you can have their say, so that the issue can be debated?
Well, I've had the privilege of being asked to testify at congressional hearings, but never in UFOs, but in the work I did with computer networking was felt to be important in emergency management.
And emergency management, not in a military context, but emergency management in civilian context, like big floods, civilian nuclear accidents,
storms, evacuation, things, large fires, where you need to bring together the different levels of government.
Those were called together by Al Gore, Congressman Al Gore, who of course was later Vice President Al Gore, called for those hearings.
And it was extraordinary because the people who were called to testify, most of them were from the government, many of them from the intelligence community, because the government would have to rely on their tools to monitor the environment in times of, for example, a nuclear crisis somewhere.
And for purely civilian applications, not military applications.
We didn't work under clearances.
We worked together just as, and I was there as a civilian expert in computer networking.
Certainly not in UFOs, although everybody knew what I like to work on.
So that was fascinating.
We wrote very nice reports.
Those reports, by the way, anticipated on what happened later in 9-11, you know, with the destruction of the towers in New York.
Well, you know, the towers in New York had been taken over by Islamists before.
Everybody forgets that.
In the 1980s, Islamists had taken control of the World Trade Center.
And they made some demands, and those demands were being negotiated, and eventually that was solved, and that was completely forgotten.
But 9-11 was not unprecedented.
Okay, so if we think about the subject that you love the most, the UFOs and ufology, do you think that hearings of that kind would be useful if we were to have them in 2021?
Or would they just simply create reports that would be filed away and off we go again?
It would create reports that would be filed away even in the middle of the crisis.
Because politics takes over and politics has to do with how you allocate money.
And of course, which is important.
The recommendations that were made by our committee, that Algore Committee on Crisis Management, which, by the way, met twice on two separate occasions, two years apart, those recommendations were never implemented.
The recommendation that we made was, look, we already have all the hardware, we have all the computers, we have all the crisis centers.
The problem is that the crisis centers don't know of each other.
So when there is a crisis, they don't know who to communicate with.
And what we need to do is to educate people and to open the windows and to let the crisis management levels talk to each other.
There was a man there who was from the intelligence community and he gave a testimony that I will never forget.
He got up and he said, look, I cannot tell you where I work, but I can tell you what data I work for.
I count the snowflakes that fall on the statue that is in the middle of Red Square every day.
And I report on the number of snowflakes.
I can count the snowflakes on the nose of Jerzynski, who was the founder of the KGB in downtown Moscow, because my birds, the bird was the satellites, of course, my birds give you that, you know, and I give it to the government every day.
I have to, by law, I have to turn off my satellite when it flies over the United States of America.
I'm not looking at the United States of America.
If you let me look at the United States of America, I can probably tell you when there is going to be a flood in Arizona.
Today, I'm not by law, I'm not allowed to give you that information.
My technology can give you that.
I can tell you approximately when it's going to happen because I can monitor the snowpack over the Rocky Mountains.
And I can probably tell you when it's going to melt because I have the weather data and I have the models that can tell you approximately when it's going to melt and where the water is going to go.
But so I'm sure that, you know, this winter or this spring, I'm going to be looking at my TV with my family and I'm going to see a woman, you know, up to her shoulders in water in her kitchen, holding her two babies, saying, why didn't somebody tell us the river was going to flood?
And I could have told her, but I'm not permitted to give that information because my technology is classified.
So the answer to that is the same as the answer you think to the UFO situation, that we need an integrated approach to each other.
Right, in the way that we're not to each other.
And we're not.
I mean, this guy cannot talk to the state regulators.
He cannot talk to the governor of Arizona.
And the governor of Arizona cannot talk to the sheriff.
Those are different administrations.
I just didn't think things would be like that in 2020.
So, Jacques, how do we get around this then?
If we want to, the UFO situation and the question of are we alone is something that we want to solve, don't we?
And, you know, you're hoping that you're going to be able to get together your 50 experts and put together a comprehensive international multilingual database.
If you're able to do that, perhaps with help from Mr. Bigelow or whoever, have we got this solved then?
Are we going to have this problem licked?
So I am not the one who will solve the problem of the nature of the UFOs.
I am not, I mean, I studied physics.
I have a master's degree in physics.
It's not good enough to do this.
I have not followed, you know, modern physics.
I talk to friends who follow it, but, you know, it's fascinating, but I'm not the expert.
What I can do is I'm a service, I can build a service organization that will give you data in a way that covers the entire world, not just, you know, the USDA, and will give you that data with some percentage of accuracy that I can also tell you.
I mean, I can tell you what's accurate and what's not accurate, what you can trust and what you should use, but with caution and so on.
