Jacques Vallée: Advice for Future UAP Researchers | The Sol Forum

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[Music] So I want to take another question uh from our members uh a guy named uh Max Millian who wants advice as a young researcher on on how what kind of technical expertise he might need or uh I would also say academic expertise and what the motivation would be to contribute meaningfully to to UAP research. I I think we are asking you that question in light of the fact that you've emphasized that very strange, very weird, very embarrassing, very absurd data is part of the spectrum of data. >> Well, um you know, he can look at the the people who are doing this work now and see where they come from. uh none of us was trained at the university to work on UFOs. All of us, whether you're talking about Dr.

Pov, you know, Cole Keller or Eric Davis or or others, we came to this out of other things we were doing. Now, in my case, I was a, you know, pretty good programmer and I trained in astrophysics. So, I had a job um and uh I had a job at the University of Texas and I had a job at Paris Observatory and I had a job at Stanford. Um and uh as part of that, I had access to computers and I had access to people who could answer my my questions about physics or about other things and tell me where to go to find the information and I would I would turn it into my, you know, interest in information science and that's what I've done, but I've never been paid to do that. So, my advice is get a good basic scientific education.

Find a place that you're passionate about, whether it's in in medicine, in biology, in physics, or in any of the related areas. And then um you know you you have plenty of time uh if you don't watch television you have plenty of time to work on your own thing. Nobody's going to stop you. Uh then you don't need a security clearance and you don't need to go to any of those places. You can just talk to people around you and you'll find people who have had experiences and you can begin to document them and then you can begin to design your own and you'll find other people like you as as we did.

Um and and you can you can build your own you know your own research field and you know uh these days thanks to Saul and other um groups like that you can publish which wasn't true you know in in in the old days I can tell you the uh Dr. Heck, who was director of an observatory and head of a department of astronomy, uh, sent multiple case reports and case analysis to Science magazine and to other magazines where he could publish anything on astrophysics, but those things about UFOs, even though they were just as well or better documented, were never accepted. they were never published. >> So, Jacques, following up on that, uh, you know, we continue to have a lot of great questions for our members and and I think this is a fantastic one. Um, because it it it tells us something about the limits of science or science as it's usually practiced.

Um, you know, someone her her name is uh Maryanne has has asked a question about what the role of the artist is in understanding uh UAP or the the phenomenon. Um, and and I think that's a question that interests you um as a writer and and someone who appreciates uh uh aesthetic culture. Well, the the artists um are there. I mean, you know, they are in Hollywood. they are in uh they've conveyed um the the impression of the witnesses you know through film and drawings and and cartoons some wonderful cartoons about that that have captured the what what we were saying before you know the the contradictions the absurdity of you know in many of those cartoons the the aliens are are landing and and they are stupified at some something humans are doing you know that creates some a moment of humor.

Humor is very very important. So um artists have been there. They have not done as much as they could do to capture the you know very often what the the witness is describing to me is graphic. it it's an impression of an object. So they will describe the object and they will describe the conditions around the object.

But obviously they are struggling with words. They describing colors describing colors that change all at the same time with uh colors I've never seen before. Well, what's a color you've never seen before? So, I I think that is where, you know, my ability to to work with that discourse stops. You know, I I it this is where I would love to be there with an artist who can draw something and say, is was it more like this or was it more like that? you know, ideally somebody with a with a terminal where or a computer where they could do some special effects, you know, with different flashes and different things and and trying to reconstruct. Of course, we're never going to do it exactly, but we could try to reconstruct the the environmental conditions that um that were there.

And I think that's the role of the artist which would be really really important. >> Well, I can imagine too Jacqu that um your own work as someone who's written uh literature namely science fiction. Uh you might think that the artist is also a source of imagination for uh scientific hypotheses or for insight into UAP. Well, the um in in my one of my science fiction novels in French was called Subspace and it had to do it was it earned the uh the Jonathorn Prize in in in France. Uh and it was about a a group of um of students of science students.

I I was a st science student at the time. So it was easy for me to relate to what happened and they were seeing little lights going through the wall of different different colors and different frequencies and they wanted they tried to study the lights and realized that the lights were conveying a message. I didn't want to use discs and so on because I didn't want to be, you know, in a UFO book. And and they they follow what the lights are telling them and they get into a space which is a the the title was subspace. So it it goes into a a space that has a different topology from our space.

Not just another planet, not just another another universe with a similar thing, but another topology of space itself. So uh so the the the spacecraft that they build gets distorted and gets encrusted with all kinds of things. And there was one I I did work with one artist who did the cover for the book. The cover for the book is the best thing about about the book. I can tell you that.

His name is Forest. F O R E S T. and he is well known for another one of his works which is Barbarella you know the the movie about Barbarella that uh all young men at the time were very excited about uh and uh so he was a designer behind Barbarella. >> Wow. Wow.

That's that that's an amazing connection. Um, so [Music]