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We have all seen the classic Spielberg film that immortalized J. Allen Hynek's phrase, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". It is the story of a little boy, a telephone repairman and a compassionate, wise French scientist who meet at the site of contact with extraterrestrials. How many of us know that the fictional character "Lacombe" is based on a real person, a compassionate and wise French scientist who travels the world in search of the elusive UFO?

Fewer still know that Dr. Jacques Vallee, who is the real-life Lacombe, does not (I repeat, not!) espouse the theory that flying saucers necessarily constitute visitors from other worlds via spacecraft, saucer-shaped or otherwise. Instead, he postulates that they may be visitors from other dimensional worlds that coexist with ours, analogous to the realms of faerie, or may in fact be manifestations of something even stranger.

Jacques Vallee received training as an astrophysicist and a Master's degree and then worked as an astronomer in France. There he witnessed the destruction of tracking tapes, which he had helped record, showing unidentified aerial phenomena. This sparked his interest in UFOs. He obtained his Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern University in Chicago and moved to California, where he pioneered computer science and proceeded to write what some UFOlogists consider to be the best books on the subject of UFOs.

"Anatomy of a Phenomenon" (1966) was followed by "Challenge to Science" (1967) co-written with his wife, Janine Vallee. In his 1970 classic "Passport to Magonia", he wrote about the relationship of UFO contact with the patterns of faerie lore and the Little People. Five years later he published "The Invisible College", which explored the patterns of influence unexplained phenomena have exerted on humanity historically.

His investigations led him on a grand tour of the sinister side of unexplained phenomena, which he encapsulated in his 1979 book, "Messengers of Deception". After a very long period away from writing, while continuing to research UFOs, he published several technical books, notably "The Network Revolution" in 1982. Vallee returned to the subject of UFOs again in 1988 with "Dimensions", which summed up UFOs from a historical perspective.

His book, Confrontations, (1990) is a detailed analysis of 100 of his most recent investigations, from northern California to Brazil.

Most recently, his book "Revelations" (1991) gives us a glimpse of the world of UFO reporting and investigation -- as well as the paranoid maze of military and intelligence involvement with UFOs. Unafraid of controversy, always ready to examine unpopular issues, he remains one of our most intrepid and highly original thinkers on any subject.

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[Note: Green Egg was an "occult" magazine published by a Neo-Pagan group calling themselves the Church of All Worlds (CAW)and loosely fashioned after the group of the same name in Heinlein's sci-fi classic "Stranger in a Strange Land". Although in reading this interview some may be pleasantly surprised to discover there is far more to the enigmatic Dr. Vallee than bizarre tales of Pancake-Bearing Martians, what we found of perhaps even greater interest and significance than the refreshingly iconoclastic substance of the interview was the fact that it appeared in this particular publication. Lastly, we offer it here in loving memory of our dear friend and Water Brother; the recently deceased CAW Bard, Adam Walks Between Worlds -- may you never thirst, my Brother. -B:.B:.]

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Daniel Blair Stewart: What aspects, data, or questions about UFO phenomena are not being addressed by the community of investigators and researchers?

Jacques Vallee: To begin with, many aspects of UFO sightings have to do with the paranormal; yet psychic phenomena, paranormal phenomena have been consistently pushed under the rug by most UFO investigators. That is due in part to the fact that witnesses tell you such things only after you have gained their trust. But very often they are a challenge to the beliefs or the world view of the investigators. They may not be ready to hear it or they may not publish it because they think it would damage their credibility. And since they are in the business of giving credibility to the subject they don't want to reveal the paranormal aspects of it.

Just to give you one example, in the Redding case that I investigated in northern California, the witnesses had seen an object three times on their claim near a mine that they worked. The case had been investigated by various UFO groups and the report had been published. I went there and gained the trust of the witnesses.

