Dr. Jacques F. Vallee has long been regarded as a senior scientific investigator of unidentified aerial phenomena. Vallee was the inspiration for the French UFO researcher in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He has investigated reports of UFOs all over the world and has worked on related U.S. and French government projects. He currently pursues a project to analyze UFO materials in a Silicon Valley lab with several colleagues.
Vallee studied mathematics at the Sorbonne and received an MS in astrophysics at Lille University, then began his professional life as an astronomer for the French Space Committee, based at Paris Observatory. In 1962, he began working as an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin, where he co-developed the first computer-based detailed map of Mars for NASA. He then moved to Northwestern University where he earned a PhD in artificial intelligence and served as a close associate of Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the U.S. Air Force’s top scientific consultant on UFOs under Project Blue Book. He went on to work for Hynek and Project Blue Book to create the first interactive computer database of UFO observations.
In the late ’60s, Vallee began exploring the commonalities between UFOs, the paranormal, and folklore. His observations were detailed in his book, Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers, in which Vallee suggested a multidimensional hypothesis. In the ’70s, Vallee served as one of the Principal investigators of DARPA and led the team which built the world's first software collaboration system, running on Arpanet, the prototype for the Internet. Joining Stanford Research Institute and the Institute for the Future in Silicon Valley, Jacques consulted on SRI’s classified remote viewing programs (including the Stargate Project), which were supported by several government agencies. In the early 2000s, Vallee worked as a member of the scientific advisory board of Bigelow Aerospace and conducted private research for Bigelow and its partners, including the Pentagon’s now declassified UFO program known as AATIP.