Just as it's done in medicine, by the way.
And I've built medical databases.
I know how you do that.
But will the data, as we come to the back end of this conversation, will the data provide us with the answer?
It may well provide us with a lot of data, but will it provide us with the answer?
No, because we can build a level on top of that database that would be an artificial intelligence network or pattern that will look for the way that data is articulated.
And that's what we don't know today.
And that's what nobody is looking for, is the pattern behind the data.
How does it react?
For example, it has waves of intense activity over a particular area.
Well, why do they see UFOs in Kent for three months?
And then they don't see it anymore.
And then they see it in Scotland for three months.
And then they see it in Italy for three months.
You know, why is that?
How does it differ?
How do we track that across the world?
And that's what I could provide.
And then somebody else would have to do the interpretation in different ways.
And we would need sociologists.
We would need psychologists to do that.
So I can help build that system.
And I can train the cadre of specialists who can do that.
That will take two years.
Okay.
And are you ready to go with this in 2021?
I'm ready to drop everything and do that.
Yes.
Oh, well, watch.
Please keep me posted about that.
I promised two listeners that I would ask you questions.
And they're very short questions.
And I'm sure that you can give them a very short answer.
But Peter, in the Isle of Man here, do you believe that world governments have been in contact with ETs?
from Peter?
No, no, I don't believe that.
But again, belief is not a word I like to use because, you know, there are a number of things I didn't believe that turned out to be true.
For example, I didn't believe, and by the way, most experts did not believe that we could do, you know, five years ago, did not believe that we could do what we do today with electronics and with fiber optics and so on.
I mean, you know, look at the speed that we can give you on the internet now.
I mean, that's against the physics we had just 10 years ago.
So what I believe is, you have to take with a grain of salt.
I think that if world governments had been given that information, that things would be different in the world.
And they are not.
I mean, we're still in a very, very scary situation.
I think we have been given evidence that our nuclear weapons could be turned off by means we don't understand.
And, you know, the Russians have come to, you know, the Russians with the right clearances have come to the U.S. to talk to people with the right clearances saying, you know, we know that you've had missiles turned off.
Right.
And it's happened to us too.
So obviously there's a mutual fear and worry about that.
And that's not contact.
That's just something showing us a point.
Yes.
And we target our missiles to kill you, but we don't want to do it by mistake.
You know, if we launch those missiles, we have to know we have a good reason.
And we're hoping you do the same thing.
And that must have been a very interesting meeting.
I would think so.
So no contact, but contact may be from their direction to us, but it's not bilateral, I think is the answer to that question.
Kevin asks this question, and I think it's a question that we can deal with very quickly, but you tell me.
In this day and age, we have wonderful camera technology.
Kevin says, how come we don't have photographs that would prove beyond doubt the existence of UFOs?
I think you may disagree with the premise of that question.
No.
That's a question that, you know, my brother in France is, you know, technically, you know, advanced specialist, and he asked me the same question.
Every time I see him, he asks me that question, and I cannot answer it.
One answer is that we do have interesting photographs, but most of the photographs we have claiming to be UFOs have turned out to be just fuzzy things that we can explain in other ways.
It may be that a real UFO has a cloaking system so that the image, for example, could be projected into your brain by a device which is not something that will show up on the photograph,
either because it's too fast or it's partly in another dimension and that the photograph is designed to do something that the other and that's not a good answer, but I'm just completely what you mean that we're looking with the wrong equipment, basically.
Well, and increasingly we're looking with the wrong equipment because if you took apart your camera today, which is probably a very advanced digital camera, or just your cell phone, your cell phone has three digital cameras that are not giving you an image of what was there.
They are not giving you a picture.
They are giving you an image that the computer in that camera, the three computers in that camera, have reassembled pixels in a way that they assume will be pleasing to you.
So they have approximate things.
Yes, they have, I mean, there is no way you can take a good picture with the, you know, the little lens they put in front of it.
I mean, I know companies that have tried to do that.
You can't do it.
I mean, it's a piece of plastic, for heaven's sake, that doesn't correct for all the things that, you know, a good 300-pound camera would give you, or a thousand-dollar camera would give you.
And it gives you a picture that's perfect.
So how does that happen?
It happens because it doesn't give you the picture of what was there.
It has re-engineered that picture to give you something that's pleasing, where everything's in focus, where the colors have been balanced.
It does all that by software.
Right, so our modern digital technology, where everybody says, oh, we're getting much better UFO photographs now because they come from digital technology, actually we were better off with film?
Yes, because in the film, you can look at the blue layer, you can look at the red layer inside the emulsion, you can look at the energy that did that.