We went back to the place where the object had been and I asked them "How did the object take off?" They said it took off ... sort of at an angle." I looked at the place and said, "Well, it had to go through the trees, didn't it?" And they said, "Well, it kind of went through the trees!" I pointed out, "That's not what you told the other people who investigated and that's not what's in the published report." And they said,"Well, this man, he was so nice and obviously he wasn't going to believe it if we told him it went through the trees."

Every genuine UFO sighting has some elements that are shocking to the "rational" view, the nuts-and-bolts picture that these are simply spacecraft from outer space.

Another aspect of your question is that for a long time the UFOlogists have been blind to the fact that the phenomenon can be manipulated. In particular it can be manipulated by the government, by various intelligence groups or by different cults with their own agenda. I published over ten years ago in "Messengers of Deception" my conclusion that many of the UFO organizations had been infiltrated. That book got me in a lot of trouble with my friends in the UFO community who refused to look at that particular problem.

Since then, of course, this observation has been vindicated. One government informant has even come forward to reveal that he, in fact, had been recruited to befriend various UFOlogists and to write psychological profiles of them. Every UFO organization is monitored by government informers.

On the board of the National Investigation Commitee on Aerial Phenomena, which was one of the major organizations in this country in the '50s and '60s, were three people who were among the founders of psychological warfare. They were people with strong ties to the government and intelligence community. I'm not saying it's necessarily illegal or wrong, but it should be recognized.

One of the recommendations of the 1953 Robertson Panel, convened by the CIA and the Air Force to review the UFO problem, was that UFO organizations be watched. That report was classified at the time. That recommendation was in fact implemented. The civilian UFO groups were being watched and infiltrated as early as the fifties. They still are.

I think this aspect has many remarkable consequences. To what extent were some well-known UFO sightings actually simulations that were staged for the benefit of someone who wanted to do social engineering research or psychological warfare research? Perhaps to see what kind of stimuli it would take to make people change their belief systems, for example. DBS: A lot of investigators have pointed out that UFOs behave like holograms. I've heard the phrase "a hologram with mass" more than once.

JV: In many cases they behaved like a hologram that had mass. In other words, if a hologram could also interact with the environment, if it could put holes in the ground and burn the vegetation, you'd have a good approximation of what the UFO is. In other words, it is not an object like that car over there is an object. It looks like a car, it feels like a car, but it isn't a car. It's something totally different which can look like a car if it wants to.

To a large extent we know how to do that! We have devices that could produce something that would look like that car and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference, including shadows reflecting on it as objects go by. This is today's technology; not 1950's or 1960's technology, but it certainly is 1990's technology. But it still would not have mass. The UFOs do have mass. They leave imprints in the ground, they interact with the environment, so that's where the analogy stops.

DBS: Tell us your objections to the extraterrestrial hypothesis as the explanation for UFOs.

JV: If we had done this interview 20 years ago I would have told you the best theory we have is that this is extraterrestrial. We do know that UFOs are a physical phenomenon, they offer us an opportunity to do some good science, and they seem to come from the sky. We have the capability to go to the moon and very soon to go to other planets. I do believe that there is life throughout this Universe. So why couldn't "they" come here?

In the last 20 years we've learned a lot of new things about this phenomenon that contradicts the idea that it is extraterrestrial.

We have too many Close Encounters. The extraterrestrial theory on the first level assumes that these are explorers on a mission. They are supposed to have evolved on some other planet and are coming here. But if they have to study us by landing 100,000 times, they have to be very dumb! That's approximately the volume of data we have on Close Encounters reports today. If you were to take into account that those tend to occur at night when there are fewer observers, if you extrapolate you would actually get into millions of landings.

Now, it wouldn't take us millions of landings if there was a civilization on Mars we wanted to study. With something the size of a beer keg in orbit we could get most of the things we needed to know about them, especially if they'd been broadcasting "I Love Lucy" into space for so many years! Then we'd want to land to check some things and get actual samples. We'd land maybe a few dozen times, maybe a few hundred times, but we wouldn't need millions of landings. So that aspect of it is a contradiction with the idea that it's an extraterrestrial mission.

The second contradiction is the shape of the beings. They are uniformly humanoid in shape, somewhat bizarre and weird. They are described as having big eyes and being short with longer arms and so on, but still they have two legs, two arms. They have a torso and eyes that are adapted to exactly the same part of the spectrum as we are. They don't walk around with goggles or strange devices on their eyes. They seem to hear what we hear; they seem to be breathing our air. That means they're human or very close to human beings! It's very unlikely that beings evolving on radically different planets would end up looking like us, breathing our air, seeing the same part of the spectrum that we see. I think the biological statistics are against it.

So you can say, "Well, they are so smart they are using biogenetic engineering to adapt to this planet and its gravity." But then why don't they just create complete human beings? If you can go 99% of the way, why not 100%, and then you'd be completely undetectable? So I think that's a serious obstacle to the ET theory.

Another argument is that this is not a recent phenomenon. It is a phenomenon that has existed, as far as we can tell, throughout history in one form or another. Without going back to Ezekiel or to Medieval folklore, we do have excellent UFO report records from 1897. I personally have a number of sightings that living people whom I actually met with and interviewed have told me about that they were witnesses of in the twenties and thirties.

So this certainly invalidates the idea that we're dealing with a civilization that has just discovered us and is coming here now. UFOs seem to have been a part of our environment for a very long time, perhaps as long as man has existed.

Another problem with the extraterrestrial hypothesis is the behavior of these beings. The mainstream of UFOlogy today claims that these are wise explorers of the galaxy who are coming here to study us and the proof of that is what they do. In abductions, for example, they take away human beings. They seem to carry them inside a craft and they draw blood from them. They take samples from them, such as sperm and ova and these look like biological experiments to people like Budd Hopkins and his followers.

Well, I think it proves entirely the opposite thing, because the descriptions that are given of the medical examinations are crude to the point of being absurd. If you had this technology, disc-shaped vehicles that could fly silently and appear out of nowhere, paralyze people and remain unnoticed; if you wanted to, you could land on the roof of the Mayo Clinic or any large research hospital and you'd have access to the blood bank, the sperm, bank, the frozen embryo banks.

We are close to having the techniques for cloning people. You could potentially restart the human race with what we know today on Earth, yet we have only been doing molecular biology for about fifteen years. It's a very young science, a new science. Think about it. If we can already do this and these beings are supposedly a million years ahead of us, they should be able to perform experiments that would be way beyond what we do.

Instead what people describe is victims coming back with obvious scars. They come back bleeding, they have things up their nose, they have terrible dreams, intense trauma, and they remember under hypnosis! The whole thing is completely absurd. The mind control people in the military already have drugs that can make people forget what they did for a week or what they did on Tuesday between 2 and 3, and no hypnotist could simply put them into a trance and recover the memory. So if we already have that kind of drug, a civilization millions of years in advance of us should be able to manipulate both the body and the memory much better.

Another thing that has been swept under the rug by UFOlogists, which is yet another argument against the extraterrestrial hypothesis, is that these objects change shape. In other words, they are not always discs or eggs or cigars. They change shape dynamically.

When I went to the Soviet Union, I met a man named Vladimir Azhazha, who is head of the research committee on UFOs in Moscow. He said, "You know, one of the most important aspects of this whole phenomenon is that it's polymorphic." I wasn't sure my interpreter was translating accurately, so I had him repeat that. He said, "It's polymorphic; they change shapes. An object ill appear as a disc and as it's moving through the sky it will change into a cube or into a pyramid or it will vanish on the spot."

I showed him an article where I had said essentially the same thing. He looked at me and he said, "You know, it's as if you and I had been working together for the last ten years." This shows something rather remarkable about the phenomenon, which is that two people who have been studying it in earnest in completely different parts of the world under completely different conditions will arrive at the same conclusions about it.

If it changes shape, if it can appear out of nowhere and disappear into nowhere, this is not just a bunch of spacecraft. This is a much more interesting technology that manipulates dimensions. It manipulates space-time. And if it can do that, then it can be from anywhere and anytime.