You may be able to go a little bit in the infrared and the ultraviolet from just an old Kodak film, you know, Kodak 100 or, you know, the thing that, you know, you were using when you were a kid.
I hope you were using that when you were a kid.
I seem to remember I did what they call an O-level in photography, and I used to use black and white stuff.
Black and white film.
I was developing it myself.
Yes, I used to do that too.
Oh, boy, and I got an O-level, we called it in the UK, qualification in photography.
And I can remember being in the darkroom trying to develop the film and all of those things.
So you think the film was better?
Jacques, we've had a very long conversation.
Thank you very much for giving me your time.
I want to ask you one last thing, because I think it's very important.
And I'm sure you will have thought of this many times.
It struck me that many of the great names that we've known, and I've known even in my lifetime in ufology and the study of these things, we're losing them.
The recent death of Stanton Friedman, who I knew very well for a long time, many people are leaving the scene now.
I worry that there isn't going to be, I appreciate that you're trying to put together your 50 experts and interpolators, and that will be a good thing.
But I wonder where the next generation of people who are willing to put in the shoe leather, as we say in the UK and the US, are willing to put the effort in.
Where are those people?
I worry about that also.
I worry very personally, because what I think is what I could do best is just to transfer my own information and the way you need to deal with those reports, transfer it to the people who are interested in taking it to the next level.
That's what I'd like to do.
If you saw my apartment today, you'd see a number of boxes where I'm putting together something like 250 folders that I don't need anymore.
I'm sending them to a museum where they will be embargoed for 10 years because I don't want anybody to go bother the witnesses.
But, you know, with special authorization, if researchers really wanted to do research on those, I want them to be able to do it.
But that, you know, I'm sending it away because I don't need those files anymore.
They contain information that would be of value in training that next cadre of people who would interpret the information.
You can't just do it the first day.
I mean, you can take an expert in photography, for example, and they are not going to be able to be very useful the first day or the first month or maybe the first year until they get exposed to a lot of the tricks and a lot of the mistakes.
It takes experience.
So basically you've thrown the ball down onto the field, onto the football field.
You are looking for the next generation to come along and pick it up.
You are doing what you can.
And I'd love to help train those people.
Jacques, thank you so much for your time and thank you for giving me an excellent 500th edition of my show.
Very kind of you to give me your time.
Very quickly, one last thing.
I heard you on with Art Bell, who was my hero.
I got to know Art in the years just before his death.
He was always my hero in all of this.
He will always be the gold standard for me.
Have you any recollections of what it was like doing those big shows with Art Bell?
What was it like to be on them?
Well, I've continued, of course, coast to coast is amazing because you're live, you know, in the middle of the night with 300 or 400 radio stations all across the United States.
It's very intimidating.
But after a while, it's wonderful.
You feel the contact with people out there, which is very warm.
in terms of human contact, it's an extraordinary experience.
I love live radio, you know, because if I make a mistake, well, you know, I just made a mistake and I'll try to correct myself and, you know, I'm human and everybody else is human and we try to do the best.
But radio is an amazing experience.
I've learned a lot from that.
I really appreciate people taking the time to listen to something like this.
And you know what, people like Arbel are criticized by being too credulous and so on.
But the questions they ask are the questions that people are going to ask.
You know, that the public has a right to ask those questions.
And they may not be the right scientific question, but they are the honest questions.
And I think we have the duty to do that.
And funnily enough, that's the hardest thing of all to do, I think, to put yourself in the mindset of your audience, which is your duty.
That's what you owe to them, I think.
And I'm doing the best that I can.
Jacques Valais, thank you very, very much.
Thank you.
Congratulations again.
Thank you.
Take care.
We'll talk again, I hope.
I hope so too.
Bye-bye.
And that's it.
Jacques Valley, edition 500 of the unexplained.
As I said at the top of this, thank you very much for being part of my journey doing this.
As I sit here in my father's old leather armchair that I've been using for broadcasting and for my podcasts for years now.
It's got leather patches on it.
It's got extra screws holding it together.
So sometimes if you hear creaking on the podcasts of the radio show, it's this chair.
But that's a little bit of my dad that's gone with me for all of these years.
And my parents supported me every step of the way through this.
I'm not sure what they would make of the technology and the world that we're living in now.
Part of me thinks I'm glad they're not seeing some of the things that happen, but boy, do I miss them.
Okay, more great guests in the pipeline from Edition 501, I think you'll find here on the Unexplained Online.
So please, whatever you do.
Thank you very much for being part of my show.
Stay calm, stay safe, and please stay in touch.
Thank you very much from Howard Hughes in Edition 500.
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